Although France was supporting the Avignon papacy, Boniface wrote in 1394 to Charles VI, asking him to help Sigismund or at least to allow his subjects to fight under the Hungarian standards.[489] In the course of the same year he twice ordered a crusade to be preached.[490] This was, however, rather an attempt to take under his wing, and give sanction to, a secular movement to help Hungary than an initiative which had originated the movement. For most of Sigismund’s allies were adherents of the other papacy.
At Avignon, Benedict XIII, a Spaniard, mounted the throne in 1394. His influence with the Duke of Burgundy, who dominated the insane French king, was almost as negligible as that of his Roman rival.
Philippe de Mézières, who had taken up the work of Marino Sanudo, and gave his life to the promotion of a crusade, left Cyprus in 1378, and settled in Paris, where he preached and wrote impassioned appeals to Christendom to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. His ‘Order of the Passion’, which was to furnish a race of fighters against the Moslem holders of Jerusalem, had replaced the celibate vow of the earlier orders by a vow of marital fidelity, so that ‘defenders of the Holy Sepulchre’ might be propagated, and trained from infancy for their mission. The whole idea of Philippe de Mézières was an anachronism. The age of the crusades had passed. After 1390 the new order fell into oblivion.[491] Like Marino Sanudo, Philippe de Mézières had actually contributed to the aggrandizement of the Osmanlis; for he turned the minds of those who were moved by his appeals from the real menace of Islam to a quixotic and wholly useless dream. The crusades had only emphasized the axiom of history that Syria, including Palestine, must be held either through Mesopotamia or through Egypt.
Against the Osmanlis as against the Moslems of the Holy Land, the Church was no longer able to move Europe. The Nicopolis crusade was undertaken and carried through by secular agencies. It had neither religious motive nor religious backing.
The interest of Hungary in checking the progress of Ottoman conquest was hardly second to that of Venice and Genoa. To the two Italian republics, who had not hesitated to stake their very existence a decade before upon the mastery of the Aegaean Sea and the free passage of the Dardanelles, one would suppose that the battle of Kossova would have been a salutary warning, and that they would have seen the necessity of opposing the Osmanlis to the full extent of their resources. The archives of these cities, however, during the entire reign of Bayezid, reveal a record of double-dealing and insincere diplomacy which was as futile and disastrous as it was shameful.