Whether the action of Mircea was actuated by treasonable motives or not is open to debate. He may have honestly believed that it was a case of _sauve qui peut_. If so, his action was not more reprehensible than that of Sigismund himself. The future Holy Roman Emperor, who was to play so important a part in the history of Europe during the early decades of the fifteenth century, forgot his bold words of the previous week: ‘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.’ Sigismund and the grand master of Rhodes hurried to the Danube, got away in a small boat,[538] and boarded one of the galleys of Monicego, the Venetian admiral. Abandoning his army and his allies to their fate, the king of Hungary sailed for home. He had the shame, if he felt it at all, when passing through the Dardanelles, of seeing the chevaliers and other prisoners of Nicopolis paraded before his eyes. One of these prisoners wrote: ‘The Osmanlis took us out of the tower of Gallipoli, and led us to the sea, and one after the other they abused the king of Hungary as he passed, and mocked him, and called to him to come out of the boat and deliver his people: and this they did to make fun of him, and skirmished a long time with each other on the sea. But they did not do him any harm, and so he went away.’[539] Sigismund went to Modon, and then back to Hungary. This was the king who had boasted that he would not only turn the Osmanlis out of Europe, but that he had enough lances to support the sky, should it fall upon his army.[540] Although his manhood had been put to the test, and had been found wanting, he was saved to play a great, if unenviable, part in the closing events of the Middle Ages.[541] After Sigismund’s escape, his great army, which was to redeem the Holy Sepulchre, fled before the Osmanlis. Those who were not killed, or drowned in the Danube, retreated through Wallachia. Froissart describes graphically the hardships of the French, German, English, Scotch, Bohemian, and Flemish crusaders in their painful march across the Carpathian Mountains. The chevaliers could secure a bare sustenance. Their pages and men-at-arms were stripped of their clothes and beaten by the peasants. It was not until they got into western Hungary that they felt themselves safe.[542]