Hermanstadt, in Transylvania, met with a still more disastrous reverse. It was at Hermanstadt that the renowned Hunyades first appeared in the wars between the Hungarians and the Turks. He was the illegitimate son of Sigismond, King of Hungary, and the fair Elizabeth Morsiney. In his early youth he gained distinction in the wars of Italy; and Comines, in his memoirs, celebrates him under the name of the White Knight of Wallachia. After some campaigns in Western Christendom, Hunyades returned to protect his native country against the Ottomans." At Hermanstadt, and again at Vasag, Hunyades defeated the Turks with great slaughter and rivalled them in the ferocity with which his prisoners were treated. His fame now gave a great impulse to the Crusade against the Turks which Pope Eugenius had preached, and drew volunteers to his standard from all the nations of the West. In 1443, Hunyades led a splendid and powerful army across the Danube near Semendra, drove the Turks beyond the Balkans, forced the passage of the mountains with a boldness and a skill that is compared with the exploits of Hannibal and Napoleon, and extorted from the Sultan a treaty (of Szegeddin, July 12, 1444) which rescued a large Christian territory from the Moslem yoke. "The Sultan resigned all claims upon Servia and recognised George Brankovich as its independent sovereign. Wallachia was given up to Hungary." But the peace which this treaty secured was brief; Christian perfidy destroyed it, and the penalty was paid by whole centuries of suffering and shame for the Christians of the Danubian states. "Within a month from the signature of the treaty of Szegeddin the Pope and the Greek Emperor had persuaded the King of Hungary and his councillors to take an oath to break the oath which had been pledged to the Sultan. They represented that the confessed weakness of the Ottomans, and the retirement of Amurath [who had placed his son Mahomet on the throne and withdrawn from the cares of sovereignty] to Asia, gave an opportunity for eradicating the Turks from Europe which ought to be fully employed. The Cardinal Julian [legate of the Pope] pacified the conscientious misgivings which young King Ladislaus expressed, by his spiritual authority in giving dispensation and absolution in the Pope's name. … On the 1st of September, the King, the legate, and Hunyades, marched against the surprised and unprepared Turks with an army of 10,000 Poles and Hungarians. The temerity which made them expect to destroy the Turkish power in Europe with so slight a force was equal to the dishonesty of their enterprise." They advanced through Bulgaria to the Black Sea, and southward along its coast as far as Varna, which they took. There they were called to account. Amurath had resumed the sceptre, put himself at the