August 1395 – August 1396
The crusade sets out, 1396
In 1394 Pope Boniface IX proclaims a crusade against the Ottomans. In August 1395 envoys of King Sigismund of Hungary reach King Charles VI of France in Paris and ask for help against Bayezid. Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, pays for the expedition with 120,000 livres raised in Flanders and puts his son John, Count of Nevers, aged 24, at its head. Enguerrand VII de Coucy goes with Nevers as his chief counsellor, with Philip of Artois, Count of Eu and Constable of France, Marshal Boucicaut and Admiral Jean de Vienne.
John of Nevers, Duke of Burgundy from 1404 as John the Fearless, in a portrait after Jean Malouel, 15th centuryWikimedia Commons, unknown painter after Jean Malouel, Public domain (John II, Duke of Burgundy.jpg)
The French and Burgundians set out from Dijon on 30 April 1396, by contemporary reports some 5,000 knights and squires with 6,000 archers and foot soldiers. They march by Strasbourg into Bavaria and travel down the Danube by Regensburg. The vanguard under Eu and Boucicaut is a month ahead of Nevers, who reaches Vienna on 24 June and Buda in July. At Buda knights from Bavaria, the Rhineland, Saxony, Bohemia and Poland join Sigismund’s Hungarians, and Ban Nicholas Garai brings the Croatian troops.
Medieval window and door frames in the eastern courtyard of the royal palace at BudaWikimedia Commons, Globetrotter19, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Castle Hill, Medieval window and door frames, Buda Royal Palace.JPG)
Forty-four Venetian ships carry the Knights Hospitaller and their Master, Philibert de Naillac, from Rhodes through the Aegean into the Sea of Marmara, and some of them sail on into the Black Sea and up the Danube. At the war council in Buda Sigismund advises waiting for Bayezid, who has not appeared by the end of July, and the French insist on marching to meet him. Part of the Hungarian army goes to gather the troops of Transylvania and Mircea’s Wallachians, and the rest marches with the crusaders down the left bank of the Danube to Orșova.
Sources
- 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).
- David Nicolle, Nicopolis 1396: The Last Crusade (1999).
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