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.
XI
There is recorded the capture of Thebes by the Turks in 1363,[557] and the surrender of Patras in Thessaly to the Osmanlis in 1381.[558] The first Ottoman army, however, to enter Greece went to the Morea in 1388, upon the invitation of Theodore Palaeologos, to support his waning power as despot against the indigenous Greeks and the Frankish lords. The Osmanlis under Evrenos carried devastation everywhere they went, and did little to help Theodore.[559] They were soon recalled by Murad to co-operate in the Kossova campaign. When Theodore was hard pressed, in 1391, by Amadeo of Savoy and the Venetians, he turned again to the Osmanlis. Once more Evrenos came to the Morea, and helped to destroy the coast towns.[560]
After the famous council of Ottoman vassals at Serres, in 1395, Theodore, who was one of the princes summoned by Bayezid to Serres, was compelled to sign the cession of Argos and Monembasia to the Osmanlis. He was then thrown into prison, and Bayezid contemplated having him assassinated. But before the cities could be delivered to the Ottoman emissaries, Theodore escaped, and declared the cession null and void.[561] The first impulse of Bayezid was to send an army upon the heels of Theodore. This punitive expedition was postponed on account of the activity of Sigismund, and the necessity of defending the northern frontiers against the Hungarians.[562]
In the spring of 1397, while Bayezid was superintending the construction of a mosque at Karaferia in Macedonia, he received a visit from the Greek bishop of Salona, who laid before him a formal accusation of adultery, sorcery, and oppression against Helena Cantacuzenos, who had been ruling the Duchy of Salona with her paramour after the death of her husband, Louis Fadrique. The bishop invited Bayezid to enter Greece, depicting to him the wonderful hunting he would have in a country full of game.[563]
The promise of good sport with the falcon was not needed. It had long been Bayezid’s intention to extend his sovereignty into the Greek peninsula. He had against Theodore not only the old count from Serres, but also the complicity of the Morean despot in the Nicopolis crusade. At the head of his army, he set out upon the first Ottoman invasion of Greece. In Thessaly, Larissa, Pharsala, and other strongholds surrendered without striking a blow. For thirty years the Greeks of Thessaly had felt that the Ottoman conquest was inevitable. When Bayezid crossed the pass of Thermopylae without opposition, Helena hurried to meet him. She offered her principality, her daughter, and herself to the conqueror. Bayezid did not want the duchess. She was set at liberty immediately. But the beautiful grand-daughter of John Cantacuzenos was sent to his harem. The duchy of Salona, in which was the shrine of Apollo, with all of Phocis, Doris, and Locris, was added to Thessaly, and made an Ottoman province.[564]
Bayezid by this time had tired of the campaign. He felt an irresistible call to return to the pleasures of the court. His military interests were beginning more and more to be centred upon an extension of his power in Asia Minor—the policy that was soon to prove his undoing. But there remained Theodore and the Morea to be dealt with. He left Yakub and Evrenos, with an army of fifty thousand, in charge of the invasion of the Peloponnesus.
Yakub struck south to Coron and Modon. The environs of Modon were pillaged and burned. He defeated Theodore at Megalopolis, and forced him to become a tributary of the Osmanlis. In the meantime, Evrenos had held in check the papal mercenaries at Corinth, and had then taken Argos by assault, with a terrible loss of life, and a booty of fourteen thousand male captives. Because the Venetians could so easily reinforce and reprovision it from the sea, the siege of Nauplia was abandoned. The two commanders, when October came, gave their soldiers licence to pillage wherever they could as a reward for their services, and afterwards withdrew to Macedonia.[565]