In the last episode of our series on the early history of the Ottoman Empire, we covered
how the Ottomans, under the leadership of Sultan Bayezid I, halted and defeated a great
European crusader host during the Battle of Nicopolis.
In this episode, we will further explore Bayezid’s thunderous war against the Byzantines and
his blockade of Constantinople, in addition to the sultan’s twilight years in power
and his last conquests in Eastern Anatolia.
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With the crusader armies scattered on the shores of the Danube and leaders of the Christian
coalition fleeing back to their own domains in defeat, Bayezid I now had free rein over
the Balkans.
The sultan’s victory at Nicopolis would be the highlight of his military career and
put the Ottoman Sultanate on the radar of powerful states across the entire Christian
and Islamic worlds.
With Hungary and Wallachia now engulfed in political turmoil after their defeat to Bayezid,
potential Ottoman invasions further into Europe became ever more likely in the years to come.
The only obstacle standing in the way of Bayezid and his dream of becoming the true ruler of
the Romans was now the land walls of Theodosius.
As events now stood, it seemed that in a few short years, the entire Balkan peninsula would
fall and submit to “the Thunderbolt of Edirne.”
However, no grand Ottoman military campaign directed toward Europe came in the years after
the Crusader defeat.
Even though the Battle of Nicopolis had been a decisive victory for Bayezid, it had come
at a considerable loss, as many Ottoman levies were lost in the conflict.
As a result, after the remaining Crusader prisoners were transported back to Anatolia,
the Ottoman sultan decided to consolidate his forces and focus on the blockade of Constantinople
instead of pushing further deeper into Europe.
Although Hungary and Wallachia were no longer threats for the time being, before leaving
for the Byzantine capital in early 1397, Bayezid stormed into the holdings of Tsar Ivan Sratsimir.
The former vassal of Edirne had cooperated with the Crusaders during the Nicopolis campaign
and thus had to be eliminated.
In a short military campaign, Vidin and its surrounding territories were captured, and
the former Bulgarian Tsar was imprisoned and later strangled to death while in captivity
in Bursa.
With the conquest of the last independent Bulgarian holdouts secured, the fortress town
of Vidin was installed with a significant Ottoman garrison once more, and its fortifications
were strengthened.
As the last remnants of resistance were put down in Bulgaria, the Thunderbolt’s war
against Constantinople increased in intensity.
Bayezid’s blockade of the Byzantine capital had become a full-scale siege by 1397 as occasional
Ottoman assaults on the Theodosian Walls began.
It is said that during this period of hostilities, the confident Ottoman sultan and his senior
officials stood on hills overlooking Constantinople, deciding who would get which palace after
the eventual fall the city.
Meanwhile, down south, local Ottoman contingents led by the marcher lords of Thessaly had also
struck deep into southern Greece, temporarily occupying the town of Athens and sacking the
town of Argos.
During this campaign, the forces of the Byzantine Emperor’s younger brother, Theodore I of
Morea, were defeated near the town of Leontari in a decisive battle.
The brutal Ottoman invasion reached down south as Modon and Coron, which saw many inhabitants
in the region being taken away into slavery.
As remnants of Byzantine Greece were ransacked, Manuel II was left pleading with European
diplomats in his court for military assistance as famine once again struck the imperial capital.
However, the fortunes of the Byzantine Emperor changed in the following years.
By 1399, the emperor’s desperate appeals were heard by King Charles VI of France, and
a 1,200-strong French contingent was sent to the Byzantine capital by sea after evading
the Ottoman blockade.
This small western host was commanded by Marshal Boucicault, a French military leader who had
been present at Nicopolis and was ransomed back to France in the years after the battle.
Upon entering the capital, Boucicault was given the title of Grand Constable by the
Emperor and began organizing minor sally-out operations against the Muslim besiegers.
However, more importantly than a military solution, the French noblemen brought a political
solution to the Byzantine capital as he began reconciliation talks between Manuel II and
his nephew John VII who still claimed the Imperial throne.
John VII had been a loyal vassal to Edirne for many years, however, with Bayezid’s
siege of Constantinople came the violent ransacking of the last remaining Byzantine holdings in
Thrace.
Witnessing his own lands in Selymbria being sacked and seeing no stop to the violent actions
of the tyrant ruler of the Ottomans, John began to reconsider his relationship with
Edirne.
Being on good terms with both the emperors of Constantinople and Selymbria, Boucicault
finalized a political agreement between uncle and nephew by the end of 1399.
The junior John VII was to become the official heir of Manuel II, while the latter’s eldest
son was to be next in line for the throne.
The Palaiologan dynasty was once more united.
With his household in check, Manuel made plans to travel to Western Europe to gather critical
military and fiscal support for Constantinople.
Declaring John VII as his regent in the capital and giving him command of the defenses of
the city, the Byzantine Emperor embarked on this visit to the West in December of 1399.
Manuel II’s three-year trip would see him travel into European lands that had not seen
a Roman Emperor in almost a thousand years.
The Emperor of the Romans first visited the domains of his younger brother Theodore I
in Morea alongside his wife Helena Dragas and their two infant sons.
However, seeing that the situation in Modon and the wider region was in a dire state caused
by the recent Ottoman invasion, Manuel and his entourage quickly made for Italy.
The emperor first visited Venice and then went through the northern Italian countryside,
reaching Milan by the spring of 1400.
Along his journey in the local region, Manuel met with a number of Byzantine scholars who
had, by the time of the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, found work in the cities of northern Italy
as professors of classical Greek studies.
One of these scholars included the famous Byzantine diplomat turned humanist philosopher
Manuel Chrysoloras who taught Greek grammar and literature in Florence, Rome, Venice,
and Bologna, much to the interest and appetite of the educated upper Italian class.
During the emperor’s journey around Europe, the two men would keep a close correspondence,
often discussing any developments of promised aid to Constantinople, which saw Chrysoloras
often relaying news back to the besieged Imperial capital.
By the summer of 1400, as the seeds of the Renaissance were taking root in the cities
of northern Italy, Manuel II had made his way to the court of Charles VI of France in
Paris.
Unfortunately for the Byzantine emperor, the French king had succumbed to one of his periodic
fits of lunacy, and thus no help for the Romans was secured in the Kingdom of the Fleur-de-lis.
After failing to gather any substantial funds from the mad king of Paris, Manuel embarked
on England to visit the court of Henry IV, thus making him the first legitimate Roman
emperor to visit the Island since the days of Constantine the Great and his sons during
the fourth century AD.
Although treated lavishly with a jousting tournament by the English king and being hosted
at Eltham Palace during Christmas celebrations, again, no substantial funds were gathered
to defend the Roman capital.
The emperor’s visit to England had not come at an ideal time, as the recent death of the
Plantagenet king, Richard II, and the recent Anglo-Scottish war had destabilized the new
Lancastrian regime of Henry IV.
With the English armies preoccupied in Scotland and France, only a sum of 3000 marks was donated
to the pleading Manuel II.
Returning back to Paris, the Byzantine Emperor then sent delegations to the courts of Pope
Boniface IX, Pope Benedict XIII, Margaret I of Denmark, Martin of Aragon, and Charles
III of Navarre, but again to no avail.
Due to the recent defeat at Nicopolis, the decline of a general crusader ethos in Europe,
and a lack of political will to save Constantinople, no significant military or fiscal assistance
was given to the desperate Manuel during his travels to the West.
With the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople barely holding out against the Ottoman siege
and famine hitting the streets of the capital, new developments in Anatolia forced Bayezid
to turn his gaze away from the city for the time being.
Aladdin Ali Bey of the Karamanids, in a desperate third attempt to reduce Ottoman influence
in Anatolia, had invaded the domains of Edirne once more.
By 1397, the Karamanid Bey had already taken the Ottoman provincial capital of Ankara by
surprise and began to advance through the former lands of the Germiyanids toward the
old Ottoman capital of Bursa.
Resolved to once and for all put an end to the Karamanid nuisance, “the Thunderbolt”
began assembling his armies to meet Ali Bey in Anatolia.
The following war between the two Turkic leaders was to be a short one.
After leaving a token force to continue the siege on Constantinople, the Ottoman sultan
defeated the Karamanid bey in a one-sided battle outside of Bursa on the nearby Akçay
plain.
After the short engagement, Aladdin Ali Bey of the Karamanids, the man who defied the
supremacy of Edirne for over a decade, was executed.
All his remaining domains were annexed into the Ottoman Sultanate.
Wanting to further consolidate his rule in the region, that following year, Bayezid launched
his second grand military campaign into Anatolia.
The Ottoman sultan began by first marching on and forcibly annexing the minor petty Turkic
Beyliks of Canik alongside the Black Sea, thus expanding his borders with the Byzantine
rump state of Trebizond.
With his northern flank secured, “the Thunderbolt” now turned his attention to one of the few
men who had defeated him in open battle, Kadi Burhaneddin.
However, Bayezid’s lust for revenge for his defeat at Kırkdilim back in 1391 was
not meant to be.
The Islamic scholar-turned-sultan had been killed the same year during an internal conflict
with the Aq Qoyunlu, a Turkoman tribal confederation situated at the edges of Eastern Anatolia.
As a result of the political anarchy caused by the war and the death of Burhaneddin, many
of the notables of the region requested Ottoman military assistance against the Aq Qoyunlu
in return for accepting the suzerainty of Edirne, much to the delight of Bayezid.
After a short and successful military campaign led by the sultan’s eldest son, Suleyman
Çelebi, the Aq Qoyunlu were defeated, and many major towns in the region, such as Amasya,
Sivas, Kayseri, Erzincan, and Tokat, were incorporated into the Ottoman Sultanate.
However, these territorial acquisitions would have unintended consequences for the Sultan
of the Ottomans.
As Bayezid expanded his realm into Eastern Anatolia, it brought him to the doorstep of
two of the most potent Islamic powers of his age.
To his south was the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, which held suzerainty over the neighbouring
Ramazanid and Dulkadirid Beyliks.
After coming to power during the thirteenth century after the fall of the Ayyubids, the
Mamluk Sultans of Egypt quickly became some of the most powerful military leaders of the
Islamic world.
While the Ottomans were still in their infancy during the reigns of Osman and Orhan, the
Mamluks had pushed out the last crusader holdouts in the holy lands with its acquisitions of
Acre in 1291 and Ruad in 1302, in addition to driving off the Mongol hordes at the battles
of Ain Jalut in 1260 and Marj al-Saffar in 1303.
In addition to their mighty prowess on the battlefield, the Mamluks Sultans of Egypt
also held onto the politically important holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, on
top of hosting the religiously important yet politically powerless Abbasid Caliphs in their
capital of Cairo.
All of these factors would contribute to the Mamluk Sultanate being one of the most prestigious
and established Islamic powers of its age compared to the newly emerging Ottoman Sultanate.
However, this era of dominance was to be fleeting for Cairo.
By the time of Bayezid, central authority from Cairo was on the decline after the death
of the formidable Mamluk Sultan Barquq in 1399, thus leaving his sultanate in the care
of his inexperienced ten-year-old son, Sultan Faraj.
Seeing an opportunity to fill in the political void left by the former Mamluk Sultan and
wanting to expand his domains further into the Taurus Mountains and Cilicia, during the
summer of 1399, “the thunderbolt” launched a military campaign against the Beyliks of
Ramazanid and Dulkadirid.
The following campaign resulted in an Ottoman victory that saw the city of Malatya being
annexed and an Ottoman puppet ruler, Mehmed Bey, being installed as the head of the Dulkadirids.
Although militarily successful, the Ottoman campaign into the local region resulted in
the severing of ties between Edirne and Cairo at a time when Bayezid needed all the help
he could get against his more dangerous neighbour to his east.
As the Ottoman Sultan’s military campaign ended, a new threat in the form of the Timurids
had reached the doorsteps of Anatolia led by their ruler Timur, also known as Tamerlane
in the West.
In the next episode, we will look at the climactic clash between the Ottomans and Timurids at
the famous Battle of Ankara, culminating with the fall of Sultan Bayezid I. To ensure you
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