Then in the rapid advance of his enemy’s troops Timour discovered that the Asiatic army of Bajazet had passed the level of the Ottoman lines in order to turn the hills he was occupying, and down he rushed with his reserve cavalry of forty divisions and cut in two the army of Europe and the army of Asia, throwing one of them back upon the hills and the other into the marshes on the left, slaughtering at the center some thousands of Ottomans and forcing Bajazet himself to fly with ten thousand of his Janizaries to a rising ground detached from the mountains whose steep declivities checked the impetuosity of the Tartar cavalry.
Timour watched with admiration the retreat of the Servian mountaineers, as in dense columns clad in splendid mail, unshaken by repeated charges of his cavalry they forced their way obliquely through that multitude until they gained the foothills in safety. “These miserable peasants are lions,” he exclaimed in admiration of their discipline and their courage.
Two sons of Bajazet were rescued by the bold daring of their devoted followers, but in vain did they urge the Emperor himself to seek refuge in flight. Satisfied that his sons were safe he continued to fight for glory or for death behind the rampart of his Janizaries who formed about him a circular wall with their dead bodies. Never was fidelity more desperate, more unswerving. Stolen from Christian homes at an early age and trained as warriors they knew no other home than the camp. They knew that their birth among the Christians and their name of renegades left them no other choice than that of death upon the field of battle or the field of torture. The retreat of the ten thousand after the death of Cyrus did not equal the glorious suicide of these ten thousand Janizaries about the body of their Sultan.
As the shades of evening began to fall, Bajazet, his youngest son and a few faithful generals and a group of horsemen sought to escape into the woody recesses of the mountains. A troop of Tartar cavalry closely pursued the trail of the retreating Sultan. The day was about to break and they hoped to escape by swimming a swift stream, the horsemen they heard galloping behind them when a loose shoe caused the horse of the Sultan to stumble. None would save themselves and leave their master, and as one of the Beys was presenting his own horse to him, a Tartar emir with a body of horsemen surrounded the small group of the Ottomans and they were prisoners.
Before night had fallen the vanquished Sultan in chains, covered with dust and blood, was brought before Timour, who was seated in the shade of his tent playing chess with the son whom he called the hope of his race. The vanquisher showed neither pride nor insolence before the vanquished. He remembered the maxims and respected the finger of God even in the enemy overthrown at his feet. He remembered that he was of the same race, that they were fighting for the same faith and he almost begged his pardon for the victory. He ordered him to be released, begged him to take a seat with him at the front of his tent on the same rank with himself and promised him that his honor and his life would suffer no risk during his brief captivity. Three imperial tents were prepared for his use; and after the discovery of his attempt to escape, Bajazet was chained at night in one of those iron-barred litters wherein women in their journeys are carried between two mules. Hence the popular, but erroneous, tradition throughout the East about the iron cage wherein Timour had shut up the Sultan intending to exhibit him in his palace at Samarcand. Timour permitted Bajazet to send for his favorite wife, the Princess of Servia—exacting from her at a banquet, but only for a single time, that she should hand him a cup of Cyprus wine the sole vengeance he wished to take for the insulting letter wherein Bajazet had threatened him with taking off his harem.
Bajazet died about nine months after his defeat at Antioch in Pisidia—his empire, lost in a single battle—having fallen into fragments before his eyes.
Turning away from the possible conquest of Europe Tamerlane soon returned to Samarcand and in 1405 set out for the final and complete conquest of China. Neither age nor the severity of the winter could retard the impatience of Timour, he passed the Sihon on the ice, marched hundreds of miles, then pitching his last camp, died of fever and fatigue and the indiscreet use of iced water April 1, 1405. The conqueror of Asia had reigned for thirty-five years and died at the age of seventy-one, having shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being ever born on the earth.