BAYEZID
THE OSMANLIS INHERIT THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE
I
The death of Murad was immediately avenged upon the battle-field by the
execution of the prisoners of noble birth. Practically all the Serbian
aristocracy that had remained loyal to Lazar and the national cause
perished.
In the midst of this bloody work, Bayezid sent servants to seek out his
brother Yakub, who had distinguished himself during the battle, and was
being acclaimed by his soldiers. Yakub was taken to Bayezid’s tent, and
strangled with a bowstring.[428] The new emir justified this crime by a
verse conveniently found for him by his theologians in the Koran: ‘So
often as they return to sedition, they shall be subverted therein; and
if they depart not from you, and offer you peace and restrain their
hands from warring against you, take them and kill them wheresoever ye
find them.’[429] They declared that the temptation to treason and revolt
was always present in the brothers of the ruler, and that murder was
better than sedition. These doctors of the law might better have pointed
out to Bayezid the admonition of the Prophet: ‘But his soul suffered him
to slay his brother, and he slew him: wherefore he became of the number
of those who perish.’[430] For the abominable practice of removing
possible rival claimants by assassination, thus begun on the field of
Kossova, was elevated to the dignity of a law by Mohammed II,[431] and
has been until our own times a blot upon the house of Osman.
Bayezid, however, was only following the example of Christian princes of
his own century. Pedro of Castille killed his brother Don Fadrique;[432]
Andronicus III Comnenos of Trebizond, killed his two brothers, Michael
and George;[433] and Andronicus III Palaeologos assassinated his brother
when his father was dying.[434]
An order was issued from the battle-field of Kossova to the Kadi of
Brusa, enjoining him to keep secret the death of Murad, and to appear to
be occupied only with public rejoicing for the victory ‘won from the
_Hungarians_’. With this order, Bayezid forwarded the bodies of his
father and brother for secret burial at Brusa.[435]
Agents of the Italian cities came to seek Bayezid after the battle to
congratulate him, and to ask for the confirmation of the commercial
privileges granted by Murad. Bayezid showed himself proud and distant.
He declared that after he had conquered Hungary he would ride so far
that he would come to Rome and there give his horse oats to eat upon the
altar of St. Peter’s.[436] A change of attitude towards Europe is
strikingly revealed in this boast. Murad, in spite of crusades projected
against him, had been careful not to draw upon himself the attention,
much less the ill-will, of the western Christian princes. He was
aggressive, but never any more so than he needed to be for the moment at
hand: and he was never aggressively Mohammedan. Bayezid, from the very
beginning of his reign, took no pains to conceal his enmity to
Christendom, and his desire to pose as the champion of Islam. He sought
alliances with the Sultan of Egypt[437] and other Moslem rulers, and
placed the utmost importance upon the extension of Ottoman sovereignty
in Asia Minor.
II
After the bloodthirst of Kossova had been satisfied and his father’s
death avenged, Bayezid was eager to enter into friendly relations with
Stephen Bulcovitz, son and heir of Lazar. He felt that the Serbians had
learned their lesson, and that they would be more helpful to him as
allies than as crushed and sullen foes. He needed their aid in the
Anatolian campaign which he was contemplating, and they were essential
to the safety of his European possessions as a buffer against the
Hungarians, who he knew would take the opportunity of his absence in
Asia to move down the Danube. So he treated Stephen and the surviving
Serbians with great kindness. Stephen received all the privileges that
had belonged to his father.[438] The Serbians were assured of an
equitable share of the booty in the campaigns in which they would
engage. On the other hand, Stephen agreed to allow Bayezid an annual
tribute, secured by the revenues of the silver mines, to command a
contingent in person in the Ottoman army, and to give his sister to the
Ottoman emir.[439] Kossova was forgiven on both sides.
Bayezid took Despina, daughter of Lazar, as wife by a formal marriage
act, which was read in the mosque of Aladja Hissar, near Krutchevatz,
at the foot of Mount Iastrebatz, twenty miles north-west of Nish.[440]
This was the last marriage ever contracted by a sovereign of the house
of Osman.[441] It sealed an alliance that proved very advantageous to
Bayezid. Throughout his life he was devoted to Despina, and his
brother-in-law Stephen in turn was a devoted and steadfast friend. The
Serbians were faithful allies to the Osmanlis, and fought with them at
Nicopolis and Angora. On his side, Bayezid kept the allegiance of the
Serbians by giving them opportunities for winning booty in the raids
against the Albanians, Dalmatians, and Hungarians, and by favouring the
Orthodox Church. When we see how complacently and cheerfully the
Serbians--except the poets--took upon themselves the Ottoman yoke, we
must believe that Kossova was regarded as a terrible calamity only by
the generations of after centuries, who found the Ottoman rule harder
than it had been for their ancestors.
Bayezid placed a strong Ottoman colony in Uskub, and settled Moslems in
the country between Uskub and Nish.[442] There were probably many also
who saw that conversion was to their advantage. However that may be,
Bayezid never had any trouble from the Serbians during his reign.
Stephen Tvrtko, kral of Bosnia, did not consider Kossova a defeat.
Seeing that his great enemy Murad and his great rival Lazar had found
death on the battle-field, and that the Osmanlis did not follow up
their victory, this view-point was natural. After Kossova, Tvrtko
increased in power and prestige. He called himself king of Bosnia,
Serbia, Croatia, and Dalmatia. Like Stephen Dushan, he was planning ‘for
great things’ when he died in March, 1391, after a reign of thirty-eight
years.[443]
Shortly before his death, Tvrtko had successfully resisted an Ottoman
invasion with the help of a Hungarian army sent to him by Sigismund. His
successor, Stephen Dabitcha, however, departed from this wise policy. He
quarrelled with the Hungarians, and played into Bayezid’s hand by
opposing Sigismund in his final effort to stem the tide of Ottoman
invasion. The Bosnians paid to the full the penalty of their king’s
folly. In 1398, Bosnia was invaded by a great army of Osmanlis and
Serbians, who ‘destroyed almost all the country and led away the people
into slavery’.[444] In spite of the sweeping assertion of the
chronicler, this must have been only a raid. For, from 1398 to 1415, the
Bosnians, still independent, were fighting with Ragusa and Hungary. In
1415, they voluntarily allied themselves with the Osmanlis, and repeated
the same old story of the other Balkan races. Mohammed I was called in
to help them against the Hungarians.[445] The Osmanlis came, and they
remained.
III
In the second year of his reign, after he had arranged a suitable
_status quo_ with the Serbians of upper Macedonia, Bayezid began that
policy of aggrandizement in Asia Minor which led finally to his
downfall. His first encroachment was against Isa bey of Aïdin. Isa was
too weak to oppose Bayezid single-handed. Instead of seeking to ally the
independent emirs against the Osmanlis, Isa thought he could save
himself with less risk by becoming a vassal of Bayezid. He was compelled
to give up Ayasoluk, and make Tyra his capital. Bayezid almost
immediately broke faith with Isa, and exiled him to Brusa or Nicaea,
where he died.[446] His two sons, Isa and Omar, managed to escape to the
court of Timur, who was rapidly becoming the most powerful Moslem ruler
in Asia.
The occupation of Ephesus aroused momentarily Bayezid’s ambition to take
possession of Smyrna. In 1391, he did in fact make some efforts to
overpower the garrison, which was greatly weakened by pestilence.[447]
Later he occupied the passes around Smyrna to prevent the entrance of
provisions.[448] But Smyrna, like Constantinople, could not be starved
out so long as the Osmanlis were not masters of the sea. Bayezid never
pressed this mild form of siege to a definite assault. His hands were
too full elsewhere. An unsuccessful assault against Smyrna would have
destroyed his prestige in the new territory of Aïdin, which was not any
too securely his by the suppression of its ruling family. Perhaps, also,
he realized that Smyrna, more than any other place in the Levant except
Rhodes, had become the city of promise to the Roman Church. He did not
want to stir up an active resistance on the part of the chevaliers of
Rhodes, for they might easily be induced to lend aid to the emirs whom
he was destroying.
Sarukhan and Menteshe, during the reign of Murad, had lost the most
virile element of their population in corsair expeditions. The Turks of
whom one reads as the roving and raiding adventurers in the Aegaean and
Mediterranean during the fourteenth century were largely from these
emirates. Decades of outgo without a corresponding income in fighting
men so depleted the maritime emirates that they were not in a position
to withstand Bayezid as they had done his father and grandfather. Their
population was seafaring, and their princes were traders rather than
warriors. When the armies of Bayezid invaded Sarukhan and Menteshe, the
two emirs attempted no resistance. They took refuge with Bayezid, emir
of Kastemuni, and abandoned their emirates to the Osmanlis.[449]
The result of the acquisition of Sarukhan, Aïdin, and Menteshe was the
immediate appearance of the Osmanlis upon the Aegaean Sea. This is the
beginning of the Ottoman naval power, which did not, however, have any
development during the reign of Bayezid. The first Ottoman naval
expedition started out in the late autumn of 1390. Sixty vessels made a
descent upon Chios, and devastated the island. Negropont (Euboea) and
the coast of Attica suffered the ravages of the raiders.[450] Bayezid
now forbade the exportation of grain from Asia to Lemnos, Lesbos, Chios,
and Rhodes. But he was hardly yet in a position to enforce this embargo.
The Christians of the Aegaean islands and of the eastern Mediterranean
soon learned that a new design, which had before been lacking, animated
the Turkish expeditions. It was the desire not so much for booty as for
the permanent possession of land. Everywhere they went, the Osmanlis
went as settlers. They fought for homes and wives.
In the south, Bayezid took Adalia, the last city of the emir of Tekke.
It was in 1391 that the Osmanlis won this seaport, their first on the
Mediterranean. If we except the southern ports of the Peloponnesus, a
whole century passed before they added another on the Mediterranean.
Following up the pretext furnished him by a complaint against Alaeddin
from his vassal, the emir of Hamid, Bayezid determined to measure his
forces against the Karamanlis. As had been the case in the previous
similar expeditions under his father, four years before, Bayezid called
out the levies of his European Christian vassals. Among those who
responded to the call was Manuel Palaeologos, who passed the winter of
1390-91 in the Ottoman camp at Angora. There he wrote his famous
dialogues on the Christian religion, purporting to be discussions with a
Moslem professor of theology.[451]
Bayezid invaded Karamania, and laid siege to Konia. Alaeddin, who had
fled to the Taurus Mountains to escape being shut up in the city, saw
soon that Konia could hold out against Bayezid for an indefinite period.
The Ottoman emir was far from his base of supplies, and nervous about
what was happening in Europe. So, when Alaeddin asked for terms of
peace, Bayezid agreed to withdraw from Konia, if Alaeddin would formally
cede to him the north-western corner of his dominions, including the
cities of Aksheïr and Akseraï, which were already in the hands of the
Osmanlis.[452] Bayezid left Timurtash as governor of the new
acquisitions, and returned to Adrianople.
While Bayezid was occupied in Bulgaria, in 1392, in his first defensive
campaign against Sigismund, Alaeddin decided upon a supreme effort to
wrest from Bayezid the hegemony of Asia Minor. He reoccupied the ceded
cities, and attacked by surprise the Ottoman army in Kermian. Timurtash
was taken prisoner. One column of the Karamanlis set out for Angora, and
the other for Brusa.
Bayezid earned for himself the nickname _yildirim_ (thunderbolt) by the
rapidity with which he transported his army into Anatolia.[453] Fresh
from a victory over the Hungarians, supported by the trained and
hardened soldiery of his Christian vassals, Greeks, Serbians,
Bulgarians, and Wallachians, his sudden appearance at Brusa caused
Alaeddin to try once more to treat with the rival who was rapidly
becoming more powerful than himself. He released Timurtash, and
suggested a return to the _status quo_ of the previous year.
Bayezid was not only convinced that a decisive struggle was now
advisable: he was also quick to see that for the first time the
advantage was all on the side of the Osmanlis. Instead of meeting the
enemy in the heart of his own country, after a long journey across
wind-swept plateaux where food was scarce, it was the enemy this time
who had made the journey and was far from home. Defeated, there would be
no retreat possible for Alaeddin.
With characteristic celerity, Bayezid sent forward an army under
Timurtash. Battle was joined in the plain of Ak Tchaï (the white river).
One cannot determine the exact location, but it was probably in Kermian
not far from Kutayia, for that is where the two retreating columns of
the Karamanlis would naturally have formed a junction. Alaeddin and his
sons Ali and Mahommed were taken prisoners. When Alaeddin was brought
before him, Timurtash could not restrain his anger until Bayezid
arrived. He remembered only that the one defeat of his long and
brilliant career had been administered by Alaeddin. Its disgrace, and
his feeling towards the emir of Karamania, was in no way palliated by
the fact that Alaeddin had voluntarily released him. Timurtash ordered
the prisoner to be hanged. When Bayezid arrived, his brother-in-law was
dead. He was overjoyed that his rival had been removed so conveniently,
and without any responsibility falling upon himself.
Karamania lay open before the invaders. The Osmanlis occupied Ak Seraï,
Konia, and Laranda. There was no organized resistance. But it is a
curious disregard of facts to record, as most historians have done,[454]
that the result of this campaign was the permanent incorporation of
Karamania in the Ottoman Empire.[455] The battle of Ak Tchaï had been
decisive only to the extent that thereafter the Osmanlis, and not the
Karamanlis, were to be the dominant race in Asia Minor. Konia and other
eastern Karamanian cities were occupied by the Osmanlis after the battle
because their ruler had been killed and his sons taken into captivity.
Had Alaeddin escaped from the field, he might have organized a
successful resistance to the Ottoman invaders. Bayezid conquered
Karamania by the battle of Ak Tchaï no more than Napoleon conquered
Prussia by Jena or von Moltke France by Sedan. To enter and occupy for
a while the capital of a country does not mean that the country is
‘incorporated’ in the domains of the successful invader. The immediate
restoration of the Karamanian dynasty after the advent of Timur proves
how superficial had been the Ottoman occupation. While they were no
longer able to be a political factor in western Asia Minor, the
Karamanlis continued until after the fall of Constantinople--for seventy
years after the battle of Ak Tchaï--to defy successfully the efforts of
the Osmanlis to destroy their independence and amalgamate them.[456]
Burhaneddin, who had set up for himself a principality north-east of
Karamania along the Halys River, which included Caesarea and Sivas, was
the next rival on the east to be attacked. Burhaneddin is reported to
have had twenty to thirty thousand followers.[457] This seems to be an
exaggeration, for we read that he did not resist the Ottoman invasion.
At the approach of Bayezid, he retired into the mountains of Armenia
near Kharput. Here he was either killed by Kara Yuluk, founder of the
famous White Sheep dynasty, or put to death by order of Bayezid.[458]
His emirate was shared by Bayezid and Kara Yuluk, the Ottoman emir
taking Tokat, Caesarea, and Sivas. There is no certainty as to the date
of this expedition. From the events which followed, it most probably
took place in 1395, the year before Nicopolis.[459]
Kastamuni, practically coterminous with the Roman province of
Paphlagonia, stood between the Ottoman possessions and the Black Sea. In
the campaign of 1393, Samsun and the cities of the interior between
Samsun and Angora, were captured by the Osmanlis. When the Ottoman army
advanced to attack Kastamuni, Bayezid offered to allow the emir to
become his vassal, if he would surrender to him the emirs of Sarukhan
and Menteshe. Whether the lesser Bayezid was unwilling to violate the
laws of hospitality, or put little faith in the promises of the
conqueror after the fate which had overtaken the emir of Aïdin, it is
impossible to say. He and his guests fled to the court of Timur. The
occupation of Sinope gave the Osmanlis an excellent port on the south
coast of the Black Sea.
Bayezid was now master of the greater part of Anatolia, but master only
in name. He had not assimilated these conquests. As later events proved,
the inhabitants of these territories were still loyal to their former
rulers.
IV
After his return from the first Anatolian campaign, Bayezid ordered a
general advance along the northern and north-western frontiers. One band
invaded Bosnia, but did not make much headway. Three bands entered
Hungary, and initiated the system of rapid raiding that in time reached
as far as Germany, and made the ‘Turks’ the nightmare of Slavic,
Teutonic, and Italian Europe. The first battle on Hungarian soil was
fought at Nagy-Olosz, in Syrmia, not far from Karlovitz, where three
centuries later the Osmanlis signed the death-warrant of their
_Weltpolitik_.
The Danube was crossed also near Silistria. Before the terrible
akindjis could penetrate far into his country, the hospodar Mircea
surrendered, or was made prisoner. After a short exile at Brusa, he
regained his liberty by consenting to the payment of a tribute of three
thousand ducats, thirty horses, and twenty falcons.[460] He agreed to
help Bayezid against the Hungarians, who had long been asserting a
sovereignty over Wallachia, and in return Bayezid promised to settle no
Moslems and build no mosques north of the Danube. In the first Hungarian
invasion, Bayezid received more valuable aid from the Wallachians than
from his janissaries. There were no better fighters in the Balkan
peninsula than these descendants of the soldiers of Trajan. The
interference of Sigismund prevented an Ottoman invasion of Moldavia,
whose hospodars remained altogether independent of the Osmanlis until
the reign of Mohammed the Conqueror.[461]
When Louis of Hungary died, he left two daughters. The younger, Hedwig,
was chosen as queen of Poland by the Polish nobles. Her marriage with
Jagello of Lithuania, who was converted to Christianity and baptized
under the name of Ladislas, definitely separated the crowns of Poland
and Hungary, and had a far-reaching influence upon the subsequent
fortunes of the Osmanlis. The crown of Hungary fell to Mary, whose
succession was questioned by Charles of Durazzo, king of Naples, the
nearest male heir. His invasion of Dalmatia, in 1385, brought into
Hungary Sigismund, second son of Charles IV of Luxemburg, the German
Emperor. For Sigismund was betrothed to Mary, but had been slow to take
upon himself the rôle of bridegroom, owing to his disappointment over
Hedwig’s election by the Poles. Now he entered into the struggle for the
Hungarian crown. In 1387, it was placed upon his head. The union between
Poland and Hungary was broken, but the fortunes of Hungary and Bohemia,
to which throne Sigismund succeeded by blood, were joined in a way that
has never been broken to the present time. The outside connexions of the
new Hungarian king were a most important factor in the growth of the
Ottoman Empire. A strong and vigorous king, whose sole interest lay in
the crown of Hungary, might have prevented the spread of the Osmanlis.
In fact, after Bayezid’s death, he might easily have destroyed the
Ottoman power in Europe. But Sigismund, called in 1411 to the larger
rôle of Holy Roman Emperor, became engrossed in the Hussite controversy
and the Church councils to end the great schism. While retaining the
crown of Hungary, he allowed the Osmanlis to make the preparations which
were to end in the Moslem subjugation of that kingdom.
In the early days, when Sigismund’s interests lay in his newly-acquired
Hungarian crown, he was alive to the menace of the Osmanlis. He sent a
message to Bayezid, demanding by what right he was interfering with
Bulgaria, which was a country under Hungarian protection. Bayezid made
no response to the address of the king’s ambassador. He merely pointed
to the weapons hanging in his tent, and gave a sign that the audience
was over.
Sigismund understood, and accepted the challenge. In 1392, he invaded
Bulgaria, won an initial battle from the Osmanlis, who would have been
annihilated had it not been for their new allies, the Wallachians, and,
after a long siege, took Nicopolis on the Danube.[462] By this time
Bayezid was able to send a large army into Bulgaria. When Sigismund
realized how numerous were the forces coming against him, he saw that
his victory bade fair to be nothing more than the acquisition of a
prison. Before the Osmanlis could surround him, he wisely abandoned
Nicopolis. The retreat became a rout.[463] It was on the return from
this expedition that Sigismund met Elisabeth Morsinay, in the county of
Hunyadi. From their union was born the great champion, who, while his
imperial father was engrossed in theological disputes and the complex
interests of the empire, battled bravely against Mohammed I and Murad
II.
The expedition of 1392 demonstrated to Sigismund that Bayezid was a foe
worthy of a European ruler, that he must be checked if Hungary were to
be saved, and that the Hungarians could not again take the offensive
against the Osmanlis without aid from western Europe. For the
pretensions of Louis to the overlordship of the Balkan States, and the
heartless propaganda of the Catholic faith, thinly disguising Louis’s
inordinate ambitions, had turned the Balkan peoples against Hungary and
‘crusaders’ from the west. They chose rather to stand on the side of
their Moslem enslavers.
Sigismund’s invasion of Bulgaria determined Bayezid to put an end to the
arrangement concluded just before Kossova between Murad and Sisman.
Bulgaria, like Thrace and Macedonia, was to be an integral part of the
empire, and to become converted to Islam and ottomanized, in so far as
that was possible. For Sisman, who had re-established himself in his old
capital, was too uncertain an ally to be trusted in the event of
another Hungarian invasion. In the spring of 1393, an army under
Soleiman Tchelebi, Bayezid’s oldest son, to whom this was the first
command, surrounded Tirnovo. The bulk of Soleiman’s army was composed of
Macedonian Christians and renegades of the first generation. In
midsummer,[464] after a three months’ siege, Tirnovo was taken by storm
from the side of the old castle, which is still, in part, standing.[465]
The inhabitants who escaped fire and sword were carried into captivity
in Anatolia. Among them was the patriarch Euthymius.[466]
This was the end of the independence of Bulgaria and of the national
church. The loss of the church was a more serious blow than the loss of
independence. For the Bulgarian nationality suffered an eclipse of
centuries. Under the laws of Mohammed the Conqueror for the
‘self-government’ of the Christian elements of the empire, the
Bulgarians were included in the Greek _millet_ (nation). Enemy to every
influence, every movement that tended to lessen its temporal power, the
Greek patriarchate of Phanar never wearied in its endeavours, and never
withheld its approval of the foulest means, to stamp out the Bulgarian
national spirit. One cannot visit the old monastery of Rilo without
realizing that the Bulgarian sufferings have been more acute from
Christian priests than from Moslem governors. One cannot follow the
trail of unending persecution in the mute witness of unchurched
communities from Monastir to the Black Sea through Macedonia and Eastern
Rumelia, and to the Danube, through Bulgarian Serbia and trans-Rhodopian
Moesia, without sympathizing with the Bulgarian aspirations of 1913, and
without comprehending the wild rage and hatred that drove an ordinarily
clear-headed and impassive people into the second Balkan war.[467]
When Tirnovo fell, Sisman was not found in his palace. His fate was a
mystery even when Schiltberger went through Bulgaria with the crusaders
three years later. Schiltberger believed that he died in captivity.[468]
His son, Alexander, became a Moslem to save his life, and was given the
governorship of Samsun.[469] He was killed fighting under the Ottoman
flag, in 1420, in the rebellion of Dédé-Sultan. The royal family of
Bulgaria had no other heirs.
Silistria, Nicopolis, Widin, and the other Danube fortresses were
strongly garrisoned and fortified.[470] By conversion and immigration
the Moslem population was cultivated, and grew rapidly on this northern
frontier of the empire.
V
The battle of Kossova did not immediately affect Constantinople. Bayezid
was intent upon arranging the new _status quo_ in Serbia. After he had
assured himself that Sigismund was not ready to attack him, he passed
over into Asia Minor. There he devoted all his energies to the
destruction of the Turkish emirates.
The old family feud of the Palaeologi continued.[471] In April 1390,
John, the son of Andronicus, entered Constantinople, and set himself up
as emperor in opposition to his grandfather and uncle. But upon Manuel’s
return from Asia in September, he was compelled to flee.[472] The
obligations of Manuel as Ottoman vassal were stronger than the
exigencies of his precarious position at Constantinople. Although his
father was in an enfeebled condition and the danger of a return of his
nephew was very real, Manuel left again in November to follow Bayezid in
the war against Karamania.
We have a striking record from Manuel’s own pen of his humiliation.
Proper food was too dear for the purse of the heir of Constantine the
Great. He was on the verge of starvation. In sharp contrast to his own
wretchedness, he describes the barbaric splendour of the court of
Bayezid, and the feasting in which he was too insignificant to have a
share. The Osmanlis treated him with studied insolence and
contempt.[473]
While Bayezid was in Karamania, the old emperor repaired the walls of
his capital. Churches were torn down in order to rebuild the towers on
either side of the Golden Gate. They were given an ornate appearance to
disguise the purpose of their having been repaired. Bayezid, informed
through his couriers, sent word to John that the towers must be rased
without delay, or Manuel would lose his eyes. The old emperor made haste
to obey. Before the demolition was finished, he died in the arms of
Eudoxia Comnena, whom he had taken for his mistress after having asked
her hand for his son. Gout and debauchery rather than grief and
humiliation ended his ignoble life; for he was only sixty-one, and, like
his father and grandfather, had never opposed the Osmanlis with enough
energy to undermine his constitution.[474]
When Manuel, in the spring of 1391, returned to Brusa, he learned of his
father’s death, and of the threat that had been made concerning himself.
Escaping in the night, he fled to Constantinople.
An ultimatum soon followed from Bayezid. Beyond the acknowledgement of
vassalage and the payment of an increased tribute, Bayezid demanded the
establishment of a kadi in Constantinople to judge the Moslem
inhabitants. Upon the heels of his messenger came the Ottoman army. The
Greeks of southern Thrace who had remained Christian were exterminated
or carried off into slavery in Asia. Like locusts, the Osmanlis swarmed
in all directions, and no village missed their notice up to the very
walls of Constantinople.[475] The first Ottoman siege of Constantinople
began.
The close investment of the city ended after seven months. Bayezid,
needing his army in Bulgaria to oppose Sigismund, consented to lift the
siege on still harder conditions than had first been imposed. Manuel
authorized the establishment of a Mohammedan tribunal in the Sirkedji
quarter, and to give seven hundred houses within the city walls to
Moslem settlers. Half of Galata, from the Genoese Tower to the Sweet
Waters, was ceded to Bayezid, who placed there a garrison of six
thousand. The tribute was once more increased, and the Ottoman treasury
was allowed a tithe on the vineyards and vegetable gardens outside of
the city.[476] From the minarets of two mosques, the call to prayer
echoed over the imperial city, which, from this time, began to be called
by the Osmanlis Istambul.[477] This was the city of promise.
From 1391 until the advent of Timur, Constantinople was blockaded on the
land side.[478] The Galata garrison and the posts at Kutchuk and Buyuk
Tchekmedje were always alert to bully and harass travellers and
provision sellers.
The Grand Vizier, Ali pasha, used the grandson and namesake of John V
Palaeologos to make trouble for Manuel. It was in his blood to become
the willing tool of the Osmanlis. In 1393, Ali pasha tried to get the
inhabitants of the city to depose Manuel in order that John, as heir of
the older son of the late emperor, might take the place which was
rightfully his.[479] Two years later John actually attacked the city
with Ottoman troops, but was repulsed.[480]
The overtures of Manuel for aid and money from Christian princes were
received with little enthusiasm. On account of the schism in the Latin
Church, Manuel could look for no papal support. Venice refused his offer
to sell Lemnos.[481] The time had passed when the Senate set even the
slightest monetary value upon a Byzantine deed of sale to an Aegaean
island.
In 1395, at Serres, Bayezid held his first court as heir of the Caesars.
He summoned before him Manuel and Theodore and John, the son of
Andronicus. Theodore, who had been ruling in the Morea (Peloponnesus),
sole remaining Byzantine theme, was charged with having encroached upon
the rights of the lord of Monembasia. The few remaining Serbian princes
were also present. Bayezid contemplated ridding himself altogether of
the Byzantine imperial family. In fact, he ordered the death of all the
Palaeologi. Ali pasha succeeded in putting off the execution long enough
for Bayezid to change his mind. The sentence was revoked, but warning
was given by cutting off the hands and putting out the eyes of several
Byzantine dignitaries. The Palaeologi, and Constantinople, had been
saved only by the intervention of a creature of Bayezid’s, who did not
want to see the imperial family perish and the imperial city fall
because these ghosts of princes were a source of revenue to him!
The peril at Serres had been so real that the Byzantine and Serbian
princes plotted immediately to throw off the Ottoman yoke, and swore to
each other that they would never again answer a summons from Bayezid.
The compact was sealed by the marriage of Irene, daughter of
Constantine Dragash, to Manuel.[482] But Dragash died shortly after the
marriage,[483] and Vuk Brankovitch died three years later.[484] They
were the last of the Serbians of Dushan’s following in Macedonia. The
disaster of Nicopolis soon crushed the hopes of the conspirators.
VI
Urban VI, the first Roman pope of the Great Schism, did practically
nothing against the Osmanlis. He sent, in 1388, two armed galleys for
the defence of Constantinople, and issued letters broadcast promising
indulgences to all who would take part in a crusade.[485] But he did not
work for a league of the states which recognized him. His successor,
Boniface IX, whose reign covered the same period as that of Bayezid, was
too occupied in combating the Angevin party in Naples, and in trying to
preserve intact the papal states and cities, to pay much attention to
the Ottoman menace.
In 1391, Boniface urged George Stracimir, who called himself king of
Rascia (Serbia), to conquer Durazzo from the ‘schismatics’, and
commanded the Catholic archbishop of Antivari to prevent the Christians
of Macedonia and Dalmatia from allying themselves with the
Osmanlis.[486] Idle words these were, revealing at once the
short-sighted policy of Boniface and his bigotry. For the Osmanlis, in
the spring of 1393, were threatening Durazzo.[487] With warring
Christian sects, their success was certain.
In Greece the interference of the Latin popes was becoming more and more
bitterly resented. Ecclesiastics and laymen alike resented proselytizing
and the invariable introduction of a bargaining clause in every appeal
for western aid. In March 1393, Dorotheus, metropolitan of Athens and
exarch of Greece, who had been justly charged by the Duke of Athens with
wanting to introduce into his duchy the Osmanlis, was a fugitive at
Constantinople. Tried on the charge brought against him by the Duke, a
synod of eight bishops acquitted him.[488] This action was indicative of
the feeling throughout the Eastern Church,--better the Osmanlis than the
Franks with their Catholic missionaries. Even the changed attitude of
Bayezid towards Christianity did little to modify this sentiment.
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.
Immediately upon hearing the news of Kossova, the Venetian Senate sent
to Andrea Bembo, who had been negotiating with Murad, a letter
instructing him as to the course he should follow in view of the death
of Murad. He was to seek out the son who had survived, or, if both sons
were alive, to be very cautious until one son had killed or defeated the
other. In the meantime, he was to make overtures to both, telling each
one, without letting the other know, that the Senate ‘had heard of the
death of his father, and on that account had great sorrow. For we have
always regarded him as a most particular friend, and we loved him and
his state. Likewise we have heard of his happy elevation to the power
and lordship of his country, concerning which we have been very happy,
because, in like manner as we have sincerely loved the father, we love
and are disposed to love the son and his dominion, and to regard him as
a particular friend.’ Then Bembo was to speak of the commercial
privileges desired by the Senate, and to disclaim the action of the
Venetian admiral, Pietro Zeno, who had attacked the galleys of
Murad.[492]
Immediately upon hearing which son had become the successor of Murad,
the Senate sent Francesco Quirini to Bayezid with gifts to secure the
renewal of the commercial treaty concluded several years before with
Murad. Bayezid readily offered to protect Venetian commerce, but he
gave no guarantee.[493]
The appearance of the Osmanlis on the Aegaean Sea, and their sacking of
Chios, Negropont,[494] and Attica, greatly alarmed the Senate. Fear was
expressed for the safety of the Venetian fortresses in Negropont and
Crete.[495] All garrisons were ordered, provisioned, and
reinforced.[496] In 1393, forgetting their sincere love for Bayezid, the
Senate decided to treat with Sigismund for an offensive alliance against
the Osmanlis.[497] So it cannot be believed that the Venetians did not
see the growing danger.
In September of the next year they responded favourably, although
vaguely, to a letter in which Sigismund notified them that in the coming
springtime he would ‘go against the Turks to their loss and
destruction’.[498] But when, in May 1396, a Hungarian embassy arrived in
Venice to announce the readiness for a forward movement, and to secure
the promised aid, Venice pledged herself only to the extent of four
galleys, and that on condition that Rhodes, Chios, and Mytilene would
co-operate with the Venetians.[499] A high-sounding letter was sent to
Tommaso Monicego, ordering him to move against the Osmanlis ‘for the
preservation of the city of Constantinople and for the honour of the
republic’.[500] Too weak and too inexperienced to withstand the hardened
mariners of Italy, the Osmanlis disappeared from the sea for the moment.
Their navy was only six years old, and could not yet match itself
against the _ghiaours_. Monicego fought no battle, for there was no
enemy to oppose him. But he made no effort to hinder the passage of the
Osmanlis from Asia to Europe and from Europe to Asia. The sincerity of
the naval co-operation in the Nicopolis crusade is open to the gravest
suspicion.[501]
While the Senate was putting off Sigismund with assurances and promises
that never materialized, they continued to treat with Bayezid and
Manuel. In September 1394, the Osmanlis appeared in the Adriatic at the
mouth of the Boyana, and seized Venetian subjects there. The danger to
Durazzo was imminent, for the Osmanlis were now masters of the valley of
the Drin. When the Senate deliberated on measures for securing the
release of the prisoners and for the defence of Durazzo, they decided to
make representations rather than threats to Bayezid.[502] He naturally
paid no attention to the Venetians. They did not intend to apply force,
so he continued the subjugation of Albania and Greece.
To Manuel the Senate wrote a letter in 1394, recommending him ‘to trust
in God, to trust in the measures which the Christian princes would know
how to take, to write to the pope and to these (the Christian princes),
promoting a general alliance’.[503] But one finds in the deliberations
of the Senate no speech or motion or letter from which one could infer
that they themselves had any hope whatever of the efficacy of the
procedure suggested to Manuel. In fact, within six months, in spite of
the imminence of the Hungarian offensive campaign that was to ‘drive the
Turks out of Europe’, the Senate actually decided to send ambassadors
to Bayezid to urge upon him the advisability of an accord with the
Byzantine emperor.[504] It was only because the crusade of Sigismund was
already launched, and they realized the uselessness of it, that they
gave up this questionable _démarche_, and discussed measures for the
safety of the Venetian fleet, and for preventing Constantinople from
falling into Bayezid’s hands without coming into any open rupture with
the Osmanlis.[505] Did Venice, while ostensibly co-operating with the
crusaders, fear that a victory at Nicopolis would bring about the
hegemony of Hungary in the Balkan peninsula, and secretly wish for the
success of the Osmanlis?
As for Genoa, no other policy was considered than that of outbidding
Venice for Bayezid’s favour. Fulsome congratulations upon his succession
were sent to Bayezid. In the autumn of 1390, a Genoese embassy appeared
at Adrianople to remind Bayezid of the traditional friendship of the
Consulta for his father and grandfather. Their assurances were backed up
by valuable gifts.[506] While cultivating the friendship of the
Osmanlis, the Consulta levied a compulsory tax upon all the communes
where they could enforce their authority for the purpose of increasing
the Genoese fleets in the Aegaean Sea and at Constantinople.[507] A
watchful eye was kept on the Venetians and the Osmanlis. Neither
Sigismund nor Manuel received real aid from Genoa.
For the necessary outside support and assistance in the crusade which
appeared to him indispensable for the safety of Hungary, Sigismund had
to look elsewhere than to the divided papacy, and to the republics of
Venice and Genoa. Whether Sigismund’s fears of the ability of the
Osmanlis to destroy Hungary were well founded is open to question. But
there is no doubt that his activity prevented the capture of
Constantinople in the early years of the reign of Bayezid.
VII
As early as 1384, the French Court was aware of the remarkable progress
of the Ottoman conquest. The character and ambitions of Murad were
presented to the boy-king Charles VI in a striking way. He was told that
Murad, in a dream, had seen Apollon, one of his false gods, who offered
him a crown of gold before which were prostrated thirteen princes of the
Occident.[508] This childhood impression was revived in 1391, when
Charles was at the zenith of his emancipation under the Marmousets. He
received an embassy of pilgrims from the Holy Land, who brought news of
a defeat they had experienced while fighting with the King of Hungary
‘against the Turks of Lamorat Baxin’. When Charles asked them about the
genealogy and antecedents of the prince, whose name they confused with
that of his father, they knew nothing of him except that he was ‘a
vassal of the King of Persia’.
But of his character and ambitions they made a statement which we are
justified in quoting, because it throws light upon the notions
prevailing in the minds of the French aristocracy who went to their
death at Nicopolis. ‘He was’, said the pilgrims, ‘a man of wisdom and
discretion, who feared God according to the superstitious traditions of
the Turks ... humane towards the conquered, because he oppressed them
very little with exactions, and did not expel them from their lands so
long as they were willing to promise allegiance under an annual tribute,
however small. He kept his promises, and permitted them to live under
their own laws.... His seal was so respected in his army that whoever
saw it fell upon his knees. He had interpreters and spies in Europe to
instruct him about the kings and their policies. _He told the pilgrims
that he would come to France after he had finished with Austria._’[509]
The chronicler from whom this report is taken added that Charles was
much excited by this threat. He was anxious to make peace with England,
in order that he could accept the challenge of Bayezid, and go to fight
him in single combat at the head of his army. But Charles, in the
following year, so completely lost his mental balance that he could no
longer maintain any personal power, and fell under the influence of the
princes of the lilies. But his sympathies remained steadfastly attached
to every scheme for fighting the Osmanlis.
In the spring of 1395, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, uncles of the
king, who had for the moment all the power of the French crown in their
hands, received at Lyons ambassadors from Sigismund, who came to demand
aid against the Osmanlis. Philip of Burgundy was greatly interested in
this mission. It is extremely improbable that he had any interest
whatever in the Christians of the Balkan peninsula, the aggrandizement
of Hungary, or even the preservation of Constantinople from Moslem
sacrilege. But, since Flanders, Artois, and the county of Burgundy had
come to him through his wife on the death of Louis le Mâle, Philip had
begun to dream of establishing a new kingdom in Europe. It was the dream
which was to plunge France into the most bitter of her civil wars, to
call forth Jeanne d’Arc from the seclusion of Domrémy, and end in the
death of his great-grandson under the walls of Nancy.
Philip had every reason in the world to aid the project of Sigismund.
Apart from the fact that his immediate hold over the insane king,
Charles VI, would be strengthened by the absence from France of the
energetic scions of noble families, who, if successful in the struggle
against Bayezid, might push on to the Holy Land and find permanent
interests--or a grave--there, Sigismund was well worth cultivating. The
elder brother of the king of Hungary, Wenceslaus, was Roman emperor, but
insecure in his position. At that very moment, Wenceslaus was
negotiating with Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti to create him Duke of Milan
in exchange for his support.[510] Galeazzo was the father-in-law of
Louis of Orleans, younger brother of the French king, and Philip’s
formidable rival. The future of the Valois of Burgundy demanded an
_entente_ with the German imperial family. As this could not be
concluded with Wenceslaus, and as Wenceslaus might at any moment be
deposed, it was policy for Philip of Burgundy to come into close contact
with Sigismund, whose future in Bohemia and in the empire Philip
foresaw. At the very least, by lending aid to Sigismund, Philip had an
excellent chance of getting Luxemburg, which was essential to the
consolidation of the new Burgundy in the Netherlands.
As earnest of the aid which would be forthcoming the following year, the
Duke of Burgundy allowed the Comte d’Eu to proceed immediately to
Hungary with some nobles and six hundred horsemen.[511] After the
Hungarian envoys had gone through the formality of an audience with the
king at Paris, they returned to Sigismund bearing a letter in which
Philip promised substantial aid in cavaliers and mercenaries, under the
command of his own elder son, Jean Valois, Comte de Nevers.
From England, the Netherlands, Savoy, Lombardy, and all parts of
Germany, Sigismund received assurances that the cream of chivalry would
flock to his standards, and that he could rely upon Europe to back him
in the expedition which was to drive Bayezid out of Europe.
VIII
The crusade which ended in the disaster of Nicopolis is one of the most
interesting events of the close of the Middle Ages, not only by reason
of the historical importance of those who took part in it, but also
because it was the last great international enterprise of feudal
chivalry. It is the end of an epoch in the history of Europe. So
widespread was the interest in Sigismund’s call to arms against the
Osmanlis that there came to meet him at Buda in the spring of 1396 not
only the French volunteers, but also scions of noble families from
England, Scotland, Flanders, Lombardy, Savoy, Bohemia, and all parts of
Germany and Austria. The English war in Normandy had ceased, Milan was
supreme in northern Italy, and for the moment there was peace in the
Holy Roman Empire. It was a favourable time to attract adventurers to
unknown lands.
This expedition furnishes the most absorbing pages in the last portion
of Froissart;[512] it is mentioned in more or less detail in a number of
other French, Italian, German, and Latin chronicles. Several
participants have left graphic accounts of the gathering of the
chevaliers, the march down the Danube, the battle and its aftermath of
massacre, the captivity and ransom of the prisoners. The archives of
Dijon and Lille tell the cost of the fitting out of the French
contingent and of the ransom of the prisoners. For this crowning event
in Bayezid’s career, we have more source material than for any episode
of Ottoman history until the fall of Constantinople.[513]
The French chevaliers numbered about a thousand. They were accompanied
by six or seven thousand attendants and mercenaries. They gathered at
Dijon, under the command of Jean de Nevers, the oldest son of Duke
Philip of Burgundy, and grandson of King John, who had been captured in
the battle of Poitiers. He was only twenty-two, and had just won his
knighthood. The fact, though, that he was heir to Burgundy, and a prince
of the royal blood, gave him the command. Philip charged the Sieur de
Coucy, one of the boldest and most experienced warriors in France, to
have an eye on the boy, and to guide the expedition with his
counsel.[514]
Prominent among the French chevaliers were Philippe d’Artois, Constable
of France, Henri and Philippe de Bar, cousins of the king, the Sieur de
Coucy, Guillaume de la Trémouille, Jacques Bourbon de Vienne, admiral of
France and prince of the royal blood, Boucicaut, marshal of France, the
Sieur de Saint-Pol, and three Flemish princes who were the brothers of
Jean de Nevers’s mother. The heir to the duchy of Bavaria was anxious to
join the French chevaliers, but was restrained by the wise words of Duke
Albert: ‘William, since you have the desire to travel and go to Hungary
and Turkey, and carry arms against people and countries which have never
done anything to us, and you have no reason for going there, except the
vainglory of this world, let John of Burgundy and our cousins of France
do their enterprises, and you do yours, and go into Friesland and
conquer our inheritance ... and in doing this I shall help you.’[515]
The chevaliers travelled through Germany and Bohemia, and were
hospitably received by the Duke of Austria. ‘On the way they spoke of
Amorath-Bacquin[516] and admired little his power.’ When they reached ‘a
city called Buda, the king made them a great reception and good cheer,
and indeed he ought to have done so, for they had come far to see him
and bear arms for him’.[517] At Buda they found the other chevaliers who
had responded to the invitation of Sigismund, among whom were the
Bastard of Savoy,[518] Frederick of Hohenzollern, grand prior of the
Teutonic Order, Philibert de Naillac, grand master of Rhodes, with a
contingent of chevaliers of Saint-John, the Elector Palatine, and John,
Burgrave of Nürnberg, ancestor of the House of Brandenburg.[519] A
scholarly biographer of Henry IV of England has recorded that he, as
Count of Lancaster, was one of the participants in the Nicopolis
expedition.[520] This error has found its way into one, at least, of our
most reliable modern historians.[521] Although the successor of Richard
II was not, as a matter of fact, at Nicopolis,[522] the blood of the
Nicopolis crusaders is in the veins of the British royal house, as in
that of practically every ruling family of Europe.
Sigismund claimed to have been assured by Bayezid that the Osmanlis
would invade Hungary in the spring of 1396. When there were no signs of
an Ottoman invasion, the crusaders decided that, as Bayezid did not come
to seek them, they had best take advantage of the summer months to go
and find the arch-enemy of Christendom.[523] Arrangements had been made
with Mircea, voïevode of Wallachia, to break with the Osmanlis and join
the coalition. Manuel, who had been invited to co-operate with the
invaders, prepared secretly to declare against Bayezid.[524]
According to the chronicles, the invasion of Bulgaria was rather a
picnic than a serious military operation. This was true, at least, for
the western chevaliers, who had brought with them wine and women in
plenty. Their baggage contained all the luxuries to which they were
accustomed at home. The French auxiliaries travelled from Buda to the
Danube by way of Transylvania and Wallachia, crossing the Carpathians
through the pass between Brassó (Karlstadt) and Sinaia.
The Hungarians, following the Danube, spread out into Serbia, pillaging
and murdering the inoffensive Christian population more thoroughly than
Ottoman akindjis would have done.[525] In spite of a lack of opposition,
they persisted in acting as if they were in the enemy’s country. Widin
surrendered without a struggle, and Orsova after five days.[526] In
September, the armies joined before the fortress of Nicopolis, whose
surrender to the Osmanlis three years before had marked the
disappearance of Bulgarian independence. They were destined to go no
farther.[527]
For sixteen days Sigismund and his allies encamped in front of Nicopolis
without giving assault.[528] They had no idea of the whereabouts of
Bayezid. It was believed among the French (whose ignorance of geography
and of distances equalled ours of modern times) that Bayezid was in
Egypt, gathering a great army of all the Moslem world to oppose the
triumphant march of the crusaders. One reads in Froissart that Bayezid
was ‘in Cairo in Babylonia [_sic_] with the sultan to get men’, that he
left the sultan there and rallied his forces at Alexandria and Damascus,
that ‘under the command and prayers of the khalif of Bagdad and Asia
Minor’, whose mandate went forth ‘to Persia, to Media, and to Tarsus’,
Bayezid received a ‘mass of Saracens and miscreants’, and that in his
army were ‘people of Tartary, Persia, Media, Syria, Alexandria, and of
many far-off countries of the miscreants’.[529]
Sigismund made a speech to the chevaliers from western and central
Europe, in which he declared: ‘Let him come or not come, in the summer
which will return, if it pleases God, we shall get through the kingdom
of Armenia and shall pass the Bras Saint-George and shall go into Syria
and shall get from the Saracens the gates of Jaffa and Beirut and
several other [cities] to go down into Syria, and we shall go to conquer
the city of Jerusalem and all the Holy Land. And if the Sultan, with all
the strength he can muster, comes before us, we shall fight him, and
there will be no going away without the battle, in God’s pleasure.’
Froissart naïvely adds immediately after his report of this speech: ‘But
it turned out very much in another way.’[530]
It certainly did. Bayezid, who had been directing the siege of
Constantinople, knew no more about the khalif and the sultan and the
‘far-off countries of the miscreants’ than did Froissart. Neither he nor
his ancestors had ever had dealings with the Moslem princes of Asia.
Persians, ‘Saracens’ and Egyptians were lacking in his army. He
gathered together his trained warriors, called upon his Christian
vassals for their quotas, and set forth over the well-known route to the
Danube. From several recent campaigns, he and his soldiers were
thoroughly familiar with the country through which they passed, and in
which the people were less afraid of him than they were of the
Christians who had come to deliver them. When, after two weeks’ march,
he pitched his camp near Nicopolis, he was simply returning to a place
where twice before the Ottoman arms had been victorious.
Sigismund was dismayed at the prompt appearance of Bayezid with an army
which was reported to him in numbers varying from one hundred and twenty
thousand to two hundred thousand. In spite of his brave words to the
chevaliers, Sigismund knew the worth of the Osmanlis as fighting-men,
and that they could not be brushed aside by a few impetuous cavalry
charges. So he begged Jean de Nevers and his companions to consult with
him, and to formulate a definite plan of action. He suggested, and won
over to this opinion the Sieur de Coucy, who was the most experienced
warrior among the chevaliers, that a reconnaissance be made first of all
to determine Bayezid’s position and intentions. Then, if Bayezid was
actually moving to the attack, or on the point of moving, it would be
the part of wisdom for the westerners to allow the foot-soldiers of
Hungary and the Wallachians to sustain the first attack. The valiant
horsemen and western mercenaries should form a second line, whether it
be in attack or defence.
The chevaliers were furious at this suggestion. Philippe d’Artois, Comte
d’Eu and Grand Constable of France, who knew Sigismund best from longer
association with him, suspected him of an attempt to rob the chevaliers
of the glory of defeating Bayezid. ‘Yes, yes,’ he cried, ‘the king of
Hungary wants to have the flower of the day and the honour. We have the
advance-guard, and already has he given it to us. So he wants to take it
away from us and have the first battle. Whoever believes in this, I
shall not.’ Then turning to the chevalier who carried his banner, he
called out, ‘Forward banner, in the name of God and of Saint George, for
they will see me to-day a good chevalier’.[531] This action was
contagious. Without knowing where the enemy was, without thinking where
or how far they were going, without waiting to agree upon a concerted
action with the bulk of their army, the French, German, and English
noblemen rushed forward to make the last charge of European chivalry
against the followers of Mohammed.
The outposts of Bayezid, taken by surprise, were cut down. The Osmanlis
who surrendered were massacred without mercy. Imagining that they were
winning a great victory, and that they were breaking through the only
obstacle between them and the Holy Sepulchre, the chevaliers rode to
death and disgrace. In the picturesque language of Rabbi Joseph, ‘they
said “Aha! aha!”. But their joy was quickly gone, for the horsemen of
Bayezid and his hosts and chariots came against them, in battle array,
like the moon when she is new.’[532]
The chevaliers had put all their strength of man and horse into the
charge. Their swords ran blood. They thought the day was theirs, when
suddenly they found themselves confronting the army of Bayezid. As was
his invariable custom, Bayezid had sent out to meet the attack of the
chevaliers, when he heard that they had commenced the battle, his
worthless untrained levies to be cut down by the enemy and exhaust their
strength. With deliberation he drew his trusted divisions in battle
array in an advantageous position, which he had ample time to choose.
His soldiers were intact and fresh. The Ottoman bowmen aimed their
arrows at the horses of the chevaliers. Unhorsed and quickly surrounded
by sixty thousand soldiers, there was nothing for the proudest warriors
in Europe to do but surrender to the foe whom they had despised.
As far as the chevaliers were concerned, the battle was over in three
hours. Jacques Bourbon, admiral of France, lay on the field with the
banner of Notre-Dame clasped tightly in his hands. Guy de la Trémouille,
Philippe de Bar, and others of the noblest blood of France, Flanders,
Bavaria, and Savoy were killed in the charge. But the greater part of
the high-born auxiliaries of Sigismund were prisoners in the camp of
Bayezid. So handsomely were they accoutred that the Osmanlis believed
them all to be princes of the Occident, and saved them for Bayezid to
determine their fate.[533]
When Sigismund learned that the chevaliers had disregarded his advice,
and had already ridden forth to find the army of Bayezid, he was greatly
worried, for he knew the tactics of Bayezid, and feared the worst. He
said to the grand master of Rhodes, ‘We shall lose the day through the
great pride and folly of these French: if they had only believed me, we
had forces in plenty to fight our enemies’.[534]
From a comparison of the chronicles, one does not get a clear idea of
what happened after the failure of the assault of the chevaliers. A
battle in which the bulk of the forces on either side were engaged
undoubtedly followed. But it is impossible to state whether Sigismund
followed up the way opened for him through the Ottoman lines by the
French charge, or whether the Hungarians and their auxiliaries were on
the defensive. Froissart and Morosini infer that Sigismund did not
attempt to fight after the failure of the chevaliers, and it was
believed in western Europe that the disaster of Nicopolis was due to the
failure of Sigismund to support the chevaliers rather than to their own
folly. The Hungarians and their king were bitterly denounced by the
French survivors.[535] On the other hand, Schiltberger, who took part in
the battle, declares that the king of Hungary was advancing in force,
and that Bayezid was preparing to retreat, when the Osmanlis received
sudden and substantial support from the krai of Serbia.[536]
The Serbians were so completely under Ottoman control after the battle
of Kossova, that they made no attempt to throw off the yoke of
Bayezid.[537] In Asia Minor as in the Balkan peninsula, against the
Karamanians and Tartars as against the crusaders, at Nicopolis as at
Angora, the Serbian auxiliaries were faithful supporters of Bayezid.
Nicopolis was certainly won with the aid of the Christians of the Balkan
peninsula. It was not only the Serbian reinforcements which won the day
for the Osmanlis. As soon as Mircea of Wallachia saw how the battle was
going, he quickly withdrew from the field, and got his forces across the
Danube before the panic started.
Whether the action of Mircea was actuated by treasonable motives or not
is open to debate. He may have honestly believed that it was a case of
_sauve qui peut_. If so, his action was not more reprehensible than that
of Sigismund himself. The future Holy Roman Emperor, who was to play so
important a part in the history of Europe during the early decades of
the fifteenth century, forgot his bold words of the previous week: ‘And
if the Sultan, with all the strength he can muster, comes before us, we
shall fight him, and there will be no going away without the battle, in
God’s pleasure.’ Sigismund and the grand master of Rhodes hurried to the
Danube, got away in a small boat,[538] and boarded one of the galleys of
Monicego, the Venetian admiral. Abandoning his army and his allies to
their fate, the king of Hungary sailed for home. He had the shame, if he
felt it at all, when passing through the Dardanelles, of seeing the
chevaliers and other prisoners of Nicopolis paraded before his eyes. One
of these prisoners wrote: ‘The Osmanlis took us out of the tower of
Gallipoli, and led us to the sea, and one after the other they abused
the king of Hungary as he passed, and mocked him, and called to him to
come out of the boat and deliver his people: and this they did to make
fun of him, and skirmished a long time with each other on the sea. But
they did not do him any harm, and so he went away.’[539]
Sigismund went to Modon, and then back to Hungary. This was the king who
had boasted that he would not only turn the Osmanlis out of Europe, but
that he had enough lances to support the sky, should it fall upon his
army.[540] Although his manhood had been put to the test, and had been
found wanting, he was saved to play a great, if unenviable, part in the
closing events of the Middle Ages.[541]
After Sigismund’s escape, his great army, which was to redeem the Holy
Sepulchre, fled before the Osmanlis. Those who were not killed, or
drowned in the Danube, retreated through Wallachia. Froissart describes
graphically the hardships of the French, German, English, Scotch,
Bohemian, and Flemish crusaders in their painful march across the
Carpathian Mountains. The chevaliers could secure a bare sustenance.
Their pages and men-at-arms were stripped of their clothes and beaten by
the peasants. It was not until they got into western Hungary that they
felt themselves safe.[542]
On the day following the battle of Nicopolis, Bayezid rode from his camp
to inspect the battle-field.[543] Orders had been given that the bodies
of the nobles who had fallen be put in a place apart from the common
dead, so that the identity of those who had lost their lives might be
ascertained. An especial search for the body of Sigismund was ordered.
The Hungarian king was not among the captives: it did not occur to
Bayezid that he had fled. When Bayezid saw how heavy had been his
casualties, and learned the story of the massacre of prisoners by the
chevaliers after they had ridden through the Ottoman outposts, he could
not control his anger. A general massacre of the prisoners was ordered.
Only because Bayezid hoped for a great ransom for the grandson of the
French king was Jean de Nevers saved. There was in the suite of the
Comte de Nevers a Picard chevalier who knew a little Turkish. Through
him Jean was able to communicate with Bayezid, and to save twenty-four
chevaliers who would bring heavy ransom. Among these were the Comte
d’Eu, the Comte de la Marche, the Sieur de Coucy, Henri de Bar, and
Boucicaut. But they were all forced to stand beside Bayezid and watch
the massacre of their companions.
Because of his youth, for none under twenty years was killed,
Schiltberger was spared to leave a description of this terrible
massacre. ‘Then I saw the lord Hannsen Greiff, who was a noble of
Bavaria, and four others, bound with the same cord. When he saw the
great revenge that was taking place, he cried with a loud voice, and
consoled the horse- and foot-soldiers who were standing there to die.
“Stand firm”, he said, “when our blood this day is spilt for the
Christian faith, and we by God’s help shall become the children of
Heaven.” He knelt, and was beheaded together with his companions. Blood
was spilled from morning until vespers, and when the king’s counsellors
saw that so much blood was spilled and that still it did not stop, they
rose and fell upon their knees before the king, and entreated him for
the sake of God that he would forget his rage, that he might not draw
down upon himself the vengeance of God, as enough blood was already
spilled. He consented, and ordered that they should stop, and that the
rest of the people should be brought together, and from them he took his
share, and left the rest to his people who had made them prisoners. The
people that were killed on that day were reckoned at ten thousand
men.’[544]
So ended the last crusade.
IX
Immediately after the battle, Bayezid sent part of his army across the
Danube to hunt down the fugitives and to punish Mircea. This force was
defeated by the Wallachians in the plain of Rovine, and withdrew into
Bulgaria.[545]
Other columns mounted the Danube through the Iron Gates, retaking on the
way the fortresses captured by the crusaders, and made a raid into
Styria. Everywhere the akindjis carried fire and death. The country was
laid waste. Peterwardein was burned, and sixteen thousand Styrians were
carried off into slavery in Macedonia and Anatolia.[546]
This invasion of Hungary made a deep impression upon the Slavic and
Teutonic races, who believed that it was the beginning of a Moslem
conquest of central Europe. The flagellants and the dancing processions
of the plague days of 1348 and 1359 were revived. For a moment, even the
Venetian Senate feared that Bayezid had led in person his army into
Hungary, and was engaged in an aggressive movement that might bring the
Osmanlis to the head of the Adriatic.[547]
But Bayezid was not carried away by the ease of his victory. He let well
enough alone. For the moment, he had absorbing interests in the ransom
of his prisoners, the developments in the Greek peninsula, the question
of Constantinople, and the temptation to licentious pleasures that had
come to him with success.
X
Bayezid announced his victory from the battle-field to the Kadi of
Brusa, and later, from Adrianople, to the Moslem princes of Asia.[548]
To the Sultan of Egypt and other rulers he sent gifts of prisoners to
corroborate his letters.[549]
The intercession of Jean de Nevers had saved the more illustrious of the
surviving French chevaliers. They were taken to Brusa. While not treated
royally, they were allowed to hunt, and were given opportunities to see
the grandeur of Bayezid.[550] But they were not kept together long. For
some months, the heir to the Duchy of Burgundy was separated from his
companions, and could talk with them only by the special permission of
Bayezid. Some of them were sent to Mikhalitch, where Philippe d’Artois,
grand marshal of France, died.[551] Enguerran de Coucy, worn out with
anxiety for his family and the disgrace that had come to him at the
close of his brilliant career, soon followed the Comte d’Artois to the
grave.
In the meantime, Jacques Helly was sent by Bayezid to Paris to
communicate to the Duke of Burgundy and the other relatives of the
captives the conditions for their ransom--two hundred thousand pieces of
gold, delivered to Bayezid at Brusa. Froissart describes the feeling
aroused at Paris by the first news of the disaster. The stories of the
survivors were not believed, and the bearers of bad news narrowly
escaped hanging or drowning. An order of the king’s council forbade any
man to mention Nicopolis. The anxiety of the families of the chevaliers
was not set at rest until Jacques Helly reached Paris on Christmas
night, three months after the battle. Only then was it known who had
been saved for ransom. What was joy to some was a crushing blow to
others. Not since the battle of Poitiers had such a calamity come to the
noble families of France. There was great lamentation throughout the
kingdom. Chief among the mourners was the Duchess of Burgundy, who had
lost her three brothers, and whose son was in the hands of Bayezid.[552]
While Jacques Helly was in France, Marshal Boucicaut was given
permission to go to Constantinople to try to raise the ransom. He spent
the Lenten season of 1397 there without success.[553] The Duke of
Burgundy resorted to every expedient to raise the enormous sum demanded
by Bayezid. For the ransom of his son ‘great taxes were laid upon all
the kingdom, and a large amount of money was gathered and transported to
Turkey, which was a great and irreparable loss’.[554] It was not
forgotten for many years. A decade later it was used as one of the
indictments against the Duc d’Orléans, who met his death through the
man he had helped to ransom.[555]
When, a year after the battle of Nicopolis, the money was at last
delivered to Bayezid through the intermediation of Gattilusio of
Mytilene and the Genoese, Venetian, and Cypriote merchants who traded
with the Osmanlis, Bayezid gave the chevaliers their liberty. To the
Comte de Nevers, he said: ‘John, I know well and am informed that you
are in your country a great lord. You are young, and, in the future, I
hope you will be able to recover, with your courage, from the shame of
this misfortune which has come to you in your first knightly enterprise,
and that, in the desire of getting rid of the reproach and recovering
your honour, you will assemble your power to come against me and give me
battle. If I were afraid of that, and wanted to, before your release I
would make you swear upon your faith and religion that you would never
bear arms against me, nor those who are in your company here. But no:
neither upon you nor any other of those here will I impose this oath,
because I desire, when you will have returned to your home and will have
leisure, that you assemble your power and come against me. You will find
me always ready to meet you and your people on the field of battle. And
what I say to you, you can say in like manner to those to whom you will
have the pleasure of speaking about it, because for this purpose was I
born, to carry arms and always to conquer what is ahead of me.’[556]
It is not true, however, as one would suppose and as Froissart records,
that ‘these lofty words were always remembered by Jean de Nevers and
his companions so long as they lived’. The French chevaliers went to
Rhodes, and then home by way of the Adriatic. The Comte de Nevers took
to himself a title which he had not earned, unless one confuses folly
with valour. To the end of his days, he was known as _Jean sans Peur_.
He never burned with a desire to wipe out the disgrace of Nicopolis, but
spent his whole life as a factional leader in the civil wars of France.
After a career which continued as ingloriously as it had begun, he was
stabbed to death on the Bridge of Montereau in 1420--tardy vengeance for
his own openly acknowledged instigation of the murder of the Duc
d’Orléans.
XI
There is recorded the capture of Thebes by the Turks in 1363,[557] and
the surrender of Patras in Thessaly to the Osmanlis in 1381.[558] The
first Ottoman army, however, to enter Greece went to the Morea in 1388,
upon the invitation of Theodore Palaeologos, to support his waning power
as despot against the indigenous Greeks and the Frankish lords. The
Osmanlis under Evrenos carried devastation everywhere they went, and did
little to help Theodore.[559] They were soon recalled by Murad to
co-operate in the Kossova campaign. When Theodore was hard pressed, in
1391, by Amadeo of Savoy and the Venetians, he turned again to the
Osmanlis. Once more Evrenos came to the Morea, and helped to destroy the
coast towns.[560]
After the famous council of Ottoman vassals at Serres, in 1395,
Theodore, who was one of the princes summoned by Bayezid to Serres, was
compelled to sign the cession of Argos and Monembasia to the Osmanlis.
He was then thrown into prison, and Bayezid contemplated having him
assassinated. But before the cities could be delivered to the Ottoman
emissaries, Theodore escaped, and declared the cession null and
void.[561] The first impulse of Bayezid was to send an army upon the
heels of Theodore. This punitive expedition was postponed on account of
the activity of Sigismund, and the necessity of defending the northern
frontiers against the Hungarians.[562]
In the spring of 1397, while Bayezid was superintending the construction
of a mosque at Karaferia in Macedonia, he received a visit from the
Greek bishop of Salona, who laid before him a formal accusation of
adultery, sorcery, and oppression against Helena Cantacuzenos, who had
been ruling the Duchy of Salona with her paramour after the death of her
husband, Louis Fadrique. The bishop invited Bayezid to enter Greece,
depicting to him the wonderful hunting he would have in a country full
of game.[563]
The promise of good sport with the falcon was not needed. It had long
been Bayezid’s intention to extend his sovereignty into the Greek
peninsula. He had against Theodore not only the old count from Serres,
but also the complicity of the Morean despot in the Nicopolis crusade.
At the head of his army, he set out upon the first Ottoman invasion of
Greece. In Thessaly, Larissa, Pharsala, and other strongholds
surrendered without striking a blow. For thirty years the Greeks of
Thessaly had felt that the Ottoman conquest was inevitable. When
Bayezid crossed the pass of Thermopylae without opposition, Helena
hurried to meet him. She offered her principality, her daughter, and
herself to the conqueror. Bayezid did not want the duchess. She was set
at liberty immediately. But the beautiful grand-daughter of John
Cantacuzenos was sent to his harem. The duchy of Salona, in which was
the shrine of Apollo, with all of Phocis, Doris, and Locris, was added
to Thessaly, and made an Ottoman province.[564]
Bayezid by this time had tired of the campaign. He felt an irresistible
call to return to the pleasures of the court. His military interests
were beginning more and more to be centred upon an extension of his
power in Asia Minor--the policy that was soon to prove his undoing. But
there remained Theodore and the Morea to be dealt with. He left Yakub
and Evrenos, with an army of fifty thousand, in charge of the invasion
of the Peloponnesus.
Yakub struck south to Coron and Modon. The environs of Modon were
pillaged and burned. He defeated Theodore at Megalopolis, and forced him
to become a tributary of the Osmanlis. In the meantime, Evrenos had held
in check the papal mercenaries at Corinth, and had then taken Argos by
assault, with a terrible loss of life, and a booty of fourteen thousand
male captives. Because the Venetians could so easily reinforce and
reprovision it from the sea, the siege of Nauplia was abandoned. The two
commanders, when October came, gave their soldiers licence to pillage
wherever they could as a reward for their services, and afterwards
withdrew to Macedonia.[565]
The population of the historic city of Argos was deported into Anatolia,
and Moslem colonies settled in the north-eastern corner of the
Peloponnesus. This was part of the general plan of Bayezid after
Nicopolis. His successes in Asia Minor had made possible, for the first
time, a movement of an unmixed Turkish element from Anatolia into the
Balkan peninsula. While these colonists were arriving in Argos, there
was a similar immigration to Adrianople, Eski Zagora, Philippopolis, and
Sofia.[566]
Bayezid is credited by the Ottoman chroniclers with the capture of the
two great cities of Hellenism, Athens and Salonika. Nowhere else than in
the Ottoman historians can one find a record of the acquisition of
Athens in 1397 by the Osmanlis. If it were true, one would certainly
find this event in the Venetian archives, for Venice was particularly
interested in Athens at this time.[567] Had the Osmanlis entered Athens,
would they have restored it to the Acciajoli family? The fate of Argos
in the same campaign makes this unlikely. Athens remained in Christian
hands until after the fall of Constantinople.[568]
As for Salonika, one finds authority for its capture by the Osmanlis
after the attempt of Manuel to retake Serres,[569] after a four years’
siege, in 1387,[570] and in 1391 by Bayezid himself.[571] But since
there is neither record nor explanation of how the city returned to the
Byzantines, even the temporary occupation of so rich and important a
maritime city, and so strongly defended,[572] during the reigns of Murad
and of Bayezid, is hardly possible. For in 1403 Salonika was sold by the
Byzantines to the Venetians,[573] and was not captured by the Osmanlis
until 1430.
Even if we cannot give to Bayezid the honour of the acquisition of
Athens and Salonika, or of the conquest of the Morea, his campaign of
1397 was the beginning of the subjugation of Greece. Important districts
had been added to the empire, and a permanent foothold gained in the
Morea. The maritime character of the peninsula, however, made
impracticable its complete conquest, until the Osmanlis were able to
hold their own against the Italians and Greeks upon the sea.
XII
The blockade of Constantinople, in spite of all the concessions that
Manuel had made to Bayezid,[574] had become an active and pressing siege
before the Nicopolis expedition. In 1394, Bayezid had given orders from
Adrianople to pursue the siege vigorously.[575] But it was not until the
spring of 1396 that Bayezid contemplated seriously the taking of the
city by assault. He was diverted by the coming of the crusaders to
Nicopolis. After Sigismund and his allies had been defeated, Bayezid
returned to Constantinople and called upon Manuel to surrender the city.
The Constantinopolitans, stunned by the disaster which had attended the
Christian arms on the Danube, urged Manuel to yield, in order that they
might be free from the calamities that would follow a successful
assault. But Manuel had been cheered by the arrival of six hundred
chevaliers and a small gift of money from France. He resisted his
people, and gave no answer to Bayezid.[576] He married his eldest son
John to the daughter of the Russian prince Vassili, whose dowry was in
gold pieces.[577] An inventory was made of the treasures of St.
Sophia.[578] Through the Patriarch, Manuel tried to get the Russian and
Polish Christians interested in the fate of the seat of orthodoxy.[579]
From Europe came the usual promises of aid. It is a merciful
dispensation of Providence that men ground their hopes upon desires
rather than upon realities. Manuel was merely human when he continued to
receive strength and inspiration from what experience should have taught
him were will-o’-the-wisps. Henry of Lancaster was projecting a new
crusade;[580] but his energies were very soon directed towards a crown
rather than a cross. The Duc d’Orléans, in response to a letter from
Manuel to King Charles VI, answered for his insane brother by promising
to come in person to the relief of Constantinople. Almost immediately
afterwards he accepted rich presents from Bayezid.[581]
Venice, in 1397, urged Manuel and the Genoese of Pera, ‘for the honour
of Christianity’ and because the alternative ‘would be to the peril and
shame of Christianity’, not to treat with Bayezid. This advice was
weakened by a saving clause at the end of the letter to the effect that,
if the Constantinopolitans and Perotes did treat with Bayezid, they
should include Venice, for ‘it would be too risky for the Venetians to
be at war alone with the Turks’.[582] Although Venice sent ten galleys
to Constantinople, and Genoa five galleys,[583] the republics followed
consistently their policy of flattering Bayezid, and trying to make him
believe that their dispositions towards him were altogether
friendly.[584]
At the time that he summoned Manuel to deliver Constantinople, Bayezid
fortified the gulf of Nicomedia, and built at Scutari the castle called
Guzel Hissar.[585] About the same time, the castle of Anatoli Hissar was
built at the mouth of the Sweet Waters of Asia, the narrowest point on
the Bosphorus. When Clavijo passed through the Bosphorus, in 1403, he
spoke of this castle as strongly built and strongly fortified, in
prophetic contrast to the ruined Byzantine fortress directly opposite on
the European shore.[586]
Perhaps it was because of the advice of Ali Pasha, who told him that the
taking of Constantinople would bring upon him a really effective
European intervention, or because he preferred to expend his energies in
the Greek peninsula and in Asia Minor, that Bayezid did not carry out
his threat to Manuel. These are the common explanations of the failure
to follow up the victory of Nicopolis with the extinction of the
Byzantine Empire.[587] As far as the Greeks were concerned, the
inheritance of the Caesars was his. He had successfully defended against
Europe what he had won. Constantinople could have been taken by assault.
In fact, from his spies within the city, Bayezid knew that the
inhabitants were favourable to surrender, and would probably force the
hand of Manuel, if the Osmanlis made a show of beginning the assault.
Bayezid must have been deterred from this enterprise, however, by the
realization of his inability to hold the city without having the mastery
of the sea.
One of Bayezid’s chief claims to greatness as a statesman is the way in
which he handled Venice and Genoa. At any time during his reign, the
Italian republics could have cut him off from Asia if he were in Europe,
or from Europe if he were in Asia. Bayezid was master of most of the
Balkan peninsula and of half of Anatolia; but he did not control the
path from one portion of his empire to the other. Since he had come to
the throne, Genoa had fallen under the influence of France. There was a
strong anti-Ottoman sentiment in the Venetian Senate, which at any
instant might crystallize into open hostility.[588] Europe was for the
moment stirred over the fate of the Nicopolis crusaders. Bayezid knew
that this was not the time to take Constantinople.
Then, too, after the great victories of Kossova and Nicopolis, and his
successful campaign against Karamania, Bayezid allowed himself to
succumb to the insidious temptations that assail the warrior when he
passes from the tent to the palace. It was not astonishing that the
pleasures of the table and of the harem proved irresistible to him.
Bayezid, who had the best qualities of his age, allowed himself to
become debauched by indulgence in shameful and unspeakable vices. His
brilliant mental and physical qualities began to suffer the inevitable
eclipse. His example was contagious. For, as the Osmanlis say, ‘the fish
begins to corrupt at the head’.
XIII
In April 1398, and again in March 1399, Boniface IX ordered to be
preached throughout Christendom a crusade for the defence of
Constantinople.[589] His appeals fell on deaf ears. Wenceslaus was
approaching the end of his power in the empire, Richard of England was
fighting for his throne, Florence was in a struggle with the Visconti,
the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Orleans were disputing the regency
in France. Only Venice and Genoa were vitally interested in the fate of
Constantinople.
Because Genoa had put itself under the guardianship of the Duke of
Orleans, brother of Charles VI of France, and son-in-law of Duke
Giovanni Visconti of Milan, the interests of her Pera colony demanded
some attention from the powerful Valois and Visconti families. This made
possible the sole response to the appeals of Manuel and the Pope, the
expedition of Marshal Boucicaut.
In the summer of 1399, a force of ten thousand Osmanlis, after coming
into more or less open conflict with the Genoese of Galata, attempted to
enter Constantinople. The defenders were few; for the inhabitants, as at
the time of the final siege in 1453, were more likely to be found in the
bazaars than on the city walls. They had little desire to prolong a
condition which was paralysing their business activities. Clavijo, who
visited Constantinople four years later, was informed that the attack
failed only because of the lack of skill and energy shown by the
Osmanlis.[590] Until they had cannon to help them, the Osmanlis never
displayed fighting ability in an assault upon fortifications. At this
critical moment, aid arrived from Europe.
Boucicaut was the only one of the prisoners of Nicopolis that accepted
the challenge of Bayezid. He did not forget the biting words of the
audience at Brusa at the time of their release. On June 26, 1399, with
four ships and two armed galleys, he set sail from Aiguesmortes. His
force of twelve hundred chevaliers and foot-soldiers had much more
cohesion and experience than the volunteers who gathered round Jean de
Nevers at Dijon three years before. He was joined at Tenedos by several
Genoese and Venetian galleys. After a victory in the Dardanelles over
seventeen Ottoman galleys, the first recorded naval combat of the
Osmanlis, Boucicaut reached Constantinople ‘just in time to save the
city’. He was received with great joy by Manuel, and given the rank of
Grand Constable.[591]
For several weeks, Boucicaut and his followers spread terror among the
Osmanlis in the Gulf of Nicomedia and the Bosphorus. The Ottoman
sailors, no match for the Provençals and Italians, took to cover. An
assault on Nicomedia failed, but the fearless marshal made several raids
into the interior,[592] and against the Ottoman settlements on the
shores of the Marmora and gulfs of Nicomedia and Mudania. His one
notable success was against Riva, near the Black Sea entrance of the
Bosphorus, on the Asiatic shore.[593] After the castle had been stormed,
and the garrison put to the sword, Boucicaut attained the objective of
his raid. In the mouth of the river Riva, from which the town takes its
name, were hidden the Ottoman galleys and smaller vessels, which had
taken refuge there when Boucicaut first appeared in the Golden Horn. All
the Ottoman shipping was destroyed by fire.
In order to remove the danger to which Constantinople was subjected by
the presence of John Palaeologos, son of Andronicus, at Silivria,
constantly intriguing with the Osmanlis, Boucicaut urged Manuel to
become reconciled with his nephew. He went, himself--it was less than a
day’s sail--to fetch John to Constantinople.[594]
This intervention of Boucicaut in the quarrels of the Palaeologi was
more helpful than his military aid. The expeditions in the neighbourhood
accomplished little against Bayezid. The chronicler of Boucicaut would
have been astonished had he known that Bayezid considered the exploits
of Boucicaut’s chevaliers and sailors of too little importance to
notice. Bayezid cared only that the Italian republics did not come out
openly against him, and lend to the crusaders the powerful and decisive
aid which they could have given. The enterprise of Boucicaut
demonstrated, however, the impotence of the Osmanlis on sea, and how
easily a united effort of Christendom, or of Venice and Genoa alone,
could have limited the activities of Bayezid to either Europe or Asia.
When John had been installed as co-emperor, Boucicaut pointed out to
Manuel that his force was exhausted, and that he would have to return to
France to find recruits. According to some authorities, this action was
due to the inability or unwillingness of Manuel to pay the adventurers
of Boucicaut for their services in his behalf.[595] Men of their kidney
were not fighting for fun or for a cause, and there was no booty to be
had from Ottoman sailors and fishermen. Before he left Constantinople,
Boucicaut secured the consent of Venice, Genoa, and the chevaliers of
Rhodes to his suggestion that Manuel do homage to Charles VI for his
empire. This honour the advisers of the French monarch refused to
accept. They did not want the king of France bound by the obligation of
protecting a vassal whose position was so precarious.
Boucicaut did not return. His restless energy found outlet later in
Cyprus, where, as French governor of Genoa, he forced the Cypriotes to
raise the siege of Famagusta,[596] and in pillaging the Syrian ports,
where his adventurers did far more damage to the Italian merchants than
to the Saracens.[597] Even had he returned to Constantinople, and with
the highest motives personally, his followers would certainly have done
the Constantinopolitans more harm than good, as had been the case with
the Catalans, and, when money was not forthcoming, have ended by being
in open conflict with those of whom they were posing as the defenders.
XIV
It was a bitter humiliation for Manuel to share the imperial throne with
the nephew whom he hated and distrusted. With him, the case of John was
one of ‘like father, like son’, and certainly John had never given the
emperor any cause to think that he was more patriotic, more loyal than
Andronicus. But there was a strong party in the city in favour of John,
and his association in governing Constantinople would remove the pretext
of righting a wrong, which Bayezid had so skilfully used to interfere in
the politics of what was now no more than a city empire.
When France refused to receive him as a vassal, Manuel decided upon a
voyage in person to solicit the intervention of Europe. In spite of his
misgivings, he felt that this was the only way of salvation left. His
own sons were too young to raise to the purple, and Theodore had his
hands full in the Morea. There was nothing to do but to leave the
government in John’s care.
On December 10, 1399, Manuel embarked on a Venetian galley to make his
supreme appeal to Europe. He stopped at Modon to leave the empress and
his sons with Theodore. The despot of the Morea was opposed to the
project. He told the emperor how the chevaliers of Rhodes, in
conjunction with the Pope, were trying to get possession of the last
theme of the empire, and that this scheme would have been successful had
it not been for the Greek hatred and fear of the Catholic Church. He
declared that Manuel, like their father, was embarking upon a hopeless
voyage. Not only that, but he would run a risk of losing his empire
entirely by leaving it in charge of John, who was more friendly to
Bayezid and the Osmanlis than to his own family and race.[598]
Manuel would listen to no remonstrances, to no arguments. He said that
his position was like that of Esther before she went in to the king: ‘If
I perish, I perish.’ With that optimism which was one of his most
redeeming traits, Manuel bade farewell to his family, and set out for
Venice.
In the only city of Europe that could rival his own capital in
splendour, he received a reception worthy of the cause for which he had
come. The Senate, as usual, promised much. But they had by this time
become thoroughly won over to the policy of _quod vi armorum potest
fieri, fiat arte et sagacitate_, to quote the words of a contemporary
record in their archives.[599] At Padua, Vicenza, and Milan, Manuel
received an imperial ovation. Giovanni Visconti, shocked at the wretched
appearance of the emperor’s suite, gave him money to be used for apparel
fitting to the successor of Constantine and his companions.[600]
There was no attempt to arrange a conference with Boniface IX. Manuel,
at this stage of his career, could not play the hypocrite so easily as
his father had done. In fact, his orthodoxy was beyond suspicion. He did
not hesitate in Paris to celebrate high mass according to the eastern
rite, and never allowed the reunion of the churches to be the basis of
his solicitations. In 1399, Boniface IX wrote a long burning letter to
the Bishop of Chalcedon, his nuncio in Hungary, ordering him to preach
and cause to be preached a crusade against the Osmanlis for the relief
of Constantinople.[601] In 1400, he had ordered a crusade, with increase
of indulgences.[602] But, when the Byzantine Emperor came to Italy,
Boniface seemed to be more interested in the Kingdom of Naples than in
the Kingdom of God.
From contemporary records, the reception of Manuel Palaeologos in France
and in England was all that the proudest and most important sovereign of
Christendom could wish for. This shadow of an emperor, who ten years
before had been a retainer at the court of Bayezid too insignificant to
be bidden to the emir’s table, and who was not even undisputed ruler of
a single city, was treated by Charles VI and Henry IV as if he actually
held the dominions entrusted by Constantine to his successors. This was
especially true in England, where barons and peasants, in spite of the
crusades, were still uncouth and ignorant. To them the East stood for a
superior civilization, to which they must bow. There was a glamour in
the name of Constantinople and in Manuel’s imperial title. Perhaps, even
if they had realized the straits to which Manuel was reduced, it would
have been the same; for it was not to the intrinsic worth or power of
the man, but to the ten centuries of glory which he represented, that
they did homage. The cry of AVE IMPERATOR had outlived the empire.
Manuel did not appreciate this. Because his optimism could not grasp
the difference between what costs and what does not cost, he allowed
himself to be cradled with false hopes for two years.
Henry IV had personally great sympathy with the mission of Manuel; for
in Africa he had borne arms against the Moslems with the cross upon his
breast, and, until he succeeded Richard II, it had always been his dream
to lead a crusade. He understood the peril of Constantinople, and in a
letter from Westminster, in January, 1401, he called the attention of
the Archbishop of Canterbury to the necessity of helping Manuel, in
order that Constantinople might not be lost, and authorized a collection
in all the churches of his realm.[603] But Henry was not secure upon his
throne. In France, the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans were still
struggling for the power that the insane king was unable to wield.
Manuel waited two years in western Europe. While he was making his heart
sick with deferred hope, the great events that were to change the
personal fortune of Bayezid, if not that of his family and his race,
were shaping themselves in the East. It was a Moslem prince who was to
afford a respite to Constantinople.
After Manuel left for the west, only the small force of chevaliers under
Châteaumorand, who had remained behind from the crusaders of Boucicaut,
saved Constantinople. The inhabitants of the city were so hungry that
they slipped over the walls by cords, and surrendered themselves to the
Osmanlis. John did nothing. There was no money in the imperial treasury.
The crusaders got their own provisions by raids on the Asiatic shore of
the Bosphorus, and by intercepting galleys. After the shock of the fall
of Sivas, Bayezid realized that he must expend the best of his force and
energy in solidifying his conquests in Europe and Asia, and in raising a
larger army to combat Timur, if he threatened again to invade Anatolia.
Although the siege was not pushed with vigour, the city was on the point
of yielding. The miserable John made a treaty to give up the city,
should Bayezid beat Timur.[604] Even the patriarch Matthew was supposed
to have an understanding with Bayezid to retain his position if the city
were taken. In a proclamation, which vividly depicted the misery of the
city, afflicted by six years of siege and famine, Matthew urged the
inhabitants to repent of their crimes, and defended himself from the
charge of having treated with Bayezid.[605]
Not only against Constantinople was Bayezid preparing the final blow. In
the Morea, the Greeks feared for the safety of Modon, where Manuel had
left his family.[606] Since 1399, the Venetian Senate had been alarmed
by the gradual Ottoman conquest of Albania, and finally for the safety
of Corfu, because the Osmanlis had appeared in force in the
Adriatic.[607]
In the early spring of 1402, Ottoman activities ceased in the Balkan
peninsula, and every soldier that could be mustered--Christian as well
as Moslem--was hurried into Asia Minor; for a greater than Djenghiz Khan
was marching westward.
XV
When the Tartars first saw iron, and their strongest warriors failed to
bend it, they thought there must be a substance under the surface. So
they called it _timur_, which means something stuffed or filled.[608] It
soon became a custom to name their great leaders Timur. But even among
primitive peoples the qualities of leadership have not necessarily
included purely physical strength. Many Samsons among the Tartars
received the distinction of being called Iron. None of them made an
indelible mark upon the history of the world, save the great Timur, who
had his left arm and left leg partially paralysed.[609] At the height of
his career, when his hordes marched against Bagdad, he was too weak to
sit upon a horse, and was carried in a litter.[610]
Timur claimed descent from the grand vizier of Djagataï, son and
successor of Djenghiz Khan. He came to the throne of Khorassan, with
residence at Samarkand, in 1369. In thirty years, while Murad and
Bayezid were winning an empire in the Balkan peninsula, Timur became
master of the greater part of the Moslem world. Persia, Armenia, the
upper valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the steppes between the
Caspian and Black Seas, Russia from the Volga to the Don and Dnieper,
Mesopotamia, the coasts of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and
western and northern India was his path of conquest.
After he had captured Sivas, Bayezid had not been able to curb the
altogether natural impulse that led him into the valley of the
Euphrates. In his way stood Kara-Yussuf, a Turcoman prince of Kharput,
who was to be, after Timur’s death, the founder of the famous dynasty of
the Black Sheep.[611] In 1399, Bayezid had put his son Soleiman,
assisted by several of his ablest generals, in charge of an advance
movement to the east. Sivas was the base of operations.
Kara-Yussuf, who had a claim upon Timur’s protection because he had
guided him on his first expedition into Armenia, appealed to the Tartar
court. Before Timur could remonstrate, Kara-Yussuf was captured by the
Osmanlis. When Timur learned this, his anger was for the first time
directed specifically against Bayezid. There were old complaints against
Bayezid. The refugee emirs had not lived at his court for years without
impressing upon Timur their woes and the injustice that had been done to
them. But Timur was busy with other plans and other conquests. Bayezid’s
former activities had not directly touched him.
In his memoirs, Timur records that he tried first to bring Bayezid to
reason. ‘I wrote to him a letter of which this is the substance: Praise
to God, master of heaven and earth, who has submitted to my authority
several of the seven climates and who has allowed the potentates and
masters of the world to bend their neck under my yoke. God have mercy
upon his humble servant, who knows the limits which are prescribed for
him and who does not cross them by a single step. All the world knows
your origin, and it is not fitting for a man of your extraction to
advance the foot of pride; for you will be able to throw yourself into
the abyss of affliction and of misfortune: resist the suggestions of
miserable counsellors.... Refrain from opening to confusion and to evils
the door of your empire. Send me Kara-Yussuf: if not, by the coming
together of our two armies all that is hidden under the veil of destiny
will be uncovered to you.’[612]
Instead of paying attention to this letter, Bayezid deliberately
committed another overt act by summoning Taharten, emir of Erzindjian,
whom he knew to be a vassal of Timur, to appear at the Ottoman court,
bringing his treasures with him! When Timur again remonstrated with
Bayezid and reminded him of his duty ‘gently and like a friend’, Bayezid
responded by summoning Timur to appear before him, and threatening to
deprive him of his harem if he refused to come. In order to express his
contempt for the Tartar conqueror, Bayezid placed his own name first in
letters of gold, and Timur’s name underneath in small black
letters.[613]
Why Bayezid took this tack in dealing with Timur is inexplicable. It is
impossible to believe that he underrated the power of Timur. One can
only suppose that his informants and advisers, to whom Timur alluded in
the first warning to Bayezid, urged upon the Ottoman emir the
improbability of a Tartar invasion of Asia Minor; for, even after the
terrible lesson of 1400, when Bayezid had two years of respite, he took
no steps to placate Timur or to prepare adequately against an invasion.
He went on blindly to his doom, and displayed none of the consummate
diplomatic and military skill that had made the first eight years of his
reign among the most brilliant of all Ottoman history.
When Timur saw that Bayezid would not even treat with him, he took the
field immediately. Soleiman sent an appeal to Bayezid, who was in
Thessaly.[614] There was no response. With feverish haste, Soleiman
attempted to put into condition the defences of Sivas, whose strong
walls had been admirably constructed by the Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin
Kaïkobad
[Illustration: TIMUR’S INVASION OF ASIA MINOR]
one hundred and sixty years before.[615] He then went boldly forth to
meet the Tartars, but, when he realized that his twenty thousand
horsemen could not hold their own against Timur, he withdrew to the
north-west, abandoning the city to its fate.[616]
It took Timur eighteen days of incessant attack to weaken the defences
of Sivas. The walls were sapped, and piles driven under them, which were
smeared with pitch and set on fire. Only after several of the towers had
fallen did the garrison agree to surrender upon Timur’s promise that
their lives should be spared and the whole city preserved. As far as the
Moslems were concerned, this promise was partially fulfilled. They were
allowed to pay for their freedom. The city, however, was pillaged and
burned, and its Christian inhabitants were sold into slavery. Three or
four thousand Armenian horsemen, who had been bravest and most stubborn
in the defence, were buried alive in the moats.[617]
The destruction of Sivas was in August, 1400.[618] The conduct of Timur
after this victory lends colour to the supposition that it was not at
all in his mind to subdue Asia Minor and overthrow the Ottoman Empire.
He had come not to conquer, but merely to give Bayezid a salutary
lesson. Instead of continuing his westward march, Timur withdrew to the
Euphrates, and spent the next eighteen months in the famous campaigns
that ended in the destruction of Damascus and Bagdad.
XVI
In the winter of 1401-2, fresh from his triumphs in Syria and
Mesopotamia, Timur paused for several months on the confines of Asia
Minor. He had not yet made up his mind to attack Bayezid.
Through a Dominican friar, who had been trying to convert him, he wrote
to Charles VI of France, whom he believed to be the most powerful king
of the Occident, making to him a proposal for sharing the world, such as
no European sovereign had put before him again until Alexander met
Napoleon on the raft at Tilsit.[619] There was also an exchange of gifts
and embassies with Genoa. The Genoese ambassador pointed out to Timur
the necessity of destroying Bayezid. When the Tartar embassy went to
Pera, the standard of Timur was flown in its honour from the Galata
tower.[620] Even the distant king of Castile had two ambassadors in the
camp of Timur, who were privileged to witness the battle of Angora from
the Tartar side.[621]
The fall of Sivas was the first set-back of Bayezid’s career. It came to
him as a heavy blow, if we are to believe the Ottoman chroniclers. But
it did not result in spurring him on to immediate military and
diplomatic effort, as such a calamity would certainly have done in the
early days of his reign. He had become a voluptuary, debauched mentally
and physically. His pride and self-confidence had increased in inverse
ratio to his ability to make good his arrogant assumptions.
Negotiations were reopened between the two great sovereigns of Islam.
The letters became more menacing on the part of Timur and more insulting
on the part of Bayezid.[622] Timur’s earlier admiration for Bayezid as
champion of the Prophet against the infidels, and his earlier reluctance
to make war against a nation of his own faith, had disappeared in the
course of his last conquests. The fire at Damascus was one indication of
Timur’s religious indifference: his willingness to treat with Christian
Europe was another. At last determined to humble Bayezid, Timur brought
his huge army into camp near Sivas. He did not, however, definitely
decide upon the invasion of Ottoman territory until he heard that
Bayezid was starting for Tokat.
To strike at Bayezid directly was impracticable, owing to the hardships
that his large army would encounter in traversing the thickly wooded and
mountainous country between him and the region in which his spies
reported the Ottoman army to be. He followed the valley of the Halys to
Caesarea. By keeping to the water-courses his army was enabled to live
off the land. It was just harvest time, and the soldiers gathered in all
the grain in the valley of the Halys and its tributaries. It took six
days to get to Caesarea, and four days more to reach Kirsheïr. In the
meantime, the advance guard of the Osmanlis had fallen back from Tokat
and Amassia to Angora. By a reconnaissance from Kirsheïr, Timur learned
that the bulk of the Ottoman forces were at Angora. Three days more
brought him to the Ottoman outposts.[623]
There was no further parley. Timur saw in Bayezid an enemy that must be
crushed. He had every confidence in his star. Bayezid had hardly
recovered from the awakening which came when he realized that Timur was
actually marching against him. His resourcefulness, his coolness, his
marvellous judgement had left him. His soldiers were exhausted by forced
marches in the hot midsummer sun, for it was the last week of July.[624]
He could have withdrawn for several days to the mountains to recuperate,
and let Timur do the seeking. Then Timur would have expended his
strength in an attack upon Angora under the broiling sun. Timur could
not have left Angora uncaptured behind him, or have moved westward in
pursuit of the Osmanlis without waiting to replenish his food supply.
But Bayezid, eager and lacking in self-control, as men sometimes are
from the presentiment of disaster rather than the confidence of success,
decided upon an immediate battle. This was just what Timur wanted.
Bayezid’s second mistake was in putting his Tartar allies in the first
line. He did this in accordance with the established Ottoman tactics,
that the enemy be allowed to expend his strength upon the untrained
rabble, and to reach the second line exhausted. But he had not taken
into consideration the fact that these Tartars were kin to his enemy,
and could easiest desert when placed in front.[625] A third mistake was
in taking the offensive rather than waiting for Timur to attack;[626]
for Bayezid had the advantage in being able to choose his position. From
Nicopolis to Plevna, Tchataldja and Gallipoli, the Osmanlis have always
shown their fighting qualities best in a defensive action.
There was nothing the matter with Bayezid’s army. Like the empire he had
been building, it was composed of all the Moslem and Christian elements
of Asia Minor and the Balkan peninsula. With the exception of the
Tartars, they were loyal to Bayezid, and had become accustomed to
fighting together with a discipline and bravery fully equal to, if not
superior to, that of Timur’s veteran warriors from central Asia. The
right wing was under Stephen Lazarevitch, brother-in-law and faithful
friend of Bayezid. In addition to Serbian horsemen, Stephen’s command
contained the other European contingents, Moslem as well as
Christian.[627] In the left wing were the troops of Anatolia, led by
Soleiman Tchelebi, Bayezid’s eldest son. The emir himself was in the
centre, surrounded by his janissaries and his three sons, Mustafa, Isa,
and Musa. To Mohammed, whose reliability and judgement Bayezid esteemed
second only to Soleiman’s among his sons, was entrusted the rear
guard.[628]
Elephants were used on both sides. Timur’s first line threw balls of
Greek fire into the midst of the archers who were covering the Ottoman
advance. The desertion of the Tartar auxiliaries, who formed a quarter
or more of Bayezid’s total strength, decided the battle before the
fighting really started.[629] When Bayezid saw that he could not prevent
the Tartars from going over to Timur, he ordered the left wing to
advance to the attack.
Fifteen thousand men fell in a vain effort to pierce the Tartar lines.
The slaughter was so great that Soleiman was unable to rally his
forces.[630] When they broke and fled, the offensive movement of the
Osmanlis was at an end. Bayezid, now on the defensive, was driven back
step by step. His retreat was cut off. With his bodyguard and the
refugees from other battalions, he made a gallant fight upon a small
hill, holding off the enemy for hours.[631] Long after nightfall, when
the main forces of Timur’s army, who had been pursuing the Osmanlis,
returned to the scene of victory, they learned that the Ottoman
sovereign was still fighting on the hill. There was no more hope for
Bayezid. The last of the defenders were overwhelmed. ‘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.’[632] At
last, as he tried to withdraw over the hill, he was overpowered,[633]
his hands were bound behind his back, and he was sent to Timur’s tent.
With Bayezid, his son Musa and several of his highest officials, one of
whom was Timurtash, were taken prisoners. Mustafa disappeared. Soleiman,
Mohammed, and Isa succeeded in escaping.[634]
The battle of Angora is memorable in Ottoman annals as the only crushing
defeat experienced by the Osmanlis in the first three centuries of their
history, and as the one instance where a sovereign of the house of Osman
has been captured. But it cannot be placed among the memorable conflicts
that have changed the course of history; for it did not affect the
fortunes of the nation that won or of the nation that lost. It was not
like Kossova and Nicopolis.
XVII
Bayezid was brought before his conqueror at midnight, when Timur was
seeking relaxation from the strain of the combat in his favourite game
of chess with his son, Shah-Rokh. Bayezid had lost nothing of his
haughty spirit, and did not try to win the good graces of Timur. He was
never more the sovereign than in this moment of humiliation. So
impressed was Timur with the manner and bearing of his prisoner, that he
accorded him every honour due to his rank.
But this spirit of generosity quickly passed. Whether it was because
Bayezid tried to escape or that Timur feared an attempt at rescue as he
marched farther into Ottoman territory, Timur’s attitude soon changed.
To break Bayezid’s spirit he began to mock him and treat him with
contempt. He ordered him to be put in chains at night, and to be carried
on the march in a litter with bars, which was nothing less than a
cage.[635] At Brusa, Bayezid’s harem was taken from him. It has been
recorded that Timur went so far as to use his unfortunate rival as a
footstool for mounting his horse and at the table, and that Bayezid was
compelled to witness the degradation of his wife, the Serbian princess
Despina, who in a state of nudity served the Tartar conqueror with wine
at his feasts.[636]
This disgraceful treatment, coupled with the fact that his sons made no
attempt to bring another army to fight for their father’s freedom or
even to ransom him, at last broke the spirit of Bayezid. For nine months
he had been held up to ridicule in the Tartar army. He had seen his
harem violated. He had seen Timur pass with ease from one portion of the
Ottoman possessions in Asia to another. Smyrna, which he had never been
able to attack, fell before the Tartars. The Turkish emirs whom he had
dispossessed were settled again in their states. When Bayezid learned
that he was to be taken to Konia, and then to Samarkand, his mind gave
way. He died of apoplexy at Ak Sheïr.[637] Timur allowed Musa to take
his father’s body to Brusa for burial.[638] He had by this time lost
interest in the Osmanlis and Asia Minor, and was dreaming of new fields
of conquest.
Bayezid died a victim not ‘to his destiny’, as the Ottoman historians
put it, but to his vices, and to his abandonment of the policy of his
predecessors, that assimilation should keep pace with territorial
aggrandizement. There never need have been an Angora. Timur had no
inclination to invade the Ottoman dominions. Bayezid goaded him into it.
Even if the test of an Angora had been necessary, Bayezid would have
sustained it and weathered the Tartar storm, had he been the same man he
was at Nicopolis. In facing a Tartar invasion, the advantage was all on
Bayezid’s side. He failed because his mental and physical faculties,
which rivalled, if they did not surpass, those of any man of his age,
had become impaired by a life of debauchery.
XVIII
After the victory at Angora, the Tartar hordes swept across Asia Minor.
Timur sent his grandson, Mohammed-Sultan, in pursuit of Soleiman, who
succeeded in escaping from Brusa just as the Tartar horsemen arrived at
the gates of the city. The Tartars stabled their horses in the mosques,
while the city was ransacked for its treasures and its young girls. Fire
followed pillage.[639] The sons of Alaeddin of Karamania were set free,
and Bayezid’s wives and daughters, with one exception, were sent to
Timur, who had established his residence at Kutayia.
In the search for Soleiman, of whose movements he was in ignorance,
Mohammed-Sultan sent soldiers north to Gemlik and Nicaea, and west to
Mikhalitch and Karasi. These cities were pillaged, and their inhabitants
reduced to slavery. When Mohammed-Sultan learned that Soleiman had
escaped to Europe, he sent an embassy to him demanding unconditional
surrender. There was no reply. The question of invading Europe was
referred to Timur. In the meantime, the advance guard of the Tartars
devastated the country which was the cradle of the Ottoman race, while
their commander celebrated at Yeni Sheïr his marriage to the eldest
daughter of Bayezid. Thus were united the families of Timur and his
vanquished foe.[640]
Mohammed-Sultan went into winter quarters at Magnesia.[641] Timur left
Kutayia in charge of Shah-Rokh, and moved on to Ephesus. He recalled the
columns which had been devastating western Asia Minor, and concentrated
his forces against Smyrna. What Bayezid had been unable to accomplish in
seven years, Timur did in two weeks.[642] The assault of Smyrna was
carried on with unceasing energy, and every possible measure was taken
to bring it to a speedy conclusion. The walls were undermined, and
bridges built out over the water in order that an attack might be made
from the side of the sea. When the fortress which crowns the hill behind
the city was entered from the land side, the chevaliers of Rhodes fought
their way down to their galleys. With lance and sword and oar they beat
off the despairing inhabitants who would have swamped their boats. All
except a thousand succeeded in escaping. These were decapitated, and of
their heads Timur built a pyramid to commemorate his victory.[643]
Timur returned to Ephesus. As he approached the city, children came out
to meet him, singing songs to appease his wrath. ‘What is this noise?’
he asked. When his attendants told him, he ordered his horsemen to ride
over the children. They were trampled to death.[644]
Smyrna fell in December, 1402. Timur spent the rest of the winter in
Ephesus. He destroyed the work of Bayezid in Asia Minor by restoring to
the deposed emirs or their heirs the emirates of Karamania, Tekke,
Menteshe, Sarukhan, Aïdin, Kastemuni, and Erzindjian. When he saw that
the sons of Bayezid were ready to quarrel about the succession of their
father, he began to treat with Isa, Musa and Mohammed, encouraging in
each the hope of recognition as sole heir. To Soleiman he sent a
diploma, investing him with the Ottoman possessions in Europe as Tartar
vassal.[645]
Timur enjoyed the position he had won of arbiter of the destinies of the
Ottoman Empire. The princes of Europe were now seeking his favour more
insistently than before Angora. Henry IV of England wrote to him most
cordially, and expressed the hope that he would be converted and become
the champion of Christianity.[646]
Manuel Palaeologos, who had learned from the Venetian Senate the news of
Bayezid’s defeat at Angora, hurried home from Europe.[647] He banished
John to Lemnos, expelled the Ottoman colonists from Constantinople, and
closed their tribunal.[648] To Timur he sent an embassy offering to
acknowledge his suzerainty, and expressing his willingness to pay to him
the tribute that had been given to Bayezid. But when Timur responded
with an order to prepare a fleet to help the Tartar hordes to pass into
Europe, Manuel was seized with panic. Smyrna had just fallen, and he
felt that a similar fate was now reserved for Constantinople. An
ambassador was sent to Rome and Venice to implore the immediate aid of
the Vatican and the Senate.[649]
Timur, however, had become tired of Asia Minor and the western campaign.
He had no constructive policy. He never attempted to organize his
conquests into a world empire. Like the earlier conquerors of his race,
Timur was a raider. Satiety came with destruction and victory, that is,
satiety for the particular conquest in which he was engaged. So he
turned his back on Constantinople and the glittering possibilities of a
European invasion. He wanted to return to Samarkand to enjoy the fruits
of his victories. Perhaps his character was only the reflection of that
of his followers.
The march had hardly started when Bayezid died at Ak Sheïr, in March,
1403. From this moment Timur forgot all about the Osmanlis. After a
brief sojourn at Konia, he left Asia Minor. Within two years he died of
fever while on his way to conquer China.[650]
XIX
After Angora the Ottoman army could have been annihilated; for Timur
sent his victorious Tartars hot upon the heels of the refugees. Not only
did they follow Soleiman to the Sea of Marmora, and the divisions which
had retreated to the Bosphorus, but they pursued closely the main body
of the army, which, to the number of possibly forty thousand, had fled
along the customary line of march to the Dardanelles.[651] There Greeks
and Latins vied in helping the refugees to cross.[652] A Venetian
eye-witness of the crossing of the Bosphorus wrote that the Venetians in
good faith offered to join with the Genoese in refusing to transport the
Osmanlis who were crowded upon the Asiatic shore. But the Genoese
started secretly to ferry them over to Europe, with the aid of the
Greeks. Then the Venetians, fearing to lose favour with the Osmanlis,
started in to help.[653] This testimony is corroborated by Clavijo, who
visited Constantinople in the following year. He adds that Timur was
disgusted with the way the Greeks and Latins failed to co-operate with
him in destroying the Ottoman army.[654]
The astonishing fact is then clearly demonstrated that Greeks,
Venetians, and Genoese made no effort to take advantage of their great
opportunity. Nor did they, during the ten years of civil war that
followed the death of Bayezid, make any move, in concert or separately,
to drive the Osmanlis out of Europe. When it was not yet certain what
Timur would do in regard to Asia Minor, or even whether he would invade
Europe,[655] the Venetians and Genoese established with Soleiman at
Adrianople the same friendly relations that they had been so careful to
maintain with his father, and fought each other in the Bosphorus. Pope
Boniface was straining every nerve to help Ladislas of Sicily to win the
crown of Hungary against Sigismund,[656] who, alone of the princes of
Europe, had his hands been free, might have contested the Balkan
peninsula with the warring factions of the Osmanlis.
The decade of civil war among the sons of Bayezid passed without
interference from the outside world, and without a single uprising on
the part of the subjugated Balkan Christians. The house of Osman,
although divided against itself, did stand. In 1413, Mohammed I,
triumphing over his brothers, became sole sovereign of the Osmanlis. The
crisis was over, and the career of conquest, interrupted for the moment
by Timur, was resumed.
Nicopolis had proved that the Osmanlis could hold against Europe what
they had won. Angora had proved that they were too firmly rooted in the
Balkan peninsula and in north-western Asia Minor, as an indigenous race
and as a nation, to be destroyed by the misfortunes of their dynasty.
Since the test of possession is ability to hold, in foul weather as well
as in fair, who can deny that the Osmanlis under Bayezid had inherited
the Byzantine Empire?
APPENDIX A
TRADITIONAL MISCONCEPTIONS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE OSMANLIS AND THEIR
EMPIRE
What has been said in this book on the origin of Ottoman power and the
foundation of the empire is so different from statements which have
found acceptance up to this time, that I am under the obligation to
justify my position by a more technical discussion, and by a fuller
citation of authorities, than has been given in Chapter I. I shall deal
with these misconceptions singly.
1. THAT OSMAN WAS A PRINCE OF ILLUSTRIOUS BIRTH.
Chalcocondylas is responsible for the first and widest diffusion of this
error in western Europe. He claims that Osman is the great-grandson of
Duzalp, ‘chief of the Oghuzes’; grandson of Oguzalp, who, aspiring to
succeed his father, reached ‘in a brief time the highest fame in Asia’;
and son of Ertogrul, who, in 1298,[657] with his fleet, devastated the
Peloponnesus, Euboea, and Attika.[658] Closely allied to the account of
Chalcocondylas is that of Hussein Hezarfenn.[659] According to Ali
Muhieddin,[660] Seadeddin,[661] and Hadji Khalfa,[662] the grandfather
of Osman was Soleiman Shah, prince or bey of Mahan in the Khorassan, who
was compelled to leave his country at the approach of Djenghiz Khan, and
lived seven years in Armenia. As he was returning home, he was drowned
in the Euphrates. Two of his sons, Ertogrul and Dundar, turned back into
Asia Minor, and were, through the kindness of the Seljuk Sultan,
Alaeddin I, given a residence near Angora, and, later, on the confines
of Bithynia. Neshri places the time of residence in Armenia as 170
years, and declares that Soleiman Shah was leader of 50,000
families.[663] Practically all of the European historians who have
written later than the publication in Europe of Chalcocondylas, Ali and
Seadeddin have followed closely these authorities.[664]
The western writers, whose works appeared before the translation and
publication of the eastern historians, or who followed earlier western
authorities, are either vague or uncertain concerning the parentage of
Osman,[665] or give an entirely different story of the rise of his
family. He is supposed to be the son of a Tartar shepherd, called
Zich,[666] who rises to fame at the court of Alaeddin I by defeating in
single combat a Greek cavalier that had killed many of the favourites of
the Seljuk Sultan.[667] According to others, who give nearly the same
story, the name of Osman’s father is ‘the madman Delis, a
shepherd’.[668] For his success in killing the Greek, the Sultan rewards
him with the castle of Ottomanzich, which is often confused with Sugut,
and is claimed to be the origin of Osman’s name.[669] By another story,
which is asserted to be the invention of Mohammed II, who thus wanted to
legitimatize in the eyes of the world his claim to the throne of the
Caesars, Osman is the descendant of a certain Isaac Comnenus, a member
of the imperial Byzantine family, who fled to the court of the Seljuks
of Konia, and became a Moslem.[670]
In this, as in the discussion of other misconceptions which follow, we
are not at all justified in throwing out categorically the testimony of
the early western writers every time that they conflict with the eastern
authorities, or in ignoring them entirely, as Hammer, Zinkeisen, and
Jorga have done. We must remember that Chalcocondylas and all the
Ottoman historians are _very late_, that they cite no sources upon which
to base their assertions or inferences, and that they write with the
intention to please, and under the necessity of pleasing, the Ottoman
court, at a time when its rulers had become so powerful that they could
not brook the recording of an humble origin for their royal house. The
extravagant descriptions of Seadeddin, for example, when he speaks of
Osman’s court, and his expressions such as ‘laying his petition humbly
at the feet of his royal master’, &c., seem much out of place in a
narrative about primitive and exceedingly plain and simple people. The
western writers claim to have sources for information which are as early
and as good as those of Ali and Seadeddin. Some of them certainly
had.[671] We cannot claim for these writers that their stories be
accepted as fact. But we can claim that they be accepted as an honest
reflection of late fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century opinion
concerning the founder of the Ottoman royal house--opinion derived from
stories which were current in Constantinople at that time, and which,
for lack of definite history, were circulated among the Osmanlis
themselves up to a very much later period.[672]
The later western historians have taken, without critical examination,
the Ottoman accounts of the origin of their royal family, as they have
of the relationship with the Seljuks of Konia, practically at their face
value. But it is not hard to prove a good case against the Ottoman
historians.
The story of Soleiman Shah, prince of Mahan and leader of 50,000
families, living and ruling in the neighbourhood of Erzerum between 1224
and 1232, is very easy to disprove. The name of Mahan is often given to
two cities, Dinewer and Nehawend.[673] It is rather the designation of a
plain in which these two cities lay. In 1229, Sultan Djelaleddin, after
his defeat by the Mongols at Mughan, passed the winter in the plain of
Mahan. A certain Izzeddin was lord of the fortress there. He had been
rebellious _some years before_, but was ‘now serving Djelaleddin
devoutly’.[674] In the history of Djelaleddin, I find absolutely no
mention of a Soleiman Shah in connexion with Mahan or any other place in
that region. With 50,000 families, Soleiman Shah would have been a
factor in Armenia between 1224 and 1232. For that is precisely the time
when Djelaleddin, Sultan of Kharesm, his logical suzerain or his enemy,
was struggling with the Seljuks of Konia in that very region! In 1229,
Djelaleddin was at Erzindjian, and ravaged the whole country.[675] At
the same time, a cousin of Alaeddin I, a very powerful ruler, Rokneddin,
was lord of Erzerum, and was strong enough to be at enmity at the same
time with Djelaleddin’s invading army and with Alaeddin of Konia.[676]
Other Arabic historians, and the Seljuk historian of this period,
confirm the history of Mohammed-en-Nesawi in its leading points, but
they, no more than the historian of Djelaleddin, make any mention
whatever of a Soleiman Shah, or of an Ertogrul.[677] Nor is Soleiman
Shah and his family mentioned in any of the Arabic genealogies prior to
the seventeenth century, although these exist in great numbers.[678]
There is only one Ottoman genealogy prior to the tables of Hadji
Khalfa.[679]
The best authority on the western Turks, the late Léon Cahun,
conservator of the Mazarine Library in Paris, declares that the Turkish
tribes of the time of the purported Soleiman Shah and Ertogrul had no
family ties. They knew no rank other than that of a man higher up in the
army. In inheritance, the younger son got the land, and the older sons
the movable possessions of the father. There were no family names; there
are none to this day. The Turks who came into Asia Minor were without
name or family. They wandered far and sold their services to get
established family ties.[680]
There is one more testimony concerning the humble origin of the Ottoman
royal house. The different historians of the relations between Timur and
Bayezid I all speak of the taunt flung by Timur at Bayezid concerning
the Ottoman ruler’s lack of royal ancestors.[681] Bayezid never made any
response to this taunt, and confined his boasting, which was by no means
of a modest sort, to his own and his father’s achievements, and to his
power as a European ruler.
We cannot establish the ancestry of Osman. It is altogether probable
that he had none of note, but was what Americans would call ‘a self-made
man’.
2. THAT OSMAN BEGAN HIS CAREER AS A VASSAL OF ALAEDDIN III, SULTAN OF
ICONIUM, UPON WHOSE DEATH, IN OR ABOUT 1300, OSMAN AND NINE OTHER
TURKISH PRINCES DIVIDED THE INHERITANCE OF THE SELJUCIDES; THAT OSMAN
PROVED MORE POWERFUL THAN THE OTHER PRINCES, AND FOUNDED AN EMPIRE UPON
THE RUINS OF THE SELJUCIDE EMPIRE.
When I call this statement, in its entirety, a misconception, I realize
that I am attacking the idea of the founding of the Ottoman Empire which
has been voiced by the most eminent historians and has an accepted and
unquestioned place in textbooks and encyclopaedias, and in general
histories.
In a French translation of Chalcocondylas, published in 1662, under the
woodcut of Osman, we find these four lines:
‘De simple Capitaine en des Pays déserts,
Près du grand Saladin la Fortune m’attire;
Et là de ses débris je fonde cet Empire,
Qui menace aujourd’huy d’engloutir l’Univers.’
I quote this verse because it seems to me to express concisely the
commonly accepted idea of the foundation of the Ottoman Empire, as I
find it written everywhere. Hammer, whose eighteen volumes contain a
wealth of material upon the Ottoman Empire not elsewhere to be found,
and who shows remarkable erudition as well as care and critical powers,
perpetuates the tales about Ertogrul and Osman and the court of Konia.
He makes the categorical statement, ‘The empire of the Seljuks broke up,
and on its ruins arose that of Osman’.[682] Creasy has popularized the
opinion of Hammer in the English-speaking world.[683] Lane-Poole, who
has written the only general history of the Ottoman Empire in English in
our generation, has tacitly accepted the common tradition.[684]
Zinkeisen and Jorga, the only later historians whose names can be
coupled for scholarly work with that of Hammer, are most unsatisfactory
in their failure to take up critically the Ottoman traditions of the
early days of the Empire.[685] Leunclavius, the sole writer in Western
Europe before Hammer, whose work might be called ‘scientific’, discusses
exhaustively and compares critically all authorities existing at his
time (1590) on most minute points of early Ottoman history, but is
almost silent on the grave inconsistencies and contradictions arising
from the question of the relation between the Osmanlis and the Seljuks
of Konia.[686] There is the same silence in Cantemir and his
translators.[687] The latest Ottoman historian says: ‘Osman’s military
and political career naturally divides itself into two parts, that in
which he was vassal of Alaeddin, and that in which he became
sultan.’[688] An Oriental whose work has enjoyed great vogue in France
declares: ‘Osman pursued through every obstacle the realization of his
plan, which consisted in founding upon the ruins of the Seljuk Empire a
great, free, and independent state.’[689]
I find one German scholar who, briefly touching upon the foundation of
Osman’s power, rejects or ignores the connexion with the Seljuks of
Konia; but he goes further afield, and makes the astonishing statement
that Osman conquered Bagdad, allowed the Khalifs only spiritual power,
called himself Sultan, and became master of the Moslem world, thereby
connecting the Mongol conquest of Mesopotamia with the Mameluke conquest
of Egypt, and attributing it all to Osman![690]
If we had good ground for rejecting the princely origin of Osman, our
justification for impugning and discarding the connexion of Osman with
the Seljuks of Konia is stronger still.
Kaï Kobad Alaeddin, the only Sultan to whom the name of Alaeddin is
given by common consent,[691] died in 1236.[692] He was succeeded by Kaï
Khosrew II, Giazzeddin, or Ghizatheddin, who was Sultan at the time of
the great Mongol invasion of Asia Minor. In the spring of 1243, Erzerum
was sacked without having received any help from Konia. Some months only
after this event did Kaï Khosrew move. He was defeated at Mughan, near
Erzindjian, in a decisive battle,[693] and fled to Angora, abandoning
his baggage. Erzindjian fell next. Then Kaï Khosrew withdrew to Sivas,
and from that city sent an embassy to the Mongols, making his submission
and promising an annual tribute of four hundred thousand pieces of
silver. The Mongol armies penetrated as far as Smyrna. Everywhere
submission was complete, although no effort was made to provide a new
government for the conquered regions in the western part of the
peninsula. The Emperor of Trebizond became a vassal of the Mongols.[694]
The battle of Mughan cost the Seljuk Empire its independence.[695] After
1246, when Kaï Khosrew died, the situation of the Seljuks of Konia is
depicted by Shehabeddin in these words: ‘The princes of the family of
Seljuk kept only the title of sovereign, without having any authority or
any power. There was left to them only that which concerned their own
person and their houses, the insignia of royalty, and sufficient money
for expenses of an indispensable necessity. The power belonged to Tartar
governors, who managed everything without opposition. It was in the name
of the princes of the family of Djenghiz Khan that the public prayer
was made, and that gold and silver money was struck.[696] When the
dynasty of the Seljucides had arrived at the last degree of weakness ...
races of Turks seized a large part of these countries.... The Turks
recognized the pre-eminence of the prince of Kermian.’[697] There is not
a word of any possible Ottoman supremacy even in his own day, fifty
years later. Every source on the latter half of the thirteenth century
which I have consulted corroborates the testimony of Shehabeddin.[698] I
have space to give only a few of the facts which I have gathered
concerning the fortunes of the Sultans of Konia during the period
1246-1300, when Ertogrul and Osman are pictured by the Ottoman
historians, and by the European historians who have followed them, as
basking in the sunshine of Seljuk imperial favour.