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Constantinople will be taken, once this city is taken the Franks will be obliged to fight the barbarians in Italy and on the Rhine.
The Byzantine Emperor’s chief adviser, Demetrios Kydones, following negotiations with the papacy that failed to bring direct aid to Constantinople.
As discussed earlier, there was now an established view among Western European Catholics that they held Jerusalem within themselves, so the Crusade of Nicopolis was a defence of Christendom for sure. However, this Crusade, and the others that would follow it were not to bring succour to Eastern Christians but rather, as Phillipe de Mezieres’s fourteenth-century Crusade treatise stated, ‘to spread Catholicism to the eastern countries’.
The Crusader army added Bulgarian and Wallachian allies during its march to bring its strength up to 16,000 men. Nicopolis’s governor was certain that Bayezid would come to his aid and was prepared to resist the Crusaders to the utmost. The Crusaders boasted no siege engines. Bayezid marched from Edirne and met up with his Serbian vassals.
Divisions appeared among the Christian leaders in a war council. A plan for mounted archers to meet the Ottoman vanguard and dispatch the skirmishers before the heavily-armed French knights rode into meet the Janissary infantry and regular Ottoman troops whilst the Hungarians protected their flanks from the Turkish cavalry was presented by King Sigismund of Hungary. This was rejected out of hand by the French nobles. They stated that they would ride at the Ottomans head on and be the first to engage the enemy. With his allies evidently set on a death-or-glory charge Sigismund had little else to do except to organise his own army’s battle plan. Word then came that the sultan’s army was only six hours march away and this apparently caused confusion in the Crusader camp.
The French vanguard charged the Ottomans who were still deploying around Nicopolis. Sigismund’s Hungarians along with Hospitaller Knights, Germans and other allies were formed up as a second wave. There was initial success as the French cut through the Janissaries. Ottoman archery and rows of sharpened stakes among the Ottoman positions took down a considerable portion of the French cavalry but the Ottoman line was broken. The French pursued stragglers even though this meant an uphill ride for those still mounted and an exhausting trudge for the half of the force that had lost its horses but remained in heavy armour. At the top of the slope the French then found themselves faced by a corps of Turkish and Serbian cavalry that Bayezid had concealed among the ravines. During a pell-mell retreat the Wallachians and Transylvanians deserted. Sigismund and his Hungarians were, however, nearly able to turn defeat into victory as they pushed the Turkish cavalry from the field, but then the Serbian troopers entered the conflict with ’15,000 men and many bannerets’ and overwhelmed them.
Sigismund managed to escape via a fisherman’s boat. France had lost much, Hungary more, but even the victor, Bayezid, was distressed by the degree of slaughter his army had suffered in the battle. On the morning of 26 September the sultan ordered an assembly of the French and Hungarian prisoners and after separating the chief nobles from the rest he forced them to watch the execution of up to 3,000 captives, an act that took until late afternoon to complete.