Today in history, September 25, 1396, one of history’s final crusades took place—and culminated in one tragedy after another.
That story is instructive and still holds lessons for today.
Two years before that fateful day, the Ottoman Turks had been “doing great injury to Hungary,” causing its young king, Sigismund, to appeal “to Christendom for assistance.” It came at an opportune time. The hitherto quarreling English and French had made peace in 1389, and a “crusade against the Turks furnished a desirable outlet for the noble instincts of the Western chivalry.”
Matters were further settled once “men of all kinds” — pilgrims, laymen, and clerics returning from the Holy Land and Egypt — told of
the miseries and persecutions to which their Eastern coreligionists were subjected by the unbelieving Saracen, and . . . appealed with all the vehemence of piety for a crusade to recover the native land of Christ.
Western knights everywhere — mostly French but also English, Scottish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Polish — took up the Cross in one of the largest multiethnic crusades against Islam.
Their ultimate goal, according to a contemporary, was “to [re-]conquer the whole of Turkey and to march into the Empire of Persia . . . the kingdoms of Syria and the Holy Land.” A vast host of some 100,000 crusaders — “the largest Christian force that had ever confronted the infidel” — reached Buda in July 1396.
But numbers could not mask the disunity, mutual suspicions, and internal rancor that was evident from the start.
Not only did the French spurn Sigismund’s suggestion that they take only a defensive posture, but when the king suggested that his Hungarians were more experienced with and thus should lead the attack on the Turks, the Frenchmen accused him of trying to take away their glory and set out to take the field before him.
They easily took two garrisons before reaching and besieging Nicopolis, then an Ottoman stronghold on the Danube. Victories and still no response from Sultan Bayezid led to overconfidence and complacency.
Suddenly, on September 25, as the Western leaders were feasting in a tent, a herald burst in with news that Sultan Bayezid “the Thunderbolt”— who only three weeks earlier had been far away besieging Constantinople — had come. Without waiting for Sigismund’s Hungarians, who were still trailing behind, the Westerners instantly formed rank and charged at the first, visible line of the Ottoman force, the *akinjis *(irregular light cavalry).
Although they made quick work of them, the Muslim horsemen had “veiled from the sight of the enemy a forest of pointed stakes, inclined towards the Christians, and high enough to reach the breast of a horse.” Many charging horses were impaled and fell as volleys of arrows descended upon man and beast, killing both.
Continue reading and learn why manuscript images like the following became common after this battle.
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