Beyezit’s nemesis sprang up in the form of a Tartar warrior whose power and energy surpassed his own. Tamerlane. He was born in Samarkand in 1346, and by the age of forty he ruled an empire, which stretched across Central Asia. Marching south to the invasion of Syria in 1398 he was met by a deputation of exiled Anatolian emirs, along with ambassadors from Constantinople, Genoa, Venice and even Charles VI of France, who urged him to attack the Ottoman Empire. This he refused to do; but he did pluck a few border cities from it en passant.

It was not in Bayezit’s nature to swallow the insult. A confrontation was inevitable. Bayezit sought battle eagerly enough. Tamerlane approached the conflict with relative indifference, but total concentration. Bayezit disposed his troops with sullen carelessness on the day of battle, outside Ankara in 1402. Tamerlane’s army as twice the size of his, and had recently been paid; with it were emirs who knew the terrain well.

After a hunting expedition Bayezit’s troops found that their camp had been shrewdly occupied in their absence, seizing the only local water source. Out of sheer thirst Bayezit’s shattered troops were forced to give battle right away. His Anatolian troops and Tartars deserted to their emirs at Tamerlane’s side as soon as battle began. Fighting into the sun, choked with the dust beaten up from the arid ground by the hooves of thousands of Mongol horsemen, shaken by the onslaught of Tamerlane’s Indian elephant cops and hopelessly outnumbered out-numbered. Bayezit was captured, and latter dashed out his brains on the bars of his cage.

Before he left the area, Tamerlane made a lunge at Bursa, which sent Prince Suleyman scurrying for cover in Europe. The conqueror took Izmir, the western Anatolian base of the knights of St John, which Bayezit had never managed to do; and there finding the pyramid he built with the severed heads of the garrison and the population combined too small, he had the heap repacked, with alternate layers of heads and mud. As he left the region the nervous citizens of Ephesus sent their children to meet him, singing, but the gruesome Tartar growled, ‘What is this noise?’ and had his cavalry ride then all down; then he went on his way, and managed to die with his boots on, heading for China, in his seventy-first year.

The young Ottoman Empire could have collapsed. The emirs, exulting galloped back to their palaces, rent rolls and old feuds. The Ghazis returned to their old frontier freedoms. The Christians of the west, on news of Bayezit’s defeat, relaxed and forgot about the Turks. Byzantium heaved a sigh of relief and the surviving Ottoman brothers began to fight out a devious civil war between themselves. The Ottomans, however did not often repeat their mistakes. ‘I am bound to be equal to the needs of both continents,’ Murad’s son Mehmet II reminded the Byzantines, whose city, of course, lay between them, like a hinge.

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