A Distant Mirror (104 page)

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.