A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  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.

  Chapter 27

  Hung Be the Heavens with Black

  Dead, deserted, or captive, the great Christian army was no more. The way to Hungary was open, but the Turks had sustained losses too great to allow them to proceed. In that sense the crusaders had not fought in vain. An attack of gout suffered by Bajazet, which supposedly prevented him from advancing, evoked from Gibbon the proposition that “An acrimonious humor falling on a single fibre of one man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations.” In reality, not gout but the limits of military capacity were the deciding factor. The Sultan turned back to Asia, after first sending Jacques de Helly, on his oath to return, to carry word of the Turkish victory and demand for ransoms to the King of France and Duke of Burgundy.

  The ordeal of the prisoners, many of them wounded, on the 350-mile march to Gallipoli was cruel. Stripped of clothing down to their shirts, in most cases without shoes, with hands tied, beaten and brutalized by their escorts, they followed on foot at their captors’ heels over the mountain range and down onto the plain. To nobles equestrian almost from birth, the indignity of the barefoot trek was as great as the physical suffering. At Adrianople the Sultan paused for two weeks. The next stage took the march across the great, empty, treeless plain stretching, as if without horizon, toward the Hellespont. Not a bush nor shelter nor person was to be seen. The sun blazed down by day; when it set, the winds were chill and the October nights cold. In alien hands, uncared for and barely fed, crushed by defeat and fearful of the Sultan’s intentions, the prisoners were in circumstances more dire than they had ever known.

  Coucy, eldest of the captives, never before a prisoner nor a loser—in which he was virtually unique for his time—survived only by a miracle, not a metaphoric miracle but one of faith. Clad only in a “little jacket,” with bare legs and the final indignity of no head covering, he was on the point of collapse from cold and exhaustion. Believing himself about to die, he prayed for aid to Notre Dame of Chartres. Though the cathedral was not of his province, the Virgin of Chartres was highly renowned as having been seen in person and known to have performed miracles.

  “Suddenly, where there had been no one seen along the road stretching far over flat country, a Bulgarian appeared who was not of a people favorable to us.” The mysterious stranger carried a gown and hat and heavy cloak which he gave to the Sire de Coucy, who put them on and was so restored in spirit by this sign of heavenly favor that he found new vigor to continue the march.

  In gratitude, Coucy was to leave 600 gold florins in his last will to Chartres Cathedral, which was duly paid after his death by Geoffrey Maupoivre, a physician who accompanied the crusade, shared the captivity, witnessed the miracle, and served as Coucy’s executor. He recorded the circumstances for the chapter of Chartres in order that they might know the origin of the unexpected gift.

  At Gallipoli the nobles among the captives were kept in the upper rooms of the tower, while the 300 common prisoners—the boy Schiltberger among them—who were the Sultan’s share of the booty were held below. The worst of the harsh conditions was deprivation of wine, the Europeans’ daily drink throughout their lives. When the ship bearing Sigismund from Constantinople passed through the Hellespont less than half a mile from shore, the Turks, unable to challenge it at sea, lined up their prisoners at the water’s edge and called mockingly to the King to come out of his boat and deliver his comrades. Sigismund had in fact made overtures from Constantinople to ransom his allies, though they had cost him the war, but his means were depleted and the Sultan knew there was more money to be had from France.

  Clinging to Europe’s farthest edge, the prisoners could see the fatal shores of Troy across the straits where the most famous, most foolish, most grievous war of myth or history, the archetype of human bellicosity, had been played out. Nothing mean nor great, sorrowful, heroic nor absurd had been missing from that ten years’ catalogue of woe. Agamemnon had sacrificed a daughter for a wind to fill his sails, Cassandra had warned her city and was not believed, Helen regretted in bitterness her fatal elopement, Achilles, to vent rage for the death of his friend, seven times dragged dead Hector through the dust at his chariot wheels. When the combatants offered each other peace, the gods whispered lies and played tricks until they quarreled and fought again. Troy fell and flames consumed it, and from that prodigious ruin Agamemnon went home to be betrayed and murdered. Since then, through some 2,500 years, how much had changed? The romance of Troy was a favorite of the Middle Ages; Hector was one of the Nine Worthies carved on Coucy’s castle walls. Did he, the Odysseus of this new war, think of that ancient siege and hollow triumph as he gazed across the straits?

  After two months at Gallipoli, the prisoners were transferred to Brusa, the Ottoman capital in Asia. Forty miles inland and enclosed by a crescent of mountains, Brusa foreclosed any idea of rescue and removed them even farther from contact with home. Everything depended on ransom. The wait until word could reach and return from France was long and the Sultan’s temper uncertain in the interval. The prisoners feared he might order their deaths at any moment, as easily as they had sent to death the prisoners of Rachowa.

  Unbelievable rumors trickled into Paris in the first week of December. That the infidel could have crushed the elite of France and Burgundy seemed unimaginable; nevertheless, anxiety mounted. In the absence of official news, the rumor-mongers were imprisoned in the Châtelet and, if convicted of lying, were to be condemned to death by drowning. The King, the Duke of Burgundy, Louis d’Orléans, and the Duc de Bar each sent separate envoys speeding to Venice and Hungary to learn news of the crusaders, to find them, deliver letters, and bring back replies. On December 16 trading ships brought news into Venice of the disaster at Nicopolis an
d of Sigismund’s escape, but by Christmas Paris was still without official word.

  On Christmas Day, Jacques de Helly “all booted and spurred” entered the Palace of St. Pol, where the court was assembled for the solemn rites of the day, and, kneeling before the King, confirmed the terrible truth of the defeat. He told of the campaign, the climactic battle, the “glorious deaths,” and Bajazet’s hideous revenge. The court listened in consternation. The King and Dukes questioned Helly intently. The letters he brought from Nevers and the other seigneurs were the first news of who was alive and, by omission, who was missing or dead. Weeping relatives crowded around to learn the fate of son or husband or friend. Helly assured his audience that the Sultan would accept ransom, for he “loved gold and riches.” If Froissart may be believed (which he need not always be), the seigneurs present expressed themselves “fortunate to be in a world where there could have been such a battle and to have knowledge of so powerful a heathen King as Amurath-Bequin” (one of the various versions of the name of this distant potentate), who, with all his lineage, “would derive honor from the great adventure.” What signifies is not whether these sentiments were actually expressed, but that they were considered by Froissart the appropriate sentiments for the occasion. At the close of the audience, the rumor-mongers of the Châtelet were released.