God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Coincidentally or not, concrete plans were put in train at least from 1392. The lead came from the Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, who used the crusade schemes to assert his power against his brothers for control of French affairs after the onset of Charles VI’s madness. He was also probably a genuine enthusiast. By 1394 a plan had crystallized under which Duke Philip, his nephew and rival, Charles VI’s younger brother, Louis, duke of Orleans and John of Gaunt would embark for Hungary the following year. Philip began collecting money from his lands in Burgundy and Flanders; Louis and Gaunt may well have received royal funds. By the end of the year, Gaunt had raised 1,500 men, although these may have been destined to police a Gascon revolt. Venice had been approached and Sigismund was expecting the army in 1395. As in 1390, crusade bulls were issued by Popes Boniface IX (Rome and Benedict XIII (Avignon), although the latter only in the spring of 1396, shortly before the expedition departed. Also in common with the al-Mahdiya expedition, there is no clear sign that any of those involved in this enterprise actually took the cross.⁵⁶

However, delays in coordinating western aid with the plans of the Hungarians, diplomatic difficulties between England and France and domestic political problems, in Gascony and at the fractious French court, sabotaged this ambitious programme. The three putative leaders withdrew. Gaunt delegated his role to his bastard John Beaufort, the al-Mahdiya veteran. Philip the Bold appointed his son and heir John of Nevers to lead his troops. Louis of Orleans abandoned the project altogether. English involvement became peripheral. Beaufort may have joined the expedition when it embarked in the spring of 1396, but it is not certain. No unequivocal evidence of English participation exists. If individuals or private companies enlisted, it is unlikely they included a substantial or officially sponsored regiment.⁵⁷ The expedition devolved on to the household of John of Nevers, a circle of Burgundian knights and a smattering of French nobles sympathetic to the Burgundian faction at court, many of them with past or future experience of war in Prussia, Tunisia and Greece. The total of men at arms probably came to a few hundred, the whole Franco-Burgundian force to a few thousand, hardly Mezieres’s great redemptive crusade. Except as a make-weight for Sigismund’s border defence, it is difficult to imagine what could be achieved by such a force. As well as its size, the decision to travel to Hungary by land severely limited its options, precluding action independent of Hungarian plans.

Although serious in intent, and courageous in battle, the leaders of this western army appear to have been seduced by wishful self-esteem, not sober strategy. Hopes of battering a path to Constantinople, of sweeping the Ottomans aside in one fell encounter or even, as some apparently envisaged, continuing to Jerusalem, were entirely illusory. Sigismund probably appreciated this, advocating a defensive strategy once the western army arrived in Hungary. Yet he played along with Burgundian fantasies to acquire powerful – and free – reinforcements. The policy was born of the crusade diplomacy after 1390 and the eagerness, demonstrated at al-Mahdiya, of French nobles to engage in what was still almost universally regarded as meritorious warfare far from home. The fourteenth century had witnessed the institutionalization of the cult of chivalry into a legion of secular orders, such as those of the Garter in England (1348) or the Star in France (1352). Many of these orders of chivalry, such as the Neapolitan Order of the Knot, dedicated to the Holy Spirit (1352), enjoined service in an eastern crusade on its members, an obligation that had more to do with personal self-image than the exigencies of Balkan politics or Levantine warfare. The 1396 campaign provided an occasion for the honouring of such commitments.⁵⁸

Leaving Burgundy in April 1396, John of Nevers’s army reached the Hungarian capital Buda late in July. Intent on forcing a hurried and incomplete response from Sultan Bayezid, the combined western and Hungarian army advanced down the Danube into occupied Bulgaria. After capturing the frontier fortresses of Vidin and Rahova, where the poorer, unransomable defenders were indiscrimately massacred, they laid siege to Nicopolis further downstream. Here Bayezid I’s army caught up with them. On 25 September, the coalition Christian forces were destroyed by the Ottomans and their Serbian allies. The Christian allies took the initiative by seeking an assault against the advancing Turks. Refusing to remain as a powerful reserve and failing to coordinate their attack with the Hungarians, the French cavalry broke itself on the Turkish infantry and first rank of horse before reaching the main column of Turkish heavy cavalry, the sipahis, when they were cut to pieces. John of Vienne Admiral of France and William of La Tremoille Marshal of Burgundy were among the slain; John of Nevers, Philip of Artois constable of France, Marshal Boucicaut and Enguerrand of Coucy were among the captured. They later attracted huge ransoms, collectively perhaps as much as 500,000 francs. The Hungarians, deserted by their Wallachian and Transylvanian levies, fared little better at the hands of the Serbians under Despot Stephen Lazarevic. The Turkish victory was overwhelming and indisputable, as crushing a defeat of French arms as Agincourt nineteen years later, where exactly the same mistakes were made. There, as at Nicopolis, the French cavalry insisted on attacking a line of archers and infantry protected by rows of stakes. It says much for poor French generalship of the period: one of the chief tacticians at Agincourt was the Nicopolis veteran Marshal Boucicaut.⁵⁹

The disastrous Nicopolis campaign has been described melodramatically as ‘a final failure’. ‘There would be no more crusades.’⁶⁰ Others have acknowledged the defeat as decisive as well as crushing. In confirming Ottoman military strength, and the adhesiveness of their Balkan clients, it exposed the ineffectiveness of western arms, traditional crusade strategies and the feeble hold Sigismund possessed over his allies. Only the irruption of Timur into western Asia in 1400 and his defeat of Bayezid in 1402 at Ankara saved Constantinople and central Europe. In Christian Europe, Nicopolis has been credited with Sigismund abandoning aggression against the Ottomans for his German and Bohemian interests and the disintegration of Anglo-French unity, with wide implications for the survival of Richard II’s regime (it fell in 1399) and the renewal of the Hundred Years War (in 1415). However, both immediate and long-term effects can be exaggerated. Only a relatively small army had been engaged at Nicopolis. The popular court poet and chronicler Froissart was told only 700 French knights were involved.⁶¹ The failure to coordinate the land attack with naval operations ran counter to contemporary experience and advice. The disaster of 1396 failed to disarm enthusiasm for fighting the infidel. Neither technically nor generically was Nicopolis the last crusade. Nicopolis did not lead to the conquest of Hungary, Bayezid’s aggression turning eastwards in 1397–1400. The reaction to Nicopolis in France did not match that to other defeats during the Hundred Years’ War. In England, chroniclers’ almost universal silence indicates minimal impact. Nicopolis did not mark a watershed between crusading optimism and pessimism.

The response to the Nicopolis defeat did reveal how crusading was viewed. On their release from Ottoman captivity and return to France in 1398, John of Nevers and his companions were ecstatically received as heroes. The manner of their defeat had inspired a familiar round of hand-wringing introspection. On 9 January 1397 churches across France conducted grief-laden memorial services. Writers close to the French court and in contact with survivors were in no doubt that vanity and folly had led to the Frenchmen’s destruction, although the bravery of individuals was accorded due praise. Nicopolis was transformed into a morality story of sin, redemption and heroism, a paradigm of the image of later medieval crusading itself. The well-informed official chronicler from the monastery of St Denis eschewed easy cliches in highlighting the contrast between the lavish feasts, ornate tents, gawdy clothes and loose women of the Christians with the God-fearing, prudent, discreet Bayezid, a suitable instrument of God’s chastisement of sinners despite his ‘Turkish superstition’.⁶² Secular writers transmuted events into good stories with a didactic purpose. Froissart’s almost wholly fantastical account of the 1396 campaign, written before 1402, emphasized the scale of the Ottoman threat, inventing threats by Bayezid to march on Rome and feed his horse on the altar in St Peter’s.⁶³ This was no simple call to return to arms, but a polemic to end the papal schism and unite Christendom, precisely the Anglo-French policy that had preceded Nicopolis, a view that did nothing to disturb underlying assumptions about chivalric honour or the efficacy of holy war. Similar themes of folly, pride, Christendom’s disorder, catastrophic defeat, the papal schism and a utopian desire to sweep the Islamic tide back as far as Jerusalem dominated the earliest literary response to the news of Nicopolis, Philip of Mezieres’s Epistre Lamentable et Consolatoire (Letter of Lament and Consolation), written by the veteran propagandist, now pushing seventy, in the first weeks of 1397.⁶⁴ Mezieres’s overlaying of pragmatic assessment of responsibility with revivalist cliche stood for a whole body of thoughtful contemporary opinion, mirrored in most other literary, historical, even diplomatic considerations of the eastern question. His ideas were not simply rhetorical flourishes or the eccentricities of a lonely, disappointed political has-been. Instead of flummery distractions, chivalry and holy war were inescapable weapons in the combat with Islam, a view the defeat at Nicopolis, in the hands of literary observers, at least, did much to reinforce. However, the response to Nicopolis confirmed a more damaging trait. Westerners’ reactions were hobbled by a crippling solipsism that explored their own cultural disposition obsessively while failing in any sustained or serious fashion to comprehend or dissect the nature of their opponents. This, too, accorded with some of the longest traditions of crusading and did not end with the great defeat on the