He made Samarkand his capital, and as he proposed to conquer the whole habitable earth from there, this ambition was sure to bring him into conflict with the Osmanli on the western confines of his territory.
Tamerlane had been insulted by the Sultan of Egypt, so he marched from Sivas, which he had taken from the Turks in Bajazet’s absence, towards Syria, which experienced for two years the terror and cruelty of his arms. An interchange of letters and embassies between Bajazet and Tamerlane, on the subject of the latter’s occasional incursions into Turkish territory, served only to aggravate the tension between the two monarchs, till hostilities became the only way out of an impossible situation. Tamerlane’s forces outnumbered the hundred and twenty thousand men with which Bajazet marched against the Tartar at Sivas, but Bajazet was impatient of the warnings of his best general, who had observed a bad spirit in the army amongst the soldiers of Tartar race whom Tamerlane had corrupted, and decided to bring matters to a definite conclusion. He did, but to his own undoing, for Tamerlane out-manœuvred him at Angora, where the opposing forces met on July 20th, 1402. The Mongol army is said to have numbered eight hundred thousand, and Bajazet could not have had more than one hundred thousand to put into the field, for many had died by the way. Moreover, Tamerlane’s army was in high spirits, and well found in every way, whereas Bajazet’s troops were discontented, and large numbers of Tartars deserted from him to swell the ranks of the Mongol army, and only the Ottoman centre, where stood the Janissaries and the Servians, made any effective resistance to the fierce charges of the Tartar cavalry. At nightfall, when all was lost, Bajazet attempted to escape from the field, but his horse stumbled and fell with him, and so delivered him into the hands of his enemy. After an ineffectual attempt to escape, Bajazet, who had hitherto been kindly treated, was placed in fetters every night, and he died of a broken heart only eight months after the battle of Angora. Prince Musa was allowed to take the body of his father, Bajazet, to Broussa for burial, by Tamerlane who did not survive his fallen rival long. Tamerlane died two years later, at Otrar, while on the march to China, at the age of seventy-one, thirty-six years of which he had reigned and conquered, and shed more blood, caused more misery, than any other human before or since.
Bajazet’s misguided efforts against Tamerlane brought the Ottoman Empire, which had been gaining strength so steadily, to the verge of ruin, and calamity after calamity fell upon the House of Othman after the disaster of Angora. Civil war broke out as each son of Bajazet strove for the throne; Solyman fought against his brother Musa, and though at first successful, spoilt the results by debauchery and the cruelty with which he treated his troops, so they deserted to Musa, and Solyman was killed while endeavouring to escape to Constantinople. Musa followed in his father’s footsteps, and seems to have inherited his energy and ferocity. He thought fit to consider that the Servian Prince, vassal of the Ottoman Empire, had assisted Solyman against him, so he carried war in Servia, war with all the barbarity a Turkish Sultan and Turkish troops were capable of, and then turned towards Constantinople, for the Emperor Manuel Palæologus had been the ally of Solyman. Musa laid siege to the City, and Manuel called to Mohammed, the youngest and ablest son of Bajazet, for assistance, and so we find Ottoman troops defending the Castle of Cæsar against their own brothers.
The war between the two brothers raged with varying success till the troops of Musa, whose conduct towards them was little better than that of Solyman, ranged themselves against him at the decisive moment when the two brothers confronted each other on the field of battle. Musa was wounded in a fray with Hassan, the Aga of his Janissaries, and seeing things going against him, fled, and was found dead in a swamp near the field of battle. The only other son of Bajazet, Issa, had disappeared during the war between Solyman and Mohammed in Asia, so the latter succeeded to the throne of Turkey, and was girt with the sword of Othman.
In Mohammed I, who reigned from 1413-1421, the House of Othman put forth one of the best sovereigns of that race. He did not win such distinction in the field as did some of his predecessors and successors; his conquests were over the affections of men, for he was just and merciful. His people called him Pehlevan, Champion, for he was brave, and of great personal strength and activity; others called him Tshelebi, which suggests that he had all those attributes that make a gentleman; true to his friends, a terror to his enemies the rebellious Turcomans, his country’s historian calls him, “The Noah who preserved the Ark of the Empire, when menaced by the deluge of Tartar invasion.”
Those were troubled times, but they seem peaceful compared to the days of Mohammed I’s predecessors, and by the time death overtook Mohammed I in the eighth year of his reign, rebellions had been suppressed, order restored, and honourable peace settled for a while in Ottoman dominions. But it was broken soon after Amurath II, son of Mohammed I, had been girt with the sword of Othman at Broussa; a claimant to the throne, alleged son of Bajazet, had long been held captive by the Emperor of Byzant, who now thought fit to set up this pretender Mustapha against young Amurath. But the new Sultan, though only eighteen years of age, showed promise of the military and political abilities of the great sons of Othman from whom he was descended, and when he and Mustapha met in battle the latter was out-manœuvred and forced to flee to Gallipoli, where he sought refuge in the strong fortress. Aided by Genoese, Amurath II broke down the defences of Gallipoli, captured Mustapha, and had him put to death. Then Amurath II turned towards Constantinople to punish the Emperor for his unprovoked hostility to him. Constantinople was invested, and Amurath’s troops surged in successive waves against the Walls of Theodosius. The fight was fiercest near the Gate of St. Romanus, where a number of dervishes, headed by a renowned saint, Seid Bakhari, formed the vanguard of a forlorn hope in a desperate attack on 25th August, 1422. Among the inducements which urged these five hundred dervishes to dash out their souls against the City walls was one calculated to appeal to a Mohammedan saint, marking the ethical difference between him and the Christian variant; the many nuns in the convents of Constantinople were assigned to these pious souls as their share of the spoil. No doubt it was hoped that the company of those ladies would brighten up the monastic seclusion of the dervishes in times of peace if ever they came as intervals in the popular diversion—war. The garrison of Constantinople was making a stout defence, and might conceivably have held out by itself, but supernatural intervention was evidently called for, if only for the sake of the ladies, and the bright apparition of a virgin, robed in violet of dazzling lustre, further encouraged the besieged, while the besiegers, hearing of this interference with their business, decided to raise the siege, and try again some other day. Historians, who are always ready to discount the value of supernatural apparitions which sparkle in the sky just in the nick of time, maintain that Amurath II was drawn from the siege of Constantinople by trouble in Asia. He had a brother, another Mustapha, whom the Greek Emperor had bribed to raise rebellion in Asia Minor. The extraordinary rapidity of Amurath’s movements frustrated all young Mustapha’s plans; he fled, was caught by some of the Sultan’s officers, and hanged on the nearest tree, which act, no doubt, saved the Sultan a good deal of trouble.
Amurath returned to Europe and resumed hostilities with the Greek Emperor, not by besieging Constantinople again, but by annexing other towns here and there. He took several towns on the Black Sea coast which had held to Byzant till then, captured Thessalonica from the Venetians, and made matters easier for the campaign he was obliged to undertake against turbulent neighbours and insubordinate vassals on the Western marches of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Hungary, still smarting under the defeat of their King at Nicopolis, was roused to action by the great Hunyadi; Bosniaks and Albanians feared for their independence, and Wallachia longed to be free; Servia, too, was troublesome, under a fiery leader Vuk Brankoviç, and after much vacillation, these enemies of the Osmanli contrived to drop their jealousies for a while, and to combine against the Eastern invader. The fortunes of war went against Amurath, and his renowned opponent, Hunyadi Janos, beat his armies at Belgrade and Hermanstadt, and again at Vasag. The Allies pushed on triumphantly through Servia and Bulgaria of to-day, up to the Balkan range, where they wrested two mountain-passes, strongly defended, from the fiercely resisting Turks. Strange to say, Hunyadi did not advance on Adrianople, but returned to Pesth after a final victory at the foot of Mount Kunobitza. During most of this time Amurath had been away in Asia; he now hurried back to retrieve the fallen fortunes of his Empire in Europe, but finding that impossible, decided to consolidate what was left to him, and entered into peace negotiations with his adversaries, which ended in the Treaty of Szeggedin, in 1444; hereby George Brankoviç, son of Vuk, became independent ruler of Servia, and Wallachia was lost to Hungary.
Misfortune dogged Amurath; his eldest son Ala-ed-din died, he who had assisted in command of the Ottoman forces in Asia, his father’s right hand, and left the Sultan inconsolable, borne down by the weight of accumulating affliction. There was a second son, Mohammed, still young, and to him Amurath entrusted the throne and its heavy burdens, while he retired into dignified seclusion at Magnesia. But Mohammed was too young for the enormous responsibilities of his post, and Amurath had to revisit the scenes of his former activity from time to time. The successes of the Christians, and the retirement to Asia of Amurath, roused the Greek Emperor to fresh intrigues against his Asiatic adversary; he and the Pope induced the King of Hungary to break the oath made at the Peace of Szeggedin, Cardinal Julian salved that monarch’s conscience, and so King Ladislaus started off on another crusade against the Turk. Amurath hurried back from Asia, crossed the Hellespont with the aid of the Genoese, and met his adversaries near Varna in November, 1444. The battle raged with varying success all day, until King Ladislaus, whose horse fell with him, was captured and slain on the spot. His head impaled on a spear threw his troops into a panic; many of them perished by the sword, among them Cardinal Julian, Stephan Bathory, and many other nobles. This victory of the sword of Othman at Varna settled the fate of those vassal Slavs who had risen against the Sultan; Servia was thoroughly reconquered, Bosnia’s royal family was exterminated, and their country added to the Ottoman dominions.
Once again Amurath retired to the pleasant seclusion he had sought at Magnesia; some describe it as monastic in character, but that description sounds unlikely; at least the monasticism of the Sultan and that of Christian monks can have had little in common, the former probably allowing pleasures which a Christian monk would be bound to regard with pious horror. Alas, and I am sorry for Amurath, because he had worked hard and deserved a good time, his son Mohammed proved unfit to hold the victorious Turkish soldiery, so he was given a change at Magnesia, while his father re-established order in the army. Amurath reigned for another six years after these happenings—years which he spent usefully, in gathering in odd outlying bits of territory into the Ottoman fold. The Peleponese peninsula was made a vassal state, and Hunyadi Janos severely beaten at Kossova.
The only trouble which Amurath was unable to settle was caused by the Albanian, Scanderbeg, who defied the Sultan from his mountain fastnesses, and reigned over his wild country and fierce subjects for many years after Amurath, who had himself instructed Scanderbeg in the art of war, had been laid to rest at Broussa.