Who won the Battle of Nicopolis?
The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Bayezid I won a crushing victory at Nicopolis on the Danube on 25 September 1396, destroying a crusading army of Hungarian, French and Burgundian knights led by King Sigismund of Hungary. Often called the last great crusade, its defeat confirmed Ottoman dominance in the Balkans and shocked Latin Christendom.1
In 1396 the knights of western Europe rode east on the scale of a great crusade, one of the last of its kind, to throw the Ottoman Turks back from the Danube. Outside the fortress of Nicopolis they met Sultan Bayezid, and in a single day their crusade, and much of the flower of French chivalry, was destroyed.2
A crusade against the Ottomans
By the 1390s the Ottomans had overrun most of the Balkans and were pressing on the Danube, the frontier of the Kingdom of Hungary. King Sigismund of Hungary called for help, and Latin Christendom answered with the largest crusade in generations: Hungarians, a glittering contingent of French and Burgundian knights under John of Nevers (the future John the Fearless), Germans, Wallachians and the Knights Hospitaller. The army marched down the Danube and laid siege to the Ottoman fortress of Nicopolis.3
The clash on the Danube
Sultan Bayezid I, called Yıldırım, the Thunderbolt, broke off his blockade of Constantinople and marched north with startling speed to relieve the fortress. On 25 September 1396 the two armies met just south of the town. Bayezid screened his infantry and archers with a line of sharpened stakes and held his sipahi cavalry in reserve.4
The knights' fatal charge
Against Sigismund's advice, the French and Burgundian knights insisted on the honor of striking first. They charged uphill, broke through the Ottoman infantry and tore past the stakes, but the effort blew their horses and scattered their ranks. Over the crest they ran straight into Bayezid's fresh cavalry. Surrounded and exhausted, the knights were cut down or captured. When Sigismund's Hungarians and the other contingents came up they too were broken, and a flanking attack by some 5,000 Serbian soldiers, by Britannica's count, under Bayezid's vassal Stefan Lazarević helped to clinch the victory.5
The reckoning
The victory was total, and the reprisal savage. Enraged by his own heavy losses, and by a crusader massacre of prisoners earlier in the campaign, Bayezid had thousands of captives put to death the day after the battle, sparing the greatest nobles, including John of Nevers, to be ransomed for vast sums. Sigismund escaped down the Danube by boat and made his way home the long way, by sea.6
How many died at Nicopolis, and how many prisoners were executed?
No one knows exactly. The crusader army, probably some 12,000 to 16,000 men, was almost entirely killed or captured, and Bayezid then had most of the prisoners put to death. Medieval writers give very different totals for the executions, from just over 300 men of rank in Froissart to 10,000 in Schiltberger.7
Britannica puts the crusaders at 12,000 to 15,000 and says most of them were killed or taken prisoner; Schiltberger reckoned Sigismund's army at 16,000 men. Schiltberger credited Bayezid with 200,000, against the 25,000 Britannica gives. Ottoman losses are just as uncertain. Britannica calls them considerable, and both Schiltberger and Froissart describe the sultan visiting the field after the battle, seeing how many of his own men had fallen and vowing to avenge them on the prisoners.8
Schiltberger, spared only because he was under twenty, says the killing went on from morning until vespers, until Bayezid's counselors knelt before him and begged him to stop, and that 10,000 men died that day. Froissart writes of more than 300 gentlemen of many nations led one after another before the sultan and cut down at his signal. The survivors, Schiltberger among them, were divided between the sultan and their captors as slaves.9
Why did the crusaders lose at Nicopolis?
The crusaders lost because they never fought as one army. The French and Burgundian knights rejected Sigismund's plan, attacked first and alone, wore themselves out against the Ottoman infantry and stakes, and were caught by Bayezid's fresh reserve, while the Hungarians coming up behind them were outflanked and some allies left the field.
The eyewitness Johann Schiltberger, a Bavarian of about sixteen who served in the battle as a knight's runner, says Sigismund asked that the Hungarians, who knew how the Turks fought, should open the attack, and that the Burgundian leader refused to give up that honor. Britannica adds that in their rush for glory the French knights lost touch with the Hungarians, who then missed an outflanking move by the Ottoman sipahi cavalry.10
Britannica stresses Bayezid's reserves and a Serbian force of some 5,000 men whose flanking attack, it says, was critical to the Ottoman success. In the final phase, according to Schiltberger, “the despot,” the Serbian ruler Stefan Lazarević, charged the Hungarian king's banner with fifteen thousand picked men and threw it down, and Sigismund fled.11
What happened after Nicopolis?
John of Nevers and the other great lords were held for ransom and bought their freedom for a huge sum, Sigismund escaped by ship, and the West did not raise another crusade on this scale until the Crusade of Varna, which ended in a similar disaster in 1444, nine years before Constantinople fell.12
Froissart says the ransom for the twenty-five leading prisoners, negotiated with Bayezid near Bursa, was fixed at 200,000 ducats. According to Britannica, it was this defeat and his capture by the Turks that earned John his name, the Fearless. Sigismund got away by water: Froissart has him crossing the Danube in a vessel from Rhodes.13
The next great effort ended the same way. On 10 November 1444 Sultan Murad II destroyed a crusading army at Varna, on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, and the young King Władysław III of Poland and Hungary was killed. Britannica judges that Varna ended Europe's attempts to save Constantinople, which fell to Mehmed II in the siege of 1453. The guide to the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire follows the story from Nicopolis to Vienna.14
Why Nicopolis mattered
Nicopolis was among the last times western Europe mounted a crusade on this scale against the Ottomans, and its failure confirmed that it was now the sultans, not the crusaders, who set the terms in the Balkans. Yet fortune could turn quickly even for the victor: within six years Bayezid himself was crushed and taken prisoner by Timur at Ankara in 1402.15
Where is Nicopolis today?
Medieval Nicopolis is Nikopol, a small town on the right bank of the Danube in northern Bulgaria, facing the Romanian town of Turnu Măgurele across the river. Ruined fortifications still dominate the town, and the crusaders who fled the battle ran down to the river below them, where many drowned trying to reach the boats.
According to Britannica, the stronghold was founded by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in 629 and became an important fortress on the Danube. Its position over one of the main river crossings kept it strategic for centuries: a study published by the Teleorman County Museum in Romania traces the Ottoman bridgehead fort built opposite Nicopolis and the fighting there in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828 to 1829.16
The flight to the river in 1396 is described by both eyewitness and chronicler: Schiltberger writes that men were beaten off the overloaded ships and drowned, and Froissart that more died in the pursuit than in the battle and many were drowned. For the wider context, see the greatest battles of the Middle Ages.17
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