‘To fight is our habit, to join in combat our aim, to struggle for the faith our task. The law of waging war for the cause of Allah Almighty is our rule … Our soldiers spend their lives and wealth for Allah, that they may gain Paradise.’
LETTER FROM SULTAN BAYAZID I TO TEMUR, 1402
‘… Tush, Turks are full of such brags
And menace more than they can well perform.
He meet me in the field and fetch thee hence?
Alas, poor Turk! His fortune is too weak
T’encounter with the strength of Tamburlaine.’
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Tamburlaine the Great
During the recent months of campaigning, while his armies were putting Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad to the sword and the flame, Temur had not neglected the arts of diplomacy. Ambassadors and couriers had been shuttling along the trade routes of Asia to further the conqueror’s interests and damage those of the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid I. They had travelled to Manuel II, the enfeebled Byzantine emperor who, under pressure from the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, had fled to Trebizond in northern Turkey where he confirmed his submission to Temur. The Tatar demanded that twenty war galleys be made available to him in advance of his next battle. Similar demands had been brought to Christian Constantinople, temporarily under the command of Manuel’s nephew, Regent John, as well as to the Genoese at Pera on the Bosporus. Representing Catholic Europe, John of Sultaniya, who had been appointed Archbishop of the East and Ethiopia by Pope Boniface IX in 1398, arrived in the Tatar court with messages of goodwill from King Charles VI of France. For all his aspirations to become Islam’s greatest defender, to earn the title of Ghazi, Warrior of the Faith, Temur’s opportunistic instincts allowed him to do business with the infidel with a clear conscience.
By far the most important correspondence, however, was that between Bayazid and Temur. The themes had remained constant since their first diplomatic exchange, but the tone of the letters had become increasingly confrontational. Temur pressed his demands that Bayazid surrender to him his two long-standing adversaries, Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad and the rebellious Turkmen chief Qara Yusuf, both of whom had for years eluded him.
‘Since we have been informed that your master wages war against the infidels of Europe, we have always held back from marching into his country with our army, unwilling to destroy a Muslim country which would only delight the infidels,’ he told the Ottoman envoys. ‘But there is nothing more disagreeable to us than to hear that he grants protection to Qara Yusuf Turcoman, the greatest robber and villain on earth, who pillages merchants, murders travellers and commits a thousand other crimes. What is most dangerous is that the wretch lives in the middle of a Muslim country where he is like a wolf among sheep.’ Bayazid must either try Qara Yusuf and execute him, send him to Temur bound in chains, or expel him from his lands. In addition, he must return the castle of Kamakh on the western Euphrates to its previous master, Temur’s ally Taharten.
But the all-conquering Ottoman, the man who had brought Christian Europe to its knees, was in no mood to compromise. To understand why, we must travel back six years to the disturbed courts of Christendom.
By the closing decade of the fourteenth century, Christian Europe had identified the Ottoman sultan as its greatest danger. At the gates of the continent, Byzantium was breathing her last, strangled by the Turkish forces who encircled her. In 1399 her emperor Manuel II had abandoned her, sailing west with a force of Genoese who had tried, and failed, to raise the Ottoman siege. Constantinople was entrusted to his nephew John. The Christian empire seemed poised to collapse under the sword of Islam. Still worse, from the European monarchs’ perspective, their mainland had been breached and Christian territories taken, first Serbia at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, then Bulgaria in 1393. Bayazid, who had earned the nickname Yilderim (Thunderbolt, or Lightning) on account of the speed with which he moved between his western and eastern fronts, was even now encroaching on Hungary. The push west had to be halted before the Crescent was raised above the entire continent.
Racked by the plague, drained by the Hundred Years’ War, and divided by the Great Schism with one pope in Rome and another in Avignon, Europe was in a perilously weak position from which to defend herself against the burgeoning power of Bayazid. Nevertheless, in recognition of the parlous position in which Christendom found itself, Popes Boniface IX of Rome and Benedict XIII of Avignon joined in calling for a Crusade against the Ottoman.
A Franco-German army was raised under the leadership of Count John of Nevers, son of the Duke of Burgundy. As they marched east, the Crusaders were joined by another force of Germans and a smaller detachment from England. At Buda, their ranks were swelled with King Sigismund of Hungary’s army of about ten thousand. By the time more knights had arrived from Wallachia, Poland, Bohemia, Italy and Spain, the Crusaders numbered around sixteen thousand, one of the largest armies Christendom had ever put into the field.
At Nicopolis on the Danube, they met an Ottoman army of similar size.* Bayazid had abandoned the siege of Constantinople and marched north on learning of their approach. Before the battle began, Sigismund, who was familiar with the Ottoman style of fighting, urged the French to hold back while his light troops charged the enemy lines, at which point the heavy European cavalry would attack. He also did not want his allies to advance too quickly from what was a sound defensive position. But the French and Burgundian Crusaders, hungry for the honour of leading the first charge, appalled by what they took as a slight to their fighting skills, and implacably opposed to entering battle behind men they regarded as peasants, refused to listen. The Count d’Eu grabbed a banner of the Holy Virgin and shouted to his men: ‘Forward in the name of God and St George, today you shall see me a valorous knight.’ Thus it was that on the morning of 25 September 1396, bursting with confidence and Christian valour, to rousing cries of ‘For God and St Denis,’ the knights of Europe galloped forward under billowing pennants.
For a while it seemed their impetuousness had succeeded, for the Crusaders, having crossed a ravine and climbed the hill towards their enemy, drove back and cut down the irregular Turkish infantry and light cavalry that faced them. Eventually they broke through the enemy positions, protected by a forest of sharpened wooden stakes, and were on the point of celebrating when disaster suddenly loomed. Sigismund’s advice had been sound. Now, exhausted from their exertions, sweating beneath their heavy armour, the Christians discovered with horror Bayazid’s huge force of heavy cavalry awaiting them over the hill. The knights were on foot, having dismounted before the stakes guarding the Ottoman positions. Worse, the main force of Hungarians was too far behind them to lend immediate support.
Such tactical ineptitude, which divided the Crusading army into two weaker forces, was an unexpected gift to Bayazid. The order was given to charge. The Sipahi cavalry let out a terrible cry, horses’ hoofs thundered across the ground, and the disorganised, disoriented French knights were hacked to pieces. ‘The sound of trumpets rose to the sky,’ wrote the Turkish poet Yusfi Meddah. ‘Over their heads the clashing of swords. The blows seemed to rain down unsparingly. Fine warriors, in their hands maces, make a rending clashing noise as they fight. Arrows fall like rain and warriors seek to scatter arrows, the cowards seek to escape, leaving behind their quivers.’ Six times the banner of the Virgin was knocked to the ground, and six times it was raised again. But the pressure from the Ottomans was too great. When Admiral de Vienne, rallying his Crusaders beneath the banner, was cut down and killed, the French knights surrendered. The Hungarians followed soon after. In desperate retreat, Sigismund managed to find his way back to the Danube, where he boarded a boat and sailed away to safety. ‘We lost the battle by the pride and vanity of those French,’ he famously said. ‘If they had believed my advice, we had enough men to fight our enemies.’
Later that day, the Ottoman sultan issued another order. He had discovered the extent of his losses with mounting fury, not least the pile of massacred Turks – who had been taken prisoner before battle – in the luxurious Crusader camp. Now he vowed revenge. All prisoners barring the greatest knights, who could be ransomed for considerable sums, were to be slaughtered. Each Ottoman officer was ordered to kill all those he had captured. The battlefield ran with blood. The flower of European chivalry were executed in cold blood.
The Bavarian page Johann Schiltberger was among those condemned to death. ‘They took my companions and cut off their heads, and when it came to my turn, the king’s son saw me and ordered that I should be left alive and I was taken to the other boys because none under twenty years of age were killed and I was scarcely sixteen years old,’ he later wrote. Schiltberger was saved only to be enslaved, but was not spared the spectacle of the mass execution.
Then I saw lord Hannsen Greif, who was a noble of Bavaria, and four others bound with the same cord. When he saw the great revenge which was taking place, he cried with a loud voice and consoled the cavalry and infantry who were standing there to die. Stand firm, he said, when our blood this day is spilled for the Christian Faith, and we by God’s help shall become the children of heaven. When he said this 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 it still 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.
Estimates of the number of prisoners killed ranged from three hundred to Schiltberger’s exorbitant figure of ten thousand. Surveying the battlefield, piled high with the dead and the dying, Bayazid the Thunderbolt had reason to be pleased with himself. The Crescent had triumphed emphatically over the Cross. He had annihilated the last Crusade. The crippling ransoms on the heads of the twenty most illustrious Crusaders would virtually bankrupt the treasuries of Christendom. Now, he boasted, he would ride on through Europe,crush the infidels with his invincible armies, and feed his horse on the altar of St Peter’s in Rome.
Europe suddenly found herself depending for her survival on the Scourge of God, a man who for two decades had glorified in butchering Christians. In Georgia repeatedly, in Tana and Saray in the lands of the Golden Horde, and most recently in Sivas, Christians had been massacred in their thousands as Temur sought to add lustre to his Islamic crown.
This was a fortuitous coalescence of interests between Temur and the kings of Europe, no more, no less. In the Tatar’s political universe, alliances tended to be convenient arrangements of the moment, to be picked up and dropped at whim, safe in the knowledge that he held overwhelming military force if events took an unexpected course. If Christians could be of use to him against Bayazid, then that was to his advantage.
His first concern, as he prepared for the critical encounter with his most powerful antagonist yet, was that the Christian powers should not obstruct his efforts in any way. His second was that they should offer all possible support. From Constantinople, Regent John, Temur’s newest vassal, duly undertook to provide soldiers, galleys and tribute. The governor of the beleaguered Genoese colony at Pera did the same. Both men vowed to prevent Bayazid’s troops in Europe crossing into Asia Minor to assist the Ottoman against Temur in a battle that grew more likely with each day.*
Further indications that war was imminent came in February 1402 with Temur’s instruction to his empresses to return to Sultaniya, a traditional prelude to conflict. Around this time the first military engagements began, as Mohammed Sultan, newly arrived from Samarkand, set about the successful siege and storming of the fortress at Kamakh, a direct challenge and provocation to Bayazid, who had only recently seized it from Temur’s ally Prince Taharten.
Rather than wait for Bayazid to come to him, Temur stole the initiative by leading his army west on a series of forced marches to Sivas. Here he was perfectly stationed for an attack on the heart of Bayazid’s empire. His amirs, however, in one of their periodic fits of pessimism, counselled against war. Their arguments must have sounded wearily familiar to the emperor: his troops were tired after campaigning in the field for three years, while the Ottoman forces, famed for their fierce fighting skills, were well rested and lavishly equipped. Their warnings were cut brutally short by the impatient Tatar. An astrologer was summoned to pronounce his verdict on the positions of the planets. He had learnt from the experience of Delhi, when he and his colleagues had advised against battle and had been roundly excoriated by Temur. The message now was more reassuring. The emperor was at the zenith of his power, Bayazid conveniently at his nadir. Well was the great conqueror named the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. This was a most auspicious time to do battle.
That Bayazid was equally keen on war and just as confident of victory is evident from a letter he sent Temur which reached the Tatar at Sivas. It was the most insulting letter yet from the Ottoman. Bayazid was, said Arabshah, a ‘stalwart champion of the faith’ and ‘a just ruler, pious and brave in defence of religion’, a verdict doubtless coloured by the Syrian’s hostility towards Temur. Such piety was nowhere in evidence in this latest correspondence, in which, against all Muslim customs, Bayazid deliberately referred to the Tatar’s wives in the most offensive fashion.
‘So far as concerns his original state, certainly he was a brigand, a shedder of blood, who violated all that is sacred, broke pacts and obligations, an eye turned from good to evil,’ the sultan’s letter began, before going on to summon Temur to appear before him as though the Tatar were no more than his meanest vassal. Its ending was practically sacrilegious: ‘I know that this speech will rouse you to invade our countries, but if you should not come, may your wives be condemned to triple divorce.’
Arabshah related the conqueror’s reaction to this missive. ‘And as soon as Temur read this reply, he was excited and said: “The son of Othman is mad, for he is prolix and sealed the purpose of his letter with the mention of women.” For among them the mention of women is a crime and grave offence.’*
Bayazid had made his intentions abundantly clear. While his envoys were still in the Tatar camp, Temur responded in kind. He ordered a review of his army, to impress upon the ambassadors the vast size of his forces, veterans from his many campaigns drawn from all reaches of his empire. No power on earth could put such a cosmopolitan army into the world, according to Arabshah.
There were men of Turan, warriors of Iran, leopards of Turkistan, tigers of Balkhshan, hawks of Dasht and Khata, Mongol vultures, Jata eagles, vipers of Khajend, basilisks of Andakan, reptiles of Khwarizm, wild beasts of Jurjan, eagles of Zaghanian and hounds of Hisar Shadman, horsemen of Fars, lions of Khorasan, and hyenas of Jil, lions of Mazanderan, wild beasts of the mountains, crocodiles of Rustamdar and Talqan, asps of the tribes of Khuz and Kerman, wolves of Ispahan, wearing shawls, wolves of Rei and Ghazni and Hamadan, elephants of Hind and Sind and Multan, rams of the provinces of Lur, bulls of the high mountains of Ghor, scorpions of Shahrizor and serpents of Askar Makram and Jandisabur … To these were added hyena-cubs of slaves and whelps of Turkomans and rabble and followers and ravening dogs of base Arabs, and gnats of Persians, and crowds of idolaters and profane Magi.
Alongside these hardened soldiers stood the gleaming ranks of fresh troops under Mohammed Sultan, each detachment gorgeously arrayed in its own colours. Some wore crimson, with matching shields, saddles and ensigns. Others were resplendent in uniforms of bright yellow, violet or white, their lances, quivers and clubs in identical colours. And there, once again, were Temur’s favourite prizes of war, the thirty elephants from Delhi, ‘covered with the most splendid trappings … with towers on their backs in which were placed archers and casters of wild-fire to spread terror and disorder wherever they should go’.
With the pomp and ceremony of the review at an end, the ambassadors were summarily dismissed. The time for diplomacy had passed. Both sides were now prepared to risk their empires on a single encounter. All that remained to be decided was where and when it would take place.
While Temur’s preparations continued, Bayazid had not been idle. In 1396 he broke off the siege of Constantinople to rout the assembled forces of Christendom. Now, six years later, he abandoned the siege once again to marshal his forces. It was, though to a lesser extent than that of his enemy, a cosmopolitan army.
He ordered the leaders of his warriors and the bold eagles of his army and the falcons and the finest of his braves and nobles of Karmian and the valiant horsemen of the seacoasts, the stallions of Karaman, the soldiers of the provinces of Mantasha, the cavalry of Sarukhan and all the Amirs of the tumans and sanjaks [districts] and lords of standards, leaders of divisions and all the governors of posts and places under the sway of both the capitals Brusa and Adrianople, and everyone that was carrying his white standard painted the green sea with the red blood of blond Greeks and split the black heart of every blue-eyed enemy with his black arrows, mounted on his piebald steed – all these he ordered to carry out their business and take their precautions and arms.
War was imminent, but a battle of nerves had first to be fought before the two armies could take to the field. Temur had already marched much farther west than Bayazid had anticipated, and to that extent the Ottoman was on the back foot, faced with the prospect of a major encounter in his own lands, a destructive situation which Temur had always sought to avoid in Mawarannahr. Based on high ground around Ankara, Bayazid now resolved, against the advice of his senior amirs, to march east and halt the enemy’s incursion into his territories. There were good reasons for this decision. It was harvest time, and Bayazid was determined to avoid the wholesale destruction and pillaging that would inevitably occur were he to wait passively for the Tatar’s advance.
Learning from his scouts that Temur was headed for Tuqat, north-west of Sivas, the Ottoman led his army to head off this advance. But the Tatar, as masterful as ever in his feints and counter-feints, had taken a completely different route. Rather than follow the difficult road north to Tuqat through inhospitable hilly country, he slipped south-west instead, following the broad sweep of the Halys as it arced towards Ankara, all the time keeping the river between his forces and the Ottomans.* This, wrote Arabshah, was ‘well-tilled country’, full of ‘shades, springs and choice fruits’. The Tatar soldiers ‘ceased not to delight in crops and pastures and udders, amid sidras without thorns and tall trees set in order and spreading shade and flowing water and gentle breezes and health-giving delights, in security, tranquillity, abundance and amplitude, without fear, journeying at their convenience, confident of prosperity and victory, promising themselves wealth and spoils’.
For a week the Tatars continued their forced marches, until Qaysariyah, where they struck camp, rested the horses and pillaged the local countryside of all available crops. As Bayazid scoured the valleys and forests and mountains for his enemy, his scouts brought him perplexing news. There was no sight of the Tatar armies. They had vanished into the depths of Anatolia. Increasingly unnerved by the sudden disappearance of his enemy, Bayazid continued to march, seeking his quarry and waiting for fresh reports from his scouts. Still nothing. Then, as swiftly as he had vanished, Temur reappeared at Qir Shahr (now Kirşehir), south-east of Ankara, where the first vicious but inconclusive skirmish was fought. Pressing on at full speed, he led his men west until, after three more days, they arrived at the Ottoman base at Ankara, only recently abandoned by Bayazid. When reports reached the Turk of this lightning manoeuvre, he was ‘seized with panic as though it were the day of resurrection and bit his hands with grief and remorse and roared and howled and burning with the fire of anger was almost suffocated and abandoned rest and sleep’.
Temur had seized a crucial advantage over his opponent. Time already favoured him. The Ottomans were a week’s march away to the east. This gave him the opportunity to choose the most favourable ground, dig in his positions, put Ankara under siege, destroy his enemy’s camp, divert the river which supplied it and, most important, rest his march-weary men. This was where he would give battle, from the very position which Bayazid had, against his officers’ advice, only just vacated. The manoeuvre bore all the hallmarks of Temur’s tactical genius. It was swift, brilliantly executed and a devastating surprise to his opponent. It was, in addition, a powerful psychological blow for Bayazid to be outwitted in his own kingdom. Temur had struck decisively.
There was now no option for the Ottoman other than to order forced marches west to Ankara. The soldiers’ morale was low, the country dry and unforgiving, stripped bare by Temur’s hordes. By the time they approached Ankara they were in a pitiful condition, said Arabshah, ‘perishing with distress and violent thirst’. The only water supply lay behind Temur’s lines. It has been estimated that up to five thousand of Bayazid’s troops died before the battle.
From the Ottoman point of view, the preparation for battle had been disastrous. Temur had outmanoeuvred Bayazid completely, drawing him out on a line and reeling him back in again with consummate ease. The sultan’s troops had seen their leader struggle to keep up with an adversary whose name was spoken of in awe throughout Asia, a man who had never been defeated in battle and who had already seized control of the superior ground they themselves had once held. But Temur’s preparations, although his adversary did not yet know it, went far deeper than this. Over several months he had been courting the Tatar tribes who had been recruited into Bayazid’s army. Playing on their sense of tribal loyalties, he offered them lucrative spoils on condition they switch sides and join their brother Tatars when battle began. Though it is difficult to give an accurate assessment of the size of both armies, the chronicles make it clear that Bayazid’s contingent of Tatars was immense. According to Arabshah, ‘It is said that the whole host of the Tatars nearly equalled the army of Temur.’ Whatever the total, Temur’s deserved reputation for generosity to his soldiers, which had fuelled his rise to power over Amir Husayn in 1370, was about to deliver him his most famous winning hand. The battle had been decided before it had even begun.*
So it was that at around 10 o’clock on the morning of 28 July 1402, the Conqueror of the World faced Bayazid the Thunderbolt on the plains east of Ankara. Once more his kettle-drums gave their tumultuous roar amid a deafening clash of cymbals and trumpets. For three decades this martial concert had been the harbinger of his enemies’ collapse. The princes of Persia had heard it, so too the khan of the Golden Horde, the kings of Georgia, the sultans of Delhi, Baghdad and Egypt. This time, the drums and cymbals and trumpets sounded the doom of Bayazid. It was one of the greatest battles the region had ever seen.
Ill-prepared, outmanoeuvred and outwitted, the Ottoman army, exhausted after a week of forced marches, began the fighting on the defensive. As the first blows fell, as the skies darkened with arrows, the desertion of Bayazid’s Tatar forces to Temur, orchestrated over a period of several months prior to the battle, proved decisive. Undermined by these losses, the Ottoman left wing under Prince Chelebi crumbled and fled the field. Consolidating these early advantages, Mohammed Sultan’s elite Samarkand division charged the Serbian cavalry, which had been devastated to see a prince of the royal blood abandon his position. Following his example, they withdrew in flight.
Bayazid’s resistance continued until nightfall, but Temur’s centre of eighty regiments and thirty elephants had already put paid to the main body of his army. After hours encircled by Temur’s forces, the Ottoman emperor’s Janissaries were finally overcome. Bayazid was seized and delivered to his enemy. The Sword Arm of Islam, for so long raised in triumph over Europe and Asia, had been brought crashing down. Bayazid would never recover.
What happened next has, over the centuries, been a matter of great contention. Much of the controversy can be blamed on Christopher Marlowe, for in the closing years of the sixteenth century and at the considerable remove of 185 years and 1,700 miles from the battle of Ankara, he penned the following prophetic lines:
The ages that shall talk of Tamburlaine,
Even from this day to Plato’s wondrous year,
Shall talk how I have handled Bajazeth …
The first-person refers to the eponymous protagonist of Tamburlaine the Great. But it can equally be understood to mean Marlowe himself, for in dramatising the immediate aftermath of the battle of Ankara he was, intentionally or otherwise, stepping into controversial territory. The issue in question was how Temur behaved towards Bayazid after his capture. It was a humiliating moment for the Sword Arm of the Faith. In the first three centuries of Ottoman history this was the only crushing defeat, the single instance in which the sovereign was captured in person.
Marlowe’s version naturally aims for the sensational. Tamburlaine removes the crown from Zabina, Bajazeth’s wife, and passes it triumphantly to his lover Zenocrate. In his first speech after the battle, the defeated Ottoman combines melancholy with defiance. Acknowledging that ‘Never had the Turkish emperor/So great a foil by any foreign foe,’ he reflects bitterly that his downfall will be welcomed by the Christians, ‘Ringing with joy their superstitious bells’. But he refuses to accept his downfall. He has enough troops, he says, ‘To make me sovereign of the earth again’.
After pouring scorn on these hopes, Tamburlaine refuses Bajazeth’s request to be ransomed. Then he orders the Ottoman emperor to be bound and forced to attend a ‘martial feast’ to celebrate his victory. We next see Bajazeth at the opening of Act IV scene II, which begins with his astonishing arrival at the banquet in a cage drawn by two Moors. ‘Bring out my footstool,’ Tamburlaine commands. The stage directions – ‘They take him out of the cage … He gets up upon him to his chair’ – painfully emphasise his opponent’s dishonour. There is no trace of magnanimity in victory. Every word, every action, is intended to shame Bajazeth.
Base villain, vassal, slave to Tamburlaine,
Unworthy to embrace or touch the ground
That bears the honour of my royal weight,
Stoop, villain, stoop! Stoop, for so he bids
That may command thee piecemeal to be torn,
Or scattered like the lofty cedar trees
Struck with the voice of thundering Jupiter …
Now clear the triple region of the air,
And let the majesty of heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Zabina, meanwhile, has been treated to her own degradation, becoming the slave of Zenocrate’s handmaiden. Bajazeth objects, warning Tamburlaine that such ambitious pride will be his ruin. He is immediately returned to his cage. Accompanied by his Persian lords and followers, Tamburlaine taunts his adversary repeatedly, trying unsuccessfully to feed him morsels of meat from the point of his sword. The proud Ottoman flings the food away, but later confesses to his wife that he is fading away. The humiliation at Tamburlaine’s hands eventually proves too much for the Turk. With no end in sight to his ‘obscure infernal servitude’, he chooses the only honourable alternative and takes his life, Marlowe providing the immortal stage direction, ‘He brains himself against the cage.’ Discovering her late husband’s grisly remains, his widow Zabina is devastated. There is nothing else for it. Chasing her husband’s shadows into the afterlife, ‘She runs against the cage and brains herself.’
History was rather less dramatic. The debate over whether Bayazid was thrown into a cage, a hugely degrading punishment for one of the world’s most powerful sovereigns, can be traced back to Arabshah, whose acid hostility to Temur we have already observed. The Syrian chronicler claimed that ‘Ibn Othman [Bayazid] was taken and bound with fetters like a bird in a cage … Ibn Othman he ordered to be brought to him every day, and received him with kind and cheerful speech and marks of pity, then derided and mocked him.’ Arabshah also had Bayazid attending Temur’s victory banquet, where he was further humiliated.
Ibn Othman saw that the cupbearers were his consorts and that all of them were his wives and concubines; then the world seemed black to him and he thought the likeness of the agonies of death sweet and his breast was torn and his heart burned, his distress increased, his liver was crushed, groans came from the bottom of his heart and his sighs were redoubled, his wound broke out again and his sore was newly inflamed and the butcher of calamity scattered salt on the wound of his affliction.
Yazdi, by contrast, offers a version much more favourable to Temur, as we have come to expect from the court panegyrist. The victorious emperor delivers a brief lecture to the effect that Bayazid has committed a great deal of injustice towards Temur, and is therefore the author of his own downfall. Temur claims never to have wanted the war, ‘because I knew that your troops were always at war with the infidels. I have used all possible ways of mildness; and my intention was, if you had harkened to my counsels, and consented to a peace, to have given you powerful succours, both of money and troops, to carry on the war for religion with greater vigour, and to exterminate the enemies of Mohammed.’ Nevertheless, he goes on, ‘to return thanks to God for my good fortune in this battle, I will neither treat you nor your friends ill; and you may rest satisfied as to that point’. Bayazid, Yazdi assures the reader, was treated with the utmost respect as a ‘great emperor’. Indeed, such was the esteem in which Temur held him that when, in March 1403, he learnt of Bayazid’s death in captivity, Temur was reportedly moved to tears by the news. He had, said Yazdi, been planning to restore the sultan to his throne.
Yazdi’s account is characteristically fulsome. There is as little reason to regard his as the definitive version of events as there is to trust that of the hostile Arabshah. That there was a great deal of bad blood between Temur and Bayazid is beyond question. But that held equally for many of Temur’s other adversaries, and none had been treated so contemptuously in defeat. Humiliating his vanquished opponents had never been his style. Instead, by far his most common practice was to reinstall them as vassal kings, which is precisely what he did in the case of Bayazid’s sons. The Ottoman prince Sulayman Chelebi, who received his father’s European lands and a capital at Adrianople, explicitly acknowledged Temur’s honourable behaviour towards Bayazid in a letter to the Tatar. The clearest suggestion, however, that Arabshah’s story of the Ottoman sultan being confined behind bars was fanciful, is the Turkic word ‘kafes’ in the chronicles, which can mean either litter or cage. It is thus quite possible, likely even, that Bayazid was brought to Temur in a litter after the battle, a conventional mode of transport for the sultan.
There are other reasons to doubt Arabshah’s version. Clavijo makes no mention of a cage; nor, critically, does Schiltberger, who had been taken captive at Nicopolis in 1396 and after the battle of Ankara became one of Temur’s slaves. The last word on the subject must go to John Buchan Telfer, the translator of the Bavarian’s narrative. ‘The fable of the iron cage is scarcely worth recalling to mind,’ he argued, ‘but had there been a shadow of truth in it, Schiltberger would not have failed to notice the circumstance of the powerful monarch he had served so long being thus ignominiously treated.’
In the carnage of Ankara, Nicopolis had become a distant memory. The days of Bayazid’s glory were over. Caged or not, the Thunderbolt had struck for the last time.
While messengers fanned out across Temur’s empire carrying news of his famous victory, the emperor made plans to exploit it to the full. With the most serious fighting over, Bayazid’s lands stretched invitingly before him like an unlocked palace. To his west lay Brusa, seat of the Ottoman empire and flourishing centre of the caravan trade through Asia Minor. Mohammed Sultan was given the enviable task of riding out to seize its treasures, although Prince Sulayman Chelebi, after narrowly beating him to the city from Ankara, had removed many of its greatest prizes. Among those which remained were the richly decorated bronze gates, inlaid with representations of St Peter and St Paul and finished with enamel, gold and azure. These were later presented to the Great Empress Saray Mulk-khanum on Temur’s return to Samarkand. When everything else of value had been taken, the city was torched.
As the Tatar hordes sped west after their fugitives, the Sea of Marmara, gateway to Europe, became choked with fleeing Turks. Reneging on their earlier agreement with Temur, the Genoese and Venetian merchants who controlled the eastern shores of the sea struck lucrative deals with the desperate Ottomans, ferrying them across the water to safety on the European mainland. It was not all plain sailing for the Turks, however. Some of the less scrupulous Christians, according to one chronicle, killed their Muslim passengers and threw them overboard in revenge for the punishing sieges Bayazid had inflicted on Constantinople.
Undefended, the provinces of Asia Minor meekly offered up their prizes to the invaders. The hordes thundered to the outer reaches of Bayazid’s fractured empire. Silver coins, precious stones, pearls, vessels and furniture of gold and silver were despatched directly to the emperor. Everything else worth seizing was loaded onto the long trains of camels and horses and returned east. One by one, towns and cities fell to Temur’s rapacious men. It was, said Arabshah, an orgy of cruelty.
They shaved heads, amputated necks, crushed arms, cut off shoul-derblades, burnt livers, scorched faces, gouged out eyes, split open bellies, blinded the sight, made tongues mute, blocked the hearing, crushed noses to the earth and brought low the lofty noses, lacerated mouths, shattered chests, crushed backs, pounded the ribs, split navels, melted hearts, severed sinews, shed blood, injured private parts, did violence to souls, destroyed men, poured out bodies like molten images, destroyed lives, and not a third or fourth part of the subjects of Rum escaped the havoc which they dealt, but most of them were either strangled or struck down or hurled headlong or destroyed by goring or devoured by wild beasts.
As news of this apocalypse filtered across the Aegean, Europe started to tremble at the prospect of Temur’s westward advance. Bayazid had folded before this terrible force. Christendom now lay prostrate before the Lame Conqueror. Its armies were no match for these rough men of the steppes, steeled by years of victory. If the emperor’s famous crimson standard, the swinging horse-tail beneath a shining golden crescent, were to appear on the European mainland, the days of Christendom were surely over.
Among the court observers of Temur’s emphatic victory over Bayazid were two distinguished Spanish knights. Payo de Sotomayor and Hernan Sanchez de Palazuelos had been sent by their farsighted King Henry III of Castile to bring him news from the Levant. The Spanish king, who despatched embassies far and wide, to the princes of Christendom as well as the Moors, asked them to report on the customs, the armies and the intentions of the rulers in that region. After a long and arduous journey, the knights had been received gracefully by Temur at his camp outside Ankara. While their Tatar hosts showered them with every comfort and courtesy, they watched events unfold on the battlefield with a mixture of admiration and dread. That Temur the Lame was a powerful Asian monarch they had fully expected. But for him to overcome the army of Bayazid, the scourge of the last Crusade, was beyond comprehension. Armed with the typical European prejudices of their time, they regarded Asia – if they considered the continent at all – with condescension, as the home of rude savages. It was inconceivable that Asia should produce a mighty Muslim warrior capable of routing Europe’s greatest enemy.
In time the two Spaniards were dismissed and, together with Temur’s return envoy, Mohammed al Qazi, sent home with fabulous presents of jewels and women for King Henry. (It was in response to this embassy that Clavijo embarked on his diplomatic mission, intending to reach Temur in his winter pastures in Georgia, but forced through delay to press east to Samarkand.) Among the Christian women whom Temur had rescued from Bayazid’s harem was Angelina, daughter of Count John of Hungary, a famous beauty of her age, celebrated by the poets.*
In the weeks that followed the battle of Ankara, European monarchs grew increasingly uneasy as news of Temur’s victory reverberated throughout the heart of Christendom. Their reactions were highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the conqueror of Bayazid had done them an enormous service by eliminating their most powerful adversary at a stroke. On the other, they wondered fearfully whether this mysterious Oriental despot, who had surged forth unannounced from unknown Asia, would now continue west across the Aegean.
Letters were despatched from Temur’s camp. Archbishop John of Sultaniya departed to the court of the French king Charles VI with imperial missives boasting of the conqueror’s triumph and stressing the need for unhindered commerce between the two continents.† In England, King Henry IV received similar correspondence. For a continent riven by division and ruled by impecunious princes, there was little question of opposing Temur. Nicopolis, from which their diminished armies and dwindling coffers were still recovering, was too painful a memory. Instead, Christendom turned to frantic diplomacy, the only option left to it. A stream of sycophantic messages coursed east.
From his newly seized throne in England, Henry, anxious to be recognised by such an important potentate, sent earnest congratulations to a warlord he had never met. From Charles VI of France came fulsome praise to ‘the most victorious and serene Prince Themur’, along with thanks for the Tatar’s enlightened treatment of Christian merchants travelling in his lands. Bearing priceless jewels and gold florins, ambassadors arrived from Manuel II, the Byzantine emperor who had appealed for help from Temur against the Ottomans, reaffirming his submission and offering tribute in return for future protection from the Turks. The Regent of Constantinople added his voice to the chorus of Temur’s newest admirers, joined by the ever pragmatic Venetians. The Genoese colony at Pera, demonstrating the merchant’s time-honoured understanding of the shifting balance of power, rushed to profess its allegiance and Temur’s pennant was immediately hoisted over the Bosporus.
Old foes suddenly saw the error of their ways. In answer to Temur’s command, Sultan Faraj of Egypt and Syria quickly offered his submission. Temur’s ambassador Atilmish was returned to his master, accompanied by gold and silver, precious jewels and horses in gorgeous livery. As was customary for defeated opponents, the conqueror’s titles were announced in the Friday prayers and coins were struck in his name. Faraj conveyed the news that he had imprisoned two of Temur’s longest-standing and most troublesome adversaries, Sultan Ahmed of Baghdad and Qara Yusuf, prince of the Black Sheep Turkmen tribes. As for what he should do with the two men, Faraj declared he was at Temur’s service.
Temur had always understood the symbolic importance of history and tradition. They formed a powerful part of the way he presented himself to his people and to his enemies. Much of his attachment to history was self-serving. Aware of his own place in the long line of world conquerors, determined to leave future generations with an official record of his achievements, he had his military campaigns scrupulously recorded and exalted.
That he also possessed a powerful intellectual interest in history seems beyond dispute. It was evidenced by his love of debate – to which the hostile Arabshah referred – by his assembly of illustrious scholars to grace his court and, in a single instance, by the great notice he showed Ibn Khaldun, the Arab historian, in the remarkable series of audiences he granted him during a month camped outside the city walls of Damascus in 1401.
Traditions he regarded with a measure of expedience. As long as they legitimated his authority, they were observed. But they could also be manipulated. His raising of the banner of Islam, in particular, marked a clear departure from the shamanism of the Mongols, but the invocation of jihadalso gave religious authority to his conquests and conferred upon him a definite prestige.
From 1370, when he first rose to power as the ruler of Chaghatay, Temur had taken care to install a puppet khan, in recognition of the Mongol laws by which only a blood descendant of Genghis Khan was entitled to rule. Though all knew who wielded the power, Temur himself assumed the junior title of Amir. By doing so, he was showing his respect, however disingenuously, for the customs of the steppe.
The yasa, the customary laws, would have been recognisable to Genghis’s Mongols almost two hundred years earlier. Temur cultivated this hinterland of convention in order to legitimise what was in effect a profoundly revolutionary enterprise, subsuming the tribal practices and hierarchies of the ulus into an overarching political system based on the empire-building of one man and his armies. On the battlefield, the formation of his soldiers – with left and right wings, a centre and vanguard – would likewise have been familiar to the Mongols of the thirteenth century.
His marriage in 1370 to Husayn’s widow Saray Mulk-khanum further reinforced his authority as ruler, since she was both daughter of the last Chaghatay khan of Mawarannahr and a princess of the Genghis line. The marriage allowed him to style himself Temur Gurgan, son-in-law of the Great Khan, a title which he took care to use in ceremonial functions as well as in the Friday prayers and even on the coins minted in his name.
With the defeat of Bayazid and the surrender of Faraj, the Islamic world’s two greatest empires had fallen to him. Alone and unchallenged, Temur now stood at its helm. Given his statesmanlike awareness of the power of tradition and the resonating force of religion, it was only natural that he should cast his eyes on a small stronghold halfway down the Aegean coast. Smyrna was the last Christian oasis in Rum, a symbolic affront to the new master of Asia Minor.* Equally compelling as an incentive to destroy it was the fact that both the Ottoman Sultan Murad and his son Bayazid had tried and failed. The Thunderbolt, indeed, had spent seven fruitless years attempting to wrest it from the Knights of the Hospital of St John, a military religious order founded in Jerusalem in the eleventh century. The temptation for Temur to succeed where others had so conspicuously failed was overwhelming.
Any hopes of clemency the knights might have harboured vanished with their refusal to surrender. Although they had not reckoned on having to defend themselves against the irresistible Temur, their confidence was understandable. Their position, high on a rocky outcrop extending into the sea, looked unassailable. To take it would require a two-pronged attack by land and water, a task that appeared beyond the bounds of siege technology. But such difficulties would only have appealed to Temur’s imagination and cunning.
His amirs ordered the men to build platforms, supported by sunken columns, across the sea, effectively cutting off the citadel from the shore. Siege engines then rumbled across towards the bottom of the walls, while scaling ladders were put into position. Hour after hour the Tatars loosed volleys of Greek-fire into the heart of Smyrna, observing with satisfaction the black curls of smoke which started to rise into the sky from the stricken city. Great mounds of timber were set alight by the walls, but the heavy rains of December prevented their collapse. For a fortnight the two sides faced each other down, the besieged defending manfully against the swarming Tatars. Eventually the unrelenting pressure began to tell. Breaches started appearing in the walls, and Temur’s men rushed through, an irresistible deluge flattening everything before it. The Knights Hospitallers had mounted a courageous resistance, but now they were overrun by superior numbers intent on slaughter and destruction. Once more Temur presided over a mass execution as the souls of the stubborn infidels were despatched.
There was a last macabre flourish to the fall of Smyrna. A fleet of galleys was spotted carrying reinforcements for the beleaguered knights. They did not know it, but they had arrived too late. As they neared the shore, Temur ordered the severed heads of the Smyrna garrison to be launched against their brother officers in the ships. The flame-throwing weapons were quickly adjusted to fit their new missiles. Soon the sky was thick with bloody skulls raining down on the horrified relief convoy, pounding into the wooden decks and striking down the knights as they prepared for battle. Temur’s atrocious plan had its intended effect. Appalled by the bombardment of heads, demoralised by the slaughter of their colleagues, the knights turned round and set sail for home.
The familiar call of jihad, echoing through the ranks of his warriors, had been answered. The last independent bastion of Christianity, which for years had frustrated the best efforts of the Ottomans to reduce it, lay in ruins. Two piles of skulls hacked from the bodies of the fallen knights commemorated another famous victory. The infidels had followed the army of Bayazid to a crushing defeat.
For years Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus, together with the Ottoman emperor, had regarded the cripple from Samarkand with undisguised distaste and disdain. He was not a Muslim, they sneered, he was merely a barbarian. One by one, after ignoring his warnings of the defeat he would inflict on them, they had been silenced. Temur’s claim to be the supreme Sword Arm of Islam no longer looked like an idle boast. On the contrary, it seemed a statement of the obvious.
For the insatiable Temur, one question loomed above all others: what next? Supreme in the dar al Islam, the Muslim world, he now had to look beyond its borders for future conquests.
But before this question could be answered, there was the wreckage of the Ottoman empire to attend to. Minor rulers who had been deposed by Bayazid were returned to power as vassal princes. Prince Sulayman Chelebi, having confirmed his submission to his father’s conqueror on pain of war, was granted the Ottoman territories in Europe. Another brother, Isa Chelebi, was awarded the heartland of the fragmented empire in north-west Anatolia. In this way Temur kept the Ottoman princes in check through the classic policy of divide and rule, just as he had done in the aftermath of defeating Tokhtamish of the Golden Horde. Emperor Manuel, who had been languishing penniless in the courts of Europe in self-imposed exile, was ordered back to his throne. Constantinople would fall, but Temur had bought it another fifty years.
Still, the kings of Christendom dared not relax. Dreadful rumours were spreading through their courts. The barbarian conqueror was requisitioning ships to lead his hordes onto European soil. He was marching his men around the Black Sea. He meant to convert the entire continent to Islam at the point of a sword. Even now, the vanguard of his armies had landed and was marching west. It was only a matter of days before it encircled Rome.
Such cataclysmic visions bore the hallmark of Europe’s myopia. Her poverty was her best defence against an invasion. From the Aegean to the Atlantic, there was little to tempt Temur into launching another holy war. Killing or converting the infidels was a noble aim in itself, of course, but Temur regarded such considerations with a more mercantile eye. Europe’s coffers and treasure houses were bare. No jewels, no jihad.
The aged emperor must also have known that before too long the Angel Izrail would be summoning him from earth. The seventy-two beautiful virgins who awaited him in paradise would surely not be kept waiting much longer. There was no point in squandering the precious time which remained to him on such a worthless continent as Europe.
But while he still lived, and while he could still move, there was yet time for one more campaign. He had contemplated it for years. Preparations had already been made along the farthest frontiers of his empire. His last expedition would be his most glorious. Once more he would proclaimjihad. He would challenge and overcome the only power on earth capable of opposing him. Poised on the shores of Europe, Temur led his army east. Christendom heaved a collective sigh of relief. Temur was bound for war with the Ming emperor of China.
* Modern estimates of the numbers ranged against each other at Nicopolis contrast dramatically with those of the contemporary chronicles, which claimed the Ottoman and Crusader armies both totalled about a hundred thousand.
* John, like Temur, was something of an opportunist. While assuring the Tatar of his unswerving loyalty and readiness to lend him all possible support against Bayazid, he was simultaneously negotiating terms with the Ottoman. The double-dealing did not stop there. John had also opened up a third front, maintaining secret contact with Charles VI, the French king, to whom he proposed selling his throne and the remnants of his empire in return for a regular salary and a castle in France. It was not altogether surprising, then, that as war with Bayazid approached, neither John nor the governor of Pera made any attempt to prevent the Ottoman troops in Europe returning to Asia Minor.
* Such customs were scrupulously observed, even in times of rejoicing. When a girl was born, her parents would refer to the child as ‘one who hides behind the veil’ or even ‘a mistress of the bed’.
* The Halys is today known as the Kizil Irmak, Turkey’s longest river. Flowing from the east, it swings around in a giant ‘C’ shape through central Anatolia, cuts through the Pontic mountains in the north and empties into the Black Sea. The river was immortalised in the story of Croesus, the fabulously rich last king of Lydia in the sixth century BC. At that time the river formed the boundary between his kingdom and the Persian empire of Cyrus the Great. Before he attacked, Croesus consulted the oracle at Delphi to tell him his chances of success. ‘Cross the river Halys and you shall destroy a great nation,’ came the reply. Confident of victory, Croesus invaded, only to be routed by his enemy. He had tragically misinterpreted the oracle, and it was his nation, not Persia, which was destroyed.
* Estimating the size of historical armies is notoriously difficult. Chronicles can distort, eyewitnesses can exaggerate and historians can wildly speculate. In the case of the battle of Ankara, the discrepancies between the various estimates are particularly pronounced. In his 1984 study, for example, Ian Heath estimated Temur’s army at eighty thousand at most, that of Bayazid at eighty to 120,000. This contrasts spectacularly with Johann Schiltberger’s exorbitant figures of 1.6 million for Temur and 1.4 million for the Ottomans.
* Sotomayor and Palazuelos must have greatly enjoyed their return journey in the company of these beautiful women. Indeed, Sotomayor was so captivated by a Greek woman called Maria that on arriving in Spain he declared his love, and later had a son by her. Angelina married Diego Gonzalez de Contreras, a noble Spaniard and magistrate of Segovia.
† All the evidence available indicates that Temur was an early and forceful proponent of free trade.
* Today it is the Turkish port of Izmir.