Crusader battle at Nicopolis

The Crusader battle at Nicopolis was a decisive defeat for the Christian coalition in September 1396 and the last known campaign of Jean de Carrouges. The clash followed a long march east and a failed effort to take a fortified city. It ended with the crusaders’ lines overwhelmed by Ottoman forces, many leaders captured, and Carrouges’s fate left uncertain. The battle also marked the end of three centuries of European military ventures in the East, and came to be remembered as the Last Crusade.

The campaign and the approach to Nicopolis

Carrouges joined the crusade as a veteran seeking another military adventure. The expedition drew nobles and knights from across Europe. The Burgundians were led by Jean of Nevers, the son of Duke Philip. Among the French commanders were Marshal Boucicaut, who had previously traveled with Carrouges in Turkey and Greece; Philip of Artois, Count of Eu, who had served as one of Jacques Le Gris’s pledges; and Admiral Jean de Vienne. Carrouges had fought alongside Vienne in Normandy nearly twenty years earlier and had joined him on the unsuccessful Scottish expedition of 1385. Nicopolis was their third campaign together.

The crusaders had no settled common plan. Some leaders spoke of marching all the way to Jerusalem, but the coalition did not agree on a single objective. The French and Burgundian forces assembled at Dijon in late April and received four months’ wages in advance. They marched east through Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria, and Hungary, meeting other crusaders, including King Sigismund of Germany and Hungary, at Budapest. From there, part of the host traveled south along the Danube, accompanied by supply ships; another contingent took a more direct overland route past Belgrade and Orsova.

In early September the forces reunited at Vidin, which they besieged and captured. The crusaders put the town’s entire garrison to the sword. Continuing east along the Danube, they ran short of supplies and attacked and plundered several more towns. On September 12 they reached Nicopolis, a strongly defended city on a high bluff above the river. Their first assault, using mines and scaling ladders, failed because they lacked the siege engines needed to overcome its defenses.

Forces gather and the attack begins

Sultan Bayezid had been besieging Constantinople, roughly three hundred miles away. On learning that the Christians had attacked Nicopolis, he abandoned that siege and ordered his army to march north. His forces joined their Serbian allies at Kazanlak around September 20. They reached Nicopolis on September 24 and encamped nearby. Messengers went to the city at night to urge its defenders to hold out, promising that relief had arrived.

Bayezid chose the ground for the coming battle rather than attacking immediately. His army took position on a ridge behind a narrow, wooded ravine a few miles south of the city, and troops planted thick rows of sharp wooden stakes there. The crusaders were now caught between the city and the sultan’s army. Having taken thousands of prisoners in raids on nearby towns, and fearing an attempt by the defenders to rescue them, the crusaders massacred their captives and left the bodies unburied as they hurried onward.

On Monday morning, September 25, the crusaders rode out to meet Bayezid’s army. The French and Burgundians refused to march behind Sigismund’s forces, whom they regarded as peasants, and demanded the lead. Sigismund yielded, but warned them not to advance too far or abandon a strong defensive position in their eagerness to attack. As the lines formed, the headstrong Count of Eu took up a banner and called for the charge. Vienne and the other French commanders urged him to wait until the troops were ready. Eu accused them of cowardice, and the premature attack began.

The French heavy cavalry charged downhill into the wooded ravine, under a hail of arrows from mounted Ottoman archers on the ridge. At the dry streambed, the knights faced the climb up the opposite slope. Some were unhorsed by the arrows; others dismounted where the slope was too steep. Many nevertheless reached the top, their plate armor deflecting most of the arrows. When the Ottoman archers withdrew, they exposed the stakes protecting the Ottoman infantry. The crusaders began pulling the stakes up, broke through, and killed or routed much of the lightly armed force.

The reversal and the defeat

The apparent success did not last. As the crusaders prepared to pursue the retreating infantry, Ottoman cavalry swept into the fighting. In the ensuing mêlée, French knights fought on foot and attacked enemy horses with daggers. The Ottoman cavalry eventually withdrew. Exhausted by the climb, the fighting, and the effort of forcing a way through the stakes, the crusaders believed they had won and rested.

Bayezid had kept another cavalry force in reserve, concealed behind trees. It now charged the resting crusaders. Some were killed in the first attack; others retreated down the slope and fled toward the city, while some crossed the Danube to escape. Those who remained continued fighting as their dead comrades accumulated around them. Jean de Vienne fell with the banner of the Virgin still in his hand. Sigismund’s forces, advancing behind the Franco-Burgundian charge, were cut to pieces.

Overwhelmed, many crusaders who had held their ground surrendered. The captives included Boucicaut and the Count of Eu, whose decision to attack before the troops were ready had set the French advance in motion. The Ottomans took as many as three thousand prisoners. Some prominent and wealthy captives, including Boucicaut and Jean of Nevers, were eventually ransomed. Others were executed in reprisal for the crusaders’ massacre of prisoners. On the day after the battle, the Ottomans beheaded several hundred crusaders before Bayezid, sickened by the slaughter, ordered it stopped.

Carrouges’s fate and the battle’s aftermath

No record establishes what happened to Carrouges at Nicopolis. The account considers it likely that he died fighting the Turks near the place where his former commander Vienne fell and was buried with him in a mass grave. Another possibility is that he was captured and executed the following day in retaliation for the massacre. The evidence does not resolve the alternatives. Given his courage, ferocity, and loyalty to his comrades, the narrative considers it unlikely that he fled the field, but this remains an assessment rather than a confirmed account of his final actions.

Carrouges’s death, if he died there, left his wife Marguerite without the defender she had lost when he departed on crusade. Their son Robert was ten years old and would not reach adulthood for another decade. The account notes that Marguerite might have relied on her cousin Thomin du Bois, who had once challenged Adam Louvel to a duel on her behalf, or on Robert de Thibouville, one of Carrouges’s sworn pledges at the judicial duel. It also emphasizes the uncertainty and isolation that may have followed when Carrouges failed to return from abroad.

The military defeat carried a significance beyond the fate of the individual knights. The disastrous outcome ended three centuries of European military adventures in the East. For Carrouges, whose earlier service had taken him through campaigns in Normandy and Scotland, Nicopolis was the final campaign the account can trace. Yet even this ending remains incomplete: the battle’s outcome is clear, while the place and manner of his death are not.