What had happened was that Timour the Lame had challenged, or rather ordered, Bajazed to return to the Greeks all the cities and territories he had captured. The order was categorical and, given to a ferocious barbarian like Bajazed, drove him to fury. The man who gave it was, however, accustomed to be obeyed.
Timour[117] or Tamarlane was a Mahometan and a Turk, though he claimed to be of the same race as Genghis, who was a Mongol. Under him the warrior shepherds of the south plains of Asia came westward in even greater numbers than they had done under his famous predecessor. They advanced in well-organised armies, under generals who seem to have had intelligence everywhere of the enemy’s country and great military skill. After having annexed Kharizon and Persia to Transoxiana and reduced Turkestan to obedience, Timour turned westward. In 1386, he appeared at Tiflis, which he subsequently captured at the head of an enormous host estimated at eight hundred thousand men. At Erzingan he put all the Turks sent there by the sultan to the sword.
Bajazed seems from the first to have been alarmed and went himself to Erzingan in 1394, but returned to Europe without making any attempt to resist the invader, probably believing that Timour had no intention of coming further west.[118] He soon learned his mistake. Timour was not merely as great and cruel a barbarian but as ambitious as Bajazed himself. In 1395, while the emperor was in the Balkan peninsula, Timour summoned the large and populous city of Sivas to surrender. The inhabitants twice refused. Meantime, he had undermined the wall. On their second refusal, his host stormed and captured the city. A hundred and twenty thousand captives were massacred. Bajazed’s son was made prisoner and put to death. A large number of the prisoners were buried alive, being covered over in a pit with planks instead of earth so as to prolong their torture. Bajazed was relieved when he learned that from Sivas, which had been the strongest place in his empire, the ever victorious army had gone towards Syria.
Timour directed his huge host towards the frontier city of the sultan of Egypt—namely, Aleppo—his object being to punish the sultan for his breach of faith in imprisoning his ambassador and loading him with irons. On his march to that city, he spread desolation everywhere, capturing or receiving the submission of Malatia, Aintab, and other important towns. At Aleppo, the army of the Egyptian sultan resisted. A terrible battle followed, but the Egyptians were beaten, and every man, woman, and child in the city was murdered.
After the capture of Aleppo, Hama and Baalbek were occupied. The latter, which, like so many other once famous cities, has become under Turkish rule a desolation with only a few miserable huts amid its superb ruins, was still a populous city, and contained large stores of provisions. Thence he went to Damascus and in January 1401 defeated the remainder of the Egyptian army in a battle which was hardly less bloody than that before Aleppo. The garrison, composed mostly of Circassian mamelukes and negroes, capitulated, but the chief was put to death for having been so slow in surrendering. Possibly by accident, the whole city was burned.
Timour was stopped from advancing to Jerusalem by a plague of locusts, which ate up every green thing. The same cause rendered it impossible to attack Egypt, whose sultan had refused to surrender Syria.[119]
From Damascus, Timour went to Bagdad, which was held by contemporaries to be impregnable. Amid the heat of a July day, when the defenders had everywhere sought shade, Timour ordered a general assault, and in a few minutes the standard of one of his sheiks, with its horsetail and its golden crescent, was raised upon the walls.[120] Then followed the usual carnage attending Timour’s captures. The mosques, schools, and convents with their occupiers were spared: so also were the imaums and the professors. All the remainder of the population between the ages of eight and eighty were slaughtered. Every soldier of Timour, of whom there were ninety thousand, as the price of his own safety, had to produce a head. The bloody trophies were, as was customary in Timour’s army, piled up in pyramids before the gates of the city.
It was on his return northwards from Damascus that, in 1402, Timour sent the message to Bajazed which at once forced him to raise the siege of Constantinople. Contemporaneously with this message, Timour requested the Genoese in Galata and at Genoa to obtain aid from the West and to co-operate with him to crush the Turkish sultan.
Timour organised or sent a large army on the Don and around the Sea of Azof on the Cimmerian Bosporus, connecting that sea with the Euxine, in order that, in case of need, it might act with his huge host now advancing towards the Black Sea from the south. His main body Bajazed’s reply to Timour’s summons. passed across the plain of Erzingan, and at Sivas Timour received the answer of Bajazed. The response was as insulting as a Turkish barbarian could make it. Bajazed summoned Timour to appear before him and declared that if he did not obey, the women of his harem should be divorced from him, putting his threat in what to a Mahometan was a specially indecent manner. All the usual civilities in written communications between sovereigns were omitted, though the Asiatic conqueror himself had carefully observed them. Timour’s remark when he saw the sultan’s letter contained the name of Timour in black writing under that of Bajazed which was in gold, was ‘The son of Murad is mad!’ When he read the insulting threat as to his harem, Timour kept himself well in hand, but, turning to the ambassador who had brought the letter, told him that he would have cut off his head and those of the members of his suite if it were not the rule among sovereigns to respect the lives of ambassadors. The representative of Bajazed was, however, compelled to be present at a review of the whole of his troops and was requested to return to his master and relate what he had seen.
Meantime, Bajazed had determined to strike quickly and heavily against Timour and by the rapidity of his movements justified the name of Ilderim. His opponent’s forces, however, were hardly less mobile. Timour’s huge army marched in twelve days from Sivas to Angora. The officer in command of that city refused to surrender. Timour made his arrangements for the siege in such a manner as to compel or induce Bajazed to occupy a position where he would have to fight at a disadvantage. He undermined the walls and diverted the small stream which supplied it with water. Hardly had these works been commenced before he learned that Ilderim was within nine miles of the city. Timour raised the siege and transferred his camp to the opposite side of the stream, which thus protected one side of his army while a ditch and a strong palisade guarded the other. Then in an exceptionally strong position he waited to be attacked.