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.
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 afternoon their crusade, and much of the flower of French chivalry, was destroyed.
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.
The clash on the Danube
Sultan Bayezid I, called Yildirim, the Thunderbolt, broke off his blockade of Constantinople and marched north1 with startling speed to relieve the fortress. On 25 September 1396 the two armies drew up on the heights above the town. Bayezid arranged his men in depth, screening his infantry and archers with a line of sharpened stakes1 and holding his best cavalry in reserve behind the hill.
The knights' fatal charge
Against Sigismund's advice, the French and Burgundian knights insisted2 on the honour 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.3 Surrounded and exhausted, the knights were cut down or captured. When Sigismund's Hungarians and the other contingents came up they too were broken, with Bayezid's Serbian vassal Stefan Lazarevic and his cavalry reportedly helping to clinch the victory4.
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 campaign5, Bayezid had thousands of captives put to death the day after the battle4, sparing only the greatest nobles, including John of Nevers, to be ransomed for vast sums. Sigismund escaped down the Danube by boat4 and made his way home the long way, by sea.
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. The shock ran through Christendom for a generation. Yet fortune could turn quickly even for the victor: within six years Bayezid himself was crushed and taken prisoner by Timur at Ankara in 14021.