George Eversley - The Turkish Empire, its Growth and Decay

What is the foundation of thy insolence and folly? [wrote Timur to Bayezid]. Thou hast fought some battles in the woods of Anatolia; contemptible trophies! Thou hast obtained some victories over the Christians of Europe; thy sword was blessed by the Apostle of God; and thy obedience to the precepts of the Koran in waging war against the infidel is the sole consideration that prevents us from destroying thy country, the frontier and bulwark of the Moslem world. Be wise in time; reflect; repent; and avert the thunder of our vengeance which is yet suspended over thy head. Thou art no more than an ant; why wilt thou seek to provoke the elephants? Alas, they will trample thee under their feet.

Bayezid replied in terms of the greatest indignation. He protested that Timur had never triumphed unless by his own perfidy and the vices of his foes.

Thy armies are innumerable: be they so; but what are the arrows of the flying Tartars against the scimitars and battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janissaries? I will guard the princes who have implored my protection; seek them in my tents. The cities of Arzingan and Erzerum are mine; and unless the tribute be paid I will demand the arrears under the walls of Tauris and Sultania.

And he added an insult of a yet grosser kind which, by its allusion to the harem, was the worst that could be devised by a Moslem: —

If I fly from thy arms may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed; but if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field, mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embrace of a stranger.

After this interchange of abuse Timur determined, in 1400, to attack and invade Asia Minor from Armenia, at the head of a horde of armed men, estimated by historians at not less than eight hundred thousand. He laid siege to Sivas, in Cappadocia, on the Armenian frontier, which had only been captured by Bayezid about three years previously. It was now defended by a garrison of Turks, under command of Ertoghrul, the eldest son of Bayezid. The fortifications were immensely strong, but Timur was ready to sacrifice any number of men in assaulting and capturing the city. He employed six thousand miners in undermining its defences with galleries and propping up the walls temporarily with timber smeared with pitch. When the mines were completed, fire was applied to the timber, and the walls gradually sank into the cavities laid open to them, and afforded entrance to the assaulting columns. The city was captured. Four thousand of its defenders were buried alive by order of Timur, and Ertoghrul was executed.

Bayezid, thus challenged, advanced, in 1401, with an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men to avenge the disaster at Sivas. Timur, however, after the capture of that city, refrained from advancing farther into Asia Minor. He passed into Syria and captured Damascus, and thence into Mesopotamia for the capture of Bagdad. It was not till the next year, 1402, that he determined to return to Asia Minor and to humble Bayezid. He retraced his steps to Sivas, and thence, after a further exchange of insolent messages with the Ottoman Sultan, he went in search of him towards Angora, taking the route of Cæsarea and Kir Sheir.

Bayezid had also collected a great army in the east of Asia Minor, and had finally concentrated it in the neighbourhood of Angora. He showed none of his previous skill as a general, though all of his insolence and bravado. His army was discontented by his avarice, and by his neglect to pay them out of the well-filled treasury. He refused to follow the advice of his best generals, who warned him against meeting Timur’s vast hosts on a field where they could deploy their whole strength. The two armies met at last on the plain of Angora, the site of many previous famous battles. It is almost inconceivable that Bayezid, in arrogant contempt of his foe, employed his army, in the face of the enemy, in a great hunt for game, which led them into a district devoid of water, where his soldiers suffered terribly, and five thousand are said to have died of thirst.

On return to their camp they found that Timur had diverted the stream which supplied it with water. Bayezid was forced to fight at a disadvantage. The Tartars, who formed a fourth part of the Ottoman army, were not to be relied on in this battle. Their sympathies were with their fellow-Tartars under Timur. Bayezid had committed the fatal error of placing them in the front line, after his usual tactics of meeting the first encounter of the enemy with inferior troops. But in this case the Tartars deserted on the field of battle. The Serbian contingent, under Prince Stephen, and other Christian vassal troops fought with the utmost gallantry and loyalty. But it was in vain. The whole Ottoman army was outnumbered, overwhelmed, and routed with great slaughter. Bayezid with his bodyguard made a last stand. “The Thunderbolt,” says the Turkish historian, “continued to wield a heavy battle-axe. As a starving wolf scattering a flock of sheep he scattered the enemy. Each blow of his redoubtable axe struck in such a way that there was no need of a second blow.” But in the end he was overpowered and taken prisoner.

Bayezid for some time after his capture was treated with unwonted generosity by Timur, who was impressed by his dignified bearing, in spite of his overwhelming defeat and humiliation. But after an attempt to escape he was more rigidly guarded, and was put into fetters at night. The treatment of him became more cruel and contemptuous. He was carried by day in the train of Timur, when on the march, in a litter, which was in effect a cage 12 12 This story of the cage, which forms the subject of a scene in Marlowe’s play of Tamerlane , has been discredited by some historians of late years. But Mr. Gibbons, after a full and careful examination of all the records of the time, has re-established its veracity. with open bars, exposed to the derision and contempt of the Tartars. His wife, Despina, the Serbian princess, was compelled to serve Timur with drink at his meals in a state of nudity, and with other women of Bayezid’s harem was taken into that of the conqueror. Timur is also said to have made a footstool of his conquered foe.

Bayezid died of a broken heart after eight months of humiliation, at the age of forty-eight. During that time Timur overran the greater part of Asia Minor, capturing Nicæa and Brusa and many other strongholds from the Ottomans, and Smyrna from the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The walls of Smyrna were undermined in the same way as those of Sivas. In two weeks Timur effected a capture which Bayezid had failed to do in three times that length of time. The Knights, when they found that the city was no longer tenable, fought their way down to their galleys against the crowd of despairing inhabitants. Most of them escaped to Rhodes and effected there another settlement. Those who failed to escape were put to death by Timur, who built a pyramid of their heads. Everywhere there was ruthless cruelty. When approaching the city of Ephesus, children came out to meet him singing songs to appease his wrath. “What is this noise?” he asked. When told, he ordered his horsemen to ride over the children. They were trampled to death.

Timur reinstated in their former territories, as tributaries to his own Empire, most of the petty princes who had been dispossessed by the Turks, including the Emir of Karamania. He eventually returned to Samarkand, where he made preparations for the invasion of China, but before this could be realized he died, at the age of seventy-one, two years after the death of Bayezid. As a result of his raid into Asia Minor the Ottoman Empire there, for the time being, completely collapsed. But the Tartars disappeared without leaving any trace behind them.

If Bayezid’s physical downfall was overwhelming and humiliating, his moral decadence was even worse, and, as it turned out, was more permanently injurious to the people of his Empire by the evil example it set. In the brief periods of peace, spent at Brusa and Adrianople, he gave way to self-indulgence and vice of a deplorable kind. He was the first of his race to break the laws of the Prophet and to drink too freely of wine. In company with his Grand Vizier, Ali, he was addicted to drunken orgies. Still worse, he was tempted by that boon companion to give way to vice of unmentionable depravity, condemned by all the world. The Empire was ransacked for good-looking boys, the sons of Christian parents, who were compelled to embrace Islamism and to enter the service of the Court, nominally as pages, but really to pander to the degrading desire of the Sultan. In adopting such practices, Bayezid set the fashion to others of his entourage. The moral infection then spread widely among the upper classes of society, especially among the judges and ulemas. There can be little doubt that immorality infected the upper society of the Empire and was one of the causes which ultimately led to decadence and ruin.