But the Slavs, Servians, Bulgarians, and Bosniaks were not disposed to give in calmly to the methods of colonization adopted by Turkey. Most of Thrace was added to the European possessions, and all Roumelia, and there seemed to be no limit to the Osmanli’s greed of territory. The natives of conquered districts were removed to other parts of Turkey, and Turks and Arabs sent to colonize in their stead. All this urged the princes of the neighbouring Slav races to another mighty effort against the Asiatic invader. Servia, remembering her past greatness, was chief of the movement, which was joined by an Albanian people, the Skipetars, Wallachians and Magyars from Hungary, Poles from the northern Slav kingdom, all combined with the southern Slavs in this enterprise. But the old crusading enthusiasm was dead, and Western Europe, which had sent heroes such as Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard Cœur de Lion, Frederick Barbarossa, looked on with apathy at the encroachments of the Turk and the spread of Islam. Richard II, weak and worthless, was King of England, the imbecile Charles VI reigned over France, and the Germanic Empire was torn by civil wars, raging between robber knights and the free towns of the Hansa, under the dissolute Emperor Wenzel. The chivalry of Spain was still fully occupied with its own crusade against the Moors, and finally there were divisions in the Papacy itself between Clement VII and Urban VI. So no help could come to the Slav Crusaders from the West. Still the league against Amurath was powerful, and he realized that its subjection would tax all his energy and resources. He made all necessary arrangements for the good government of Asia during his absence in the field, then crossed the Hellespont to meet the enemy.
In the meantime the Bulgarians and Serbs had become over-confident, owing to a successful battle in Bosnia; an Ottoman army moving through that country was attacked by the Allies with great vigour, and fifteen out of twenty thousand Turks killed. Inactivity on the part of the Christians marked the next few months, while Amurath was pouring troops into Bulgaria, and completing the conquest of that important member of the league. Ali Pasha, Amurath’s general, marched with an army of thirty thousand men against Sisvan, over the passes of the Nadir Derbend, and forced Shumla to surrender; Tirnova and Pravadi fell, and the Bulgarian King fled to Nicopolis. Here Ali Pasha besieged him, and Sisvan begged for peace. The terms of peace eventually agreed to by the conquering Turk put an end to Bulgaria’s existence as a political entity; it became a province of the Ottoman Empire.
Lazar, King of the Servians, the head of the Powers leagued against Amurath, was alarmed at the rapid strides made by the Osmanli forces, and prepared for a resolute struggle. Amurath accepted the formal challenge sent him by the Servian King, and marched westward towards the frontiers of Servia and Bosnia; on the plain of Kossova he met the Allies. After a night spent in a council of war in both camps, the antagonists met on the plain of Kossova, the “Amselfeld,” as the Germans call it. To northward of the small stream Shinitza, which traverses the plain, the chivalry of Servia, Bosnia, and Albania, their auxiliaries from Poland, Hungary, and Wallachia, were drawn up in battle array on 27th August, 1389.
But the crusaders were unable to stand before the fierce onslaught of the Osmanli, despite their reckless bravery. Slav chivalry went under in a sea of blood, though Milosh Kabilovitch had inflicted a fatal wound on the conqueror. The battle of the “Amselfeld” settled the fate of the southern Slavs for many centuries.
Amurath II had died from the wound inflicted by Milosh Kabilovitch, and his son Bajazet reigned in his stead. He pursued the war against Servia energetically, and made that country a vassal state of the Ottomans. King Stephen Lazarevitch, successor to King Lazar, gave the Sultan his sister to wife, and agreed to pay as tribute a certain portion of the produce of the silver mines in his dominions. Thus Bajazet broke down Servia’s resistance, and then turned against the other states which had taken part in the latest crusade. Myrtché, Prince of Wallachia, submitted, and his country became a vassal state of Turkey; Sigismund, King of Hungary, invaded Bulgaria, but after some slight successes, was defeated by a superior Turkish army in 1372, and forced to retreat. While returning to his country from this campaign King Sigismund saw fair Elizabeth Morsiney, and loved her. Their son, the great Hunyadi Janos, avenged King Sigismund in his victorious campaigns against the Turks.
Once again Western chivalry attempted to check the rising tide of Islam. Sigismund, King of Hungary, felt the danger of that power pressing on his frontiers, and succeeded in moving the sympathies of other members of the Catholic Church. So when Pope Boniface IX, in 1394, proclaimed a crusade against the Osmanli, many of the martial youth of France and Burgundy, set free by the end of the one hundred years’ war with England, joined in this new crusade. Count de la Manche, three cousins of the King of France, James of Bourbon, Henri and Philippe de Bar, acted as commanders under Count de Nevers; besides these were other Frankish nobles, Philippe of Artois, Comte d’Eu, and Constable of France, Lord de Courcy, Guy de la Tremouille, Jean de Vienne, Admiral of France, St. Pol. Montmorel, and Reginald de Roze, marched from France, and on their way through Germany were joined by Frederic, Count of Hohenzollern, Grand Commander of the Teutonic Order, and Grand Master Philibert de Naillac, who came from Rhodes with a strong body of Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. There came also Bavarian knights, under the Elector Palatine, and the Count of Mumpelsgarde; Styria sent its contingent under Count de Cilly. In all, some ten to twelve thousand of the flower of Western chivalry came down the Danube, full of high pride, and boasting that “if the sky should fall, they would uphold it on the point of their spears.” Myrtché, Prince of Wallachia, though vassal and tributary to the Sultan, had been induced to tempt the fortunes of war once more, and joined the hosts of the Crusaders.
Bajazet was away in Asia, but his general, Yoglan Bey, defended Nicopolis stoutly against the Crusaders, who closely invested it, and so gained time for his master. Swiftly and silently came Bajazet, with his well-trained, well-disciplined army, and the Christian knights at table on the 24th September, 1396, were suddenly informed that a large Turkish army was bearing down upon them. The Franks flew to arms and charged recklessly into battle; their impetuosity and want of discipline proved their undoing, and by evening Bajazet had vanquished this last crusade against the rising fortunes of Islam. King Sigismund escaped; most of the prisoners taken by the Turks were massacred, and those who were spared lived weary months in captivity at Broussa until ransomed in 1397.
Thus was the West defeated in its attempt at rescuing Eastern Christians, and Bajazet’s victorious armies moved on to new conquests; they overran and devastated Styria and southern Hungary, marched through the pass of Thermopylæ, where there was no Leonidas and his devoted band to bid them halt, and under their conquering Sultan, Locris, Phocis, and Bœotia fell to the sword of Othman, till finally the whole Peloponese was a Turkish province.
Constantinople, the only remaining portion of the Greek Emperor, had escaped so far, but now its fate seemed about to be sealed when another man, as great, perhaps, as Bajazet himself, came out of Asia—Tamerlane and his Mongolian hordes.
Timour the Tartar, Timourlenk, Tamerlane, as he is variously called, was born near Samarkand in the earlier part of the fourteenth century, and spent the first half of his life in struggling for ascendancy over the petty chiefs of rival tribes until, at the age of thirty-five, he had fought his way to undisputed pre-eminence, and was proclaimed Khan of Zagatai by the warriors of his race.