Béla Csaba (St. George's Night)

Bela Csaba was a Hungarian soldier who rose, in the late 1400s, to become the first Captain-General of Livonia. He is widely acknowledged by historians as one of history's most skillful generals, and is notable for, as far as is known, having never lost a battle. Csaba has been the subject of numerous modern biographies, historical studies and fictional accounts, focused on his indisputably strange life story. Born in Hungary sometime in the mid-1400s, to a Hungarian peasant family, Csaba was noted as a skilled choral singer, and, in an example of an uncommon but by no means unique custom among medieval Catholic rulers, was taken into service by Albert II of Habsburg and castrated to preserve his voice, as a planned gift to the Pope. Thoroughly traumatized by the experience, Csaba refused to sing and was eventually taken into service as a stableboy by a minor German noble who died on crusade in Livonia, where Csaba was conscripted for Thaarason II's campaign against the invading Danes. By the end of the campaign, Csaba, having developed an extensive knowledge of knightly horses as a stableboy, had risen to the rank of cavalry lieutenant, where he impressed Thaarason II with his pathological loathing of anything even slightly associated with the Papacy. After Thaarason's early death in 1445, he was appointed as captain of his infant son Vesse's personal guard by Thaarason's wife, Vaisvilka. He helped plan and direct campaigns against Novgorod, then Muscovy, in the late 1460s, and led the Livonia force that intervened in the Danish Hussite Wars in the 1480s. Having lived to a great age (likely into his 80s), he died in 1493 and was honoured with the posthumous grant of the title of Captain-General of Livonia.