On September 25, 1396, Sultan Bayezid together with the support of his Serbian vassal - prince Stefan Lazarevich, defeats the crusaders at Nikopol. The battle was a result of the crusade announced in 1394 by Pope Boniface IX against the Turks for the liberation of Europe. It was the penultimate Great Crusade and the last Western European Crusade to the East in the Middle Ages (the last being the Varna Crusade 1443 – 1444). For his quick actions, Sultan Bayazid was nicknamed the Lightning.
After their victory in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the Ottoman Turks conquered most of the Balkan Peninsula. It fell under Ottoman rule in 1393. The kingdom of Tarnovo. Byzantium was also conquered. Only Constantinople still holds, although it has been besieged by the Turks several times.
In 1395, Tsar Ivan Shishman was killed in the Danube fortress Nikopol by order of Sultan Bayazid I, because he did not fulfill his vassal duties and did not send his troops to help the Turks. His brother, Tsar Ivan Sratsimir, who ruled the kingdom of Vidin, was also forced to become a vassal of the Turks. The Ottoman wave of conquest swept across the Balkans and reached the borders of Hungary.
Hungarian King Sigismund, who became Holy Roman Emperor, was the first European monarch to sound the alarm about the Ottoman invasion of the heart of Europe. He began negotiations with the French for the organization of a common crusade, which was supported by Pope Boniface IX. Among the organizers of the march, the Burgundian Duke Philip II Bold stands out.
In 1396, his son Jacques the Fearless led 10,000 French knights to the east. He was joined by 6,000 German knights from the Rhineland, Bavaria and Nuremberg, under the command of the Prince of Hohenzollern – Frederick, and 1,000 English and Scots. Apart from them, Polish, Austrian, Swiss, Lombard and Croatian soldiers joined the crusading army. The Venetian admiral Nico assembled a fleet of 44 galleys from the maritime city-republics of Venice and Genoa. Knights of the Order of John arrived with them from the island of Rhodes and joined the Crusader army.
Hungarian King Sigismund joins the crusading army with 30,000 soldiers. In total, the Christian army reached 60,000 people. The 24-year-old Count Jean the Fearless was designated as the commander-in-chief of the crusade. The Crusader cavalry was commanded by the French Marshal Jean le Mengres, also known as Boussicot. The Voivode of Wallachia, Mircea Stari, who was a vassal of Hungary, also joined the Crusader army with his cavalry units. He has combat experience against Bayezid, whom he deals heavy blows in the battles. The Crusaders set off for Bulgaria, moving along the left bank of the Danube River.
On Venetian ships on the Danube, a small number of Ioannit knights arrived from Rhodes, led by the Grand Master of the Order of Saint John, Philibert de Naiac.
The army crosses the Danube at Zhelezni vrata near the town of Orshova, and the transfer by boats and pontoons takes eight days. The French marshal Jean le Mengres tells that when the crusader army reached the walls of Vidin, “the lord of that city came out of the city, who was an Orthodox Christian and had been forcibly subdued by the Turks. He surrendered the city and all its land to the Hungarian king, and also all the Turks who were inside the city”. Crusaders pillage the areas they pass through. Rahovo (today Oryahovo) was looted, and its inhabitants – Turks are captured or killed.
The Crusaders brought no siege engines with them, and Nikopol was well supplied and defended. However, the Crusaders did not expect Sultan Bayezid I to appear with his troops anytime soon, as he was busy besieging Constantinople. However, he raises the siege of Constantinople and sets off with an army at a rapid pace towards Nicopolis. On the way he is joined by his vassal, the Serbian prince Stefan Lazarevic with heavily armed horsemen.
The battle was fierce and began with a cavalry charge by the French knights under the command of Jean de Nevers, who became known as Jean the Fearless after fearlessly charging the enemy. However, it ended with the defeat of the crusaders after the appearance of the Serbian knights who fought on the side of the Turks. The defeat of the forces sent against the Turks by France, England, Scotland, Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Switzerland, Venice, Genoa, Wallachia, Bulgaria, the Teutonic Order, and the Order of the Knights of St. John, is also the last blow against the perishing Second Bulgarian Kingdom and extinction of one of the last European hopes for saving Constantinople from the Turks.
On September 26, Bayazid ordered the execution of between 3,000 and 10,000 prisoners as revenge for the killing of Turks in Oryahovo by the French. He kept captives under the age of 18 for his own army or sold them into slavery. The Kingdom of Vidin fell under Turkish rule immediately after the Battle of Nikopol, and Tsar Ivan Sratsimir was captured and imprisoned in Bursa.
All subsequent attempts to liberate the Balkan Peninsula – the uprising of the heirs to the throne Konstantin Sratsimir and Fruzhin Shishman in the northwestern regions of conquered Bulgaria from 1404-1408, which ended in their defeat and their transformation into petty vassals of the Habsburgs; the last crusade led by the Polish-Hungarian king Władysław II Jagiełło and the Transylvanian voivode Janusz Hunyadi from 1443-1444 and the Balkan rulers who joined him – Georgi Brankovich, Vlad Dracul, Georgi Kastrioti – Skenderbeg, ending with the defeat of the Christian army and the death of the young king in the battle of Varna in the fall of 1444, led to the final conquest of Serbia (1459), Bosnia (1463-1465), Albania (1479), Herzegovina (1482) and until the capture of the Byzantine capital Constantinople (29.V.1453), Thessaly (1460), Peloponnese (1468), Dalmatia and Montenegro (1499) by the armies of the Ottoman rulers Murad II (1421-1444), Mehmed II Fatih (1444 -1446; 1451–1481) and their successors.
Wallachia and Moldavia were also forced to end their resistance and recognize the authority of the Ottoman sultans, and the Hungarian lands, already in the first decades of the 16th century, became the arena of another clash between the East and the West, personified by the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.