Battle of Nicopolis

Outside the Danube fortress of Nicopolis, in what is now northern Bulgaria, an army of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Bayezid I destroyed a crusading force led by King Sigismund of Hungary and a host of French knights on 25 September 1396. One of the last large crusades of the Middle Ages, it ended in a rout, the massacre of many prisoners and enormous ransoms. The defeat discouraged further Western coalitions for decades and sealed the fate of the last Bulgarian state.

Since the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 the Ottomans had overrun most of the Balkans, and from 1394 they blockaded Constantinople. In 1393 they took Nicopolis itself from the Bulgarian tsar Ivan Shishman. Hungary now lay on the front line, and Venice and Genoa feared for their trade. Pope Boniface IX proclaimed a crusade in 1394, and a truce in the Hundred Years' War freed French knights to answer. The project was financed above all by Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who placed his young son John, Count of Nevers, in nominal command, with the veteran Enguerrand de Coucy as his chief adviser.

The French set out from Dijon on 30 April 1396 and joined Sigismund at Buda in July, while a Venetian fleet carried the Knights Hospitaller from Rhodes into the Black Sea and up the Danube. Against Sigismund's advice to wait for the Turks, the French insisted on advancing. The army crossed the Danube at the Iron Gates over eight days, received the surrender of Vidin and stormed Oryahovo, where the French broke the terms Sigismund had agreed and sacked the town. On 12 September the crusaders reached Nicopolis. Lacking siege engines, they settled down to starve it out, convinced that Bayezid would not come.

Medieval chroniclers gave wildly inflated totals, some as high as 400,000. Modern estimates are far smaller: nineteenth-century German historians suggested roughly 7,500 to 15,000 crusaders against 12,000 to 20,000 Ottomans, while David Nicolle proposed about 16,000 and 15,000. Bayezid's army included 1,500 Serbian heavy cavalry under his vassal Stefan Lazarević.

When news came that the sultan was near, the crusaders killed the prisoners taken at Oryahovo. On the morning of 25 September Sigismund asked the French to delay so his scouts could report. The Constable of France, Philippe d'Eu, rejected any wait and led a charge. The knights scattered the Ottoman irregulars and broke through lines of sharpened stakes, but many lost their horses doing so. Pressing uphill on foot in heavy armour, they met Bayezid's reserve of sipahi cavalry and were overwhelmed. Nevers was captured and the remaining French surrendered. Meanwhile the Transylvanian and Wallachian contingents left the field, and Sigismund's Hungarians, Germans and Hospitallers fought on until the arrival of the Serbian cavalry decided the day. Sigismund escaped by boat to the Venetian ships.

The next day an enraged Bayezid ordered the execution of many prisoners; estimates of those killed range from 300 to 3,000. Wealthy nobles were spared for ransom and young captives were enslaved. Many fugitives drowned in the Danube or died of hunger on the way home. The captives were marched to Gallipoli and then to Bursa. Coucy died in captivity in February 1397, and a ransom of 200,000 gold florins was agreed that June. The last leaders reached France in February 1398.

Western Europe made no further serious attempt to halt the Ottoman advance until the 1440s, when another crusade ended at the Battle of Varna. The defeat is widely seen as the end of the Second Bulgarian Empire, whose last ruler, Ivan Sratsimir, died a captive in Bursa. Ottoman expansion was checked only when Timur defeated Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara in 1402.

Our 1400 map shows the Ottoman state stretching across the Balkans to the Danube shortly after the battle, with the Kingdom of Hungary on the other side of the river.