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on cliffs above the river Danube. On the morning after the battle the sultan sat and watched as the surviving Crusaders were led naked before him, their hands tied behind them. He offered them the choice of conversion to Islam or, if they refused, immediate decapitation. Few would renounce their faith, and the growing piles of heads were arranged in tall cairns before the sultan, and the corpses dragged away. By the end of a long day, more than 3,000 Crusaders had been butchered, and some accounts said as many as 10,0. A single knight was freed and sent to Paris to recount the sultan’s vengeance to the king of France. The carnage was in part a response to the Crusaders’ massacre of their Turkish prisoners before the battle, but this formal and ceremonial slaughter was an innovation, and different from the massacres that were commonplace after the capture of cities or in the immediate aftermath of a battle. The mass killings by Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 had stemmed from an enraged bloodlust after battle. Bayezid by contrast intended a calculated and memorable act of cruelty, which ran counter to the normal customs of war: many of those killed were of noble birth, for whom a ransom would have been paid.29

But the sultan’s aim was achieved. The news of Nicopolis and its aftermath quickly became known throughout Europe and it proved very difficult to rouse any interest in the West for a new Crusade.30 Only in Hungary was the appeal of the Crusade still potent, and eventually Bayezid’s son Murad II confronted a resurgent Hungarian power. The Hungarians and their allies were led by the “white knight of Wallachia,” János Hunyadi, whose silvered armor became famous throughout the Balkans. The Hungarians knew him as “Török-verö” (scourge of the Turks). He was appointed governor of Transylvania in 1441, and regained much of the land lost to the Turks along the Danube. In 1443, the long-anticipated Crusade was launched: Vladislav, king of both Poland and Hungary, launched a new Crusade, and advancing south of the Danube recaptured both Sofia and Nish. After a serious defeat at Kostunitza, Murad sanctioned a ten-year truce.

But in the following year, the Hungarian king broke the terms of the truce and led a new Crusade down the Danube. Murad, at the time defending his territory in Asia, quickly gathered the Ottoman armies from there and Europe. He marched north toward the Crusaders. At the city of Varna, on the shores of the Black Sea, the sultan unexpectedly won another victory on the scale of Nicopolis. King Vladislav and many of his best troops died in the battle. The king’s head was cut from his body, preserved in a barrel of honey, and dispatched to Bursa, where it was spiked on a lance and paraded in triumph through the streets.31 Meanwhile, Hunyadi, who had commanded one wing of the Crusader force, escaped from the debacle and fled north beyond the Danube. He slowly gathered a new army and again marched south to attack the Ottomans. On October 16, 1448, on the fateful plain of Kosovo, Hunyadi and his army of Hungarians, Wallachians, Czechs, and Germans met the Ottomans on the same ground where Lazar had fallen more than half a century before. The battle lasted three days, and Hunyadi’s army succumbed to Ottoman discipline and tenacity.32

There was a new intensity to these wars in the Balkans. Hitherto, the Mongols had been unique in their relentless cruelty, but now it seemed that both Christians and Muslims vied with each other for the scale and ingenuity of their atrocities. The ruler (voivod) of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes “the Impaler,” perfected the technique of mass death, skewering his enemies on a long spit or spear—the longer the stake, the higher in rank the victim.33 In 1461, Murad II’s son the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, was horrified when he saw the 20,000 rotting corpses hanging on sharpened stakes outside the walls of Vlad’s capital of Tirgoviste, although he himself had had no hesitation in condemning criminals to death by impalement in his own domains. Earlier centuries had seen many isolated examples of