The duke of Burgundy’s oldest son John, god-son of the pope, was now twenty-five. He was small of stature but well knit and vigorous and a good soldier. Burning for glory he led a detachment of French and Flemings to the aid of the king of Hungary against the Turk Bajazet. They were successful in a skirmish and took some prisoners. To these they offered the choice either to turn Christians or to be slain. A French monk was sent who exhorted them long and earnestly; but they did not understand French, and consequently gave no evidence of conviction and conversion: they were put to death accordingly. The battle of Nicopolis followed, where the Christians were totally defeated. John and some of his comrades were brought before Bajazet who reminded them of their cruelty to their own prisoners, and ordered the heads to be struck off of all except John and one or two others for whose ransom he expected large sums. Legend says that a soothsayer warned Bajazet not to kill John of Burgundy; that that Frankish prince was destined to be more fatal to his brother misbelievers than all the Turks in Asia Minor. The duke when he heard of his son’s captivity, laid a tax on his dominions and sent the required ransom to Bajazet who dismissed John with the remark that whenever he chose to come again on the same errand, he might count on the same welcome. Good and pious churchmen all over Europe had tried in vain to put an end to the strife between two rival pontiffs who missed no occasion to curse each other in all those awful formulas provided for the heretical and reprobate; and the secular powers had at last taken the matter up. The king had had a long season of being rational; and the duke of Burgundy thought it a favorable time for a conference between the king and the emperor on the state of the schism. The duke as a Frenchman, leaned toward the see of Avignon, but he kept it to himself because Dame Margaret being a Fleming, was of the other persuasion. Rheims the capital of Champagne was chosen as the place of meeting. It was a bad choice as we shall see. Wenceslas emperor of Germany was a reformer who believed in the high hand and the out-stretched arm. On one occasion suspecting the fidelity of his wife, he summoned her spiritual director, and commanded him to divulge what he had heard from her lips at the confessional. The priest refused. The emperor ordered him sewed up in a sack and thrown into the Moldau; and the empress had to look for another confessor. But the emperor had one failing: he was by spells convivial, and then he was sometimes as delirious as the king of France himself.