Church bells ring at noon partly because of John Hunyadi
In 1456, as John Hunyadi defended Belgrade against an army led by the Ottoman sultan himself, the pope ordered church bells rung at midday to call Christians to prayer for the fighters. Hunyadi won, and the noon bell became a commemoration of that victory. Three weeks later, he was dead.
Hunyadi was born around 1406 and first appears in a royal charter of 18 October 1409, when King Sigismund of Hungary granted Hunyad Castle, in today's Hunedoara in Romania, to his father Voyk, a court knight, and relatives including young John. Two 15th-century chroniclers say Voyk came from Wallachia at the king's invitation, a view most historians accept, though the Romanian scholar Ioan-Aurel Pop argues he was a local of the Hunyad area.
He learned war on Hungary's exposed southern frontier. By 1441 he held a string of commands, including Voivode of Transylvania and captain of Nándorfehérvár, the fortress now called Belgrade. He borrowed the Hussite trick of fighting from wagons, and combined paid professionals with local peasants raised against raiders. In 1442 he won four victories, among them one over a large army under Şehabeddin, governor of Rumelia, the first time a European force had beaten an Ottoman army of that size with its provincial cavalry and janissaries.
He lost too, at Varna in 1444 and at Kosovo in 1448. But his Long Campaign across the Balkan Mountains in 1443 and 1444 and the stand at Belgrade made his name; contemporaries called him the Turk-buster and Pope Pius II named him Christ's Champion. His victories kept the Ottomans out of Hungary for over 60 years. He died of an epidemic that swept the crusader camp on 11 August 1456.
He was equally formidable in politics. Backing Wladislas I in a succession war, he won the lesser nobility's support, and the Diet made him first one of seven captains-in-chief and then sole regent for the boy king Ladislaus V from 1446 to 1453. On resigning he received Hungary's first hereditary title, count of Beszterce. His estates reached about four million cadastral acres, unmatched in the kingdom before or since, and his fame helped elect his son Matthias Corvinus king in 1457.
Source: John Hunyadi
