Miraculous Escapes from Ottoman Captivity

MIRACULOUS ESCAPES FROM OTTOMAN CAPTIVITY

ENIKO CSUKOVITS

The September 25, 1396 was a sombre day for Christian Europe: Sultan Bayezid I (1389–1402) annihilated the crusader troops at Nicopolis in the Lower Danube Region. The defeat was unexpected and shocking: the Ottomans were considered a new enemy on the European battlefields; peoples living along the routes of the Ottoman expansion were in the initial phase of getting acquainted with the Empire’s might and fighting methods. The army led by the Hungarian king and assisted by French, Burgundian, German, and Polish knights crossed the Danube in August with the aim of expelling the Ottomans from European soil. “Were the skies to fall upon them, the tips of their spears would have upheld it”, boasted the French knights. Their boundless self-confidence, however, proved to be somewhat impetuous. The Christians reached the castle on the rock at Nicopolis, that was considered one of the key strategic points on the Lower Danube, on September 12. Two weeks later the main body of the Ottoman army arrived to relieve the castle and the following day defeated the crusaders. King Sigismund of Hungary (1387–1437) could barely escape from the battlefield; the majority of the soldiers were either killed or taken captive. Following a bloody hand-to-hand combat, Count John of Nevers, the heir to the throne of Burgundy, Enguerrand, the landlord of Couchy, Guillaume de Trémoille, the Marshal of Burgundy, and the famous Marshal Boucicaut, the archetype of chivalry, were cap- tured. It was a total disaster; the ire of the sultan was particularly vicious since he was very much aggrieved by the losses inflicted on his troops. The prisoners of war, who were stripped of all their clothes, were driven in front of him in groups of three and four, where most of them were beheaded. The most distinguished captives, also naked, stood next to the sultan and had to watch the brutal execution of their fellow soldiers. The 2 ENIKO CSUKOVITS bloody scene was just the first act in the course of ordeals that they were to suffer in the future.1 Those crusaders, whose lives were spared were driven to Gallipoli, several hundreds of kilometres from Nicopolis on foot, wearing a last piece of clothing. They were then shipped to Asia Minor. Commoners and the lesser nobles, such as the Bavarian Hans Schiltberger who wrote a book about his sufferings after his escape, became the sultan’s slaves.2 The most illustrious captives were guarded in Bursa far from the sea. Sul- tan Bayezid asked for 200 thousand golden florins in return for the release of the Burgundian heir and his fellow soldiers. It was such a vast amount that would have been impossible to gather without the joint effort of the European leaders. However, even this was not the total ransom: for the release of Leusták Jolsvai, the Hungarian Palatine (i.e. viceroy), who fought together with the French, the Ottoman ruler demanded an extra 50 thousand golden florins.3 The unbelievable news of the defeat reached Paris by December, where they had to wait more than a year for the return of the crusade’s leaders. The Count of Nevers and some of his surviving fellow soldiers reached their respective homes as late as February 1398. By then the self- deceiving re-assessment of the events had started: the heir to the Bur- gundian throne marched into Dijon and Paris as a victor; his heroism demonstrated in the Battle of Nicopolis earned him the adjective “fear- less”. “There was no family in the kingdom that did not have to mourn at least one member who died in the battle”, noted the chronicler of Saint-

1Joseph Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient au XIVe siècle: expéditions du ma- réchal Boucicaut. Paris, 1886. Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Crusade of Nicopolis, London, 1934 (reprinted 1978). Regarding the accounts of the battle, see primarily Le Livre des faicts du bon Messire Jean Le Maingre, dit mareschal Boucicaut. Ed. by Denis Lalande. Genève, 1985 and Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys contenant le règne de Charles VI de 1380 à 1422. I–II. Publiée en latin et traduit par M. L. Bellaguet, introduction de B. Guenée. Paris, 1994. 2Hans Schiltbergers Reisebuch. Nach der Nürnberger Handschrift herausgegeben von F. Langmantel. Tübingen, 1885. 3Boucicaut’s chronicler also gave an account of the circumstances in which Jolsvai was taken captive; cf. Le Livre des faicts, 110–111. The Palatine’s family was unable to collect the ransom for his release, thus he subsequently died in Ottoman captivity. Elemér Mályusz, Kaiser Sigismund in Ungarn 1387–1437. Budapest, 1990, 134.