A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Chapter 26

  Nicopolis

  For fifty years Europeans had heard, more or less inattentively, the distant crash of the Turks’ penetration in the East and the cries of distress marking their relentless advance. The Ottoman Turks were the last and destined to be the most enduring wave of warrior nomads who during the 11th to 13th centuries had swept out of the Asian steppes to overwhelm Asia Minor, as the Goths and Huns before them had overwhelmed Rome. Originally, the Ottomans had settled on the shores of the Black Sea in Anatolia as vassals of the preceding Seljuk Turks and guardians of the Seljuk frontier. When the Seljuk empire crumbled under the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and his successors, the trained, hard-fighting bands of the border chief Osman (whence the name Ottoman) declared their independence of Seljuk rule in 1300, and rose on the ruins of their predecessors. In 25 years, with all the brutal energy of a people on the way up, they conquered key cities and large tracts of Anatolia and mastered the shores of the thin blue straits separating Asia from Europe.

  Across the straits on the European side stood Constantinople, capital of what was left of the Byzantine Empire. This eastern relic of the ancient Roman Empire was now finally disintegrating 800 years after Rome had succumbed to the earlier barbarians. Pushed back into Europe, it was a shrunken remnant of former greatness, its naval and commercial supremacy lost to Genoese and Venetians, its structure weakened by the same processes at work in the West—feudal service inadequately replaced by a money economy, Black Death, economic disruptions, religious dissent, workers’ uprisings, warring peoples. Serbs and Bulgars, developing their own kingdoms, assaulted it on the west and a variety of small powers harassed it in the Aegean. Its provinces were disorganized, its military force dependent on mercenaries, its sovereignty torn apart by ferocious feuds around the throne. These feuds provided the opening through which the Ottoman Turks entered Europe.

  The feuds began with the pretensions of John Cantacuzene, who as chief minister bore the title the “Great Domestic” and served as regent for John V Paleologus, child heir to the throne. In 1341 Cantacuzene declared himself joint—in reality, rival—Emperor as John VI. Through ensuing years of civil war he maintained his hold by purchasing the services of the hardy, disciplined Ottoman forces. When, at Cantacuzene’s invitation, Sultan Orchan crossed the Hellespont in 1345, it was, in Gibbon’s knell, “the last and fatal stroke” in the long fall of the ancient Roman Empire.

  Murad I, Orchan’s successor, gained a foothold on the European side with the capture in 1353 of Gallipoli, key to the Hellespont. Exactly 100 years later the Turks were to take Constantinople itself, but Cantacuzene, like other great actors in history, had no vision of the consequences inherent in his acts. Rather, to cement the collaboration with his new allies, he gave his daughter in marriage to Orchan in a Moslem ceremony, bridging the abyss between Christian and infidel without scruple—and without affecting his faith. Some years later, when forced to abdicate, the once “Great Domestic” became a monk and retired to write in cloistered calm a history of the times he had done so much to embroil.

  Incurable discord at Constantinople gave the Turks the means to exploit their gateway at Gallipoli. Upon Cantacuzene’s abdication, his former ward, John Paleologus, regained the throne (which accounts for the alarming succession of John VI by John V) only to plunge into a vicious family struggle in which sons and grandson, uncle and nephew over the next 35 years deposed, imprisoned, tortured, and replaced one another in various combinations with Murad I.

  While assisting the Paleologi toward their mutual destruction, the Turks, like a hand opening out from the wrist at Gallipoli, expanded through the Byzantine and Bulgarian dominions. In 1365 Murad advanced his capital to Adrianople (Edirne) 120 miles inside Europe. In 1371 he defeated a league of Serbs and Bulgars on the river Maritza in Bulgaria. John V henceforth held part of his empire, and the Bulgar boyars their territories, as vassals of the Sultan. In 1389 a new league of Serbs, Rumanians, and their northern neighbors, the Moldavians, attempted to stem the Turks but were defeated by Murad in the decisive Battle of Kossovo, the grave of Serbian independence. The Serbian Czar and the elite of his nobles were killed and his son forced to accept vassalship to the Sultan. Murad himself was killed after the battle by a dying Serb who, feigning to have a secret to tell the Sultan, stabbed him in the belly when Murad leaned over to listen to him. However, the Sultan left his successor, Bajazet, the strongest power in the region. In the 35 years since their crossing of the Bosporus, the Turks had overrrun the eastern Balkans up to the Danube and now stood at the borders of Hungary.

  The division of their foes was the major factor in the Turkish advance. A legacy of bitter mistrust had separated Constantinople from the West ever since the Latin crusaders had penetrated the Eastern dominions. The old schism in Christianity between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches left an implacable dispute over minor matters of ritual—the less fundamental they were, the greater the rancor—and made adversaries of the Balkan peoples. Bulgaria and Wallachia (the contemporary name for Rumania) and most of Serbia belonged to the Greek Church, as opposed to Hungary, which belonged to the Latin and was resented for its efforts to impose Roman Catholic clergy and gain political dominion over its neighbors. Mircea, voyevod or ruler of Wallachia, fought against the Turks at Kossovo, but, because of old animosities, was not anxious to make common cause with Hungary against the common enemy. The same was true of the Serbs, who in any case were precluded from doing so once they accepted the Sultan as overlord. This had been Murad’s policy: to neutralize the Balkan rulers by leaving them in place under the obligation of homage. Because their kingdoms lacked unity, being no more than loose federations of semi-autonomous rulers, each could be picked off individually. One by one, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Wallachian rulers paid homage in order to avoid continuous Turkish raids. In areas of direct conquest, Murad divided the territory as fiefs among his followers, rooting them in Europe. Half the Turkish army at Kossovo already held land on the far side of the Bosporus.

  Bajazet lost none of the impetus of his forebears. Chosen Sultan on the battlefield of Kossovo, he began by strangling his brother with a bowstring, a customary Turkish precaution, and proceeded at once to the business of shaking the Byzantine throne by assisting John VII to overthrow his grandfather. When John was in turn overthrown by his uncle, Manuel II, Bajazet besieged and blockaded Constantinople for seven years. In the meantime, he expanded his hold in Bulgaria, invaded Macedonia and Attica, and ravaged Bosnia and Croatia—taking more prisoners, it was said, than he left inhabitants. He was bold, enterprising, always on horseback, “equally avid for the blood of his enemies as he was prodigal with that of his soldiers.” His vanguard of ghazis, instruments of Allah, fought with the extra zeal of holy war against the Christian infidels. A ghazi, according to Turkish definition, was “the sword of God who purifies the earth from the filth of polytheism,” by which was meant the Christian Trinity.

  In 1393, after occupying Tirnovo, capital of the eastern Bulgarian kingdom, Bajazet captured Nicopolis, the strongest Bulgarian fortress on the Danube. Situated on a height above the town of Nicopolis on the river’s edge, it commanded what was then a ford of the Danube protected by a Wallachian fortress on the opposite bank. Two tributary rivers entered the Danube at the base of the castle which thus controlled communications through the interior as well as down the Danube. At this strategic site the European-Ottoman clash was to come.

  When the Bulgarian Czar, Ivan Shishman, refused, though a vassal, to support the Turks’ further advance with troops and provisions, Bajazet imprisoned him in Nicopolis. Growing impatient with the vassalage system, the Sultan subsequently had his prisoner strangled, reduced his kingdom to the status of a Turkish sandjak or province, and moved on against Vidin, capital of the western Bulgarian kingdom. When Sigismund, King of Hungary, sent envoys to demand by what right the Sultan abrogated Bulgarian sovereignty, Bajazet answered without words by simply pointing to the wea
pons and war trophies that hung upon his walls. Behind him he constructed a huge tower to fortify Gallipoli and a permanent port for his galleys. He raised imposing mosques at Adrianople and built caravansaries along the path of his advance. While his armed horsemen thrust forward in Europe, he continued to campaign and extend his hold in Anatolia. For the “fiery energy of his soul” and the speed of his marches, he earned the surname Ilderim, meaning Thunderbolt.

  Following the capture of Nicopolis, King Sigismund’s appeals to the West for help grew more pressing. His country was now the last organized state in Eastern Europe resisting the Turks and it still remembered the terror of the Mongol ravages that had swept and receded over the Danube plain in the last century. Though Hungary was “Queen of the surrounding countries,” the resistance she could offer to the new invaders was hampered by incessant quarrels with Poland and Lithuania on the north, by the hostility of her neighbors to the south, and by divisions within its own ruling class and among its commoners. The country was a patchwork made up of a foreign sovereign, Hungarian nobles, native peasants living by an agriculture untouched by the West, and a merchant class of German immigrants who had developed the towns and remained alien in habit as they did in Bohemia and Poland.

  Through a century of rule by the Angevin dynasty, the Hungarian crown was closely connected with the French court and continued to be so under the Luxemburg dynasty, which began with Sigismund. He became King in 1387 by virtue of marriage to the daughter of the last Angevin King, Louis the Great, who died without a male heir. Son of the late Emperor Charles IV and younger half-brother of Wenceslas, Sigismund was a less serious statesman than his father, more able and sensible than his distracted brother. Like Wenceslas, he was well educated and fluent in four languages. Tall, strong, and uncommonly handsome, with light-brown hair worn long and curled, he was intelligent and well-meaning as a ruler but pleasure-loving, extravagant, and licentious, with a record of scandalous love affairs. History knows him largely as Emperor in later life, but at this time he was only 28 and barely keeping his balance in precarious circumstances.

  Succeeding as an outsider to the Hungarian crown at nineteen, he had faced comparison with a dynamic and powerful predecessor, the enmity of rebellious nobles, a domineering mother-in-law, and a rival to the throne in the person of that throne-surfeited Angevin heir, Charles of Durazzo. Through hectic years of cabals and assassinations, Charles of Durazzo and Queen-Mother Elizabeth of Hungary managed to destroy each other, and the rebellious nobles were more or less contained, despite such intensity of feeling as caused one of them to shout at Sigismund, “I will never bow to you, you Bohemian pig!” Preoccupied by these various challenges in his first eight years as ruler, Sigismund was not able to mobilize effective resistance to the Turks, who took advantage of the situation to ravage his borders.

  Personally brave though tactless, hot-tempered and cruel when angered, Sigismund had survived. Like each of the Luxemburgs, he had distinctive characteristics. On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler. Attending the Parlement at Paris to observe the courts of justice in operation, he heard a verdict given against a plebeian plaintiff named Seignet on the ground that he was no knight while the defendant was. To the astonishment of his retinue and assembled lawyers, judges, and onlookers, Sigismund rose, announced in a loud voice his right to make knights, summoned Seignet to him, bade him kneel, and dubbed him knight on the spot. Removing one of his gold spurs and his belt from which hung a dagger to represent a sword, he had one of his men put these insignia on the dumbfounded new knight, and “thus the King advanced the cause of the said Seignet.”

  While not oblivious to the Turkish advance, the West, having no great attachment to Constantinople, paid little serious attention to the danger until it reached Hungary. Every Pope in the last forty years had, it is true, called for crusade against the approaching infidel, some with real fervor, but the fervor was more for invigoration of the Faith than from a realistic appreciation of the danger. Such enterprises as were launched against the Turks were narrow in scope and motivated by special interests. The interest of the popes was to re-absorb the Eastern Church within the Latin fold; the interest of the Venetians and Genoese was to preserve their trading posts in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean; the interest of the Lusignans of Cyprus was to preserve their kingdom against the Turkish tide. The nearest thing to a united effort was the Latin League organized by Pope Clement VI in 1344, even before the Turks entered Europe. With the combined forces of the papacy, Venice, Cyprus, and the Hospitalers of Rhodes, Clement had hoped, by initial success against the Turks, to induce Constantinople to enter into alliance with the Latin League and reunite with the Roman Church. Victorious at the outset, the Latin fleet took Smyrna and destroyed 100 Turkish vessels, but the crusaders’ land forces, paralyzed by disease, dissension, and irresolute leadership, made no headway and the campaign petered out in negotiated terms.

  One further effort was made in the 1360s under the prodding of Pierre de Lusignan of Cyprus, whose interest was most immediate. After vainly touring the courts of Europe for three years trying to raise the forces for a crusade, he was able to mount an expedition from Cyprus in 1365 which triumphantly took the rich city of Alexandria in Egypt as a first step on the way to Jerusalem. Wishing to make sure of their immense booty, his followers insisted on sailing away with their gains, leaving Lusignan without enough forces to exploit his victory, or even hold it. Alexandria had to be given up.

  At the same time, Amadeus of Savoy, whose aunt, Anne of Savoy, was Dowager Empress in Constantinople, led a remarkable campaign intending to join up with Lusignan. He succeeded in regaining Gallipoli, but this too was transitory. The Free Companies under Du Guesclin, who were supposed to march overland against the Turks from the West at the same time, never came. Amadeus, like Lusignan, lacked the forces to go farther, and within a few years Murad recovered Gallipoli.

  In 1369 Constantinople itself called for help. In a desperate effort to excite the aid of the West, Emperor John V journeyed to Rome to abjure the schism between the Greek and Latin churches and offer himself as the first convert. He succeeded mainly in exciting the fury of his own clergy and laity, who repudiated his arrangements. Europe, preoccupied with the renewal of the Anglo-French war, was not interested.

  The one person on record who consistently tried to energize a response proportionate to the challenge was Philippe de Mézières, although in his case, too, the enemy was irrelevant: crusade for its own sake was his great objective. For him it was a moral imperative, a philosopher’s stone that would cure society’s suffering and turn its evils to gold: quarrels and hostilities would cease, tyrants fall or reform, Christianity would convert Turks, Tatars, Jews, and Saracens and bring about the peace and unity of the world. But though he was an exalté, Mézières knew the Levant and the Turks at first hand, with the result that he understood the gravity of the problem and took it seriously.

  As a young cleric drawn by ardor for the Holy Land, he had joined the crusade of the Latin League to Smyrna; later, as chancellor to Pierre de Lusignan of Cyprus, he lived close to the Turkish problem for many years and, on returning to the French court after Lusignan’s death, made it his purpose in life to regain the East for Christianity. He recognized that this meant not reckless adventure, but organized serious warfare to meet an organized, disciplined foe whom he knew from Smyrna to be well trained, courageous, and ruthless. He conceived of the force needed as a national army to include bourgeois and common people serving as men-at-arms, and knights as leaders, motivated by virtue and zeal rather than greed. Like the Templars and Hospitalers of old, they would be dedicated to obedience, justice, and military discipline, and in the course of their great enterprise would revive the true ideals of knighthood. He founded, for this purpose, an Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ. As indicated by the name, his interest was moral, not military.

  Mézi
ères’ insistent propaganda—which included the marvelous stage spectacle of the First Crusade performed for the Emperor’s visit to Paris—undoubtedly had its effect on Charles VI and doubtless on others. In 1389 a firsthand report on the Turks was brought back by Boucicaut on his return from the Holy Land, where he had gone to ransom Comte d’Eu on the journey that produced the Cent Ballades. His recitals of all he had seen in the East, of his visit to Sigismund in Hungary, and his reception at Gallipoli by Sultan Murad, who had treated him nobly and given him magnificent gifts and a safe-conduct, heightened the young King’s desire for the “glorious adventure.” In the 1390s news from the East grew more urgent. When the peace parley of 1393 failed to conclude a treaty with England, Charles nevertheless urged Lancaster to consider a joint expedition against the Turks “to defend the faith and come to the aid of Hungary and the Emperor of Constantinople.” But while peace with England hung fire, nothing could be done, and not until the Duke of Burgundy interested himself did anything happen.

  Burgundy was still the principal mover of events. Before retrieving national power through the King’s madness, he had been looking for a crusade to go on, with options divided between Prussia—which would serve no purpose except to keep warriors busy—and Hungary. In 1391 he sent Guy de Tremoille to Venice and Hungary to investigate the situation and, persuaded of sufficient grandeur in the cause to suit his requirements, planned a crusade, originally to be led by himself, Louis d’Orléans, and the Duke of Lancaster. In the end, none of the three went. Whether defense against the Turks was seen as a vital European interest is doubtful. Burgundy’s personal interest in sponsoring the crusade was to magnify himself and his house, and since he was the prince of self-magnification, the result was that opulent display became the dominant theme; plans, logistics, intelligence about the enemy came second, if at all.