Battle of Zlatitsa

Battle of Zlatitsa
	Part of Crusade of Varna
	; Sredna Gora
Date	12 December 1443
Location	Zlatitsa pass in the Balkan Mountains, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Bulgaria)
Result	Ottoman victory
Belligerents
Kingdom of Hungary; Kingdom of Poland; Serbian Despotate; Papal States	Ottoman Empire
Commanders and leaders
Władysław III of Poland; John Hunyadi; Đurađ Branković; Julian Cesarini	Murad II; Kasim Pasha; Turakhan Beg
Strength
Unknown	Unknown
Casualties and losses
Heavy casualties during the battle and the subsequent retreat	Unknown

The Battle of Zlatitsa was fought on 12 December 1443^[2]^[3] between the Ottoman Empire and Serbian and Hungarian troops in the Balkans as part of the larger Crusade of Varna.^[4] The battle was fought at Zlatitsa Pass (Bulgarian: Златишки проход) (Turkish: Izladi Derbendi) near the town of Zlatitsa in the Balkan Mountains, Ottoman Empire (modern-day Bulgaria). The impatience of the King of Poland and the severity of the winter then compelled John Hunyadi to return home in February 1444, but not before he had utterly broken the Sultan's power in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania.

^ Imber, Colin (2006). The Crusade of Varna 1443-145. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 9781472416940. In reality, it had been a disaster. In his account of the Hungarian army's retreat, Długosz describes 'the greater part of the King's army falling in heaps, overcome by hunger, and some soldiers marching with their bodies tottering hither and thither... most of them in truth so exhausted that you would think them to be ghosts devoid of flesh rather than men. His description echoes precisely the account of the army's return in The Holy Wars of Sultan Murad.
^ Mellersh, H. E. L.; Williams, Neville (1999). Chronology of World History. ABC-CLIO. p. 527. ISBN 978-1-57607-155-7.
^ Setton, Kenneth M.; Hazard, Harry W.; Zacour, Norman P., eds. (1989). A History of the Crusades, Volume VI: The Impact of the Crusades on Europe. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 270. ISBN 0-299-10740-X. the most important battle of the whole campaign took place at Bolvani, in the plain of Nish on November 3, 1443
^ "Battle of Zlatica". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2014. Retrieved 13 November 2014. ...finally defeated Hunyadi at the Battle of Zlatica (İzladi) in 1443