IX
Immediately after the battle, Bayezid sent part of his army across the Danube to hunt down the fugitives and to punish Mircea. This force was defeated by the Wallachians in the plain of Rovine, and withdrew into Bulgaria.[545]
Other columns mounted the Danube through the Iron Gates, retaking on the way the fortresses captured by the crusaders, and made a raid into Styria. Everywhere the akindjis carried fire and death. The country was laid waste. Peterwardein was burned, and sixteen thousand Styrians were carried off into slavery in Macedonia and Anatolia.[546]
This invasion of Hungary made a deep impression upon the Slavic and Teutonic races, who believed that it was the beginning of a Moslem conquest of central Europe. The flagellants and the dancing processions of the plague days of 1348 and 1359 were revived. For a moment, even the Venetian Senate feared that Bayezid had led in person his army into Hungary, and was engaged in an aggressive movement that might bring the Osmanlis to the head of the Adriatic.[547]
But Bayezid was not carried away by the ease of his victory. He let well enough alone. For the moment, he had absorbing interests in the ransom of his prisoners, the developments in the Greek peninsula, the question of Constantinople, and the temptation to licentious pleasures that had come to him with success.