A Distant Mirror (105 page)

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

D
ead, 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 and 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.

The nobility felt “bitter despair,” according to the Monk of St. Denis, and “affliction reigned in all hearts.” Black garments appeared everywhere, and Deschamps wrote of “funerals from morn to eve.” Prayers and tears filled the churches, with sorrow the more intense because the dead had received no Christian burial and the lives of the survivors were feared for. Mourning and lament spread through Burgundy, where so many families suffered a loss. On January 9, a day of solemn services for the dead in the capital and the provinces, “it was piteous to hear the tolling of the bells in all the churches of Paris.” Hardly had the English marriage been celebrated and the burden of the old war lifted at last when rejoicing was stifled, as if God did not wish to allow mankind cause for joy.

The ladies of France sorrowed grievously for their husbands and lovers, “especially,” says Froissart, always concerned for his patron, “the Dame de Coucy, who wept piteously night and day and could take no comfort.” Probably at the suggestion of her brothers, the Duc de Lorraine and Ferry de Lorraine, who came to console and advise her, she wrote on December 31 to the Doge of Venice begging him to aid in arranging the ransom of her husband. Two envoys—Robert d’Esne, a knight of Cambresis with five attendants, and Jacques de Willay,
châtelain
of St. Gobain, one of the Coucy properties—were dispatched separately, expressly to arrange the deliverance of Coucy and Henri de Bar. They were sent and their expenses paid by Louis d’Orléans, rather than by the Dame de Coucy. With communications no faster than a man could travel, there could be no word for many months.

The problem of arranging ransom was riddled with anxiety because of the unfamiliarity of dealing with a sovereign outside Christendom, of whom only the worst might be expected. On the advice of Jacques de Helly, who reported the Sultan’s exorbitant passion for the accoutrements of the hunt, a convoy of magnificent gifts, especially selected to appeal to him, was assembled to accompany the Duke’s ambassadors. Twelve white gerfalcons, of a rare and costly species of which Gian Galeazzo reportedly sent two to the Sultan every year, were escorted each by its own falconer, together with falconers’ gauntlets embroidered with pearls and precious stones. Ten handsome horses and
ten hounds, caparisoned in the arms of Burgundy and conducted by grooms in the Duke’s white-and-scarlet livery, were to make the journey to Turkey, along with saddles of rich work inscribed in “Saracen letters and flowers of overseas,” saddle draperies with buckles in the form of golden roses, fine scarlet cloth of Reims believed unknown in the Orient, and, as a subtle compliment to Bajazet, tapestries of Arras depicting the history of Alexander the Great, from whom he claimed to be directly descended. All this was dispatched with the King’s chamberlain, an experienced diplomat, and three noble ambassadors, officials of Burgundy, who departed on January 20, 1397, to negotiate the ransom. In haste to keep his oath to the Sultan, Jacques de Helly had already hurried on ahead with letters for the prisoners.