Battle of Nicopolis - Strength of Forces

Strength of Forces

The number of combatants is heavily contested in historical accounts. Historian Tuchman notes, "Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event," and the Battle of Nicopolis was considered so significant that the number of combatants given by medieval chroniclers ranges as high as 400,000, with each side insisting that the enemy outnumbered them two-to-one, which for the crusaders offered some solace for their defeat and for the Turks increased the glory of their victory. The oft-given figure of 100,000 crusaders is dismissed by Tuchman, who notes that 100,000 men would have taken a month to cross the Danube at Iron Gate, while the crusaders took eight days.

The closest record to a first-person account was made by Johann Schiltberger, a German follower of a Bavarian noble, who witnessed the battle at the age of 16 and was captured and enslaved for 30 years by the Turks before returning home, at which time he wrote a narrative of the battle estimating the crusader strength at the final battle at 16,000, though he also estimated Turkish forces as a wildly inflated 200,000. German historians of the 19th century attempting to estimate the combatants on each side came to the figures of about 7,500-9000 Christians and about 12,000-20,000 Turks, while noting that, from the point of logistics, it would have been impossible for the countryside around Nicopolis to have supplied food and fodder for scores of thousands of men and horses. (Medieval armies acquired supplies by taking them from the surrounding area as they marched, as opposed to using the supply lines of modern armies.)