The next place after Somovit, also on the Bulgarian shore, is Nicopoli, picturesquely situated at the foot of bold cliffs and up the slopes between them. For here the left bank has taken on new beauty, and in front of it the Danube stretches, about two miles in width, its surface broken by a number of islands about which pelicans and various waterfowl abound. Its mosques and minarets remain as indications of the long period that it was a Turkish town, and to suggest something of the past when the Crescent and the Cross fought strenuously together for the mastery.
In 1392, and again three years later, King Sigismund of Hungary captured Nicopoli. Then Sultan Bajazet, the “Thunderbolt,” came thither with his army, determined to show that he merited his newly-acquired title. To use Gibbon’s words he had “turned his arms against the Kingdom of Hungary, the perpetual theatre of the Turkish victories and defeats. Sigismond, the Hungarian King, was the son and brother of the Emperors of the West; his cause was that of Europe and the Church; and on the report of his danger, the bravest Knights of France and Germany were eager to march under his standard and that of the Cross. In the battle of Nicopoli, Bajazet defeated a confederate army of a hundred thousand Christians, who had proudly boasted, that if the sky should fall, they could uphold it on their lances. The far greater part were slain or driven into the Danube; and Sigismond, escaping to Constantinople by the river and the Black Sea, returned, after a long circuit, to his exhausted Kingdom. In the pride of victory Bajazet threatened that he would besiege Buda; that he would subdue the adjacent countries of Germany and Italy; and that he would feed his horse with a bushel of oats on the altar of St. Peter’s at Rome. His progress was checked, not by the miraculous interposition of the apostle, not by a crusade of the Christian powers, but by a long and painful fit of the gout. The disorders of the moral are sometimes corrected by those of the physical world; and an acrimonious humour falling on a single fibre of one man, may prevent or suspend the misery of nations.”
In the great Christian host thus destroyed, there was a large body of the Knights of Malta, all of whom, it is said, perished with the exception of the Grand Master, who escaped with King Sigismund in a boat. The historian, it should be added, gives this as the “general idea” of the fighting, but he goes on to suggest that the Christian army was not so large as has been said, and that it was the carelessness of the Christians, no less than the greatness of the Ottoman leader, that gave so signal a victory to the latter, for he continues, speaking of the leaders of the French army, “when their scouts announced the approach of the Turks, the gay and thoughtless youths were at table, already heated with wine; they instantly clasped their armour, mounted their horses, rode full speed to the vanguard, and resented as an affront the advice of Sigismond, which would have deprived them of the right and honour of the foremost attack. The battle of Nicopoli would not have been lost if the French would have obeyed the prudence of the Hungarians; but it might have been gloriously won had the Hungarians imitated the valour of the French. They dispersed the first line, consisting of the troops of Asia; forced a rampart of stakes, which had been planted against the cavalry; broke, after a bloody conflict, the janizaries themselves; and were at length overwhelmed by the numerous squadrons that issued from the woods, and charged on all sides this handful of intrepid warriors.”
The victory placed the Danubian provinces under Turkish rule, and so may be said to have been responsible for nearly five centuries of that sporadic struggle which only ended after the termination of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. Again and again was Nicopoli a battle centre. It was besieged once more by the Hungarians in 1444; twice the Turks were defeated here in the closing decade of the sixteenth century. The town was occupied by the Russians in 1810, and in 1829 the Russians destroyed the Turkish flotilla here and stormed the place. In 1877 before the advance on Plevna, Nicopoli was captured and burnt by the Russians, and was occupied by the Rumanians during the stubborn attack on Plevna.
In an old guide book it is recorded that a little beyond Nicopoli is Pellina, a Latin settlement of about two thousand souls, who chose this spot to avoid persecution, to which they, as Christians, were subject in Nicopoli. “As the steamboat passes along, a number of them generally assemble on a hill, having a bishop at their head, and cry aloud, ‘Brothers, come to us!’ imagining the passengers to be of the same creed as themselves. The captain returns their invitation by a salute.” As I have not travelled this portion of the Danube, I cannot say whether this picturesque incident still occurs. The passing of Turkish rule has long since done away with any occasion for it. Even when Miss Skene journeyed up the river, Christian “Infidels” were sometimes very badly received, for she recorded landing at one place, to which she gave no name (possibly it was Nicopoli), where she and her companions were stoned back to their vessel.
Opposite Nicopoli is the small Rumanian town of Turn-Magurelle, with ruins of a Turkish fortress. The broad river—like an inland sea, as one traveller puts it—flows on past many reedy islands, from which now and again large flocks of pelicans are to be seen, until, beyond a very large island, another Bulgarian place of historic importance is reached at Sistov, a very picturesquely situated town, about the base and on the slopes of a hill surmounted by ancient ruins. These ruins are part of the fortress, destroyed by the Russians in 1810, where the Treaty of Sistov, between Austria and Turkey, was signed in 1791. It was probably here that Miss Skene landed when she got the view of the river described in the following passage. She tells how after “a fortnight’s imprisonment on board” the captain’s permission to land for half an hour was hailed with delight, and how she and her companions adopted his suggestion of making “for the ruins of an old castle visible on the summit of the hill.” Sistov was still a Turkish town, inhabited by a people who looked with disfavour on Christian visitors.
“It was with considerable difficulty that we made our way through the assembled villagers, whose gestures and cries were most expressive of the hatred and contempt with which they regarded us. Happily the steamer and its contents engaged them so much, that we succeeded in getting clear of the village altogether, by a circuitous road, which was particularly like a road anywhere else, and ascended to the summit of the hill. The ruins were merely those of an old Turkish castle, in no way remarkable, but as soon as we disengaged ourselves from them, and got out on to the open brow of the hill, the view which then burst upon our sight was most remarkable.
“Here was indeed the Danube at last, which till then, seen in detail, and most unfavourably, in its swollen and irregular state, we had never comprehended as the great, the stupendous, the noble river which it is. Springing in the very heart of that Europe, of which it is the great artery, and sweeping along with its silver rolling waters, too vast and majestic to be turbulent, undiminished in volume, unvarying in course from land to land, till now, where we could distinguish it far off in the vast plains that lay around us—it came, turning its mighty stream through the green meadows which it fertilized, and rushing deep and wide, as though it had gathered all the rivers of earth to its bosom, beneath our feet, rolled on away to that wild and stormy sea, whose tremendous billows cannot, even for twenty miles, resist its current. The country, of which we obtained a panoramic view from this spot, was but one succession of fertile plains, but the river was still in flood, and the distance rendered the details of the opposite shore quite indistinct.”
From Sistov to Rustzuk—a distance of about forty miles the Danube flows past the low, reed-grown banks, broken up and enislanded by ditches and small branches of the stream on the left, and past the low, bare hills of Bulgaria on the right, with little to vary the sameness beyond the passing of islands and the sight of some of the waterfowl with which these lower parts of the river abound.
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