When, a year after the battle of Nicopolis, the money was at last delivered to Bayezid through the intermediation of Gattilusio of Mytilene and the Genoese, Venetian, and Cypriote merchants who traded with the Osmanlis, Bayezid gave the chevaliers their liberty. To the Comte de Nevers, he said: ‘John, I know well and am informed that you are in your country a great lord. You are young, and, in the future, I hope you will be able to recover, with your courage, from the shame of this misfortune which has come to you in your first knightly enterprise, and that, in the desire of getting rid of the reproach and recovering your honour, you will assemble your power to come against me and give me battle. If I were afraid of that, and wanted to, before your release I would make you swear upon your faith and religion that you would never bear arms against me, nor those who are in your company here. But no: neither upon you nor any other of those here will I impose this oath, because I desire, when you will have returned to your home and will have leisure, that you assemble your power and come against me. You will find me always ready to meet you and your people on the field of battle. And what I say to you, you can say in like manner to those to whom you will have the pleasure of speaking about it, because for this purpose was I born, to carry arms and always to conquer what is ahead of me.’[556] It is not true, however, as one would suppose and as Froissart records, that ‘these lofty words were always remembered by Jean de Nevers and his companions so long as they lived’. The French chevaliers went to Rhodes, and then home by way of the Adriatic. The Comte de Nevers took to himself a title which he had not earned, unless one confuses folly with valour. To the end of his days, he was known as _Jean sans Peur_. He never burned with a desire to wipe out the disgrace of Nicopolis, but spent his whole life as a factional leader in the civil wars of France. After a career which continued as ingloriously as it had begun, he was stabbed to death on the Bridge of Montereau in 1420--tardy vengeance for his own openly acknowledged instigation of the murder of the Duc d’Orléans. XI There is recorded the capture of Thebes by the Turks in 1363,[557] and the surrender of Patras in Thessaly to the Osmanlis in 1381.[558] The first Ottoman army, however, to enter Greece went to the Morea in 1388, upon the invitation of Theodore Palaeologos, to support his waning power as despot against the indigenous Greeks and the Frankish lords. The Osmanlis under Evrenos carried devastation everywhere they went, and did little to help Theodore.[559] They were soon recalled by Murad to co-operate in the Kossova campaign. When Theodore was hard pressed, in 1391, by Amadeo of Savoy and the Venetians, he turned again to the Osmanlis. Once more Evrenos came to the Morea, and helped to destroy the coast towns.[560]