According to the chronicles, the invasion of Bulgaria was rather a picnic than a serious military operation. This was true, at least, for the western chevaliers, who had brought with them wine and women in plenty. Their baggage contained all the luxuries to which they were accustomed at home. The French auxiliaries travelled from Buda to the Danube by way of Transylvania and Wallachia, crossing the Carpathians through the pass between Brassó (Karlstadt) and Sinaia. The Hungarians, following the Danube, spread out into Serbia, pillaging and murdering the inoffensive Christian population more thoroughly than Ottoman akindjis would have done.[525] In spite of a lack of opposition, they persisted in acting as if they were in the enemy’s country. Widin surrendered without a struggle, and Orsova after five days.[526] In September, the armies joined before the fortress of Nicopolis, whose surrender to the Osmanlis three years before had marked the disappearance of Bulgarian independence. They were destined to go no farther.[527] For sixteen days Sigismund and his allies encamped in front of Nicopolis without giving assault.[528] They had no idea of the whereabouts of Bayezid. It was believed among the French (whose ignorance of geography and of distances equalled ours of modern times) that Bayezid was in Egypt, gathering a great army of all the Moslem world to oppose the triumphant march of the crusaders. One reads in Froissart that Bayezid was ‘in Cairo in Babylonia [_sic_] with the sultan to get men’, that he left the sultan there and rallied his forces at Alexandria and Damascus, that ‘under the command and prayers of the khalif of Bagdad and Asia Minor’, whose mandate went forth ‘to Persia, to Media, and to Tarsus’, Bayezid received a ‘mass of Saracens and miscreants’, and that in his army were ‘people of Tartary, Persia, Media, Syria, Alexandria, and of many far-off countries of the miscreants’.[529] Sigismund made a speech to the chevaliers from western and central Europe, in which he declared: ‘Let him come or not come, in the summer which will return, if it pleases God, we shall get through the kingdom of Armenia and shall pass the Bras Saint-George and shall go into Syria and shall get from the Saracens the gates of Jaffa and Beirut and several other [cities] to go down into Syria, and we shall go to conquer the city of Jerusalem and all the Holy Land. And if the Sultan, with all the strength he can muster, comes before us, we shall fight him, and there will be no going away without the battle, in God’s pleasure.’ Froissart naïvely adds immediately after his report of this speech: ‘But it turned out very much in another way.’[530]