Bayezid I

Bayezid I, nicknamed Yıldırım, "the Thunderbolt", was the Ottoman sultan from 1389 to 1402. In thirteen years of near-constant campaigning he pushed the Ottoman state to the Danube in the west and the Euphrates in the east, crushed a crusading army at Nicopolis and blockaded Constantinople for years. His reign ended in disaster when the conqueror Timur defeated and captured him at Ankara, plunging the Ottoman realm into a decade of civil war.

Bayezid was born around 1360, a son of Sultan Murad I and his Greek wife, Gülçiçek Hatun. As a young man he married a daughter of the ruler of Germiyan, a neighbouring Turkish principality, and governed the town of Kütahya that came with the match. He earned his famous nickname for his speed in a battle against the Karamanids, the Ottomans' main rivals in central Anatolia.

Murad I was killed at or just after the Battle of Kosovo in June 1389, and Bayezid succeeded him. He at once had his younger brother strangled to remove a possible rival. Serbia soon became a vassal; in 1390 Bayezid married Olivera, daughter of the Serbian prince Lazar who had died at Kosovo, and recognised Lazar's son Stefan Lazarević as ruler with wide autonomy. Skopje fell to him in 1391.

Bayezid then turned on the Turkish principalities of Anatolia. Because attacking fellow Muslims could alienate the frontier warriors on whom the dynasty relied, he obtained religious rulings justifying the wars, and he leaned heavily on Serbian and Byzantine vassal troops. In 1390 alone he absorbed Aydın, Saruhan and Menteşe, and he soon overran Hamid, Teke and Germiyan and took Konya from Karaman. In 1397 he killed the emir of Karaman and annexed his lands, and in 1398 he took the emirate of Canik and the lands of Kadi Burhan al-Din, ruler of Sivas.

In the Balkans he extended Ottoman control over Bulgaria and northern Greece between 1389 and 1395, though the Wallachian prince Mircea the Elder checked him at Rovine in 1394 or 1395. Bayezid also besieged Constantinople, capital of the shrunken Byzantine Empire, building the fortress of Anadoluhisarı on the Bosphorus. At the urging of the emperor Manuel II, a crusade gathered under King Sigismund of Hungary, but in 1396 Bayezid routed it at Nicopolis, in present-day Bulgaria. He celebrated by building the Great Mosque of Bursa. The blockade of Constantinople dragged on until 1402.

Bayezid's eastern conquests brought him into direct conflict with Timur, ruler of the Timurid Empire, who had his own claims over the Anatolian princes. After years of insulting letters, Timur stirred up Bayezid's former vassals and invaded. At the Battle of Ankara on 20 July 1402 the Ottoman army was beaten, and Bayezid was captured while trying to flee.

Bayezid died in Timurid captivity at Akşehir on 8 March 1403. European tradition later portrayed his imprisonment as a series of humiliations: an iron cage, being used as a footstool, his Serbian wife forced to serve Timur at table. Contemporary witnesses mention none of this, and historians at Timur's court wrote that he was treated with respect and that Timur mourned his death. The cage story appears in later writers, such as the Ottoman historian Neşri and Pope Pius II, and grew in the retelling. It inspired works including Marlowe's Tamburlaine and operas by Handel and Vivaldi. Reports of suicide or poisoning are likewise disputed.

The defeat at Ankara shrank the Ottoman state drastically. Many Anatolian principalities regained their independence, and Bayezid's sons Süleyman, İsa, Musa and Mehmed fought one another for the succession for about ten years, a period known as the Ottoman Interregnum. Mehmed emerged victorious and was crowned as Mehmed I.

Our 1400 map shows the Ottoman state at its height under Bayezid, two years before Ankara, stretching across the Balkans and much of Anatolia around the remnant of Byzantium.