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Thunderbolt

Bayezit is known in Turkish history as Yilderim, ‘Thunderbolt’, though whether because of his lightning marches, or the speed with which he seized the sultanate, or his ferocious temper, nobody is sure. He opened his reign with a succession of dazzling exploits. He pushed back a coalition of Anatolian beys. In the Holy City of Constantinople the Byzantine Emperor, now his vassal, gave over one of the churches to be a mosque, surrounded by a Muslim merchant quarter, equipped with its own religious judge, a kadi.

Murad had been the illiterate son of an emir. Bayezit was the son of a sultan. His mother was a Byzantine princess, born of that city where imperial grandeur and its assumptions had been ingrained for a thousand years. The ulema mistrusted him. He named his children after major religions. The Pope opened a correspondence with him, though he might have been surprised by Bayezit’s ambition to make the high altar of St Peter’s a manger for his horse. Bayezit grubbed up the buffer state between his domains and Hungary by executing Shishman of Bulgaria; he dressed like a Greek, practised buggery like one; drank wine; and asked the Caliph in Cairo to make him Sultan of Rum. He seems to have enjoyed having enemies. ‘For this I was born – ’ he told a shrinking Jean de Nevers, hefting his scimitar, ‘to bear arms and to conquer whatever is before me,’ and he bundled emirs from their emirates until he could claim to rule from the banks of the Danube to the far Euphrates.

In 1396 he laid siege to Constantinople, with 10,000 vassal troops. News reached him there of the arrival of a foreign army on his Danubian frontier, and he swiftly raised the siege and marched north-west to combat what proved to be the last European crusade to the East.

An army of mainly French crusaders had set out in imitation of their knightly forebears two centuries earlier, to drive Islam from Europe.* In Buda they joined up with the Teutonic Knights and the Hungarian army of young King Ladislas. A month later they were all at Nicopolis on the Danube, boasting they could hold the sky up with their lances. The Ottoman garrison commander refused to yield; perhaps he had learned of the massacre of the garrison which surrendered at Widdin days earlier. The crusaders settled down to a siege. Bayezit, someone suggested, was far away; ‘in Cairo in Babylon’. They prepared to wait for him, and ordered the tables spread.

The knights had drunk deep by the time scouts reported the appearance of a Turkish army in the vicinity. The Hungarians knew their enemy. With the support of the French commander, Ladislas proposed a cautious advance led by the Hungarian infantry; but the mass of knights had never much trusted the Hungarians, whom they now suspected of devising a stratagem to rob them of the honours of victory. Before anyone could change their minds 6,000 knights were charging uphill, and laying into a swarm of barbarous horsemen who wilted and parted at their thunderous advance.

A very old Turkish trick. Somewhere ahead, the French supposed, lay the undefended Turkish camp. ‘They said, “Aha! Aha!” ’ recalled the Rabbi Joseph, drily, ‘but their joy was quickly gone.’

Having far outstripped the Hungarian infantry, the knights crested the rise and found themselves face to face with a force of 60,000 men. Their charge took them crashing and stumbling into the centre. The Turkish wings rolled them up, ‘the horse of Bayezit and his hosts and chariots’; the light horsemen closed in from behind, and grim janissaries of the royal guard plucked them from the saddle one by one.

Later the French blamed the Hungarians for having struck a defensive attitude from the first. The Hungarians accused the French of hastiness. Schiltberger, a German infantryman who was captured and turned Turk, serving thirty years as a janissary before escaping home to Germany, thought Sigismund had been advancing when the Voivode of Wallachia chose suddenly to desert him, and the Ottoman side was bolstered by a detachment of Serbian troops. But it was a very academic post-mortem.

A lucky few got away. King Ladislas and the Grand Master of the Knights of St John fled to a Venetian galley on the Danube, which plied its oars for the Black Sea; others struggled across the river and thence north on foot into the Carpathian mountains, where they were robbed and beaten. In Paris that winter a few bedraggled, half-wild men who entered the capital in ones and twos were told to shut their mouths, or hang. It was solemnly declared that Nicopolis should not be mentioned in the King’s Council, for the rumours were terrifying. Not until Christmas Eve did a French negotiator, Jacques de Helly, arrive at the palace with incontrovertible proof.

The crusaders had butchered their own Turkish prisoners blithely enough on the morning of the battle. Bayezit, grimly surveying his casualties on the field, ordered a massacre of his own, sparing only twenty-four of the richest dressed knights for ransom, and a handful of boys for his own army. Marshal Boucicault was given the grisly privilege of choosing two more men to be spared out of the hundreds of knights who were led before the Sultan; the commoners were dispatched without review. Blood flowed until vespers, and when the Sultan agreed to hear pleas of clemency from his own men, 10,000 prisoners had already been decapitated. A detachment of the Ottoman army was sent into Wallachia to punish its prince, a vassal of the Sultan, while the light horsemen who had lured the knights to their doom followed the Danube up its course without fear of opposition, and raided as far as Styria in Austria, taking 16,000 captives.

The survivors were marched over the Balkans to that castle at Gallipoli which became their prison; and one day they were all brought out and lined up along the shore to watch a Venetian galley row by, carrying the King of Hungary into the Mediterranean, and safety. The Turks shouted at him to come and rescue his men, ‘but they did not do him any harm, and so he went away’.

Bayezit’s own fantastic doom was sealed in a decade. Headstrong and arrogant, he never quite understood the natural limits which his forebears had been careful to respect. They had loaded up their conquests east and west like saddlebags, careful to secure one front before campaigning on the other, keeping their enemies anxious and divided. Murad by 1389 held 101,000 square miles of territory, almost exactly divided between the two continents; but Bayezit gobbled such huge tracts of Anatolia that by 1402 he ruled over 267,000 square miles, of which two-thirds were in Asia. He made many enemies among the old ruling families he displaced, and he was careless of the loyalty of the men he took into his service.

Nemesis sprang upon him in the shape of a Tartar warrior whose power and energy surpassed his own. Tamerlane the Great, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, was born in Samarkand in 1346, and by the age of forty he ruled an empire which stretched across Central Asia. Marching south to the invasion of Syria in 1398 he was met by a deputation of exiled Anatolian emirs, along with ambassadors from Constantinople, Genoa, Venice and even Charles VI of France, who urged him to attack the Ottoman Empire. This he refused to do; but he did pluck a few border cities from it en passant.

It was not in Bayezit’s nature to swallow the insult. He wrote fiery, scornful letters to Tamerlane, his own name in a golden flourish, with Tamerlane’s below, very small and black; and rashly promised support for his ally Kara Yusuf, Lord of the Black Sheep, who had placed himself beyond the reach of mercy by attacking the caravan for Mecca. Tamerlane, on taking Sivas, had the Ottoman garrison and Bayezit’s eldest son executed in 1399; three thousand Christian Armenian soldiers of the town were buried alive.

A confrontation was inevitable. Bayezit sought battle eagerly enough. Tamerlane approached the conflict with relative indifference, but total concentration. Bayezit disposed his troops with sullen carelessness on the day of battle, outside Ankara in 1402. Tamerlane’s army was twice the size of his, and had recently been paid; with it were emirs who knew the terrain well. Bayezit, though, preferred to save his coin, ‘reserving it for Tamerlane’, as one of his generals bitterly remarked, ‘as surely as if the head of that monarch were stamped on it all already’; and on the morning of battle he led his men on a huge hunting expedition in which 6,000 men were said to have perished from fatigue. Returning to their camp, they found that Tamerlane had shrewdly occupied it in their absence, seizing the only local water-source. Out of sheer thirst Bayezit’s shattered troops were forced to give battle right away.

His Anatolian troops and Tartars deserted to their emirs at Tamerlane’s side as soon as the battle began. Fighting into the sun, choked with dust beaten up from the arid ground by the hooves of hundreds of thousands of Mongol horsemen, shaken by the onslaught of Tamerlane’s Indian elephant corps, hopelessly outnumbered, his own right wing now turning upon him, the Sultan with his janissaries and vassal troops fought until nightfall on a patch of rising ground. His vizier swept up Suleyman, Bayezit’s chosen heir, and the trusty Serbs covered their retreat. His other sons Isa and Musa saved themselves, with their personal troops. Mehmet was carried to Amasya by its old emir. At dusk the Sultan made an effort to escape, but he was spotted and ridden down by the Titular Khan of Jagetai. Only Mustafa, among Bayezit’s sons, was unaccounted for. Tamerlane ordered a close inspection of the battlefield, but his corpse was never found, and his fate remained a mystery. ‘On whose account,’ wrote the historian, ‘thirty men of that name perished.’

Tamerlane used his captive magnanimously until Bayezit’s prickly hauteur proved too much for him, and he was placed in a cage, too small for standing upright, and dragged in the wake of Tamerlane’s retinue. His wife Despina was made to serve naked at the victor’s table. Nobody offered to ransom the prisoners, and perhaps no one was sorry when Bayezit eventually dashed out his brains on the bars of his cage.

Before he left the area, Tamerlane made a lunge at Bursa which sent Prince Suleyman scurrying for cover in Europe. The conqueror took Izmir, the western Anatolian base of the Knights of St John, which Bayezit had never managed to do; and there, finding the pyramid he built with the severed heads of the garrison and the population combined too small, he had the heap repacked, with alternate layers of heads and mud. As he left the region the nervous citizens of Ephesus sent their children to meet him, singing, but the gruesome Tartar growled, ‘What is this noise?’ and had his cavalry ride them all down; then he went on his way, and he managed to die with his boots on, heading for China, in his seventy-first year.

The young Ottoman Empire could have collapsed. The emirs, exulting, galloped back to their palaces, rentrolls, and old feuds. The gazis returned to their old frontier freedoms. The Christians of the west, on news of Bayezit’s defeat, relaxed and forgot about the Turks. Byzantium heaved a sigh of relief, and bustled about diplomatically to regain some of her lost domains. The surviving Ottoman brothers began to fight out a devious civil war amongst themselves, prodded on by the emirs, the gazis, the money men of Bursa, the theologians, the Byzantines, and the Italian city-states, all eager to prolong the conflict. Over the next ten years a brother would now and then be thrashed and executed, and Prince Suleyman, who once used three battalions of dead Serbs as a table for his banquet, and whose chances looked the best, was the very first to go. Somewhere Isa disappeared. The emirates overplayed their hand; backed Mehmet as the weakling; found him more powerful than they had hoped, tried to back off, but all too late.

Bayezit’s fate, and the interregnum which had followed, revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the Ottoman state. Bayezit’s authority still descended from the stirrup. But the empire had outgrown the ability of a single man to govern it personally, and the larger it grew, the more local loyalties threatened to prevail over loyalty to the new dynasty. Physically it was hard for the Sultan to meet threats as they arose on distant borders, and the journey between them was long and hard.

On the other hand, his enemies were no more united than before, and nobody proved very capable of taking advantage of Ottoman disarray. The idea of Ottoman dominion had taken root, and the easy rhythm of Turkish conquest soon resumed under Mehmet I and his son Murad II. By 1430 the sultans had restored the empire Bayezit had gambled away thirty years before. The Ottomans did not often repeat their mistakes. ‘I am bound to be equal to the needs of both continents,’ Murad’s son Mehmet II reminded the Byzantines, whose city, of course, lay between them, like a hinge.

 

* The old Duke of Bavaria advised his son not to ‘carry arms against people and countries which have never done anything to us, with no reason to go there but vainglory’, but to go into Friesland if he wanted to travel and conquer his inheritance.