Cowardly Hungarians or Arrogant French? Defeat at Nicopolis (1396) in Contemporary French Narrative Sources
Abstract
This article discusses the explanations for the defeat of the cusader army at Nicopolis given by three French narrative sources contemporary to the battle: Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, Le livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, and Jean Froissart's Chroniques. With each of the three texts representing a different trend in medieval historiography, views on the events vary from one author to another based on their different literary aims.
Considering the course of the battle as well as the composition of the crusader army out of two contingents, a French and a Hungarian, blame for defeat could easily have fallen on either side. The prevalent opinion in modern historiography is that French narrative sources fault the Hungarians and their cowardice.
Such studies, however, fail to take into account the literary nature of the sources and are, in most cases, influenced by the seminal work on the topic by Joseph Delaville de Roulx. The main aim of this article, therefore, is to examine the ""Hungarians' blame in the defeat and review it with regard to the narrative strategies employed by the medieval texts; special focus is given to the role which the supposed blame was to fulfil depending on the different aims of the narratives, as well as to the varying extent to which specific individual members of the Hungarian army were blamed.