A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [363]
D’Eu gave the signal to advance, with himself in command of the van. Nevers and Coucy commanded the main body. With their backs to the fortress and the town, the French knights on their war-horses, so brilliantly armored “that every man seemed a king,” rode forward with their mounted archers toward the enemy coming down from the hills ahead. The date was September 25. The Hospitalers, Germans, and other allies remained with the King of Hungary, who no longer controlled events.
The impact of the French assault easily smashed the untrained conscripts in the Turkish front lines. With the hot taste of success, even against opponents so unequal, the knights plunged ahead against the lines of trained infantry. They came under volleys of lethal arrows and up against rows of sharpened stakes which the Turks had planted with the points at the height of a horse’s belly. How the French broke through is unclear. Out of the welter of different versions, a coherent account of the movements and fortunes of the battlefield is not to be had; there is only a tossing kaleidoscope. There are references to horses impaled, riders dismounting, stakes pulled up, presumably by the French auxiliaries. The knights fought on with sword and battle-ax, and, by their ardor and heavy weight of their horses and weapons, appear to have dominated and routed the Turkish infantry, who circled back to take refuge behind their cavalry. Coucy and Vienne urged a pause at this stage to rest and restore order in the ranks and give the Hungarians time to come up, but the younger men, “boiling with ardor” and believing they had glimpsed victory, insisted on pursuit. Having no idea of the enemy’s numerical strength, they thought that what they had encountered so far was his whole force.
Accounts tell of a scramble uphill, of the sipahis on the wings sweeping down for envelopment, of the Hungarians and foreign contingents caught in confused combat on the plain, of a stampede of riderless horses—evidently from the line of stakes, where, in the havoc, the pages could not hold them. At sight of the stampede, the Wallachians and Transylvanians instantly concluded that the day was lost and deserted. Sigismund and the Grand Master of Rhodes and the Germans rallied their forces against the Turkish envelopment and were fighting with “unspeakable massacre” on both sides when a critical reinforcement of 1,500 Serbian horsemen gave the advantage to the enemy. As a vassal of the Sultan, the Serbian Despot, Stephen Lazarevich, might have chosen passive neutrality like the Bulgarians on whose soil the struggle was being fought, but he hated the Hungarians more than the Turks, and chose active fidelity to his Moslem overlord. His intervention was decisive. Sigismund’s forces were overwhelmed. Dragged from the field by their friends, the King and the Grand Master escaped to a fisherman’s boat on the Danube and, under a rain of arrows from their pursuers, succeeded in boarding a vessel of the allied fleet.
The French crusaders, of whom more than half were unhorsed, struggled in heavy armor to the plateau, where they expected to find the debris of the Turkish army. Instead, they found themselves face to face with a fresh corps of sipahis held in reserve by the Sultan. “The lion in them turned to timid hare,” writes the Monk of St. Denis unkindly. With harsh clamor of trumpets and kettle drums and the war cry “Allah is Great!” the Turks closed in upon them. The French recognized the end. Some fled back down the slope; the rest fought with the energy of despair, “no frothing boar nor enraged wolf more fiercely.” D’Eu’s sword arm slashed right and left as bravely as he had boasted it would. Boucicaut, filled with warrior’s pride mixed with shame for his errors