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.”