The Western settlers hastened to come to terms with Timour, who, like his great predecessor, was not opposed to any Christians on account of their religion. The Genoese in Phocaea, in the islands of Mitylene and Scios, sent to make submission, and became tributaries of the conqueror.
Smyrna was the last of Timour’s conquests in western Asia Minor. He went to Ephesus, and during the thirty days he passed in that city his army ravaged the whole of the fertile country in its neighbourhood and in the valley of the Cayster. The cruelties committed by his horde would be incredible if they were not continually repeated during the course of Tartar and Turkish history. In fairness, it must also be said that the Ottoman Turks, although their history has been a long series of massacres, have rarely been guilty of the wantonness of cruelty which Greek and Turkish authors agree in attributing to the Tartar army. One example must suffice. The children of a town on which Timour was marching were sent out by their parents reciting verses from the Koran to ask for the generosity of their conqueror but co-religionist. On asking what the children were whining for, and being told that they were begging him to spare the town, he ordered his cavalry to ride through them and trample them out: an order that was forthwith obeyed.
Timour, wearied with victories in the west, now determined to leave Asia Minor and return to Samarcand. This resolution he carried out. He contemplated the invasion of Death of Timour. China, but in the midst of his preparations died, in 1405, after a reign of thirty-six years.
Bajazed the Thunderbolt died at Aksheir two years earlier, and his son Mousa was permitted to transport his body to Brousa.[123]
The battle of Angora gave the greatest check to the Ottoman power which it had yet received. Considering the number of men engaged and the complete victory obtained by Timour, one might have expected it to have been fruitful in more enduring consequences than it produced. But its immediate results, though not far-reaching, were important. The fourteen years’ victorious career of the Thunderbolt was brought suddenly to an end. The empire of the Ottoman Turks which he had largely increased, and especially by the addition to it of the north-west portion of Asia Minor, was for a time shattered to pieces. The sons of the vanquished sultan, after the departure of Timour and his host, were quarrelling over the possession of what remained. Three of them gained territories in Asia Minor, while the eldest, Suliman, retook possession of the lands held by his father in Europe. Most of the leaders of the Ottoman host, the viziers, governors, and scheiks, had been either captured or slain, and in consequence the sons of Bajazed fighting in Asia Minor found themselves destitute of efficient servants for the organisation of government in the territories which they seized on the departure of Timour.
The progress of the great Asiatic horde created a profound impression in Western Europe. The eagerness of the Genoese to acknowledge the suzerainty of Timour gives an indication of their sense of the danger of resistance. The stories of the terrible cruelties of the Tartars lost nothing in their telling. When the news reached the neighbouring nations of Hungary and Serbia and the republics of Italy of the defeat of Bajazed, the capture of Brousa, of Smyrna, of every other town before which the Asiatic army had sat down, and of the powerlessness of the military knights, it appeared as if the West were about to be submerged by a new flood from Asia. No terror so great had threatened Europe since the time when Charles Martel defeated the Moslem hordes on the plains around Tours, or since the even more threatening attack upon Christendom when the main body of the Arab armies sat down for successive years before Constantinople and were signally defeated by the obstinacy of its defenders.
Then, when news came of the sudden departure of the Asiatics and of the breaking up of the Ottoman power, hope once more revived, and it appeared possible to the pope and Christian peoples to complete the work which Timour had begun by now offering a united opposition to the restoration of an Ottoman empire. Constantinople itself when Bajazed passed it on his way to Angora was almost the last remnant of the ancient empire, and seemed as if it required only one more attempt, and that not needing that the sultan should put forth all his strength, to secure its capture. The battle of Angora saved it and gave it half a century more of life.
A struggle which lasted for six years began between the sons of Bajazed. Suliman, in 1405, sought to ally himself with the emperor, and his proposals show how low the battle of Angora had brought the Turkish pretensions. He offered to cede Salonica and all country in the Balkan peninsula to the south-west of that city as well as the towns on the Marmora to Manuel and his son John, now associated as emperor, and to send his brother and sister as hostages to Constantinople. The arrangement was accepted.
Suliman, having thus made himself secure, attacked his brother Isa in 1405, defeated and killed him.[124] Another brother, Mousa, in the following year, attacked the combined troops of Suliman and Manuel in Thrace, but the Serbians and Bulgarians deserted the younger brother, and thereupon Suliman occupied Adrianople. Manuel consented to give his granddaughter in marriage to Suliman, who in return gave up not merely Salonica but many seaports in Asia Minor: a gift which was rather in the nature of a promise than a delivery, since they were not in his possession. Unhappily, Suliman, like many of his race, had alternate fits of great energy and great lethargy, and was given over to drunkenness and to debauchery. This caused disaffection among the Turks; and Mousa, taking advantage of it, led an army in 1409, composed of Turks and Wallachs, against him. The Janissaries, who were dissatisfied with the lack of energy displayed by their sultan, deserted and went over to the side of Mousa. Suliman fled with the intention of escaping to Constantinople, but was captured while sleeping off a drinking bout and killed.