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Ah, fair Zabina! we have lost the field; And never had the Turkish emperor So great a foil by any foreign foe. Now will the Christian miscreants be glad, Ringing with joy their superstitious bells, And making bonfires for my overthrow …
Tamburlaine the Great Part One, Act III, Scene III. The Sultan Bayezid following his capture at the Battle of Ankara.
Following the Battle of Nicopolis Bulgaria was completely subsumed into the Ottoman Empire and ceased to exist. Bayezid raided Hungary, Wallachia, and Bosnia and the Albanian nobles all accepted vassalage under him. Constantinople was also besieged again until Manuel II agreed that the House of Osman would confirm all future Byzantine emperors.
Constantinople would have fallen to Bayezid in 1402, but it was saved by the last great eruption of the Mongol hordes. Timur Leng claimed the heritage of Chinggis Khan through marriage, and this brilliant but brutal generalissimo campaigned in the Middle East in 1399. Bayezid attempted to ally with the Mamluk Sultanate but Timur was able to rapidly destroy the Mamluk army of Syria at Aleppo and then moved on to Baghdad, where he built 120 towers of skulls from its slaughtered inhabitants and reddened the Tigris with their blood.
Timur moved on Ankara and Bayezid’s troops arrived in poor order after a forced march. The Battle of Ankara was the greatest battle that Timur had yet fought. Bayezid’s Asian levies mutinied and only the Serbs and the Janissaries kept the Ottoman army from complete destruction. Bayezid was captured. He died in captivity a year later, and it appeared that the Ottoman Empire was at an end. It was saved by Timur’s death whilst campaigning in China. Bayezid’s sons fought a protracted civil war amongst themselves but the empire survived.
Mehemmed eventually defeated his brothers and Wallachia fell to the renascent Ottomans. In 1422 Constantinople was besieged again. The Christians were in retreat everywhere, and the Order of the Dragon had been formed as a response to the losses. Its most famous adherent, the Hungarian lord Jonas Hunyadi, led a tenacious resistance in the early 1440s, and even managed to secure a peace on reasonably equal terms with Sultan Murad II in 1444 after three years of constant war. He used techniques that in many ways sat against established ‘chivalric’ warfare. He depended heavily on infantry, handgunners, cannon, and war wagons to form laagers from within which his men could stymie the charges of the Turkish sipahi cavalry, and behind which his heavy cavalry could form up to charge the Ottoman positions. Hunyadi would end his days as an Athletae Christi for his efforts defending Christendom. The honour would also be bestowed on the Albanian, George Skanderbeg.
Skanderbeg had been sent to the Ottoman court in 1423 as a noble hostage for his father’s good conduct. He underwent military training in Edirne, converted to Islam and took Iskander Bey as his Muslim name. In 1443 he deserted the Ottoman army and led 300 Albanian troops away with him. He formed a league with minor Albanian lords and defeated the Ottoman pasha’s army of some 25,000 men with only 7,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry through the very unchivalrous method of hiding half his cavalry in a forest, which then swooped into the battle and closed it. The Ottoman losses may have been as great as 10,000 killed or captured. Skanderbeg would go on to torment his foes with a long campaign of guerrilla warfare, and to also undertake pitched battles against tremendous odds.
