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Was the battle of Ankara the last chance for the Byzantine Empire?

The Byzantine Empire was dying. The last four hundred years had been a period of perpetual decline. The devastating defeats at Manzikert and Myriocephalum had cost them almost all of Asia Minor and in Europe the peripheral provinces had been conceded. Things could not have gotten worse but somehow they did when Constantinople fell to the treacherous Fourth Crusade in 1204, fragmenting the empire and although fifty-seven years later Byzantium was restored it was a shadow of its former self. After the euphoria of the restoration had died down, the next century and a half was blighted by the inability to prevent foreign interference, especially by Italian city-states like Venice, and the expansion of the Ottoman emirate of north-eastern Anatolia. By 1400, Byzantine territory amounted to little more than Constantinople itself and half of the Peloponnese. From behind the vast walls and defences of ‘the second Rome’ , the Byzantines could only watch as their once mighty empire paled into insignificance. However, was there to be on final opportunity for them to pull themselves out of the rut?

In 1402, just north of the modern day capital of Turkey, Ankara, two Muslim armies met in an ‘ultimate trial of strength’. The defeat and dismembering of the Ottoman Empire by Timur’s Mongol hordes handed the Byzantines a chance to rebuild a meaningful empire. However, little over half a century later, a twenty-one-year-old Turkish Sultan extinguished the last flame of the Roman Empire. Had 28th of July 1402 been the last chance for the fledging Byzantines or did the defeat of Bayezit I merely postpone the inevitable? To answer this question, we must investigate the state of the Byzantine Empire at the turn of the fifteenth century, its ability to respond to any advantage or opportunity and the reconstitution of the Ottoman Sultanate after 1402. It is only through this kind of in depth scrutiny that we can determine whether the Byzantines could have clawed their way back to prominence or if they had already reached the point of no return long before the Lame squared up to the Yildirim outside Ankara.

As I have already suggested, the Byzantine Empire of the fourteenth century was so reduced and de-habilitated that it was unidentifiable as the great empire of Justinian or Heraclius. By the 1370s, the helplessness of the empire and its emperor, John V Palaeologus (1341-91), was on show for everyone to see. While on a visit to the west to beg for aid, the basileus became a virtual prisoner in the mercantile republic of Venice because he could not pay the accumulating interest on the loan of 30,000 ducats taken out by the empress Anne in 1343 against the value of the imperial crown jewels now held in pawn by the Doge but even more embarrassing was that he did not have enough money to pay his way home. In the Balkans the situation continually got worse for the Byzantines as on 26th September 1371, the last remaining power was crushed when the Turks destroyed the Serbian army at the river Marista, forcing them to accept vassalage, pay tribute and supply military assistance. With almost the entirety of the lands south of the Danube under the Ottoman yoke, any effective western aid in the form of a crusade was impossible. John, with no help forthcoming and any resistance being useless plus the undermining of his position by his own son, had no other choice but to accept Turkish suzerainty in 1373. John Palaeologus gets heavily criticised for his capitulation to the Ottoman bey but in reality, he had no other option. His capital was not the rich commercial centre it had once been and had never fully recovered from the crusader sack in 1204 and more recently the epidemic of bubonic plague, known to history as the Black Death. This dismal picture made John realise that it was better to accept Ottoman authority, saving something from the wreckage, rather than to settle in for a siege that his beleaguered, malnourished and under-populated people could not survive.

The next decade was to make matters even worse as the empire imploded and tore itself apart. John’s son Andronicus rose in revolt and civil war broke out with each side supporting either a Venetian or Genoese presence on the island of Tenedos. However, it was not hard to see that the real power and authority lay with Murad I and the imperial ruler of Byzantium was only chosen with his backing, depending on who offered the better concessions. First it was the half blind Andronicus, crowned Andronicus IV (1376-79) in 1376 after promising Murad Gallipoli, who defeated his father and brother, Manuel, with a Turkish force of cavalry and infantry; but only three years later, the Ottoman bey received an even better deal from John and Manuel. After reinstating the elder Palaeologus as the senior basileus, Murad obtained an increased tribute, additional military assistance and the last Byzantine possession in Asia Minor, the city of Philadelphia. Even after the death of Andronicus IV, the Byzantines could not pull together to fight a concerted war against her enemies as Manuel and John had fallen out over the Manuel’s treatment in the settlement of 1381. As Manuel continued to resist the Turkish advance as governor of Thessalonica, John followed a policy of appeasement and defeatism, which, while proved right by the continued existence of the disintegrating empire, was unacceptable to his second son and now heir-apparent. This family infighting was a trademark of the Palaeologi and was one of the main reasons why the empire started to fall apart almost as soon as it was restored in 1261. How could the Byzantines afford to fight wars against Serbs, Bulgars and Turks when it spent all its remaining money and used all its meagre resources fighting against itself?

John V died on 16th February 1391 after nearly half a century on the imperial throne, and while his reign had been extraordinary for its length, the longest in Roman/Byzantine history, for all intents and purposes it had been too long. His passive obedience to the Turks had turned both his sons against him and left the empire as a ragtag collection of small despotates led by a decaying city. However, given the situation he had inherited with enemies everywhere in Europe, be they the empires of Serbia and Bulgaria, the principality of Achaea or the Genoese and Venetians, all vying for Byzantine territory coupled with the meteoric rise of the Ottomans on his eastern frontier, John was fighting a lost battle. By his death it had gotten even worse as any chance of galvanising support throughout the Christian states in the Balkans had been snuffed out as the Ottoman juggernaut rolled its way to a Danube frontier and with western aid far from forthcoming, the situation was bleak and resistance was futile.

By 1400, it was obvious to most that the Byzantines were going down but thanks to the last three emperors it would go down fighting. The first of these was Manuel II (1391-1425), whose route to the purple had been far from straightforward. However, he had proved himself to be a man of action saving his father on two separate occasions with complete success and within days of his succession had again showed his mettle. On 7th March 1391, he sneaked away from Bayezit’s camp, for as a vassal he had been forced to go on campaign with his Turkish suzerain, returning to Constantinople to assume the throne. This assumption of authority without his approval enraged the Sultan , who contrived to humiliate the new basileus. Such was his power over the Byzantine ‘Empire’, he was able to hand over the entire trade monopoly of Constantinople to Turkish traders and make them exempt from imperial law and virtually autonomous within Byzantine territory. Worse was to come for only two months after his accession, Manuel was forced to rejoin the Sultan to campaign in the Black Sea. Again this shows the depths to which Byzantium had fallen for even a strong and capable leader like Manuel, who in better circumstances could have been remembered as a great ruler, was reduced by his lack of resources or real power to a mere lieutenant in the army of his infidel overlord.

It seems that the situation in the Balkans eventually roused the west to send a crusade against the Turks. This may have been a chance for Byzantium and Christendom as a whole to turn the tide against the rampant Ottomans. The leader of the movement was Sigismund of Luxemburg, the current King of Hungary and future Holy Roman Emperor. His fear of Ottoman incursions along the Turko-Hungarian border was the real reason for the crusade instead of helping the Christians in the Balkans. However, the sensational defeat of the crusader army of French, German and Hungarian knights outside Nicopolis by Bayezit I was traumatic for all Christians involved. For the west it killed off any thoughts of crusading against the infidel for nearly fifty years as the first encounter between Islamic Turks and Catholic Christians did not augur well for the future. For the Balkans it ended any hope for foreign aid against their conquerors and brought an even sterner Sultan who began to annex territory instead of ruling over vassals. In the aftermath of Nicopolis, Constantinople was placed under an almost constant blockade and the occupants could only watch as a huge castle rose on the Asian coast of the Bosphorous, now known as Anadolu Hisar, from where the Sultan could partially control what came through the Sea of Marmara.

By the close of the fourteenth century the emperor’s position was almost untenable. Repeated efforts to acquire support from the west had been a failure and Manuel now resolved to travel to Paris to plead for aid from the French King, Charles VI, in person. This desperate call for help matched the desperate situation, and was only to be met with further disappointment. While many western sovereigns promised military and financial aid and treated Manuel as the principal defender of eastern Christendom, the idea of a full-blown international crusade was refused outright. Byzantium looked set to capitulate. This was before Manuel got word from Constantinople that Bayezit was now a prisoner, his army was in pieces and his empire divided between his feuding sons. A possible opportunity had arisen, but despite having a capable basileus it was very unlikely that that a malnourished and demoralised Byzantium could ever amount the spectacular campaign that would be needed to relive the glory of the past.

Before we look at the battle of Ankara and the consequences for the Byzantines and the Ottomans, we must first look at the sultanate of Bayezit and how its meteoric rise had changed the face of Asia Minor and the Balkans. The thirteenth century Mongol retreat from Anatolia created a power vacuum in which several small Turcoman states fought for prominence. These new ghazi emirates not only fought each other but also on occasion joined together to attack the Byzantines and by the middle of the fourteenth century had driven them from Asia altogether. By far the most important of these emirates was based on the city of Sögüt. Upon the accession of Osman I in 1281, for whom the Ottoman Empire was named, the ghazi emirates were still under the yolk of the Seljuks and then that of the Mongol governors in the early 1300s. However, as the Ilkhanate began to falter, these Turcoman states drifted out of the Mongol sphere and were free to govern themselves. The Ottomans proved extremely capable at self-government and by the time of Osman’s death and the capture of Bursa in 1326, the Ottoman emirate had be transformed from a

…minor Seljuk barony into a principality covering most of the northwest of Anatolia.

Under Osman’s successor, Orkhan (1326-60), the Ottomans continued to expand in all directions, pushing east to absorb some of the smaller emirates and establishing themselves on the shores of the Sea of Marmara with the capture of Nicaea in 1331 and the absorption of the Karasi emirate in 1345. It is from this position that the Ottoman expansion began in earnest. Lured by the riches of Europe and the chance to become the heirs to the Byzantine Empire, Orkhan attacked and captured Gallipoli in 1354, the first Ottoman possession in Europe. The Ottomans were aided in their conquests by the disintegration of not only the Byzantine Empire but also of the Serbian Empire. At its height, the ‘Empire of the Serbs and Greeks’ had covered Serbia, Albania, Epirus and most of Macedonia but following the death of Stefan Dushan in 1355, this much-vaunted empire fell apart, with the Albanians gaining their independence and the remnant dissolving into half a dozen inconsequential principalities. The desperate situation in Greece emboldened the Ottomans further and 1361 proved to be pivotal year for the blossoming empire for not only did they occupy Ankara in the east they also advanced into Byzantine territory and captured Adrianople, renamed Edirne. Ottoman ambition was further displayed by the moving of their capital to this conquered city on the European continent and the Christian states seemed powerless to stop the Turkish onslaught. The consequences for Constantinople were dire indeed for not only was she no longer in command of the Hellespont but her land connections to her remaining Greek territories were compromised by Turkish raiders and more disastrous was that her link to the other Christian states was being threatened. Byzantium was in trouble of being isolated and cut off.

Over the next twenty years, Murad I (1360-89) established control over Thrace, successfully defended it from Serbs and Bulgars and by the 1380s had begun to subjugate these peoples. However, the Turks did not have it all their own way. In 1387, the Turkish vanguard force got overzealous and advanced deep into Bosnian territory and was defeated at Plochnik and more seriously the following year. However, the speed and lethality of Murad’s response doused any Byzantine hopes that a new Serbo-Bosnian alliance between Lazar and Tvrtko could come to their rescue. The Ottoman bey gathered a massive army from Anatolia and marched to crush the resistance. The two forces met on the Field of Blackbirds, Kossovo Polye. Murad did not survive the encounter but the battle ended in a crushing victory for the Ottomans and the total defeat of the Slavic allies. The threat of isolation became a reality for the Byzantines as almost all of the Balkans was forced to recognise Ottoman superiority. The weakness of Byzantium was all too obvious as it had come to depend on its former provinces, like Serbia and Bulgaria, to defend it from the infidel and following 1389, under the vassalage of her implacable foe, it appeared to be only a matter of time before Byzantium was finished.

Nor did the new Ottoman ruler offer any respite for the Byzantines, for if the reign of Murad had been remarkable for its steady expansion rather than its speed, the man who succeeded him after Kossovo was like lightning. Murad’s son, Bayezit I (1389-1402), demanded a much quicker pace to the Ottoman expansion and for his energy, courage and rapidity, he was to earn the title Yildirim – ‘the Thunderbolt’. He swiftly enforced the vassalage of Serbia by marrying his sister to Lazar’s son, Stephen, before marching to Anatolia to enlarge his territory. In 1390, the emirates of Saruhan, Aydin and Menteshe quickly succumbed in the face of the Thunderbolt and over the next five years he was to make significant gains throughout Asia and Europe, with Bosnia and Wallachia being added to his long list of tributaries and the annexing of Jandar, Bulgaria and much of Greece.

This annexation of territory marks a watershed in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Since its foundation, the Ottoman dynasty had depended on their military strength to keep their subjects under control but now as the empire grew a more centralised power base was required to bring order to the diverse group of peoples under the Turkish umbrella. This is shown by the growing importance of Edirne as not only a strategic military post but also as centre of administration. Bayezit aided this centralisation by having himself crowned Sultan and the continued annexing of territory. These new territories were given a regional governor to maintain order, collect taxes and raise troops from the local subject peoples. This political infrastructure meant that now even if a Balkan or western army could defeat the seemingly invincible Turkish forces, the Ottomans would have something to fall back on. By 1400, Bayezit had completed the conquest of Anatolia after defeating Sivas and D’hul-Qadr. The only blemish on his sizable empire was the city of Constantinople itself and after having besieged it on and off for nearly seven years, Bayezit looked certain to capture the bastion of Christianity, however, his conquests in Anatolia had given the Ottomans a border with the aggressively expansionist empire of Timur and the Great Emir had set his sights on the thriving Turkish state. The Sultan’s ambition was about to get the better of him.

The roots of Timur’s empire lie in the thirteenth century when the nomadic empire established by Genghis Khan had grown to become the largest continuous land empire the world had ever seen. The following century had seen the central authority of the kagan, the khan of khans, diminish and the Mongol empire had split into four separate khanates: the Yuan dynasty in China, the Chagadai Khanate in middle Asia, the Ilkhans in Persia and the Golden Horde in Russia. With regards to 1402, the Chagadai Khanate is the important one. The heirs of Genghis’s second son ruled over a vast expanse riddled with religious dissensions where Buddhism, Islam, shamanism and Tibetan ideologies interfaced. Unlike the other Mongol influenced states, Chagadai retained strong nomadic traditions and because of this, despite incorporating cities like Bukhara and Samarkand, it was regarded as a backwater. However, it is from this backwater that the next Genghisid conqueror was to appear. In the 1360s, Timur seized control of the Chagadai Khanate and quickly pushed into Persia, establishing his capital at Samarkand in 1365. The next thirty years saw Timur expand his territory in all directions; in Persia, he ended the Ilkhanate; in Russia, he reached the north shore of the Black Sea and destroyed the capital of the Golden Horde and in 1398 he destroyed the Delhi Sultanate.

Having subjugated his neighbours to the north, south and east, there was only one direction left to look. This need for conquest is explained by the nature of Timur’s military machine. Like Mongol armies of the past, his hordes ran on plunder and soon emptied any land it occupied forcing Timur to look further afield and wage a military campaign almost every year. From his bases in Iraq and Iran, the Great Emir now pushed into the Levant, picking a fight with the Mamluks. The capture of Damascus and Aleppo in 1401 quickly subdued the slave warrior empire and using the pretext that fugitives had fled into Ottoman territory, Timur squared up to Bayezit. It is interesting that both the protagonists were Turcoman by race and Muslim by religion. This shows that it was not religious conviction that fuelled Timurid expansion and the so-called ‘enemies of the faith’ were not the targets, with the expulsion of the Knights of St. John from Smyrna and the ransacking of Georgia as the only sign of anti-Christian activity.

Despite the reputation that the victories in Russia, Persia, India and the Levant had brought Timur, the Ottoman Sultan eagerly accepted this Mongol challenge. Living up to his reputation, Bayezit, breaking off the siege of Constantinople, quickly marched to his eastern frontier to meet the Great Emir. However, this time his eagerness was to be his undoing. As he arrived east he found to his horror that Timur had out-manoeuvred him and was now marching unmolested into the heartland of the Ottoman Empire. With water in short supply, Bayezit must have realised his error for now, instead of having a favourable position in his own territory from which to wait for Timur’s attack, he faced an exhausting counter-march to fight an enemy that had time to choose a battlefield that suited its own strengths. This is exactly what happened as the two armies met outside Ankara with Timur choosing flat terrain to take advantage of his greater numbers and superb cavalry and horse archers. Bayezit’s fate was sealed when his own Mongolian cavalry, unwilling to fight their kinsmen and possibly with Timurid gold lining their pockets, deserted and joined the enemy. Thoroughly out-classed and out-numbered, Bayezit and his army were surrounded and routed with 15,000 casualties. Bayezit was taken prisoner and supposedly carried in an iron cage and used as a footstool and mounting block. Despite his ignominious end, we cannot underestimate the impact Bayezit had on the Ottomans and Byzantines. He showed himself time and again to be a great warrior, doubling the size of his empire and proving himself every bit worthy of his cognomen, Yildirim.
When he came to the throne in 1389, the sleeping giant of the Ottoman Empire had only just begun to show its devastating potential. Under Bayezit, this giant became a monster that both east and west had to fear, and had ended any chance for the Byzantines. In fact his death was to prove a brief respite for the dying empire.

Following his crushing victory at Ankara, Timur spent much of the next year dismembering the Ottoman Empire. He reinstated many of the princes and emirates deposed by Bayezit and received the submission of the house of Osman, establishing one of Bayezit’s sons, Musa, as the new Sultan and as a vassal. This succession was to cause civil war throughout Ottoman territory, however, as Timur returned east in 1404, the situation could have been a lot worse for the Ottomans. The eldest surviving son of Bayezit, Süleyman, escaped to Europe with most of the royal treasury and while the empire was split, the Rumeli remained firmly in the Ottoman grip. Indeed, it could have been a lot worse for all concerned in the region, for if Gibbon is to be believed, Timur entertained the idea of crossing into Europe and was only stopped by the combined presence of the Turkish and Byzantine navies.

However, despite their survival and relative state of well being, the Ottomans were divided and severely weakened, giving an opportunity to Byzantium and Christendom to strengthen their positions. Upon hearing of Ankara, Manuel was in no rush to return home for he saw this as the best chance to enlist a concerted Christian offensive in the Balkans. He had discussions with several Italian city-states and found the Venetians especially accommodating. This is yet another example of the Venetians getting involved in the east and again their reasons appear to have been less than religiously driven. It is more likely that they hoped to secure a monopoly over the Byzantine trade routes that had been lost in 1391. Whatever the reasons, Manuel was happy with the proposed and returned home in April 1403 furnished with three galleys and a promise of more. The diplomatic situation in Constantinople was extremely surprising. Süleyman had decided to find some allies and his terms must have seemed too good to be true for the Byzantines. The treaty signed between Süleyman and Byzantium, Genoa, Venice, Rhodes, Naxos and Serbia released the Byzantines from their vassalage and from all tribute. Instead, the Turkish Prince accepted freely the suzerainty of the Byzantine emperor and returned Thessalonica, Mount Athos and much of the Black Sea coast in return for being recognised as the ruler of Thrace from his palace in Edirne. However surprising the Prince’s offer was, the motives are understandable. The Ottomans did not follow primogeniture succession and Bayezit had not named a successor, and now there were four sons fighting over the crown. Manuel could not have seen this treaty as a long-term arrangement but it gave him more resources to shore up his defences against the inevitable confrontation with the other sons of Bayezit and the strategic position of Byzantium meant that Süleyman needed Byzantium as much as Byzantium needed him for now.

The next seven years was a period of relative stability, however, for Manuel it did not last long enough. In 1410, the emperor was engaged in bringing the Morea and Thessalonica back under his direct authority, providing a united front against foreign invasion but before he was finished, Musa, ‘who had inherited all the savagery of his father’, attacked and captured Edirne. Süleyman was taken prisoner and promptly strangled. Manuel’s advantage had gone as Musa nullified the 1403 treaty and laid siege to Thessalonica and just to show that he meant business, the Sultan attacked Constantinople and although the land walls held, it proved that the honeymoon period after Ankara was over. The Byzantine Emperor could no longer rely on anyone else and was forced to engage himself in a dangerous political game, something that he proved extremely adept at. By offering support to Musa’s brother Mehmet, Manuel was able to reignite the polarised civil war and when Musa was defeated and killed at Camurlu in Serbia in 1413 a grateful Mehmet conferred all the concessions made by Süleyman a decade before. It appeared that as long as the diplomat Manuel and the balanced Mehmet ruled their respective states the situation would remain better than it had been for the last twenty-five years and that Byzantium may well have a chance.

The question posed in the title of this essay was whether or not the battle of Ankara was the last chance for the Byzantine Empire but this immediately begs the question; the last chance to do what? If it suggests a last chance for survival, implying that Bayezit was about to snuff out Constantinople in 1402, then yes, Timur’s victory gave Byzantium another half a century of existence. However, if it is taken as the last chance to make the Byzantine Empire as great as it had once been then the answer has to be a definite no. Byzantium had been suffering terribly for over three hundred years and by the fifteenth century the situation had become terminal. The only hope to prolong the inevitable was to follow the diplomatic line of Manuel Palaeologus as by this time the ‘empire’ only survived due to the goodwill of the Ottoman Sultan. However, the reaction of the war faction in Constantinople to the accession of Murad II (1421-51) proved that the Byzantines would always try to punch above their weight. The last generation sealed its own fate by backing a rival claimant to the Ottoman throne, contracting the enmity of Murad and his son Mehmet II (1451-81). The situation was hopeless and the Byzantines were powerless to resist the rampant Murad as his forces besieged Thessalonica and Constantinople. The Byzantines did show that they were still willing to fight as they held out in the face of a Murad’s siege engines but the end result of the siege of Thessalonica displayed how far the empire had fallen when instead of see the city fall into Ottoman hands, which is was about to, Manuel’s son, Andronicus, handed the city over the authors of many Byzantine woes, the Venetians. By the death of Matthew the monk on 22nd July 1425, the empire of Byzantium was effectively bordered by the walls of Constantinople and was only surviving because the Ottoman Sultan did not want to commit the resources and manpower needed to capture what was a minor blemish on his large empire.

By 1451, however, the writing was on the wall. The new Ottoman Sultan was hell bent on taking Constantinople and once he had invested in the siege, it was only a matter of time before the land walls gave out against the massive guns brought to bear against them. In a sense the fall of Constantinople was to be an anti-climax as there was no great western crusade to prevent the last bastion of eastern Christendom falling into the hands of the infidel and perhaps in another sense it was long overdue. This idea of being behind schedule comes from the suggestion that if it had not been for the battle of Ankara then Bayezit may have mopped up the remnants of the empire half a century earlier. Timur’s western adventure had not saved the Byzantine Empire, merely prolonged its miserable existence in an impossible situation. Manuel had tried his best and in some ways had taken full advantage of the situation presented to him but Byzantium needed more than a clever diplomat. Great leaders and generals had in the past rescued what had looked liked impossible situations but by 1402 the recovery of the Byzantine Empire was beyond the impossible, requiring a miracle; a miracle that not even god-fearing and pious men like the last of the Palaeologi could provide.


Bibliography

Arbel, B. et al. (1989), Latins and Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean
Barker, J.W. (1969), Manuel II Palaeologus: A Study in Late Byzantine Statesmanship
Gibbon, E. (1788), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Hookham, H. (1962), Tamburlaine the Conqueror
Kinross, Lord (1977), The Ottoman Centuries
Man, J. (2004), Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection
Nicol, D.M. (1972), The Last Centuries of Byzantium
Nicol, D.M. (1979), The Final Years of the Byzantine Empire
Norwich, J.J. (1997), A Short History of Byzantium
Vasiliev, A.A. (1952), History of the Byzantine Empire

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