26 September 1396 – June 1397
After Nicopolis, 1396–1397
Bayezid rides over the field after the battle and finds the hostages from Rahova whom the crusaders killed the night before. On 26 September the captives are brought before him, and the French knight Jacques de Helly, who once served Murad I, points out the lords to be held for ransom, among them Nevers, Coucy and Eu. Boucicaut, already among the men led out to die, is spared when Nevers pleads for him. Those judged to be under 20, among them the 16-year-old Johann Schiltberger, are made slaves, and the rest are killed until Bayezid stops the executions in the afternoon, between 300 and 3,000 men by different counts.
The killing of the captives before Bayezid after Nicopolis, painted by the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book about 1470Wikimedia Commons, Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, Public domain (Battle of Nicopol aftermath. The massacre of the Christians as revenge for the Rahova massacre.jpg)
The captives are marched on foot to Gallipoli, and after two months there the lords are taken on to Bursa. Coucy dies at Bursa in February 1397, and Eu dies in captivity in June. In June 1397 the ransom is set at 200,000 florins, and on 24 June the prisoners are freed on a first payment of 75,000 and their promise to wait in Venice for the rest. Nevers returns to France in February 1398.
Sigismund, fearing treachery from the Wallachians, sails down the Danube to the Black Sea and goes home by Constantinople, the straits and the Adriatic. Bayezid marches on Vidin and takes it at the end of 1396 or early in 1397, and Ivan Sratsimir is taken to Bursa, where he is probably strangled. Most historians count him as the last ruler of medieval Bulgaria. Ottoman raiders cross into Syrmia and plunder Zemun and Mitrovica, and Schiltberger has them reach Pettau (Ptuj) in Styria, a raid that some historians doubt.
Sources
- Johann Schiltberger, Reisebuch (about 1427).
- Jean Froissart, Chronicles, book IV (about 1400).
- Michel Pintoin, Chronicle of the Monk of Saint-Denis (early 15th century).
- Aziz S. Atiya, The Crusade of Nicopolis (1934).
- Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), 566–575.
- John V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans (1987), 424–425.
- Hans Pirchegger, “Die ersten Türkeneinfälle (1396, 1415, 1418)”, Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Steiermark 18 (1922).
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