Many there were, however, who rejoiced at his death. For, like all great men, he too had enemies against whom he was engaged in a life-and-death struggle as much as against the Turks. He had his envious rivals from the moment he had struggled into fame and had acquired a fortune. These men cared little to remember that he was indebted for both to his talents and courage. Some of the great lords, who were able to trace back their pedigrees to past centuries, looked upon him, the son of a simple noble, as an upstart. When he afterwards became captain-general and governor, they refused to obey him, but he made them obey by force of his arms. They were only silenced, however; in their innermost hearts they both hated and feared him. Among these were Garay, Brankovics, and Czilley, all of them connections of the royal house. The latter, Ulric Czilley, a wily and base man, who, though a foreigner, had pushed himself into the first place near the minor King Ladislaus V., was unremitting in his intrigues against him. He and his companions made the shallow-minded young king believe that Hunyadi and his two sons, who were growing into manhood, were ambitious of the crown, and, under this pretext, but without the king’s knowledge, they laid traps for him. The fearless hero faced all such base machinations with the loftiness of a truly martial spirit. The secret attacks he met with caution and straightforwardness, and the slanderous insinuation that he coveted the throne he refuted by the simplicity of his life. Rich enough to have at any moment ten thousand men at his back, he was always as modest and unselfish as a monk. His detractors reflected on his great wealth, forgetting that his entire income was spent in armaments against the Turks.
He lived and died like a true knight, and in Hungarian history he will live forever as their grandest hero. If he did not achieve his most ardent wish, the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, his will always remain the merit of having made the arms of Hungary respected and feared by the Turks, and they no longer dared to look upon his country as an easy conquest. Over sixty years elapsed before a Turkish sultan again ventured to threaten Belgrade.