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Bayezid announced his victory from the battle-field to the Kadi of Brusa, and later, from Adrianople, to the Moslem princes of Asia.[548] To the Sultan of Egypt and other rulers he sent gifts of prisoners to corroborate his letters.[549]
The intercession of Jean de Nevers had saved the more illustrious of the surviving French chevaliers. They were taken to Brusa. While not treated royally, they were allowed to hunt, and were given opportunities to see the grandeur of Bayezid.[550] But they were not kept together long. For some months, the heir to the Duchy of Burgundy was separated from his companions, and could talk with them only by the special permission of Bayezid. Some of them were sent to Mikhalitch, where Philippe d’Artois, grand marshal of France, died.[551] Enguerran de Coucy, worn out with anxiety for his family and the disgrace that had come to him at the close of his brilliant career, soon followed the Comte d’Artois to the grave.
In the meantime, Jacques Helly was sent by Bayezid to Paris to communicate to the Duke of Burgundy and the other relatives of the captives the conditions for their ransom—two hundred thousand pieces of gold, delivered to Bayezid at Brusa. Froissart describes the feeling aroused at Paris by the first news of the disaster. The stories of the survivors were not believed, and the bearers of bad news narrowly escaped hanging or drowning. An order of the king’s council forbade any man to mention Nicopolis. The anxiety of the families of the chevaliers was not set at rest until Jacques Helly reached Paris on Christmas night, three months after the battle. Only then was it known who had been saved for ransom. What was joy to some was a crushing blow to others. Not since the battle of Poitiers had such a calamity come to the noble families of France. There was great lamentation throughout the kingdom. Chief among the mourners was the Duchess of Burgundy, who had lost her three brothers, and whose son was in the hands of Bayezid.[552]
While Jacques Helly was in France, Marshal Boucicaut was given permission to go to Constantinople to try to raise the ransom. He spent the Lenten season of 1397 there without success.[553] The Duke of Burgundy resorted to every expedient to raise the enormous sum demanded by Bayezid. For the ransom of his son ‘great taxes were laid upon all the kingdom, and a large amount of money was gathered and transported to Turkey, which was a great and irreparable loss’.[554] It was not forgotten for many years. A decade later it was used as one of the indictments against the Duc d’Orléans, who met his death through the man he had helped to ransom.[555]
When, a year after the battle of Nicopolis, the money was at last delivered to Bayezid through the intermediation of Gattilusio of Mytilene and the Genoese, Venetian, and Cypriote merchants who traded with the Osmanlis, Bayezid gave the chevaliers their liberty. To the Comte de Nevers, he said: ‘John, I know well and am informed that you are in your country a great lord. You are young, and, in the future, I hope you will be able to recover, with your courage, from the shame of this misfortune which has come to you in your first knightly enterprise, and that, in the desire of getting rid of the reproach and recovering your honour, you will assemble your power to come against me and give me battle. If I were afraid of that, and wanted to, before your release I would make you swear upon your faith and religion that you would never bear arms against me, nor those who are in your company here. But no: neither upon you nor any other of those here will I impose this oath, because I desire, when you will have returned to your home and will have leisure, that you assemble your power and come against me. You will find me always ready to meet you and your people on the field of battle. And what I say to you, you can say in like manner to those to whom you will have the pleasure of speaking about it, because for this purpose was I born, to carry arms and always to conquer what is ahead of me.’[556]
It is not true, however, as one would suppose and as Froissart records, that ‘these lofty words were always remembered by Jean de Nevers and his companions so long as they lived’. The French chevaliers went to Rhodes, and then home by way of the Adriatic. The Comte de Nevers took to himself a title which he had not earned, unless one confuses folly with valour. To the end of his days, he was known as Jean sans Peur. He never burned with a desire to wipe out the disgrace of Nicopolis, but spent his whole life as a factional leader in the civil wars of France. After a career which continued as ingloriously as it had begun, he was stabbed to death on the Bridge of Montereau in 1420—tardy vengeance for his own openly acknowledged instigation of the murder of the Duc d’Orléans.