For fifty years Europeans had heard, more or less inattentively, the distant crash of the Turks’ penetration in the East and the cries of distress marking their relentless advance. The Ottoman Turks were the last and destined to be the most enduring wave of warrior nomads who during the 11th to 13th centuries had swept out of the Asian steppes to overwhelm Asia Minor, as the Goths and Huns before them had overwhelmed Rome. Originally, the Ottomans had settled on the shores of the Black Sea in Anatolia as vassals of the preceding Seljuk Turks and guardians of the Seljuk frontier. When the Seljuk empire crumbled under the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and his successors, the trained, hard-fighting bands of the border chief Osman (whence the name Ottoman) declared their independence of Seljuk rule in 1300, and rose on the ruins of their predecessors. In 25 years, with all the brutal energy of a people on the way up, they conquered key cities and large tracts of Anatolia and mastered the shores of the thin blue straits separating Asia from Europe.
Across the straits on the European side stood Constantinople, capital of what was left of the Byzantine Empire. This eastern relic of the ancient Roman Empire was now finally disintegrating 800 years after Rome had succumbed to the earlier barbarians. Pushed back into Europe, it was a shrunken remnant of former greatness, its naval and commercial supremacy lost to Genoese and Venetians, its structure weakened by the same processes at work in the West—feudal service inadequately replaced by a money economy, Black Death, economic disruptions, religious dissent, workers’ uprisings, warring peoples. Serbs and Bulgars, developing their own kingdoms, assaulted it on the west and a variety of small powers harassed it in the Aegean. Its provinces were disorganized, its military force dependent on mercenaries, its sovereignty torn apart by ferocious feuds around the throne. These feuds provided the opening through which the Ottoman Turks entered Europe.
The feuds began with the pretensions of John Cantacuzene, who as chief minister bore the title the “Great Domestic” and served as regent for John V Paleologus, child heir to the throne. In 1341 Cantacuzene declared himself joint—in reality, rival—Emperor as John VI. Through ensuing years of civil war he maintained his hold by purchasing the services of the hardy, disciplined Ottoman forces. When, at Cantacuzene’s invitation, Sultan Orchan crossed the Hellespont in 1345, it was, in Gibbon’s knell, “the last and fatal stroke” in the long fall of the ancient Roman Empire.
Murad I, Orchan’s successor, gained a foothold on the European side with the capture in 1353 of Gallipoli, key to the Hellespont. Exactly 100 years later the Turks were to take Constantinople itself, but Cantacuzene, like other great actors in history, had no vision of the consequences inherent in his acts. Rather, to cement the collaboration with his new allies, he gave his daughter in marriage to Orchan in a Moslem ceremony, bridging the abyss between Christian and infidel without scruple—and without affecting his faith. Some years later, when forced to abdicate, the once “Great Domestic” became a monk and retired to write in cloistered calm a history of the times he had done so much to embroil.
Incurable discord at Constantinople gave the Turks the means to exploit their gateway at Gallipoli. Upon Cantacuzene’s abdication, his former ward, John Paleologus, regained the throne (which accounts for the alarming succession of John VI by John V) only to plunge into a vicious family struggle in which sons and grandson, uncle and nephew over the next 35 years deposed, imprisoned, tortured, and replaced one another in various combinations with Murad I.
While assisting the Paleologi toward their mutual destruction, the Turks, like a hand opening out from the wrist at Gallipoli, expanded through the Byzantine and Bulgarian dominions. In 1365 Murad advanced his capital to Adrianople (Edirne) 120 miles inside Europe. In 1371 he defeated a league of Serbs and Bulgars on the river Maritza in Bulgaria. John V henceforth held part of his empire, and the Bulgar boyars their territories, as vassals of the Sultan. In 1389 a new league of Serbs, Rumanians, and their northern neighbors, the Moldavians, attempted to stem the Turks but were defeated by Murad in the decisive Battle of Kossovo, the grave of Serbian independence. The Serbian Czar and the elite of his nobles were killed and his son forced to accept vassalship to the Sultan. Murad himself was killed after the battle by a dying Serb who, feigning to have a secret to tell the Sultan, stabbed him in the belly when Murad leaned over to listen to him. However, the Sultan left his successor, Bajazet, the strongest power in the region. In the 35 years since their crossing of the Bosporus, the Turks had overrrun the eastern Balkans up to the Danube and now stood at the borders of Hungary.
The division of their foes was the major factor in the Turkish advance. A legacy of bitter mistrust had separated Constantinople from the West ever since the Latin crusaders had penetrated the Eastern dominions. The old schism in Christianity between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches left an implacable dispute over minor matters of ritual—the less fundamental they were, the greater the rancor—and made adversaries of the Balkan peoples. Bulgaria and Wallachia (the contemporary name for Rumania) and most of Serbia belonged to the Greek Church, as opposed to Hungary, which belonged to the Latin and was resented for its efforts to impose Roman Catholic clergy and gain political dominion over its neighbors. Mircea, voyevod or ruler of Wallachia, fought against the Turks at Kossovo, but, because of old animosities, was not anxious to make common cause with Hungary against the common enemy. The same was true of the Serbs, who in any case were precluded from doing so once they accepted the Sultan as overlord. This had been Murad’s policy: to neutralize the Balkan rulers by leaving them in place under the obligation of homage. Because their kingdoms lacked unity, being no more than loose federations of semi-autonomous rulers, each could be picked off individually. One by one, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Wallachian rulers paid homage in order to avoid continuous Turkish raids. In areas of direct conquest, Murad divided the territory as fiefs among his followers, rooting them in Europe. Half the Turkish army at Kossovo already held land on the far side of the Bosporus.
Bajazet lost none of the impetus of his forebears. Chosen Sultan on the battlefield of Kossovo, he began by strangling his brother with a bowstring, a customary Turkish precaution, and proceeded at once to the business of shaking the Byzantine throne by assisting John VII to overthrow his grandfather. When John was in turn overthrown by his uncle, Manuel II, Bajazet besieged and blockaded Constantinople for seven years. In the meantime, he expanded his hold in Bulgaria, invaded Macedonia and Attica, and ravaged Bosnia and Croatia—taking more prisoners, it was said, than he left inhabitants. He was bold, enterprising, always on horseback, “equally avid for the blood of his enemies as he was prodigal with that of his soldiers.” His vanguard of ghazis, instruments of Allah, fought with the extra zeal of holy war against the Christian infidels. A ghazi, according to Turkish definition, was “the sword of God who purifies the earth from the filth of polytheism,” by which was meant the Christian Trinity.
In 1393, after occupying Tirnovo, capital of the eastern Bulgarian kingdom, Bajazet captured Nicopolis, the strongest Bulgarian fortress on the Danube. Situated on a height above the town of Nicopolis on the river’s edge, it commanded what was then a ford of the Danube protected by a Wallachian fortress on the opposite bank. Two tributary rivers entered the Danube at the base of the castle which thus controlled communications through the interior as well as down the Danube. At this strategic site the European-Ottoman clash was to come.
When the Bulgarian Czar, Ivan Shishman, refused, though a vassal, to support the Turks’ further advance with troops and provisions, Bajazet imprisoned him in Nicopolis. Growing impatient with the vassalage system, the Sultan subsequently had his prisoner strangled, reduced his kingdom to the status of a Turkish sandjak or province, and moved on against Vidin, capital of the western Bulgarian kingdom. When Sigismund, King of Hungary, sent envoys to demand by what right the Sultan abrogated Bulgarian sovereignty, Bajazet answered without words by simply pointing to the weapons and war trophies that hung upon his walls. Behind him he constructed a huge tower to fortify Gallipoli and a permanent port for his galleys. He raised imposing mosques at Adrianople and built caravansaries along the path of his advance. While his armed horsemen thrust forward in Europe, he continued to campaign and extend his hold in Anatolia. For the “fiery energy of his soul” and the speed of his marches, he earned the surname Ilderim, meaning Thunderbolt.
Following the capture of Nicopolis, King Sigismund’s appeals to the West for help grew more pressing. His country was now the last organized state in Eastern Europe resisting the Turks and it still remembered the terror of the Mongol ravages that had swept and receded over the Danube plain in the last century. Though Hungary was “Queen of the surrounding countries,” the resistance she could offer to the new invaders was hampered by incessant quarrels with Poland and Lithuania on the north, by the hostility of her neighbors to the south, and by divisions within its own ruling class and among its commoners. The country was a patchwork made up of a foreign sovereign, Hungarian nobles, native peasants living by an agriculture untouched by the West, and a merchant class of German immigrants who had developed the towns and remained alien in habit as they did in Bohemia and Poland.
Through a century of rule by the Angevin dynasty, the Hungarian crown was closely connected with the French court and continued to be so under the Luxemburg dynasty, which began with Sigismund. He became King in 1387 by virtue of marriage to the daughter of the last Angevin King, Louis the Great, who died without a male heir. Son of the late Emperor Charles IV and younger half-brother of Wenceslas, Sigismund was a less serious statesman than his father, more able and sensible than his distracted brother. Like Wenceslas, he was well educated and fluent in four languages. Tall, strong, and uncommonly handsome, with light-brown hair worn long and curled, he was intelligent and well-meaning as a ruler but pleasure-loving, extravagant, and licentious, with a record of scandalous love affairs. History knows him largely as Emperor in later life, but at this time he was only 28 and barely keeping his balance in precarious circumstances.
Succeeding as an outsider to the Hungarian crown at nineteen, he had faced comparison with a dynamic and powerful predecessor, the enmity of rebellious nobles, a domineering mother-in-law, and a rival to the throne in the person of that throne-surfeited Angevin heir, Charles of Durazzo. Through hectic years of cabals and assassinations, Charles of Durazzo and Queen-Mother Elizabeth of Hungary managed to destroy each other, and the rebellious nobles were more or less contained, despite such intensity of feeling as caused one of them to shout at Sigismund, “I will never bow to you, you Bohemian pig!” Preoccupied by these various challenges in his first eight years as ruler, Sigismund was not able to mobilize effective resistance to the Turks, who took advantage of the situation to ravage his borders.
Personally brave though tactless, hot-tempered and cruel when angered, Sigismund had survived. Like each of the Luxemburgs, he had distinctive characteristics. On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler. Attending the Parlement at Paris to observe the courts of justice in operation, he heard a verdict given against a plebeian plaintiff named Seignet on the ground that he was no knight while the defendant was. To the astonishment of his retinue and assembled lawyers, judges, and onlookers, Sigismund rose, announced in a loud voice his right to make knights, summoned Seignet to him, bade him kneel, and dubbed him knight on the spot. Removing one of his gold spurs and his belt from which hung a dagger to represent a sword, he had one of his men put these insignia on the dumbfounded new knight, and “thus the King advanced the cause of the said Seignet.”
While not oblivious to the Turkish advance, the West, having no great attachment to Constantinople, paid little serious attention to the danger until it reached Hungary. Every Pope in the last forty years had, it is true, called for crusade against the approaching infidel, some with real fervor, but the fervor was more for invigoration of the Faith than from a realistic appreciation of the danger. Such enterprises as were launched against the Turks were narrow in scope and motivated by special interests. The interest of the popes was to re-absorb the Eastern Church within the Latin fold; the interest of the Venetians and Genoese was to preserve their trading posts in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean; the interest of the Lusignans of Cyprus was to preserve their kingdom against the Turkish tide. The nearest thing to a united effort was the Latin League organized by Pope Clement VI in 1344, even before the Turks entered Europe. With the combined forces of the papacy, Venice, Cyprus, and the Hospitalers of Rhodes, Clement had hoped, by initial success against the Turks, to induce Constantinople to enter into alliance with the Latin League and reunite with the Roman Church. Victorious at the outset, the Latin fleet took Smyrna and destroyed 100 Turkish vessels, but the crusaders’ land forces, paralyzed by disease, dissension, and irresolute leadership, made no headway and the campaign petered out in negotiated terms.
One further effort was made in the 1360s under the prodding of Pierre de Lusignan of Cyprus, whose interest was most immediate. After vainly touring the courts of Europe for three years trying to raise the forces for a crusade, he was able to mount an expedition from Cyprus in 1365 which triumphantly took the rich city of Alexandria in Egypt as a first step on the way to Jerusalem. Wishing to make sure of their immense booty, his followers insisted on sailing away with their gains, leaving Lusignan without enough forces to exploit his victory, or even hold it. Alexandria had to be given up.
At the same time, Amadeus of Savoy, whose aunt, Anne of Savoy, was Dowager Empress in Constantinople, led a remarkable campaign intending to join up with Lusignan. He succeeded in regaining Gallipoli, but this too was transitory. The Free Companies under Du Guesclin, who were supposed to march overland against the Turks from the West at the same time, never came. Amadeus, like Lusignan, lacked the forces to go farther, and within a few years Murad recovered Gallipoli.
In 1369 Constantinople itself called for help. In a desperate effort to excite the aid of the West, Emperor John V journeyed to Rome to abjure the schism between the Greek and Latin churches and offer himself as the first convert. He succeeded mainly in exciting the fury of his own clergy and laity, who repudiated his arrangements. Europe, preoccupied with the renewal of the Anglo-French war, was not interested.
The one person on record who consistently tried to energize a response proportionate to the challenge was Philippe de Mézières, although in his case, too, the enemy was irrelevant: crusade for its own sake was his great objective. For him it was a moral imperative, a philosopher’s stone that would cure society’s suffering and turn its evils to gold: quarrels and hostilities would cease, tyrants fall or reform, Christianity would convert Turks, Tatars, Jews, and Saracens and bring about the peace and unity of the world. But though he was an exalté, Mézières knew the Levant and the Turks at first hand, with the result that he understood the gravity of the problem and took it seriously.
As a young cleric drawn by ardor for the Holy Land, he had joined the crusade of the Latin League to Smyrna; later, as chancellor to Pierre de Lusignan of Cyprus, he lived close to the Turkish problem for many years and, on returning to the French court after Lusignan’s death, made it his purpose in life to regain the East for Christianity. He recognized that this meant not reckless adventure, but organized serious warfare to meet an organized, disciplined foe whom he knew from Smyrna to be well trained, courageous, and ruthless. He conceived of the force needed as a national army to include bourgeois and common people serving as men-at-arms, and knights as leaders, motivated by virtue and zeal rather than greed. Like the Templars and Hospitalers of old, they would be dedicated to obedience, justice, and military discipline, and in the course of their great enterprise would revive the true ideals of knighthood. He founded, for this purpose, an Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ. As indicated by the name, his interest was moral, not military.
Mézières’ insistent propaganda—which included the marvelous stage spectacle of the First Crusade performed for the Emperor’s visit to Paris—undoubtedly had its effect on Charles VI and doubtless on others. In 1389 a firsthand report on the Turks was brought back by Boucicaut on his return from the Holy Land, where he had gone to ransom Comte d’Eu on the journey that produced the Cent Ballades. His recitals of all he had seen in the East, of his visit to Sigismund in Hungary, and his reception at Gallipoli by Sultan Murad, who had treated him nobly and given him magnificent gifts and a safe-conduct, heightened the young King’s desire for the “glorious adventure.” In the 1390s news from the East grew more urgent. When the peace parley of 1393 failed to conclude a treaty with England, Charles nevertheless urged Lancaster to consider a joint expedition against the Turks “to defend the faith and come to the aid of Hungary and the Emperor of Constantinople.” But while peace with England hung fire, nothing could be done, and not until the Duke of Burgundy interested himself did anything happen.
Burgundy was still the principal mover of events. Before retrieving national power through the King’s madness, he had been looking for a crusade to go on, with options divided between Prussia—which would serve no purpose except to keep warriors busy—and Hungary. In 1391 he sent Guy de Tremoille to Venice and Hungary to investigate the situation and, persuaded of sufficient grandeur in the cause to suit his requirements, planned a crusade, originally to be led by himself, Louis d’Orléans, and the Duke of Lancaster. In the end, none of the three went. Whether defense against the Turks was seen as a vital European interest is doubtful. Burgundy’s personal interest in sponsoring the crusade was to magnify himself and his house, and since he was the prince of self-magnification, the result was that opulent display became the dominant theme; plans, logistics, intelligence about the enemy came second, if at all.
The first problem, as always, was finance. In 1394 Burgundy demanded an aid of 200,000 livres from Flanders, impoverished though it was by the years of civil war. Strenuous bargaining by the Flemish reduced the sum to 130,000, enough to initiate preparations of unsurpassed luxury in garments if not weapons. In January 1395 the Duke sent a second Tremoille brother, Guillaume, to inform Sigismund that an official request to the King of France for help would be favorably received.
Four imposing Hungarian knights and a bishop reached Paris in August. They told the court that Sultan Bajazet was assembling an army of 40,000 in order to subject Hungary to the fate of Bulgaria, Wallachia, and Serbia, and that unless the French sent help, the King of Hungary would soon be reduced to the last distress. They told how the cruel Turks held Christians in dungeons, carried off children to be converted to Islam, despoiled maidens, spared no one and nothing from sacrilege. Their King had given battle several times with unhappy result against this fearful and powerful enemy. However painful was such an admission, “the fate of Christians obliges us to say it.” King Sigismund implored help “in the name of kinship and the love of God.”
The English marriage having been arranged, King Charles was able to reply that, “as chief of the Christian Kings,” it devolved upon him to prevent Christianity from being trampled underfoot by the Sultan and to punish his effrontery. Enthusiasm was general. Comte d’Eu, now Constable of France, and Boucicaut, now Marshal, proclaimed it the duty of every man of valor to undertake battle against the “miscreants,” the word generally used for Moslems as for peasants and laborers, indicating contempt. Loaded with gifts and assurances of help, the Hungarian envoys returned, spreading word of the French crusade on their way through Germany and Austria and arranging provisions for its passage.
On his return from Italy, two months after the Hungarians’ visit, Coucy found the court in great excitement over the crusade, and lost no time in taking the cross. After the habit of his kind, he never stayed home if he could help it. Burgundy, Orléans, and Lancaster had all withdrawn from the enterprise, owing to the negotiations with England which required their presence—or from reluctance to leave the vicinity of the throne. But the house of Burgundy remained in control in the person of the Duke’s eldest son, Jean de Nevers, aged 24 and not yet a knight, whom his father proposed to put in nominal command. The predestined Cain (in Michelet’s phrase) to his cousin Louis d’Orléans’ Abel, the Count of Nevers showed few signs as yet of the decisive character that was to appear after his father’s death. As Duke, he would be known as Jean Sans Peur (John the Fearless), meaning, it would seem, that he did not fear to do evil. Married at fourteen in the famous double wedding, he was already the father of two. Undersized, with a large head, hard features, graceless manners, and inelegant dress, he was the opposite in everything except ambition of his superb and charming cousin Louis. “Nature,” wrote Michelet, “seemed to have fashioned him on purpose to hate the Duc d’Orléans.”
While Nevers’ royal blood and position gave éclat to the cause, his father recognized the need of more responsible leadership, which he evidently did not expect from either Constable d’Eu or Marshal Boucicaut, who were both under 35. He turned to Coucy as elder statesman and the most experienced warrior—since Clisson’s disgrace—in the realm.
Since he had first marched at fifteen against the English, and at eighteen hunted down the Jacquerie, the range of Coucy’s experience had extended over an extraordinary variety of combat, diplomacy, government, and social and political relationships. As son-in-law of Edward III, holding double allegiance to two kings at war, his position had been unique. He had seen war as captain or one of the top command in eleven campaigns—in Piedmont, Lombardy, Switzerland, Normandy, Languedoc, Tuscany, northern France, Flanders, Guelders, Tunisia, Genoa; he had commanded mercenaries, and fought as ally or antagonist of the Count of Savoy, Gregory XI, Hawkwood, the Visconti, the Hapsburgs, the Swiss, Navarrese, Gascons, English, Berbers, the Republic of Florence, and nobles of Genoa. As diplomat he had negotiated with Pope Clement VII, the Duke of Brittany, the Count of Flanders, the Queen of Aragon, with the English at peace parleys, and the rebels of Paris. He had had one temperamental and extravagant wife eight years his senior, and a second approximately thirty years his junior. He had served as adviser and agent of the two royal Dukes, Anjou and Orléans, as Lieutenant-General of Picardy and later of Guienne, as member of the Royal Council, as Grand Bouteiller of France, and had twice been the preferred choice for Constable. He had known and dealt with every kind of character from the ultra-wicked Charles of Navarre to the ultra-saintly Pierre de Luxemburg.
Not surprisingly, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy sent for him and said, “Sir, we know well that above all other knights of France you are the most used and expert in all things, wherefore dearly we require that you would be companion to our son on this voyage and his chief counselor.”
“Monseigneur and you, Madame,” Coucy replied, “I will go, firstly for devotion to defend the faith of Jesus Christ; secondly, in that you do me so much honor as to give me charge of Monseigneur Jean your son. I shall acquit myself of the charge in all things to the best of my power.” But, he added, he would prefer to be excused of the charge and let it be conferred rather on Comte d’Eu and Comte Jacques de la Marche, both related by blood to Nevers. (As a D’Artois, D’Eu shared the blood of the Valois, which was the chief reason he was Constable, while De la Marche, youngest of the crusaders, “without beard or moustache,” was a Bourbon.)
“Sire de Coucy,” answered the Duke, “you have seen much more than these two and know better the ordaining of an army in strange countries than either our cousin D’Eu or De la Marche, therefore we charge you and pray you to execute our request.” Coucy bowed, saying, “Your prayer is my command,” and agreed to accept if he had the aid of Guy and Guillaume de Tremoille and Admiral de Vienne. Clearly he, too, with unhappy percipience, had no great confidence in the younger men.
Because the problem of command was to be crucial in the outcome of the crusade, Burgundy’s effort to name a “chief counselor” is significant, whether or not Froissart’s report of the interview is verbatim. Writing history in terms of direct speech was a license medieval chroniclers allowed themselves. So did Thucydides. If we accept Pericles’ speech to the Athenians, we need not balk at Burgundy’s to Coucy. It has been questioned on the ground that Coucy’s name does not appear as “chief counselor”—or at all—in the final list of Nevers’ primary counselors, which consisted of the two Tremoilles and Odard de Chasseron, all of the Burgundian court, together with Philippe de Bar and Admiral de Vienne. Coucy, D’Eu, Boucicaut, De la Marche, and Henri de Bar made up a separate list whom Nevers could consult “when it seemed good to him.” As an arrangement for the governance of a military campaign, this had flaws. It may reflect some sparring between Nevers and his father; more fundamentally, it reflects the absence of a concept of unity of command.
Emptied of occupation by the peace with England, knights took the cross with alacrity “to escape idleness and employ themselves in chivalry.” Some 2,000 knights and squires are said to have joined, supported by 6,000 archers and foot soldiers drawn from the best available volunteers and mercenary companies. Just as he had set a record for opulence at the double wedding, Burgundy now determined that the equipment for his son’s debut in war should be the most resplendent ever. Nevers’ personal company of 200 were supplied with new livery of a “gay green,” with 24 wagonloads of green satin tents and pavilions, with four huge banners painted with the crusade’s emblem—a figure of the Virgin surrounded by the lilies of France and the arms of Burgundy and Nevers. Pennons for lances and tents, tabards for the trumpets, velvet saddle blankets and heraldic costume for twelve trumpeters were all embroidered with the same emblems in gold and silver, many encrusted with jewels and ivory. Kitchen equipment was made especially for the campaign as well as pewter tableware of forty dozen bowls and thirty dozen plates. Four months’ wages in advance had to be paid before departure. The cost of all this outran the money raised from Flanders. New taxes were levied on all Burgundy’s domains, including the traditional aid for knighting of the eldest son and for overseas voyage. Payment in lieu of participation in the crusade was exacted even from old men, women, and children. For further needs en route, the Duke negotiated loans from municipalities, tax farmers, Lombards, and other bankers.
Competitive splendor governed the preparations. Coucy’s costs were covered in part by Louis d’Orléans, who paid him the remaining 6,000 livres due for the Genoa campaign in a flat sum, plus 2,000 to his son-in-law Henri de Bar and the expenses for seventeen knights and squires of Louis’ household who were to follow Coucy’s banner.
First among the foreign allies were the Knights Hospitalers of Rhodes, who, since the decline of Constantinople and Cyprus, held the dominant Christian position in the Levant; secondly, the Venetians, who supplied a fleet; and on land, German princes of the Rhineland, Bavaria, Saxony, and other parts of the Empire who had been recruited by the Hungarians and joined the French corps en route. Adventurers from Navarre and Spain, Bohemia and Poland, where French heralds had proclaimed the crusade, joined individually. The Italian states were too engaged in their usual intramural hostilities to send contingents, and the supposed English presence of which so much has been made is imaginary. No record exists of the financing necessary to send an English force abroad, nor of the necessary royal permission to leave the country. Neither Henry of Bolingbroke nor other “son of the Duke of Lancaster” could have led an English contingent, since they and most of the leading English nobles were present at Richard’s marriage five months after the crusade’s departure. Sporadic mention of English participants can be explained by the presence of Hospitalers of the English “tongue” who joined their brothers of Rhodes. The question that remains is not whether the English were present but why they were absent. It may be that as the contention between King Richard and Gloucester grew more vehement, each wanted his partisans near at hand; or it may be that the animosity left by the long war had cut deeply into the old brotherhood of chivalry, leaving the English with no taste for a crusade under French leadership.
Enthusiasm was not universal. Nevers’ father-in-law, Albert, Duke of Bavaria and Count of Hainault, was not impressed by the need to expel the Turks or defend the Faith. When his son, William of Ostrevant, with a following of many young knights and squires, expressed a strong desire to go, Duke Albert curtly told him his motive was “Vainglory” and asked what reason he had “to seek arms upon a people and a country that never did us any damage.” He said William would be better employed to use his forces for the recovery of family property unlawfully held by the neighboring lords of Frisia. Allowed a martial enterprise, William was happy to obey. The eastern frontier of Europe was far away and, given the communications of the time, the Turks seemed to most Europeans hardly more than a name.
The papal schism did not incommode the venture. Boniface, the Roman Pope, to whom Hungary, Venice, and the Germans were obedient, had been actively preaching the crusade since 1394. He wanted the prestige, as his late rival Clement had wanted the prestige of sponsoring a saint. Pope Benedict of Avignon sponsored the French. At Burgundy’s request, he gave the customary plenary absolution to crusaders and special permission to take shelter with “schismatics” (the Greek Christians) and infidels.
The departure from Dijon on April 30, 1396, was a superb spectacle which could not fail to lift the hearts of observers. At the fulfillment of his dream, Mézières, however, could not rejoice. The humility of pilgrims, he wrote, did not grace the great procession: “they go like kings, preceded by minstrels and heralds in purple and rich garments, making great feasts of outrageous foods,” and spending in one month more than they ought to in three. It would be the same as previous expeditions, ruined by extravagance and indiscipline, motivated by chivalry’s love “for one of the great ladies of the world—Vainglory.”
The crusaders’ route took them via Strasbourg across Bavaria to the upper Danube and from there, using the river as transport, to rendezvous with the King of Hungary at Buda (Budapest). The joint armies would proceed from there against the Turks. Objectives, if vague, were not modest. After expelling the Turks from the Balkans, the crusaders planned to come to the aid of Constantinople, cross the Hellespont, march through Turkey and Syria to liberate Palestine and the Holy Sepulcher, and return after these triumphs by sea. Arrangements had been made for the Venetian fleet and galleys of the Emperor Manuel to blockade the Turks in the Sea of Marmora and for the Venetians to sail up the Danube from the Black Sea to meet the crusaders in Wallachia in July. As grandiose as the projected invasion of England and march on Rome, the program was unaffected by past frustrations. Nor had the siege of Mahdia, involving many of the same leaders, altered their contempt for the infidel as foe. The ranks of chivalry still believed that nothing could withstand their valor.
Rules of discipline were decreed by a War Council of March 28, which provided that a noble causing disruption was to lose horse and harness, a varlet drawing a knife in a quarrel to lose his hand, anyone committing robbery to lose an ear. The larger question of obedience to command—which military ordinances since the time of Jean II had tried and failed to solve—was left untouched. The Council of March 28 added a final provision that was to be determining at Nicopolis: “Item, that [in battle] the Count and his company claim the avant garde.” Chivalry’s sense of itself required valor to be proved in the front line. Victory required more.
Coucy did not travel with the main body because he was detached on a mission to the lord of Milan. Angry at the removal of Genoa from his sphere of influence, Gian Galeazzo was maneuvering to prevent its transfer of sovereignty to the King of France. Coucy was sent to warn him that his interference would be regarded as a hostile act. More than Genoa was behind the quarrel. Gian Galeazzo had turned against France, bitterly if not openly, because his beloved daughter Valentina was being subjected to a campaign of slander charging her with bewitching or poisoning the King. The vicious rumors were the work of Queen Isabeau, who wanted Valentina out of the way, perhaps from jealousy of her influence with the King, or to facilitate her own affair with Orléans, or as part of Isabeau’s perpetual machinations with Florence against Milan, or something of each. Whispered in the taverns and markets, among a public ready to believe ill of the Italian foreigner, the rumors grew so rampant that mobs shouting threats gathered before Valentina’s residence. Louis d’Orléans made no effort to defend his wife, but rather complied with Isabeau’s objective by removing Valentina from Paris on the excuse of her safety. She was left to live in exile thereafter at her country residence at Asnières on the Seine, where, twelve years later, she died.
Valentina’s removal occurred in April, the month of the crusade’s departure, and was not taken lightly by her adoring father. He threatened to send knights to defend his daughter’s honor, but his contemporaries believed he did more than that. For revenge upon France, he was said to have notified Bajazet of the crusaders’ plan of campaign and to have kept him closely informed of its progress. The charge against Gian Galeazzo was probably a product of French animosity and the search for someone to blame after the appalling dénouement, but it could also have been true. A Visconti did not shrink from revenge, especially not the man who had so coolly dispatched his uncle to prison and death.
It is not impossible that Coucy may have inadvertently revealed the crusaders’ plan of campaign to his host in Pavia. Gian Galeazzo was a strange, cheerless, secretive prince who would have concealed his paternal feelings. With regard to Genoa, however, Coucy’s intervention was successful; sovereignty was duly transferred to the King of France in the following November. Coucy, accompanied by Henri de Bar and their followers, left Milan in May for Venice, where he requisitioned a ship from the Venetian Senate on May 17 to take him across the Adriatic. He embarked on May 30 for Senj (Segna), a small port on the Croatian coast. Evidence is lacking of his route thereafter, but the choice of Senj would indicate that he and his party traveled to Buda by the most direct way, a journey of some 300 miles through wild, rugged, and dangerous country.
He reached the rendezvous before Nevers, who was in no hurry. Stopping along the upper Danube for receptions and festivities offered by German princes, Nevers and his gorgeous companions in green and gold did not reach even Vienna until June 24, a month behind the vanguard under D’Eu and Boucicaut. A fleet of seventy vessels with cargo of wine, flour, hay, and other provisions was dispatched from Vienna down the Danube while Nevers enjoyed further festivities offered by his sister’s husband, Leopold IV, Duke of Austria. After borrowing from his brother-in-law the huge sum of 100,000 ducats, which took time to arrange, Nevers finally arrived in Buda at some time in July.
Sigismund welcomed his allies with joy not unmixed with apprehension. Although the Hungarian nobles had taken the cross with enthusiasm, their loyalty to him was not perfect, and he foresaw difficulties in the problem of a combined march and a coordinated strategy with the visitors. The French were not disposed to take advice, and the habits of pillage and brigandage, grown routine in the last fifty years of warfare, had already been exhibited on their march through Germany.
Strategy also had to be coordinated with the ardent crusader Philibert de Naillac, Grand Master of the Hospitalers, and with representatives of the Venetian fleet. The 44 ships of Venice, carrying the Hospitalers from Rhodes, sailed through the Aegean into the Sea of Marmora, and some of them continued into the Black Sea and up the Danube, without meeting hostile action. Inferior at sea, the Turks did not challenge them, nor did they in turn blockade the Turks in Asia, which suggests that Bajazet and a large part of his forces were already on the European side.
Conflict immediately marked the War Council at Buda. Sigismund advised waiting for the Turks to take the offensive and then giving battle when they reached his borders where he exercised control, thus avoiding the difficulties of a long march and the uncertainties to be encountered in the doubtful territory of the schismatics. He had led a campaign against the Turks in Wallachia in the previous year, as a result of which Bajazet had sent heralds to declare war and to announce his intention to be in Hungary before the end of May. The Sultan had boasted that after chasing Sigismund out of Hungary he would continue on to Italy, where he would plant his banners on the hills of Rome and feed his horse oats on the altar of St. Peter’s.
Now, by the end of July, he had not appeared. Reconnaissance parties sent out by Sigismund as far as the Hellespont showed no signs of the “Great Turk,” causing the French to declare him a coward who did not dare face them. Sigismund assured them the Sultan would come and it were better to let him extend himself in a long march rather than undertake it themselves. But with his reputation as something of a lightweight, Sigismund had neither the authority, the force of character, nor the prestige to make his advice prevail. The French insisted they would chase the Turks out of Europe wherever they were found, and boasted that “if the sky were to fall they would uphold it on the points of their lances.”
Chosen as spokesman for the allies (tending to confirm his position as “chief counselor”), Coucy rejected a defensive strategy. “Though the Sultan’s boasts be lies,” he said, “that should not keep us from doing deeds of arms and pursuing our enemies, for that is the purpose for which we came.” He said the crusaders were determined to seek out the enemy. His words were upheld by all the French and foreign allies present at the Council, although they aroused a fatal jealousy in Comte d’Eu, who felt that as Constable he should have taken precedence as spokesman.
Sigismund was forced to acquiesce; he could hardly, at this point, hang back. The march went forward, down the left bank of the Danube. Part of the Hungarian army veered out to the north to gather in the reluctant vassal forces of Wallachia and Transylvania. The main body of the allies followed the wide, flat, dreary river, where the only life was the flickering of water birds in the brown water and an occasional fisherman’s boat poking out from the reed-grown banks. The remainder of the Hungarians under King Sigismund brought up the rear. French indiscipline and debaucheries reportedly increased the farther they went. Suppers were served of the finest wines and richest foods, transported by boat. Knights and squires indulged themselves with prostitutes they had brought along, and their example encouraged the men in outrages upon the women of the countries through which they passed. The arrogance and frivolity of the French irritated their allies, causing continual conflicts. Pillage and maltreatment of the inhabitants grew unrestrained as they entered the schismatic lands, further alienating peoples already hostile to Hungary. Appalled by such conduct under the banner of the Virgin and in the cause of the cross, accompanying clerics pleaded for discipline and threatened the anger of God in vain. “They might as well,” wrote the Monk of St. Denis, “have talked to a deaf ass.”
The tale of French “wrongs, robberies, lubricities, and dishonest things,” told from hearsay, is long and explicit and has grown over the centuries. The Monk of St. Denis, basing his account of the crusade on what was told him by a survivor, vibrates with moral disapproval. He treats the French crusaders throughout with utmost scorn and reproach, denouncing them for immorality and blasphemy, for games of dice, “the father of cheating and lies,” and warning repeatedly of a dire outcome to punish their wickedness. Taking their cue from him, later historians waxed purple on the subject of a perpetual bacchanalia, of young knights spending whole days with their fallen women in shameful pleasures, of soldiers drowned in wine. To know the truth is beyond our reach, for it must be remembered that even the contemporary accounts were written ex post factowhen the natural reaction was to blame the tragedy of the crusade on the moral failure of the crusaders. Had they been victorious, would they have been charged with so many rich and lurid villainies?
At Orsova, where the Danube narrows through a defile called the Iron Gates, the expedition crossed over to the right bank. The crossing on pontoons and in boats took eight days, though not because the army numbered anything like the 100,000 sometimes suggested. For such a number to cross would have taken a month. Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event. Like the Black Death, the Battle of Nicopolis was to shed so dark a shadow that some reports of the number of combatants range up to 400,000, with the chroniclers of each side giving the enemy twice as many as their own. The nearest to a firsthand figure is that given by the German Schiltberger, a participant, not a chronicler. The servant—or “runner,” as he calls himself—of a Bavarian noble, he was a boy of sixteen when captured by the Turks at Nicopolis, and wrote, or more likely dictated, his simple unadorned narrative from memory when he finally made his way home after thirty years in bondage to the Turks. He places the total Christian forces at 16,000. German historians of the 19th century arrived by various intricate processes at a figure of about 7,500 to 9,000 for the Christians and somewhere from 12,000 to 20,000 for the Turks. They note in passing the impossibility of feeding off the country men and horses in the scores, much less hundreds, of thousands. (Five hundred years later, on the same battleground in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, as pointed out by a recent student of the problem, the opposing forces numbered 8,000 Turks against some 10,000 Russians.)
Vidin, the western Bulgarian capital held under Turkish suzerainty, was the crusaders’ first conquest. Its native prince, having no great motive to fight for an alien conqueror against an overwhelming force of invaders, promptly surrendered, foiling the French of combat. Although the only bloodshed was the slaughter of Turkish officers of the garrison, the field of Vidin nevertheless served for the knighting of Nevers and 300 companions. They felt confirmed in confidence as they moved on; Turkish garrison forces were enough to hold the Bulgarians in vassalage but not enough to challenge the great Christian army.
The next objective, 75 miles farther on, was Rachowa (Oryekova), a strong fortress protected by a moat and a double ring of walls. Determined on deeds of arms, the French hastened by a night march to reach it ahead of their allies and arrived at dawn just as the Turkish defenders came out to destroy the bridge over the moat. In a fierce fight, 500 men-at-arms including Coucy, D’Eu, Boucicaut, De la Marche, and Philippe de Bar gained the bridge but against vigorous resistance could make no further headway until Sigismund sent up reinforcements. Rather than allow others to share the honor of the fight, Boucicaut would have rejected the aid, but in spite of him the forces combined and reached the walls as night fell. Next morning, before combat could be renewed, the Bulgarian inhabitants arranged to surrender the town to Sigismund on condition that their goods and lives would be spared. Violating the surrender, the French put the town to pillage and massacre, claiming later that the place was taken by assault because their men-at-arms had already scaled the walls. A thousand prisoners, both Turkish and Bulgarian, were seized for ransom and the town left in flames. The Hungarians took the action as an insult to their King; the French charged the Hungarians with trying to rob them of their glory; Sigismund’s apprehensions were confirmed.
Leaving a garrison to hold Rachowa, the divided army moved on to Nicopolis, storming and seizing one or two forts and settlements on the way, but by-passing one citadel from which emissaries escaped to carry news of the Christian army to the Sultan.
Where was Bajazet? The question has been endlessly debated. Was he still in Asia or already on the march? He was to reach Nicopolis with a massive force within three weeks of the taking of Rachowa, too short a time, even given his reputation for speed, to have assembled and ferried an army across the straits. The allied fleet, which might have prevented his passage, engaged in no naval action. The likelihood is that Bajazet was already on the European side at the siege of Constantinople, where he learned of the crusaders’ plan of campaign—if he was not already informed by Gian Galeazzo—through intercepting correspondence between Sigismund and the Emperor Manuel. Breaking off the siege, he marched with the forces he had, gathering others at garrisons en route.
As the key to control of the lower Danube and communications with the interior, Nicopolis was essential to the crusaders, who quite rightly made it their strategic objective. They came within sight of the fortress high on its limestone cliff on September 12. A road ran along the narrow space between the river’s edge and the base of the cliff. On the inland side a ravine split the cliff into two heights dominating the lower town and descending steeply to the plain. Like the castle of Coucy, it was a site formed by nature for command. The so-called fortress was actually two walled and fortified enclosures or towns, the larger one on the bluff and the smaller below, each containing military, civil, and religious buildings and in the larger one a bazaar or street of shops. The French had no difficulty recognizing an objective as formidable as Mahdia, even without the knowledge that it was well supplied with arms and provisions and commanded by a resolute Turkish governor, Dogan Bey. Convinced that the Sultan must come to the defense of so important a stronghold, the Governor was prepared to fight for time, and resist, if necessary, to the end.
The French had brought no catapults or other siege weapons, as they had brought none against Barbary. Funds had been invested in silks and velvet and gold embroidery, cargo space packed with wines and festive provisions. Why drag heavy machinery a thousand miles across Europe for use against a contemptible enemy? Something fundamental in the culture determined these choices.
Boucicaut made light of the lack of siege weapons. No matter, said he, ladders were easily made and, when used by men of courage, were worth more than any catapults. Knighthood’s zealot, Boucicaut at age twelve had served as the Duc de Bourbon’s page in the Normandy campaign, at sixteen was knighted at Roosebeke, at 24 held the lists at St. Ingelbert for thirty days, the most admired exploit of his generation. Two years later, in 1391, he was created Marshal. Unable to endure repose, he had gone twice to fight with the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and, afterward, to the East to ransom D’Eu in Cairo and visit Jerusalem. In honor of an episode in Tunisia when the Saracens were supposedly stopped from attack by the descent from Heaven of two beauteous women in white bearing a banner with a scarlet cross, he created an Order of the White Lady with the stated purpose of providing defenders of the gentle sex whenever needed. He was the epitome, not the norm, of chivalry, and could well have expressed (although the words are those of Jean de Beuil, a knight of the next century) what it was that inspired his kind in an age of personal combat:
How seductive is war! When you know your quarrel to be just and your blood ready for combat, tears come to your eyes. The heart feels a sweet loyalty and pity to see one’s friend expose his body in order to do and accomplish the command of his Creator. Alongside him, one prepares to live or die. From that comes a delectable sense which no one who has not experienced it will ever know how to explain. Do you think that a man who has experienced that can fear death? Never, for he is so comforted, so enraptured that he knows not where he is and truly fears nothing.
Neither impetuous assault nor mines deep enough to hold three men upright could force entry into Nicopolis. The lack of siege engines and the steep slopes made it impossible to take the place by storm, necessitating a siege by blockade. The crusaders invested Nicopolis on all sides, strictly guarded all exits, and, with the addition of the allied blockade in the river, settled down to let the garrison and inhabitants starve. Two weeks passed in slackening discipline, in feasting, games, debaucheries, and the voicing of contempt for the non-appearing enemy. Allies were invited to splendid dinners in tents ornamented with pictures; nobles exchanged visits, appearing every day in new clothes with long sleeves and the inevitable pointed shoes. Despite hospitality, sarcasm and jokes about the courage of their allies deepened ill-feeling in the army. In drunkenness and carelessness, no sentinels were posted. Natives of the region, alienated by pillage, brought in no information. Foragers, however, moving farther out each day, reported rumors of the Turks’ approach.
In truth, the Sultan with cavalry and infantry had by now passed through Adrianople and was advancing at forced pace over the Shipka pass to Tirnovo. A reconnaissance party of 500 Hungarian horsemen, sent forward by Sigismund, penetrated to the vicinity of Tirnovo, seventy miles to the south, and brought back word that the “Great Turk” was coming indeed. The same word passing to the beleaguered and desperate inhabitants of Nicopolis set off shouts of celebration and the noise of trumpets and drums, which Boucicaut claimed was a ruse. Convinced that the Turks would never dare attack, he threatened to cut off the ears of anyone reporting rumors of their approach, as demoralizing to the camp.
Coucy was less inclined to sit in ignorance for pride’s sake, and felt the need of action to arouse the camp. “Let us find out what sort of men our enemies are,” he said. According to a veteran’s account told to the chronicler Jehan de Wavrin fifty years later, Coucy was consistently gracious to the local allies and “willingly kept by him the good companions of Wallachia who were well acquainted with Turkish customs and stratagems.” Always a practical warrior, he was one of the few to concern himself with the nature and whereabouts of the enemy. With Renaud de Roye and Jean de Saimpy, Burgundy’s chamberlain, and a company of 500 lances and 500 mounted archers, he rode south. Learning that a large Turkish body was approaching through a pass, he detached a party of 200 horsemen to engage the enemy and by a feigned retreat to draw them into pursuit, enabling the rest of the troop, concealed in ambush, to take them in the rear. This was a regular tactic for use when the terrain favored it, and it worked on this occasion with complete success. As the Turks rushed past, the crusaders issued from their concealment among the trees crying, “Our Lady be with the Sire de Coucy!” and closed in upon them from behind while the French vanguard, turning back from its feigned flight, attacked from the front. Thrown into confusion, the Turks could not rally and suffered great slaughter. Giving no quarter, Coucy’s troop killed as many as they could and left the field, “happy that they could escape thence and return as they came.”
Coucy’s victory shook the camp from its frivolities, but with two unfortunate effects: it increased French confidence and it aggravated the Constable’s jealousy, “for he saw how the Sire de Coucy had the admiration of all the company and also of the foreigners.” Fomenting discord, he accused Coucy of imperiling the army out of bravado and depriving Nevers of leadership and glory.
Sigismund convened a council of war. He proposed that the Wallachian foot soldiers should be sent forward to meet the enemy’s vanguard, which was customarily a rabble of rough conscripts whom the Turks sent ahead of their main force for purposes of pillage. In battle they were exposed to the brunt of opponents’ attack in order to tire them. They were not worthy, Sigismund said, of the combat of knights. When the shock of contact had been absorbed by the common soldiers, French chivalry, forming the crusaders’ front line, could enter battle in full and fresh strength. The Hungarians and allies would follow to support their attack and keep the sipahis, or Turkish cavalry, from dashing in upon their flanks. The honor and glory of battle, Sigismund is supposed to have concluded, did not lie in the first blows but in the last—in those blows that finished the combat and decided the victory.
D’Eu furiously objected. French knights had not come so far, he said, to be preceded into battle by a miserable peasant militia more accustomed to flee than to fight. The knight’s custom was not to follow, but to lead and to encourage others by his example. “To take up the rear is to dishonor us and expose us to the contempt of all.” Moreover, as Constable, he claimed the front place; anyone ahead of him would do him a mortal insult—an obvious reference to Coucy. Boucicaut supported him warmly; Nevers, in the belief that Turkish sabers and scimitars could not resist the lances and swords of France, was easily persuaded along with the younger hotheads of his suite. Sigismund departed to make his own battle plan.
Apparently within hours—the accounts are confused—he sent back a message that Bajazet was now within six hours’ march of Nicopolis. The crusaders, said to be carousing at dinner and befuddled with wine, rose in disorder, some scorning the report, some in panic, some hastily arming. All the flaws and dissensions of the campaign came to a head in an atrocious act. Supposedly for lack of guards to spare, the prisoners of Rachowa were massacred, perhaps with less compunction because they were schismatics and infidels. No chronicler mentions who gave the order, although the Monk of St. Denis and others recognized it as an act of “barbarism.”
At daybreak, as ranks were forming under the banners of the leaders, Sigismund, in a last effort, sent his Grand Marshal to report that only the Turkish vanguard had been sighted and to plead against a hasty offensive without knowledge of how near or how numerous was the Sultan’s main force. Scouts had been sent out and would return within two hours with the information necessary for a plan of battle. The crusaders could rest assured, said the Marshal, that if they waited they were in no danger of being surrounded. “Sirs, do as I advise, for these are the orders of the King of Hungary and his council.”
Nevers, hastily summoning his own council, asked for the opinion of Coucy and Vienne, who advised obeying the King of Hungary’s desire, which seemed to them wise. “He has the right to tell us what he wants us to do,” Coucy said. D’Eu burst out, “Yes, yes, the King of Hungary wishes to have the flower and honor of battle.” That was his reason and no other. “We are the vanguard. He granted it to us and now wants to take it back. Those who want to may believe him. I do not.” Seizing his banner, he cried, “Forward, in the name of God and St. George, you shall see me today a valorous knight!”
This speech by the brainless Constable, a third choice for that office, was declared a “presumption” by Coucy. He asked for the comment of Vienne, who, as eldest knight, carried the sovereign banner of the crusade. “When truth and reason cannot be heard,” replied the Admiral, “then must presumption rule.” If the Constable wished to fight, he said, the army must follow, but it would be stronger if it advanced in unity with the Hungarian and allied forces. D’Eu obstinately refused to wait. The dispute grew angry, with the hotheads charging that their elders were moved not so much by prudence as by fear. The familiar slights of each other’s courage were flung. If Coucy and Vienne submitted, it was because prudence cannot make a strong case against the mystique of valor.
D’Eu gave the signal to advance, with himself in command of the van. Nevers and Coucy commanded the main body. With their backs to the fortress and the town, the French knights on their war-horses, so brilliantly armored “that every man seemed a king,” rode forward with their mounted archers toward the enemy coming down from the hills ahead. The date was September 25. The Hospitalers, Germans, and other allies remained with the King of Hungary, who no longer controlled events.
The impact of the French assault easily smashed the untrained conscripts in the Turkish front lines. With the hot taste of success, even against opponents so unequal, the knights plunged ahead against the lines of trained infantry. They came under volleys of lethal arrows and up against rows of sharpened stakes which the Turks had planted with the points at the height of a horse’s belly. How the French broke through is unclear. Out of the welter of different versions, a coherent account of the movements and fortunes of the battlefield is not to be had; there is only a tossing kaleidoscope. There are references to horses impaled, riders dismounting, stakes pulled up, presumably by the French auxiliaries. The knights fought on with sword and battle-ax, and, by their ardor and heavy weight of their horses and weapons, appear to have dominated and routed the Turkish infantry, who circled back to take refuge behind their cavalry. Coucy and Vienne urged a pause at this stage to rest and restore order in the ranks and give the Hungarians time to come up, but the younger men, “boiling with ardor” and believing they had glimpsed victory, insisted on pursuit. Having no idea of the enemy’s numerical strength, they thought that what they had encountered so far was his whole force.
Accounts tell of a scramble uphill, of the sipahis on the wings sweeping down for envelopment, of the Hungarians and foreign contingents caught in confused combat on the plain, of a stampede of riderless horses—evidently from the line of stakes, where, in the havoc, the pages could not hold them. At sight of the stampede, the Wallachians and Transylvanians instantly concluded that the day was lost and deserted. Sigismund and the Grand Master of Rhodes and the Germans rallied their forces against the Turkish envelopment and were fighting with “unspeakable massacre” on both sides when a critical reinforcement of 1,500 Serbian horsemen gave the advantage to the enemy. As a vassal of the Sultan, the Serbian Despot, Stephen Lazarevich, might have chosen passive neutrality like the Bulgarians on whose soil the struggle was being fought, but he hated the Hungarians more than the Turks, and chose active fidelity to his Moslem overlord. His intervention was decisive. Sigismund’s forces were overwhelmed. Dragged from the field by their friends, the King and the Grand Master escaped to a fisherman’s boat on the Danube and, under a rain of arrows from their pursuers, succeeded in boarding a vessel of the allied fleet.
The French crusaders, of whom more than half were unhorsed, struggled in heavy armor to the plateau, where they expected to find the debris of the Turkish army. Instead, they found themselves face to face with a fresh corps of sipahis held in reserve by the Sultan. “The lion in them turned to timid hare,” writes the Monk of St. Denis unkindly. With harsh clamor of trumpets and kettle drums and the war cry “Allah is Great!” the Turks closed in upon them. The French recognized the end. Some fled back down the slope; the rest fought with the energy of despair, “no frothing boar nor enraged wolf more fiercely.” D’Eu’s sword arm slashed right and left as bravely as he had boasted it would. Boucicaut, filled with warrior’s pride mixed with shame for his errors that had brought his companions to this fatality, fought with an unlimited audacity that carved a circle of death around him. Philippe de Bar and Odard de Chasseron were killed. The banner of Notre Dame clutched in the hand of Admiral de Vienne wavered and fell. Bleeding from many wounds, he raised it again and, while trying to rally the faint-hearted from flight, with banner in one hand and sword in the other, was struck down and slain. Coucy’s outstanding figure was seen “unshaken by the heavy leather clubs of the Saracens that beat upon his head” and their weapons that battered his armor. “For he was tall and heavy and of great strength and delivered such blows upon them as cut them all to pieces.”
The Turks closed round Nevers. His bodyguard, prostrating themselves in attitudes of submission, appealed wordlessly for his life. Holy war or not, the infidel was as interested in rich ransoms as anyone else, and spared the Count. Upon his surrender, the remaining French yielded. The Battle of Nicopolis was lost, the debacle complete. Thousands of prisoners were taken, all the crusaders’ equipment, provisions, banners, and golden clothes fell to the victors. “Since the Battle of Roncesvalles when [all] twelve peers of France were slain, Christendom received not so great a damage.”
Though Froissart could not have known it, his epitaph for the crusade was historically just. The valor of the French had been extraordinary and the damage they inflicted on the enemy sufficient to show that if they had fought united with their allies, the result—and the history of Europe—might have been different. As it was, the Turks’ victory, by turning back the Western challenge and retaining Nicopolis, lodged them firmly in Europe, ensured the fall of Constantinople, and sealed their hold on Bulgaria for the next 500 years. “We lost the day by the pride and vanity of these French,” Sigismund said to the Grand Master; “if they had believed my advice, we had enough men to fight our enemies.”
The defeat was followed by a frightful sequel. As Bajazet toured the battlefield, hoping to find the corpse of the King of Hungary—and finding that of Vienne with the banner still held by his dead hand—he was “torn by grief” at the sight of his losses, which outnumbered the Christian. He swore he would not leave their blood unavenged, and the discovery of the massacre of the prisoners of Rachowa augmented his rage. He ordered all prisoners to be brought before him next morning. Jacques de Helly, a French knight who had seen service with Murad I, was recognized by Turkish officials and called upon to designate the leading nobles for ransom. Coucy, Bar, D’Eu, Guy de Tremoille, Jacques de la Marche, and a number of others in addition to the Count of Nevers were thus spared, as well as all those judged to be under twenty for forced service with the Turks.
The rest, an uncertain figure of several thousand, were marched naked before the Sultan, bound together in groups of three or four, with hands tied and ropes around their necks. Bajazet looked at them briefly, then signed to the executioners to set to work. They decapitated the captives group by group, in some cases cut their throats or severed their limbs until corpses and killers alike were awash in blood. Nevers, Coucy, and the rest were forced to stand by the Sultan and watch the heads of their companions fall under the scimitars and the blood spurt from their headless trunks. Boucicaut, dazed and wounded, was recognized in the line. Nevers fell on his knees before the Sultan and, by a pantomime of hands pressed together with fingers entwined, indicating that they were like brothers, capable of equal ransom, succeeded in having Boucicaut spared. The killing continued from early morning to late afternoon until Bajazet, himself sickened at the sight or, as some say, persuaded by his ministers that too much rage in Christendom would be raised against him, called off the executioners. Estimates of the number killed range—aside from the wilder figures—from 300 to 3,000.
The dead on the battlefield were many more, nor did all the fugitives reach safety. Some escaped the Turks only to drown in the Danube when the ships which they boarded in fleeing hordes became overloaded and sank. Afterward those on board knocked off others trying to get on. A Polish knight swam across in armor, but most who tried this feat went under. Fearful of treachery on Wallachian shores, Sigismund sailed to the Black Sea and Constantinople and eventually made his way home by sea. Those of his allies who succeeded in crossing the Danube and attempted to return by land found the country stripped by the Wallachians. They wandered in the woods, reduced to rags and misery, covering themselves with hay and straw. Robbed, ragged, and starving, many perished on their way; a few reached their homes, among them Count Rupert of Bavaria in beggar’s clothes, who died of his sufferings a few days later.
Luxury and immorality, pride and dissension, superior Turkish training, discipline, and tactics all contributed to the fatal outcome. Nevertheless, what basically defeated the crusaders was the chivalric insistence on personal prowess—which raises the question: Why do men fight? Wars may be fought for the glorification of man’s feelings about himself, or for a specific goal in power, territory, or political balance. Medieval war was not always impractical. Charles V cared nothing for glorification if he could only get the English out of France. In the campaigns of Normandy, Arezzo, and Genoa, Coucy used every other means first—money, diplomacy, and political bargains—and arms only last, to achieve a specific objective. For all his chivalric renown, of the kind that attracted Nottingham’s challenge, he belonged rather to the school of Charles V than to that of Boucicaut, although he seems to have had a foot in each.
Within a few years of the deaths of Charles V and Du Guesclin in 1380, their pragmatism had been unlearned. It had been successful but aberrant. The chivalric idea reasserted itself and determined the choices made in the course of the Nicopolis campaign. Why, in a society dominated by the cult of the warrior, was extravagant display more important than the equipment of victory? Why was absolutely nothing learned from an experience as recent as Mahdia? All the grandiose projects of the last decade—invasion of England, Guelders, Tunisia, the Voie de Fait—were either castles in the air or exercises in futility. Why, after a less than glorious fifty years since Crécy, was the attitude of the French crusaders so steeped in arrogance and overconfidence? Why were they unable to take into account the fact of opponents who did not fight for the same values and who obeyed different rules? It can only be answered that a dominant idea is slow to change and that, regardless of everything, the French still believed themselves supreme in war.
The crusaders of 1396 started out with a strategic purpose in the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, but their minds were on something else. The young men of Boucicaut’s generation, born since the Black Death and Poitiers and the nadir of French fortunes, harked back to pursuit of those strange bewitchments, honor and glory. They thought only of being in the vanguard, to the exclusion of reconnaissance, tactical plan, and common sense, and for that their heads were to roll in blood-soaked sand at the Sultan’s feet.