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.