EVENTS — 224/262 — The battle of Nicopolis
The Battle of Nicopolis took place on 25 September 1396 between the Hungarian king, Sigismund of Luxembourg and the Ottoman Turks, led by Sultan Bayezid.
Sigismund’s army was made up of soldiers from France, Burgundy, Germany, England, Italy, Bohemia, Poland and other countries. In total, it numbered between 10 and 15 thousand men. The Ottomans, to whom the Balkans belonged at the end of the 14th century, numbered nearly 20 thousand.
The experienced Turkish warriors completely crushed the Christian knights, mainly due to undisciplined French knights who disobeyed orders, they attacked the Turkish vanguard thinking it was the main army, and were subsequently crushed.
Those who did not die on the battlefield were brutally executed - reportedly up to 3,000 men. The richest were captured and saved only by ransoms, which they repaid over decades. When news of the defeat reached Paris, no one believed it, and those who initially spread it were sentenced to death by drowning for “spreading lies.”
The Ottoman victory was a triumph of Islam over Christianity. Turkish troops posed a real threat to European countries, especially to Hungary.
— With the tremendous impact the lost Battle of Nicopolis had on the Christian world, it made a perfect blank canvas for narratives of all sorts. Ottoman sources are lacking, the earliest surviving historical records ignore the battle completely, later texts mark Sultan Bayezid I's win as that of a "Holy War" against the infidels. Chroniclers such as the scholar Ibn al-Jazarī, who had been present himself at the battle, thus exaggerate the enemy armies by a lot when mentioning 200,000 crusaders, with “every hero and champion of all the Christian kingdoms, each of whom thought he could repel a thousand men”, approaching on 2,000 ships (the fleet that the Venetians provided measured 44), and yet Bayezid defeated them “in no time”.
Similarly, Johann Schiltberger, a 16 year old servant of a Bavarian nobleman who would write his autobiography after spending the following 30 years in Ottoman captivity, mentions 200,000 men in the sultan's army and 10,000 people (valid estimations range from 300 to 3,000) that Bayezid had massacred in his rage and strive for revenge after battle in an execution that lasted from early morning to late afternoon. Schiltberger also notes on the headless escape of Sigismund's allies onto boats that were so full that soldiers pushed each other off to drown, and the biography of French Marshall Jean II. Le Maingre “Boucicaut” turns the events into a story of brave knights being betrayed by their Hungarian allies.
Most French contemporaries, like the former soldier, then diplomat and writer Philippe de Mézières, blamed the French's own lack in chivalric virtues for the defeat, busying themselves more with expensive garments, feasts and drinking, dice game and prostitutes than with actual war efforts, and so does the Parisian chronicle of Michel Pintoin, that speaks of clergymen trying to urge the French knights to show some discipline, though “they might as well have talked to a deaf ass”.
The battle quickly made its way into French narratives as a whole, spawning a whole new subgenre of knightly tales in which the evil “Saracen” was now replaced with "the Turk” as a synonym for everything Muslim or Arabic. Survivors of the battle and the following imprisonment became the heroes of adventurous stories such as the “Cent nouvelles nouvelles”, a Burgundian version of the Decameron. But the events also fostered a new interest in Muslim studies – even more so since the ransom payments for captive knights and noblemen led to first diplomatic contacts with the Ottomans. Philip the Good, who became Duke of Burgundy in 1419, is said to have shaped the Burgundian court into a seminar for Turkish studies, and the young son of John the Fearless, the prior Duke of Burguny who had been captured for ransom during the battle, is said to have dressed up “as a little Turk” when being taught about the world of the Orient.
More on Nicopolis here.
