The closest record to a first-person account was made by Johann Schiltberger, a German follower of a Bavarian noble, who witnessed the battle at the age of 16 and was captured and enslaved for 30 years by the Turks before returning home, at which time he wrote a narrative of the battle estimating the crusader strength at the final battle at 17,000,[1] though he also overestimated Turkish forces as a wildly inflated 200,000.[15] German historians of the 19th century attempting to estimate the combatants on each side came to the figures of about 7,500–15,000 Christians and about 12,000–20,000 Turks, while noting that, from the point of logistics, it would have been impossible for the countryside around Nicopolis to have supplied food and fodder for scores of thousands of men and horses.[14] (Medieval armies acquired supplies by taking them from the surrounding area as they marched, as opposed to using the supply lines of modern armies.)