"And when Karaman saw that Bayezid was entering the city, he attacked him with his warriors, and fought with him in the town, and if he had received the least assistance from the inhabitants he would have forced Bayezid out of the city; but when he saw that he had no assistance, he fled, but was taken before Bayezid, who said to him: “Why wilt thou not be subject to me?” Karaman answered, “Because I am as great a lord as thyself.” Bayezid became angry, and asked three times if there was anybody who would rid him of Karaman. At the third time came one who took him aside and cut off his head and went back with it to Bayezid, who asked what had he done with him? He answered, “I have beheaded him.” Then Bayezid shed tears and ordered that another man should do to the killer what he had done to Karaman, and he was taken to the place where he beheaded Karaman and he was also beheaded. This was done because Bayezid thought that nobody should have killed so mighty a lord, but should have waited until his lord’s anger had passed away. He then ordered that the head of Karaman should be fixed on a lance and carried about the country, so that other cities might submit to him on hearing that their lord was killed."
This was Schiltberger’s description of his new lord in action. Last episode, we left Schiltberger as he left Nicopolis and told of a long captivity to come with the Ottomans. Here that new Ottoman lord Bayezid was facing, in the figure of this Karaman, a brother-in-law, but more importantly the powerful leader of a Turcoman dynasty to rival the Ottomans, the Karamanids of southeast Anatolia. According to Schiltberger, Karaman had refused to be subject to him, being, as Karaman was, feeling slightly “Rains of Castmere-ish,” as great a lord as he. So Bayezid sets out with 150k men, and Karaman to meet him with 75k, or at least with large numbers of men.
They meet on the plains before the city of Konya, battling twice that day before retiring, neither side conclusively the victor, and in the night, each commander has his own plans for how to proceed. Karaman gives orders for his men to create a great disturbance with horns and with drums, much like soccer fans outside the visiting team’s hotel, but Bayezid has his soldiers keep their fires to a minimum, only for cooking and those quickly extinguished. Under cover of darkness, 30k men are sent round to the rear of the enemy and ordered to attack in the morning as Bayezid launches his own assault. When the next day came, it was Bayezid’s plan that would bear fruit, and Karaman fled back to the safety of the city’s walls upon seeing himself threatened on two sides. Then, a state of siege set in, ending after 11 days, when the city’s people sent word that they would fall back from the walls and not oppose him, if only Bayezid would guarantee their lives and belongings. This he readily did, and then stormed those walls to face, as we heard, Karaman and his soldiers within the city. Soon it was taken, and Karaman killed.
Remember that this Karaman was Bayezid’s brother-in-law. His sister and nephews would surrender themselves, walking out the gates of a nearby city which Bayezid was besieging. They gave themselves up to his mercy, and indeed, it is treated in Schiltberger’s narrative as an act of great mercy that Bayezid does spare them, has them raised up by his men and brought back to his capital. Being a blood relative was no guarantee of safety.
Pulling back from Schiltberger’s depiction, we know that Bayezid had taken Karamanian territories in Southeast Anatolia, through force and negotiation, and left them under the governorship of a man named Timurtash before turning to other matters in Bulgaria. The Karamanian leader, appearing in Schiltberger’s story as Karaman but identifiable to us as Alaattin Ali Bey, took the opportunity to regain control and seize Timurtash as a prisoner, but Bayezid, “the Thunderbolt,” responded quickly with his army. Alaattin surrendered Timurtash immediately in the face of this experienced force, one which apparently included Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians, and Wallachians. He hoped for a return to the previous peaceful arrangement. However, this was not to be. Timurtash himself would command Bayezid’s response. Following the ensuing battle he would take Alaattin prisoner, and perhaps motivated by an anger more personal than political, would see him kill. All of this was of course tremendously convenient for Bayezid, who is reported to have been rather pleased to be rid of his rival and without any blood on his own hands.
Both versions of this story of the Karamanian leader’s demise give us the beginnings of a picture of Anatolia at the close of the 14th century. Closely examined, the picture is not one of early Ottoman hegemony. Rather, the Ottomans had striven in competition with neighbouring beyliks. Some of these beyliks, the territories of “beys” or lords, had not only rivaled but had overshadowed the Ottoman beylik on the Anatolian peninsula. Perhaps it is time to take a closer look at the Ottomans and their story.
The origins of the Ottomans are somewhat difficult to tease out, for contemporary sources are those of their neighbours, neither detailed nor unbiased, and Ottoman perspectives are available only from some time later on. However, the Ottoman origin story is that of a dream.
Osman, son of Ertugrul, was sleeping one night in the home of a holy man when a powerful vision took him:
He saw that a moon arose from the holy man’s breast and came to sink in his own breast. A tree then sprouted from his navel and its shade encompassed the world. Beneath this shade there were mountains, and streams flowed forth from the foot of each mountain. Some people drank from these running waters, others watered gardens, while yet others caused fountains to flow. When Osman awoke he told the story to the holy man, who said “Osman, my son, congratulations, for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants and my daughter Malhun shall be your wife.”
Obviously the truth of the matter, that Osman dreamed such a dream, is quite beyond us at this point. We can say that the earliest surviving references to the dream are dated to long after Osman’s, or even Bayezid’s, time. But we can also say that it is a lasting narrative of real power. It granted, by divine right, the Earth as a protectorate to Osman, his children, and his children’s children, to take, to nurture, and to protect. In building an empire that would be contemporaneous with both the Eastern Roman Empire and the Soviet Union, those descendants took a pretty good run at realizing that dream. And we still refer back to Osman in referring to that empire, Ottoman being but an anglicization of the Turkish Osmanli.
What became the Ottomans had been merely among the many Islamic Turkoman tribal groups that had moved into Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, following the victory of the Seljuk Empire over the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071. The Seljuk successor state, the Sultanate of Rum, meaning of the Romans, was itself overturned by the Mongols, and became an Ilkhanid vassal for the region. The Ilkhanate, that administrative area of the Mongol empire centring on modern-day Iran, had its attention elsewhere, and as Seljuk power weakened, various beyliks came to prominence on the peninsula. They thrived in the spaces that were now available between the receding reaches of two crumbling powers: the Mongol dominated Seljuks and the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines. In the southeast, one of those beyliks which we have already met, Karamanogullari, that of the Karamanids, took Konya from the Seljuks and put an end to their struggling dynasty. In the northwest, pushing up against Byzantine rule, were the Ottomans.
The Ottomans seem to have had various things going for them. Their proximity to the Constantinople allowed for trade, cultural exchange, and alliances, and the city no longer had the ability to really project power as it once had. I don’t want to go into the whole story of the Eastern Roman Empire here, but a combination of internal and external pressures had brought things to a breaking point.
The arrival of the Seljuks in Anatolia from the east had pushed the Byzantines out of much of that peninsula and brought constant seasons of raiding; To the north and west, further territory was lost to rebellions or attacks on the part of Serbs, Bulgars, and Venetians, among others; and Crusader assistance throughout all of this was often every bit as threatening to the Byzantines as anyone else; Indeed, Constantinople had been sacked by crusaders in 1204 and only retaken in 1261 after which vastly expensive repairs and reconstruction were needed.
Not at all helping matters were the endless rounds of civil war and usurpation which have come, with good reason, to partly define the Byzantine Empire in our imagination. Time after time, internal wars were waged, power seized, relatives violently blinded, facially mutilated, and packed away to monasteries, or simply killed, and the Ottomans got in on this. They hired on as mercenaries during civil war and enjoyed active alliances or inter-marriage with the sitting emperor at different times.
They were also ideally situated to benefit from Genoa’s conflict with Venice, and it was on Genoan ships that they first had their troops ferried across the Bosphorus, the strait separating what is now Asian Turkey from European Turkey. On the other side, a Byzantine regent gave them their first foothold, hiring on Turkic mercenaries to garrison a fortress only to see those mercenaries offer their services, and their fortress, to Suleyman Pasha, son of the Ottoman Sultan, Orhan.
Though it is their beylik which we now remember, as they grew into an immensely powerful and lasting empire, the Ottomans were not initially the most powerful group of Islamic Turkoman raiders in the region, and this actually stood to their advantage. Various other, taller, nails were hammered down around them, and this seems to have served them well in outlasting and outgrowing their immediate competitors who came to the attention of Byzantines, mercenaries, crusaders, Seljuks, and Mongols. And the Ottomans grew very quickly indeed. Our first picture of them from the Byzantine side comes from a 1301 record of their loss in battle to a group led by a man named Osman. By 1333, Emperor Andronicus would be paying Osman’s son Orhan for peace, and by the end of the century, Osman’s great-grandson Bayezid would be soundly defeating the future Holy Roman Emperor at Nicopolis.
An important observation here is that what we commonly call “the Ottomans” was by no means a homogenous group. We’ve already seen that later on, in battle, they will present a very international army, and the following quotation, from Uyar and Erickson, indicates a similar variety in their earlier constitution. The Ottomans were...
"...a loose group of pastoralist nomadic tribes that were in the early phases of moving from nomadic life to a sedentary one. Even though semi-nomads were the core group, there were many others coming from different backgrounds and regions, including refugee villagers, artisans, and townsmen coming from inner and eastern Anatolia as well as unemployed Seljukid officials and scholars. Of course, there were fugitives from the various rebellions, especially heterodox dervishes. All these very different people with conflicting identities came to settle the very complex and fragmented frontier... The people called the Ottomans, a terminology largely devised by early European historians, were obviously not simply a unitary nomadic tribe."
Divisions of allegiance are not rigid here. There were Turkoman fighters employed by the Byzantines and “the Ottomans,” as we’ll continue to call them here, seem to have included recently Byzantine magistrates, officers, and soldiers who had left collapsing military institutions. I have seen the Ottomans of this very early period termed a kind of “predatory confederation” for whom the promise of treasure and slaves was a unifying force that overpowered any ethnic, religious, or cultural divisions that might have driven them against one another.
And unity is important when you look at early Ottoman history. Other groups around them grow but then disintegrate as success leads to new local assertions of power. The Ottomans seem to have identified this risk and sought to centralize power and military loyalty, shifting it over from time from the lords under their influence.
But that’s enough on Ottoman development for now. We should return to Schiltberger. We’ve heard already how he came to live among the Ottomans and his reports on the doings of Bayezid. Let’s hear about his try for freedom. Quote:
"And when Beyazid came to his capital, there were sixty of us Christians agreed that we should escape, and made bond between ourselves and swore to each other that we should die or succeed together; and each of us took time to get ready, and at the time we met together, we chose two leaders from amongst ourselves by lot, and whatever they ordered we were to obey."
Here we have a return to something much more personal, not simply reports of what he has heard, but something Schiltberger has obviously taken part in, a mass escape attempt on the part of 60 Christian captives. This group who had bonded over their pact and chosen leadership, rises in in the early hours of the morning, some time after midnight. They arm themselves, and they ride off. They make for a mountain first, reaching it by daybreak. There they rest a little while, letting their horses recover, but not for very long. They must know they’ll be chased when their absence is noted, and even such prolific captors as the Ottomans could hardly have failed to notice 60 prisoners gone, and with horses to match. The escapees wait only until the sun has risen and then ride again, this time for a day and a night. No mention is made of a rest this time, though perhaps there was one or two in there somewhere.
Meanwhile, their absence has indeed been noticed. Bayezid has dispatched 500 horsemen to retrieve them. These 500 were not ordered to kill those they found, but rather to bring them back and present them before Bayezid to receive his judgement. And despite the head-start of the escapees this pursuit overtakes them near a narrow gorge.
Bayezid’s men call for surrender, but this Schiltberger and his fellow escapees will not do. They think it better to fight and die here together than to be dragged back and killed later. Remember that the memory of the slaughter at Nicopolis was still very fresh, and these men had no reason at all to expect mercy from Bayezid, no matter their age. The 60 Christians dismount from their horses, and prepare to defend themselves, perhaps seeking shelter in that narrow gorge. Fighting ensues, but it’s hard to say how fierce. After all, the 500 had been ordered to bring these prisoners back, not slaughter them on site, so they may have simply tightened their hold, drawn in and increased the pressure, allowing the weight of their numbers to press the 60 into giving up.
Schiltberger has it that the man leading the pursuit is deeply impressed by the fighting resolve displayed before him, and he steps forth, requesting an hour’s peace, that they might talk, and to this the 60, or however many of them there were at this point, consent. A truce established, the officers goes on to make an offer: surrender now, and he would answer for the safety of their lives. Schiltberger tells it this way:
"We said we would consult, and did consult, and gave him this answer: We knew that so soon as we were made prisoners, we should die so soon as we came before [Bayezid], and it would be better that we should die here, with arms in our hands, for the Christian faith. When the commander saw that we were determined, he again asked that we should give ourselves up as prisoners, and promised on his oath that he would ensure our lives, and if Bayezid was so angry as to want to kill us, he would let the Sultan kill him first. He promised this on his oath, and therefore we gave ourselves up as prisoners."
So Schiltberger and his fellows were brought before Bayezid and they can only have felt so confident about this, their lives dangling from this man’s word. And Bayezid does nothing to increase their confidence at first. He’s furious. He orders that they should each one of them be killed immediately. But the commander who had made the promise does step forward here and intervene. He says that he had trusted in Bayezid’s mercy and on it had promised the captives their lives. He says that he had sworn that they would be spared. Bayezid asks of him if the escapees had done any harm, and the commander responds that they had not. So Bayezid spares their lives, instead merely imprisoning them. Of course, 12 of them, a full 1/5th of the original contingent, do die during that imprisonment, so this is not exactly a boundless act of mercy. Schiltberger and his surviving comrades would be in prison for 9 months before someone, apparently Bayezid’s son, would speak up for them again, and beg that they should be set free. This Bayezid did, first extracting a promise from the prisoners, then returning their horses and increasing their pay.
So that’s interesting. If you were picturing Schiltberger and his colleagues chained up in a galley or something similarly dire, well he was actually a paid employee at this point, and apparently with his own horse. This should put the story in the second 6 years of Schiltberger’s Ottoman timeline, when he deserved to be allowed to ride, and thus somewhere between 22 and 28 years old, if the timeline is to be trusted at all. But of course it is not to be trusted, and Schiltberger’s assessment, that he spent 12 years with Bayezid, is not consistent with the rest of his story as to that period. We know that it was bookended neatly by two battles, and one, Nicopolis, is dated 1396, while the other occurred in 1402. So we have 6 years, not 12, spent with Bayezid, and Schiltberger was somewhere between 16 and 22 for the episode of the escape, perhaps older than 19, if Schiltberger is to be believed on not being allowed to ride during the first half of this time.
Another interesting element in Bayezid releasing the prisoners is the nature of the promise he asks them to make. In Schiltberger’s telling, this is a simple statement that they will not try to escape again, but was there more to it than that? Schiltberger elsewhere refers in passing to the matter of an Eastern Bulgarian duke and his son who were both taken captive. While the father died in prison, the son, quote, “became converted to the faith of Infidels, so that his life might be spared.” This really begs the question, did Schiltberger and his fellow captives convert to Islam so that their life might be spared? He says nothing of the sort, and identified as Christian in the tale of his escape, but this fragment of a story suggests he might have had to.
The topic of slavery and conversion under the Ottomans is something we could pursue much further than we have room for here. Suffice for now to recognize that in the 14th century Christians did serve within Ottoman ranks without having converted first, and that, again, this was a very heterogeneous world we look back on simply as “Ottoman.” As for Schiltberger’s conversion, it must remain in doubt, as an intriguing possibility. Our picture of the period has grown much more complex since a Commander J Buchan Telfer, in introducing Schiltberger’s travels, wrote that
"...our traveller is careful to avoid saying anything that might be construed into a semblance of his having renounced his religion, under whatsoever circumstances; but that he must have done so, inevitably, may be accepted as an unquestionable fact, for where is the page in history of Beyazid, of Timur, and of his successors, that tells of a Christian having been spared persecution, followed by torture and death? Nor is it credible that the presence of a slave, professing Christianity, would have been at all tolerated in the camps of those barbarous and fanatic rulers."
While quite possible, I don’t think we should consider Schiltberger’s conversion to be “unquestionable fact.”
That converted son we referred to earlier was apparently rewarded with conquered land over to which to administer, and Schiltberger has a rather strange tale to tell regarding that land. It’s the first taste we get of the fantastical, an element which will increasingly crop up here as the story goes on. It is said to have occurred while Schiltberger was elsewhere, and he makes no claim to having witnessed these events. This is what he says happened:
There is a city. It sits near both the sea and the forests. Round the city come vipers from the forests, and serpents from the seas. They come in such great numbers that they take up the space of a mile all around the city so that nobody dares go out. The snakes make no move to enter the city, but remain outside for 11 days. They fight each other, the serpents against the vipers, but they harm neither humans nor cattle. On the tenth day, the lord of the city rides out with a few others for a closer look. They find that the one side must succumb to the other, and that they are losing at every turn. Early the next morning, the lord rides out again, and he finds only the dead, 8000 of them, and he orders them buried and sends word to Bayezid to tell him of this marvel. There is some confusion in my translation here, but it appears that the serpents of the sea had slaughtered the forest vipers. And when Bayezid hears this, he rejoices. Why, one might ask? Apparently he sees himself as a lord of the coast and takes this for a sign that he will soon also be lord of the sea.
Really, it’s as good an interpretation as any. Stories of this sort appear in the Schiltberger narrative, sometimes without a great deal of context beyond “This is something interesting I’ve heard about from somewhere far away.” In this case it’s presented as being more local, occurring in lands where he tells of Bayezid campaigning. Perhaps it is one of the pieces borrowed from other books - remember that the Travels of Johann Schiltberger does this fairly extensively - but it seems just as likely to be a local tale he had heard in his time among the Ottomans.
Before we start building up towards the end of our protagonist’s time with Bayezid, and the coming of Timur into our story, we should look over the treatment of the Ottomans and their character, and the history of the Schiltberger book in that treatment.
At first look, I don’t find the Schiltberger depiction of the Ottomans, and of Bayezid, to be a particularly unsympathetic one, which is interesting. It is worth noting that Bayezid’s mercy is often brought about by the pleas of those around him, after an initial outburst of violent anger. He, as a character, is not necessarily inherently merciful; rather, he is portrayed as a leader who will, eventually, listen to his sons and other advisors, which is not such a terrible thing to be of course.
Aside from the slaughter in the aftermath of the battle at Nicopolis, which I realize is a bit of a large “aside,” we really don’t see Bayezid being terribly cruel. Tremendously successful, militarily speaking, yes, and thus responsible for no shortage of death, but cruel and/or unusual, no, not really. There’s none of that excessive slaughter we’ll see when Schiltberger writes of his time with Timur. Bayezid does trot the defeated lord’s head about on a lance, but he doesn’t make towers of heads, conduct mass killings of children, or bury large numbers alive. So there’s that, but material from Schiltberger’s later travels could be called upon to firmly establish the narrative of the “cruel Muslim” and then easily lumped in with the immediate Turkish threat.
The Travels of Johann Schiltberger was used repeatedly in polemics against the Ottomans. There’s a great article covering this by Samuel Wilcocks, who goes into the history of the book’s publications. It’s a topic we’ll return to at different times, but here we’ll focus on that polemical factor.
In 1595 and 97 pamphlet editions were issued in Frankfurt and Vienna, and these were not books; these were 4-8 pages. They consisted of material on Islam that the Schiltberger scribe had actually drawn from an earlier writer who in turn had borrowed it from a 13th century text. The source material is said have been quite a sympathetic portrayal of Islam, “uncommonly tolerant” even, but over time it had been reworked to emphasise the desired levels of cruelty and barbarism. It also had a bit of prophecy tacked on, that Islam would end with the next Muhammad, likely referring to Mehmed III and obviously not quite accurate.
People had earlier read Schiltberger as a “wonderful and diverting history, ” if one to be treated with some scepticism, or as a narrative of travel or pilgrimage, but now he was repurposed as an authority on Islam and the evil Turk. One publishing house which had earlier issued the full travels was now responsible for an 8-page pamphlet titled “Of the Turks and Mahomet: a true, thorough report from the historian Johann Schiltberger.” So the text’s audience changed just as society, its concerns, and its fears changed, and under Schiltberger’s name more editions were published, often including prophecies, biblical verses, couplets about Islam as Christianity’s Satanic corruption, hymns urging readers to take arms in the call to crusade, and finally the Schiltberger material itself. That material could make up a fairly small percentage of the work, actually, and it was generally altered for maximum villainy. As Wilcocks argues, these pamphlets did not offer knowledge; rather they offered “reassurance: that the Turks could be resisted by a chivalrous Christian soldier, or by a skeptical European observer, or at the least by a prophecy.”
All that in mind, let’s get back to the dawn of the 15th century to check in on Schiltberger and Bayezid. The one would soon be dead, his burgeoning empire badly shaken though not broken, and the other captured once again and bundled off to a new and exotic location.
This shattering of both their worlds is foreshadowed in my edition of The Travels in a chapter whose title is both deeply misleading and hilariously benign: “How the infidels remain in the fields with their cattle, in winter and summer.” These were the words which, in our story at least, foreshadowed Bayezid’s doom. A reader might be tempted to file this section away under “minimal cultural interest,” but this is where the wheels of international power start grinding into motion.
The chapter opens innocently enough:
“It is the custom among the Infidels for some lords to lead a wandering life with their cattle, and when they come to country that has good pasturage, they rent it of the lord of the country for a time. There was a Turkish lord called Osman, who wandered about with his cattle, and in the summer came to a country called Tamast, and the capital of the country is also so called.”
But the situation soon deteriorated. Osman, actually Kara Yuluk Osman Bey, and his people, sometimes referred to as “The Horde of the White Sheep,” stay the summer in Tamast, which we would call Sivas, with the permission of its lord, Kadi Burhan al-Din Ahmad, and all is well. In the fall, they leave, but they do so without that lord’s permission. This doesn’t seem like it would be a huge problem, but Schiltberger tells us that Burhan al-Din was furious. He took one thousand horsemen, encamped on the pasture land where Osman had stayed, and sent a further four thousand horsemen in pursuit, ordering them to drag this Osman back, his life and belongings intact. Osman hears word of his pursuers though, and he and his people conceal themselves on a mountain, where by good fortune, or good planning, they see their blissfully oblivious pursuers set up camp on the meadow below, passing the night apparently unaware that they were under observation and under threat. As Schiltberger describes it:
"...when the day dawned, Osman took one thousand of his best horsemen to look at the winds, and when he saw that they were not on their guard, and were without care, he rode towards them and suddenly took them by surprise, so that they could not defend themselves, and many of them were killed; the others took to flight. The king was told how Osman had annihilated his expedition, but he would not believe it, and thought that fun was being made of him, until some of them came running to him. Even then he would not believe it, and sent one hundred horsemen to see if such was the case; and when the hundred horsemen went to see about it, Osman was on his way with his people to attack the king; and when he saw the hundred horsemen he overtook them, and came with them into camp."
So Burhan al-Din, referred to here as the king, really could not believe events were turning against him. Even as survivors from the initial encounter reached his camp, he would not hear their warning, thinking himself made a joke by his underlings. He clearly didn’t trust them, or, as seems to have been the case with his already shattered expedition, could not believe that he would be attacked. He doesn’t make preparations for combat; he sends out a party for confirmation and that party comes bundling back into the camp with Osman and his men on their heels, and then it’s too late. The camp is overtaken and the soldiers run. Burhan al-Din himself makes it out of the camp, but he is chased by one of Osman’s men. The man catches up to him, and, after calling on him to surrender, is about to shoot him with his bow, but Burhan al-Din makes himself known. He offers great rewards - a castle, the ring on his hand- if only he could be allowed to escape, but instead he is dragged back before Osman, who’s been busying himself cutting down fleeing men as they ran. Osman receives this prisoner as a valuable piece to be played, and he goes out to get himself a city. And don’t worry - this is getting back to Bayezid and Schiltberger, I promise you.
Osman sends word to Burhan al-Din’s capital: he has their king and they should deliver themselves and their city to him in exchange for his promise of peace and security. But the city, Sivas, isn’t going for this. They have lords enough, thank you, and do not require the king to be returned at all. So Osman tries again. This time he sends the king himself to make his case. Al-Din goes before his people and asks them for his life; he asks them to give up the city. Even if he began confidently, as a beloved lord returning home, he must have felt a very special kind of desperation, alone at the walls, for the people replied : “We will not give up the city to Osman, because he is too feeble a lord for us; and if thou shouldst no longer care to be our lord, we have thy son whom we will have for our lord.” Needless to say, Osman is not pleased by this response, and he promptly has the valueless al-Din beheaded before the city and in clear sight of its apparently uncaring citizenry. The body is quartered, and the parts, along with the head, are placed on stakes.
Now the king’s son within Sivas needs a powerful friend, and quickly, and he sends off to his father in law, the ruler of what Schiltberger terms White Tartary, in other words a Turko-Mongol ruler. This ruler takes his request seriously, moving with all his people, literally all the people, cattle, horses, etc, to remove the threat of Osman. And much like the last time he was threatened, Osman takes to the mountains. The tartar lord camps before the city, and, in another now familiar move, Osman swoops down out of the mountains at night, arriving from two sides with loud cries, spooking the tartar lord and causing him to bolt for shelter within the gates of Sivas. And his people in turn flee at the news that their leader has abandoned them, and Osman pursues them, again cutting down many from behind. The ruler does follow and rally his people, but cannot not convince them to return to the attack, so Osman is left to continue with the siege. And you may be wondering when, if ever, Schiltberger, or even Bayezid, will reenter our story. Well, this was when the people of Sivas turned to Bayezid for help, offering in exchange their surrender to him. When Bayezid responded by sending a reported 20 thousand horsemen and four thousand foot soldiers under the command of his son Suleyman, Schiltberger was with them.
As Suleyman’s men meet Osman and his soldiers, the Ottomans are apparently a little scattered, a common side effect of moving sizeable armies overland. They are almost broken immediately, but Suleyman rallies them and a hard three hours of fighting ensue with the Ottomans victorious. Osman escapes, to be heard from shortly, and, as he seems very comfortable doing in times of stress, takes for the mountains.
Matters thus settled, the contested city of Sivas opens its gates to Suleyman, but he doesn’t get to keep the city to himself. Bayezid will present it to another son, Mehmed, and send Suleyman on to deal with a certain White Tartar lord, perhaps the one we have just encountered.
This is not the the only Ottoman military expedition which Schiltberger tells us he was part of, but it is the earliest one. In another expedition, he was dispatched, as one of 20 thousand men, to help the new Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Nasir ad-din Faraj, secure his rein against a rival bid for power. The effort was likely undertaken as a diplomatic one on Bayezid’s part. He anticipated an imminent threat, that posed by Timur who you may known Tamerlane, and probably hoped for the Sultan’s assistance in the coming war, but Nasir had reason beyond not wanting to send his troops away from home for declining such a request. It had not been so long before that Bayezid and Nasir’s father, Barquq, had come into conflict over the city of Malathea. Bayezid had come away with it, but he would likely have forgone this success if only any help were to be his in the battle to come. Timur was on the way.
Schiltberger tells us that when our friend Osman had been driven off by Suleyman, he had not remained up in his mountain retreat for long; he’d gone to his lord Timur to complain of Bayezid and ask for Timur’s help in dealing with him. Was Timur interested in such an expedition? Indeed he was. So interested was he, that he mustered 10 hundred thousand men, a large number even on the scale of historical troop estimates, and decided to take Sivas from Bayezid. As a first step he simply demands, in writing, that Bayezid hand it over.
This is not their first communication by the way. Although Schiltberger makes no mention of it, they have been exchanging letters for years, letters which range from the diplomatic to the personally insulting and threatening. In one report we hear of Timur addressing Bayezid like this:
Believe me, you are nothing but an ant; don’t seek to fight against the elephants because they will crush you under their feet. The dove which rises up against the eagle destroys itself. Shall a petty prince, such as you are, contend with us? But your boasts are not extraordinary, for a Turk never spoke with judgement. If you do not follow our counsel, you will regret it. This is the advice we give you. Behave as you think fit.
Bayezid, in turn made no effort to forestall war. Rather, he seems to have welcomed it:
For a long time we have wanted to wage war against you. God be praised, our will has now been achieved and we have decided to march against you with a formidable army. If you don’t advance to meet us, we will come and seek you out and pursue you as far as Tabris and Sultaniya. Then we shall see in whose favour heaven will declare and which of us will be raised in victory and which abased by a shameful defeat.
Sivas gives us our first look at Timur in action against the Ottomans. It is described by Syrian chronicler Arabshah as “among the finest of great cities, set in a beautiful region, remarkable for public buildings, fortifications, famous qualities and tombs of martyrs renowned above all.” It’s Seljuk-built walls were high and thick, but Timur set up his siege, using war machines and battering rams, towers from which they could strike down at the wall tops, and sappers beneath the walls, tunnelling and setting fires. According to Schiltberger, he took the city by force after 21 days. In other accounts, those within the walls asked for peace when they realized their defences could not hold. Timur is said to have made a promise to spill no blood, and it was a promise that he would keep in his own special way. Having ordered great pits to be dug, Timur gathered the horsemen who had defended the city. There were between 3 and 5 thousand of them, soldiers brought there by Suleyman who had himself since escaped. Timur had them painfully bound in suffocating, constricting positions, and he had them buried alive, bloodlessly. Then, he destroyed the city, and carried off its surviving inhabitants into captivity.
Schiltberger disregards chronological norms with the events that follow, placing Timur’s attacks in Syria after the Battle of Angora with Bayezid. We’re also going to put aside Syria for next episode, but keep in mind that this was what Timur was up to following the destruction of Sivas.
When Timur returned to the region following his attacks on the Syrian cities, Bayezid could not allow his opponents to come further into his territory than they already had. It was the season when a ripening harvest was at stake, and thus an invading army could not only live off the land but also deal a lasting blow to Ottoman resources that would be felt throughout the following year. Bayezid gathered his Turkish troops from Europe, Balkan vassals such as the Serbians, groups of Kipchaks, and other Turkic nomads, and he moved swiftly east to Angora. There at least some of his commanders urged that he remain, by the ready supply of water, and wait for Timur, but this he would not do. He pushed on, seeking to cut off Timur’s advance in the direction his scouts reported. By doing so he was also moving into more wooded ground, suitable to an army that with large contingents of foot soldiers. Where, not that long ago, the Ottoman military had overwhelmingly been mounted, it had become increasingly infantry reliant, and it was soon to face the kind of horse-centric army the Ottomans themselves had once formed.
Timur, was very aware of Bayezid’s movements. He made use of scouts and of local emirs who looked forward to regaining their land should Bayezid be defeated. Based on their information, and having first given indications of going north-west, he circled round to the south-west, pillaging the land as he went to support his army, moving quickly and evading any contact. Grain harvests were brought in and wells dug where necessary. Quick marches were interspersed with days of rest and refreshment, and the army moved swiftly but did not exhaust itself.
Bayezid meanwhile seems to have entirely lost track of his enemy, that great horde becoming strangely invisible as he groped towards it with his own vast army. For 2 weeks he chased phantoms until word came that Timur had resurfaced just southeast of Angora. In a matter of weeks Timur’s army had maneuvered itself into position at that well-supplied site by the water from which Bayezid had only recently departed. Success in this achieved, orders were given for the city itself to besieged, the river to be diverted, and the army to be spread out to take advantage of the surrounding grasslands.
Here Timur had already scored an enormous advantage, eating off the land and managing to rest his army before encamping at a water source, while at the same time denying that source to the Ottomans and causing them to rush back in a panicked series of forced marches that left them exhausted and terribly dehydrated before the battle had begun. Arabshah characterized them as “perishing with distress and violent thirst,” or, in another translation, “perishing with distress and murdered by thirst,” and indeed some estimates have 5,000 of Bayezid’s men actually dying before the fighting could begin.
As the Ottomans arrive, Timur has to act quickly. He calls off the siege of Angora itself, and calls in his soldiers from the surrounding grasslands; they’d been taking advantage of the pastures, and so there was a real opportunity there for the Ottomans to take advantage of a scattered enemy. But they couldn’t. They were too weary from the march, a gruelling back and forth under Anatolia’s summer sun, weighed down by armour and armaments, the constant threat of battle with Timur the Conqueror’s horde, and the not so simple process of moving a vast body of humans as quickly as possible on a mix of boots and hooves. It’s been pointed out that Bayezid need not have initiated battle at this point. Instead he might have done as Osman had and withdrawn to the mountains, forcing Timur to expend strength in taking Angora or to leave his water source to pursue the recovering Ottomans. However, that was not to be, and the two sides formed up in opposing positions.
On the Ottoman side, where Schiltberger was, Lazarovic of Serbia, Bayezid’s brother in law, commanded heavily armoured cavalry on the right wing, perhaps 20 thousand of them. On the left was Bayezid’s son Suleyman with loyal Anatolian troops and a variety of horsemen identified by Schiltberger as being from White Tartary. In the center was Bayezid and three of his sons with around 5,000 Janissaries and groups of Sipahi cavalry. Another son, Muhammed, commanded the rear guard. All told, they may have numbered somewhere between 20 and 500 thousand, with Schiltberger putting the number at fourteen hundred thousand men. In a truly epic confrontation, this giant faced one more than its equal in size, for Schiltberger attests to sixteen hundred thousand fighting under Timur’s. Hyperbolic assessments aside, we can fairly say that these were two great armies, both proven in warfare: Bayezid’s at Nicopolis and in other actions since, and Timur’s against the Golden Horde, the Delhi Sultanate, and just recently in Syria.
At Angora, the order of battle for Timur’s army is a kind of Timurid family tree, that I won’t trouble you with at present, commanding troops from a great empire that now stretched from Syria to Delhi, and up to Russia. Front and centre were 32 war elephants from which arrows and Greek fire could be cast down. Actually both sides are sometimes said to have had Greek fire at this battle, though its role in the proceedings is pretty unclear as is that of the elephants.
Schilterberger’s portrayal of the battle is alarmingly sketchy for a man who was present at what appears to us to be such an immense event, really a momentous historical occasion, and one he had a real stake in too. He’s by this point lived among the Ottomans for most of his adult life, 12 years by his own, apparently faulty, reckoning, and presumably he had some feelings on their victory or defeat, not to mention the matter of his own potential death, in battle or afterwards. But we have to remember that he was not writing this as he went, likely did not write it at all in fact, but rather was reporting many years later what he remembered, and this was far from his only military experience, as huge a moment as it seems to us now. In any case, we shall have to turn to other sources for a story of the battle that goes beyond its barest of brushstrokes. Perhaps that speaks as much as anything to the confusing nature of such a clash and the difficulty of gaining any clear sense of it from down in the press of things and without the benefit of a helicopter or even a hilltop from which to see what was going on.
It’s unclear to us how things kicked off, but the following passage from the writer Justin Marozzi at least paints an imaginative picture:
"All was still on both side. A ripple stirred through Timur’s lines of cavalry as the horses sensed a charge. Then, slicing through the silence, came the heavy rumble of the great kettle-drums, joined by cymbals and trumpets, the signal for battle. Below the valley echoed to the thundering of horses’ hooves, the swoosh of arrows and the clash of metal upon metal. From the first blows struck the fighting was ferocious."
As the battle went on, the efficacy of Timur’s preparations was made clear. For months he had been engaged in diplomatic efforts with two primary goals. The first, through contact with Constantinople and Genoese Pera, to keep Bayezid’s European troops in Europe had not come to fruition; likely everyone involved was only too happy to see them go east. But the second had paid off. Bayezid’s cavalry irregulars, variously identified as Turcoman or Tartar, numbered perhaps a quarter or more of his men, and these men had been in contact with Timur for some time and had been persuaded to switch sides. This gets told in a few different ways, but they were either at the front of the left wing and simply turned about or, more devastatingly, they attacked Suleyman’s men from behind, breaking them. In either case, Suleyman, commander of the left wing, fought hard but was forced to flee with what remained of his forces.
It is also said that many of Bayezid’s Anotolian troops either refused to take part in the battle or switched sides themselves. They were of beyliks conquered by Bayezid, had much to complain of, and may have been informed that their former lords were now serving Timur, having taken refuge in his court.
All of this was, understandably, a disturbing turn of events for the Serbian vassal on Bayezid’s right wing. His cavalry seems to have had some success, beating back their enemies, but ordered not to pursue for fear of encirclement, and indeed that may have been just what Timur’s men intended by their retreat. When he saw, though, that Bayezid’s son was retreating, Lazarovic deemed the day lost and he withdrew. Only Bayezid’s centre, where he himself was, remained.
The battle apparently lasted all day. Timur is said to have returned at nightfall from pursuing the retreating Ottomans to find Bayezid and a loyal core still fighting, and this perhaps accounts for stories of Bayezid dispersing Timur’s troops, who believed Timur had lost, only to have Timur return in great strength and in turn surround the Ottomans.
Bayezid would make his stand on a hill, encircled by his enemy. Maybe that’s where Schiltberger was too. Bayezid is said to have struggled to the last. We read: “The Thunderbolt continued to wield a heavy battle-ax. As a starving wolf scatters a flock of sheep, he scattered the enemy. Each blow of his redoubtable ax struck in such a way that there was no need of a second blow.” He and his man could not hold that hill indefinitely however, and, perhaps while attempting to fight his way down, his horse fell, and he was finally taken and bound as a prisoner.
Arabshah gives the following characterization of Bayezid’s men at the battle:
"… they were like a man who sweeps dust away with a comb or drains the sea with a sieve or weighs mountains with a scruple. And out of the clouds of thick dust they poured out upon those mountains and the fields filled with those lions’ continuous storms of bloody darts and the showers of black arrows and the tracker of Destiny and the hunter of Fate set dogs upon cattle and they ceased not to be overthrown and overthrow and to be smitten by the sentence of the sharp arrow with effective decree, until they became like hedgehogs, and the zeal of the battle lasted between those hordes from sunrise to evening, when the hosts of iron gained the victory and there was read against the Ottomans the chapter of “Victory.” Then their arms being exhausted and the front line and reserves alike decimated, even the most distant of the enemy advanced upon them at will and strangers crushed them with swords and spears and filled pools with their blood and marshes with their limbs and Bayezid was taken and bound with fetters like a bird in a cage."
That “bird in a cage” line would really echo through fiction and history. It may be where we get the Christopher Marlowe version of what came after the battle, of Bayezid humiliated and kept in a cage by his captor. This is now generally not believed to have been the case, but certainly happy times were not ahead for the Ottoman ruler. His army had been shattered. He had seen the defection of many recently conquered beyliks. His son Musa had been taken prisoner with him, along with his son Mustafa, and his Serbian wife Despina. Some would actually blame Despina for the loss, saying she had corrupted Bayezid, while other focused this accusation of moral laxity, and resultant inattention, squarely on the Sultan himself. His Ottoman Empire was about to enter into a phase of contraction, infighting, and civil war as Bayezid’s sons fought for its diminished throne, but Bayezid would not be witness to this. We’ll end this episode with Schiltberger’s characteristically terse depiction of events.
"Then Timur remained 8 months in the country, conquered more territory and occupied it, and then went to Bayezid’s capital and took him with him, and took his treasure, and silver and gold, as much as one thousand camels could carry; and he would have taken him into his own country, but he died on the way. And so I became Timur’s prisoner, and was taken by him to his country. After this I rode after him. And what I have described took place during the time that I was with Bayezid."