For thirty years Murad had guided the destinies of the Osmanlis with a political sagacity surpassed by no statesman of his age. It is only because we know so much more of Mohammed the Conqueror and of Soleiman the Magnificent that Murad has never received his proper place as the most remarkable and most successful statesman and warrior of the house of Osman. When we measure the difficulties which confronted him, the problems which he solved,and the results of his reign, against the deeds of his more dazzling successors, we see how easily he stands with them, if not above them. The transformation effected in his lifetime is one of the most wonderful records in all history. His conquests were to endure for five centuries, until the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878: some of them have survived the cataclysm of the recent Balkan wars.
His energy and zeal for fighting, so like his father’s, and yet put to the test of being extended over a field of action far wider than his father ever dreamed of, did not flag. He never had a disagreement with any of his generals or administrators. His system of conquest and of government, unsupported by tradition or the background of a gradual growth, fitted every condition for which it had been framed. His treatment of the Greeks showed superb skill in estimating their character. Although an infidel and enemy of Christ in the eyes of the Byzantine ecclesiastics, he handled them so much better than the popes that he won their sympathies. No more striking proof of his complete success in a problem of assimilation, at once racial as well as religious, can be found than the letter of the Orthodox patriarch written to Pope Urban VI in 1385, in which it is stated that Murad left to the Church entire liberty of action.[426]In the records of the Greek patriarchate from 1360 to 1389,[427]one does not find a single instance of complaint received of ill treatment of the priesthood by the Osmanlis.
Osman gathered around him a race, Orkhan created a state, but it was Murad who founded the empire.
Thedeath of Murad was immediately avenged upon the battle-field by the execution of the prisoners of noble birth. Practically all the Serbian aristocracy that had remained loyal to Lazar and the national cause perished.
In the midst of this bloody work, Bayezid sent servants to seek out his brother Yakub, who had distinguished himself during the battle, and was being acclaimed by his soldiers. Yakub was taken to Bayezid’s tent, and strangled with a bowstring.[428]The new emir justified this crime by a verse conveniently found for him by his theologians in the Koran: ‘So often as they return to sedition, they shall be subverted therein; and if they depart not from you, and offer you peace and restrain their hands from warring against you, take them and kill them wheresoever ye find them.’[429]They declared that the temptation to treason and revolt was always present in the brothers of the ruler, and that murder was better than sedition. These doctors of the law might better have pointed out to Bayezid the admonition of the Prophet: ‘But his soul suffered him to slay his brother, and he slew him: wherefore he became of the number of those who perish.’[430]For the abominable practice of removingpossible rival claimants by assassination, thus begun on the field of Kossova, was elevated to the dignity of a law by Mohammed II,[431]and has been until our own times a blot upon the house of Osman.
Bayezid, however, was only following the example of Christian princes of his own century. Pedro of Castille killed his brother Don Fadrique;[432]Andronicus III Comnenos of Trebizond, killed his two brothers, Michael and George;[433]and Andronicus III Palaeologos assassinated his brother when his father was dying.[434]
An order was issued from the battle-field of Kossova to the Kadi of Brusa, enjoining him to keep secret the death of Murad, and to appear to be occupied only with public rejoicing for the victory ‘won from theHungarians’. With this order, Bayezid forwarded the bodies of his father and brother for secret burial at Brusa.[435]
Agents of the Italian cities came to seek Bayezid after the battle to congratulate him, and to ask for the confirmation of the commercial privileges granted by Murad. Bayezid showed himself proud and distant. He declared that after he had conquered Hungary he would ride so far that he would come to Rome and there give his horse oats to eat upon the altar of St. Peter’s.[436]A change of attitude towards Europe is strikingly revealed in this boast. Murad, in spite of crusades projected against him, had been careful not to draw upon himself the attention, much less the ill-will, of the western Christian princes. He was aggressive, but never any more so than he needed to be for the moment at hand:and he was never aggressively Mohammedan. Bayezid, from the very beginning of his reign, took no pains to conceal his enmity to Christendom, and his desire to pose as the champion of Islam. He sought alliances with the Sultan of Egypt[437]and other Moslem rulers, and placed the utmost importance upon the extension of Ottoman sovereignty in Asia Minor.
After the bloodthirst of Kossova had been satisfied and his father’s death avenged, Bayezid was eager to enter into friendly relations with Stephen Bulcovitz, son and heir of Lazar. He felt that the Serbians had learned their lesson, and that they would be more helpful to him as allies than as crushed and sullen foes. He needed their aid in the Anatolian campaign which he was contemplating, and they were essential to the safety of his European possessions as a buffer against the Hungarians, who he knew would take the opportunity of his absence in Asia to move down the Danube. So he treated Stephen and the surviving Serbians with great kindness. Stephen received all the privileges that had belonged to his father.[438]The Serbians were assured of an equitable share of the booty in the campaigns in which they would engage. On the other hand, Stephen agreed to allow Bayezid an annual tribute, secured by the revenues of the silver mines, to command a contingent in person in the Ottoman army, and to give his sister to the Ottoman emir.[439]Kossova was forgiven on both sides.
Bayezid took Despina, daughter of Lazar, as wife by a formal marriage act, which was read in the mosque of AladjaHissar, near Krutchevatz, at the foot of Mount Iastrebatz, twenty miles north-west of Nish.[440]This was the last marriage ever contracted by a sovereign of the house of Osman.[441]It sealed an alliance that proved very advantageous to Bayezid. Throughout his life he was devoted to Despina, and his brother-in-law Stephen in turn was a devoted and steadfast friend. The Serbians were faithful allies to the Osmanlis, and fought with them at Nicopolis and Angora. On his side, Bayezid kept the allegiance of the Serbians by giving them opportunities for winning booty in the raids against the Albanians, Dalmatians, and Hungarians, and by favouring the Orthodox Church. When we see how complacently and cheerfully the Serbians—except the poets—took upon themselves the Ottoman yoke, we must believe that Kossova was regarded as a terrible calamity only by the generations of after centuries, who found the Ottoman rule harder than it had been for their ancestors.
Bayezid placed a strong Ottoman colony in Uskub, and settled Moslems in the country between Uskub and Nish.[442]There were probably many also who saw that conversion was to their advantage. However that may be, Bayezid never had any trouble from the Serbians during his reign.
Stephen Tvrtko, kral of Bosnia, did not consider Kossova a defeat. Seeing that his great enemy Murad and his great rival Lazar had found death on the battle-field, and that theOsmanlis did not follow up their victory, this view-point was natural. After Kossova, Tvrtko increased in power and prestige. He called himself king of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Dalmatia. Like Stephen Dushan, he was planning ‘for great things’ when he died in March, 1391, after a reign of thirty-eight years.[443]
Shortly before his death, Tvrtko had successfully resisted an Ottoman invasion with the help of a Hungarian army sent to him by Sigismund. His successor, Stephen Dabitcha, however, departed from this wise policy. He quarrelled with the Hungarians, and played into Bayezid’s hand by opposing Sigismund in his final effort to stem the tide of Ottoman invasion. The Bosnians paid to the full the penalty of their king’s folly. In 1398, Bosnia was invaded by a great army of Osmanlis and Serbians, who ‘destroyed almost all the country and led away the people into slavery’.[444]In spite of the sweeping assertion of the chronicler, this must have been only a raid. For, from 1398 to 1415, the Bosnians, still independent, were fighting with Ragusa and Hungary. In 1415, they voluntarily allied themselves with the Osmanlis, and repeated the same old story of the other Balkan races. Mohammed I was called in to help them against the Hungarians.[445]The Osmanlis came, and they remained.
In the second year of his reign, after he had arranged a suitablestatus quowith the Serbians of upper Macedonia, Bayezid began that policy of aggrandizement in Asia Minor which led finally to his downfall. His first encroachmentwas against Isa bey of Aïdin. Isa was too weak to oppose Bayezid single-handed. Instead of seeking to ally the independent emirs against the Osmanlis, Isa thought he could save himself with less risk by becoming a vassal of Bayezid. He was compelled to give up Ayasoluk, and make Tyra his capital. Bayezid almost immediately broke faith with Isa, and exiled him to Brusa or Nicaea, where he died.[446]His two sons, Isa and Omar, managed to escape to the court of Timur, who was rapidly becoming the most powerful Moslem ruler in Asia.
The occupation of Ephesus aroused momentarily Bayezid’s ambition to take possession of Smyrna. In 1391, he did in fact make some efforts to overpower the garrison, which was greatly weakened by pestilence.[447]Later he occupied the passes around Smyrna to prevent the entrance of provisions.[448]But Smyrna, like Constantinople, could not be starved out so long as the Osmanlis were not masters of the sea. Bayezid never pressed this mild form of siege to a definite assault. His hands were too full elsewhere. An unsuccessful assault against Smyrna would have destroyed his prestige in the new territory of Aïdin, which was not any too securely his by the suppression of its ruling family. Perhaps, also, he realized that Smyrna, more than any other place in the Levant except Rhodes, had become the city of promise to the Roman Church. He did not want to stir up an active resistance on the part of the chevaliers of Rhodes, for they might easily be induced to lend aid to the emirs whom he was destroying.
Sarukhan and Menteshe, during the reign of Murad, had lost the most virile element of their population in corsairexpeditions. The Turks of whom one reads as the roving and raiding adventurers in the Aegaean and Mediterranean during the fourteenth century were largely from these emirates. Decades of outgo without a corresponding income in fighting men so depleted the maritime emirates that they were not in a position to withstand Bayezid as they had done his father and grandfather. Their population was seafaring, and their princes were traders rather than warriors. When the armies of Bayezid invaded Sarukhan and Menteshe, the two emirs attempted no resistance. They took refuge with Bayezid, emir of Kastemuni, and abandoned their emirates to the Osmanlis.[449]
The result of the acquisition of Sarukhan, Aïdin, and Menteshe was the immediate appearance of the Osmanlis upon the Aegaean Sea. This is the beginning of the Ottoman naval power, which did not, however, have any development during the reign of Bayezid. The first Ottoman naval expedition started out in the late autumn of 1390. Sixty vessels made a descent upon Chios, and devastated the island. Negropont (Euboea) and the coast of Attica suffered the ravages of the raiders.[450]Bayezid now forbade the exportation of grain from Asia to Lemnos, Lesbos, Chios, and Rhodes. But he was hardly yet in a position to enforce this embargo.
The Christians of the Aegaean islands and of the eastern Mediterranean soon learned that a new design, which had before been lacking, animated the Turkish expeditions. It was the desire not so much for booty as for the permanent possession of land. Everywhere they went, the Osmanlis went as settlers. They fought for homes and wives.
In the south, Bayezid took Adalia, the last city of theemir of Tekke. It was in 1391 that the Osmanlis won this seaport, their first on the Mediterranean. If we except the southern ports of the Peloponnesus, a whole century passed before they added another on the Mediterranean.
Following up the pretext furnished him by a complaint against Alaeddin from his vassal, the emir of Hamid, Bayezid determined to measure his forces against the Karamanlis. As had been the case in the previous similar expeditions under his father, four years before, Bayezid called out the levies of his European Christian vassals. Among those who responded to the call was Manuel Palaeologos, who passed the winter of 1390-91 in the Ottoman camp at Angora. There he wrote his famous dialogues on the Christian religion, purporting to be discussions with a Moslem professor of theology.[451]
Bayezid invaded Karamania, and laid siege to Konia. Alaeddin, who had fled to the Taurus Mountains to escape being shut up in the city, saw soon that Konia could hold out against Bayezid for an indefinite period. The Ottoman emir was far from his base of supplies, and nervous about what was happening in Europe. So, when Alaeddin asked for terms of peace, Bayezid agreed to withdraw from Konia, if Alaeddin would formally cede to him the north-western corner of his dominions, including the cities of Aksheïr and Akseraï, which were already in the hands of the Osmanlis.[452]Bayezid left Timurtash as governor of the new acquisitions, and returned to Adrianople.
While Bayezid was occupied in Bulgaria, in 1392, in his first defensive campaign against Sigismund, Alaeddin decided upon a supreme effort to wrest from Bayezid the hegemony of Asia Minor. He reoccupied the ceded cities, and attacked by surprise the Ottoman army in Kermian. Timurtash was taken prisoner. One column of the Karamanlis set out for Angora, and the other for Brusa.
Bayezid earned for himself the nicknameyildirim(thunderbolt) by the rapidity with which he transported his army into Anatolia.[453]Fresh from a victory over the Hungarians, supported by the trained and hardened soldiery of his Christian vassals, Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians, and Wallachians, his sudden appearance at Brusa caused Alaeddin to try once more to treat with the rival who was rapidly becoming more powerful than himself. He released Timurtash, and suggested a return to thestatus quoof the previous year.
Bayezid was not only convinced that a decisive struggle was now advisable: he was also quick to see that for the first time the advantage was all on the side of the Osmanlis. Instead of meeting the enemy in the heart of his own country, after a long journey across wind-swept plateaux where food was scarce, it was the enemy this time who had made the journey and was far from home. Defeated, there would be no retreat possible for Alaeddin.
With characteristic celerity, Bayezid sent forward an army under Timurtash. Battle was joined in the plain of Ak Tchaï (the white river). One cannot determine the exact location, but it was probably in Kermian not far from Kutayia, for that is where the two retreating columns of the Karamanlis would naturally have formed a junction. Alaeddin and his sons Ali and Mahommed were taken prisoners. When Alaeddin was brought before him, Timurtash could notrestrain his anger until Bayezid arrived. He remembered only that the one defeat of his long and brilliant career had been administered by Alaeddin. Its disgrace, and his feeling towards the emir of Karamania, was in no way palliated by the fact that Alaeddin had voluntarily released him. Timurtash ordered the prisoner to be hanged. When Bayezid arrived, his brother-in-law was dead. He was overjoyed that his rival had been removed so conveniently, and without any responsibility falling upon himself.
Karamania lay open before the invaders. The Osmanlis occupied Ak Seraï, Konia, and Laranda. There was no organized resistance. But it is a curious disregard of facts to record, as most historians have done,[454]that the result of this campaign was the permanent incorporation of Karamania in the Ottoman Empire.[455]The battle of Ak Tchaï had been decisive only to the extent that thereafter the Osmanlis, and not the Karamanlis, were to be the dominant race in Asia Minor. Konia and other eastern Karamanian cities were occupied by the Osmanlis after the battle because their ruler had been killed and his sons taken into captivity. Had Alaeddin escaped from the field, he might have organized a successful resistance to the Ottoman invaders. Bayezid conquered Karamania by the battle of Ak Tchaï no more than Napoleon conquered Prussia by Jena or von Moltke France by Sedan. To enter and occupy fora while the capital of a country does not mean that the country is ‘incorporated’ in the domains of the successful invader. The immediate restoration of the Karamanian dynasty after the advent of Timur proves how superficial had been the Ottoman occupation. While they were no longer able to be a political factor in western Asia Minor, the Karamanlis continued until after the fall of Constantinople—for seventy years after the battle of Ak Tchaï—to defy successfully the efforts of the Osmanlis to destroy their independence and amalgamate them.[456]
Burhaneddin, who had set up for himself a principality north-east of Karamania along the Halys River, which included Caesarea and Sivas, was the next rival on the east to be attacked. Burhaneddin is reported to have had twenty to thirty thousand followers.[457]This seems to be an exaggeration, for we read that he did not resist the Ottoman invasion. At the approach of Bayezid, he retired into the mountains of Armenia near Kharput. Here he was either killed by Kara Yuluk, founder of the famous White Sheep dynasty, or put to death by order of Bayezid.[458]His emirate was shared by Bayezid and Kara Yuluk, the Ottoman emir taking Tokat, Caesarea, and Sivas. There is no certainty as to the date of this expedition. From the events which followed, it most probably took place in 1395, the year before Nicopolis.[459]
Kastamuni, practically coterminous with the Roman province of Paphlagonia, stood between the Ottoman possessions and the Black Sea. In the campaign of 1393, Samsun and the cities of the interior between Samsun and Angora, were captured by the Osmanlis. When the Ottoman army advanced to attack Kastamuni, Bayezid offered to allow the emir to become his vassal, if he would surrender to him the emirs of Sarukhan and Menteshe. Whether the lesser Bayezid was unwilling to violate the laws of hospitality, or put little faith in the promises of the conqueror after the fate which had overtaken the emir of Aïdin, it is impossible to say. He and his guests fled to the court of Timur. The occupation of Sinope gave the Osmanlis an excellent port on the south coast of the Black Sea.
Bayezid was now master of the greater part of Anatolia, but master only in name. He had not assimilated these conquests. As later events proved, the inhabitants of these territories were still loyal to their former rulers.
After his return from the first Anatolian campaign, Bayezid ordered a general advance along the northern and north-western frontiers. One band invaded Bosnia, but did not make much headway. Three bands entered Hungary, and initiated the system of rapid raiding that in time reached as far as Germany, and made the ‘Turks’ the nightmare of Slavic, Teutonic, and Italian Europe. The first battle on Hungarian soil was fought at Nagy-Olosz, in Syrmia, not far from Karlovitz, where three centuries later the Osmanlis signed the death-warrant of theirWeltpolitik.
The Danube was crossed also near Silistria. Before theterrible akindjis could penetrate far into his country, the hospodar Mircea surrendered, or was made prisoner. After a short exile at Brusa, he regained his liberty by consenting to the payment of a tribute of three thousand ducats, thirty horses, and twenty falcons.[460]He agreed to help Bayezid against the Hungarians, who had long been asserting a sovereignty over Wallachia, and in return Bayezid promised to settle no Moslems and build no mosques north of the Danube. In the first Hungarian invasion, Bayezid received more valuable aid from the Wallachians than from his janissaries. There were no better fighters in the Balkan peninsula than these descendants of the soldiers of Trajan. The interference of Sigismund prevented an Ottoman invasion of Moldavia, whose hospodars remained altogether independent of the Osmanlis until the reign of Mohammed the Conqueror.[461]
When Louis of Hungary died, he left two daughters. The younger, Hedwig, was chosen as queen of Poland by the Polish nobles. Her marriage with Jagello of Lithuania, who was converted to Christianity and baptized under the name of Ladislas, definitely separated the crowns of Poland and Hungary, and had a far-reaching influence upon the subsequent fortunes of the Osmanlis. The crown of Hungary fell to Mary, whose succession was questioned by Charles of Durazzo, king of Naples, the nearest male heir. His invasion of Dalmatia, in 1385, brought into Hungary Sigismund, second son of Charles IV of Luxemburg, the GermanEmperor. For Sigismund was betrothed to Mary, but had been slow to take upon himself the rôle of bridegroom, owing to his disappointment over Hedwig’s election by the Poles. Now he entered into the struggle for the Hungarian crown. In 1387, it was placed upon his head. The union between Poland and Hungary was broken, but the fortunes of Hungary and Bohemia, to which throne Sigismund succeeded by blood, were joined in a way that has never been broken to the present time. The outside connexions of the new Hungarian king were a most important factor in the growth of the Ottoman Empire. A strong and vigorous king, whose sole interest lay in the crown of Hungary, might have prevented the spread of the Osmanlis. In fact, after Bayezid’s death, he might easily have destroyed the Ottoman power in Europe. But Sigismund, called in 1411 to the larger rôle of Holy Roman Emperor, became engrossed in the Hussite controversy and the Church councils to end the great schism. While retaining the crown of Hungary, he allowed the Osmanlis to make the preparations which were to end in the Moslem subjugation of that kingdom.
In the early days, when Sigismund’s interests lay in his newly-acquired Hungarian crown, he was alive to the menace of the Osmanlis. He sent a message to Bayezid, demanding by what right he was interfering with Bulgaria, which was a country under Hungarian protection. Bayezid made no response to the address of the king’s ambassador. He merely pointed to the weapons hanging in his tent, and gave a sign that the audience was over.
Sigismund understood, and accepted the challenge. In 1392, he invaded Bulgaria, won an initial battle from the Osmanlis, who would have been annihilated had it not been for their new allies, the Wallachians, and, after a long siege, took Nicopolis on the Danube.[462]By this time Bayezidwas able to send a large army into Bulgaria. When Sigismund realized how numerous were the forces coming against him, he saw that his victory bade fair to be nothing more than the acquisition of a prison. Before the Osmanlis could surround him, he wisely abandoned Nicopolis. The retreat became a rout.[463]It was on the return from this expedition that Sigismund met Elisabeth Morsinay, in the county of Hunyadi. From their union was born the great champion, who, while his imperial father was engrossed in theological disputes and the complex interests of the empire, battled bravely against Mohammed I and Murad II.
The expedition of 1392 demonstrated to Sigismund that Bayezid was a foe worthy of a European ruler, that he must be checked if Hungary were to be saved, and that the Hungarians could not again take the offensive against the Osmanlis without aid from western Europe. For the pretensions of Louis to the overlordship of the Balkan States, and the heartless propaganda of the Catholic faith, thinly disguising Louis’s inordinate ambitions, had turned the Balkan peoples against Hungary and ‘crusaders’ from the west. They chose rather to stand on the side of their Moslem enslavers.
Sigismund’s invasion of Bulgaria determined Bayezid to put an end to the arrangement concluded just before Kossova between Murad and Sisman. Bulgaria, like Thrace and Macedonia, was to be an integral part of the empire, and to become converted to Islam and ottomanized, in so far as that was possible. For Sisman, who had re-established himself in his old capital, was too uncertain an ally to be trustedin the event of another Hungarian invasion. In the spring of 1393, an army under Soleiman Tchelebi, Bayezid’s oldest son, to whom this was the first command, surrounded Tirnovo. The bulk of Soleiman’s army was composed of Macedonian Christians and renegades of the first generation. In midsummer,[464]after a three months’ siege, Tirnovo was taken by storm from the side of the old castle, which is still, in part, standing.[465]The inhabitants who escaped fire and sword were carried into captivity in Anatolia. Among them was the patriarch Euthymius.[466]
This was the end of the independence of Bulgaria and of the national church. The loss of the church was a more serious blow than the loss of independence. For the Bulgarian nationality suffered an eclipse of centuries. Under the laws of Mohammed the Conqueror for the ‘self-government’ of the Christian elements of the empire, the Bulgarians were included in the Greekmillet(nation). Enemy to every influence, every movement that tended to lessen its temporal power, the Greek patriarchate of Phanar never wearied in its endeavours, and never withheld its approval of the foulest means, to stamp out the Bulgarian national spirit. One cannot visit the old monastery of Rilo without realizing that the Bulgarian sufferings have been more acute from Christian priests than from Moslem governors. One cannot follow the trail of unending persecution in the mute witness of unchurched communities from Monastir to the Black Sea through Macedonia and Eastern Rumelia, and to the Danube, through Bulgarian Serbia and trans-Rhodopian Moesia, without sympathizing with the Bulgarian aspirations of 1913, and without comprehending the wild rageand hatred that drove an ordinarily clear-headed and impassive people into the second Balkan war.[467]
When Tirnovo fell, Sisman was not found in his palace. His fate was a mystery even when Schiltberger went through Bulgaria with the crusaders three years later. Schiltberger believed that he died in captivity.[468]His son, Alexander, became a Moslem to save his life, and was given the governorship of Samsun.[469]He was killed fighting under the Ottoman flag, in 1420, in the rebellion of Dédé-Sultan. The royal family of Bulgaria had no other heirs.
Silistria, Nicopolis, Widin, and the other Danube fortresses were strongly garrisoned and fortified.[470]By conversion and immigration the Moslem population was cultivated, and grew rapidly on this northern frontier of the empire.
The battle of Kossova did not immediately affect Constantinople. Bayezid was intent upon arranging the newstatus quoin Serbia. After he had assured himself that Sigismund was not ready to attack him, he passed over into Asia Minor. There he devoted all his energies to the destruction of the Turkish emirates.
The old family feud of the Palaeologi continued.[471]In April 1390, John, the son of Andronicus, entered Constantinople, and set himself up as emperor in opposition to his grandfather and uncle. But upon Manuel’s return from Asia in September, he was compelled to flee.[472]The obligations of Manuel as Ottoman vassal were stronger than the exigencies of his precarious position at Constantinople. Although his father was in an enfeebled condition and the danger of a return of his nephew was very real, Manuel left again in November to follow Bayezid in the war against Karamania.
We have a striking record from Manuel’s own pen of his humiliation. Proper food was too dear for the purse of the heir of Constantine the Great. He was on the verge of starvation. In sharp contrast to his own wretchedness, he describes the barbaric splendour of the court of Bayezid, and the feasting in which he was too insignificant to have a share. The Osmanlis treated him with studied insolence and contempt.[473]
While Bayezid was in Karamania, the old emperor repaired the walls of his capital. Churches were torn down in order to rebuild the towers on either side of the GoldenGate. They were given an ornate appearance to disguise the purpose of their having been repaired. Bayezid, informed through his couriers, sent word to John that the towers must be rased without delay, or Manuel would lose his eyes. The old emperor made haste to obey. Before the demolition was finished, he died in the arms of Eudoxia Comnena, whom he had taken for his mistress after having asked her hand for his son. Gout and debauchery rather than grief and humiliation ended his ignoble life; for he was only sixty-one, and, like his father and grandfather, had never opposed the Osmanlis with enough energy to undermine his constitution.[474]
When Manuel, in the spring of 1391, returned to Brusa, he learned of his father’s death, and of the threat that had been made concerning himself. Escaping in the night, he fled to Constantinople.
An ultimatum soon followed from Bayezid. Beyond the acknowledgement of vassalage and the payment of an increased tribute, Bayezid demanded the establishment of a kadi in Constantinople to judge the Moslem inhabitants. Upon the heels of his messenger came the Ottoman army. The Greeks of southern Thrace who had remained Christian were exterminated or carried off into slavery in Asia. Like locusts, the Osmanlis swarmed in all directions, and no village missed their notice up to the very walls of Constantinople.[475]The first Ottoman siege of Constantinople began.
The close investment of the city ended after seven months. Bayezid, needing his army in Bulgaria to oppose Sigismund, consented to lift the siege on still harder conditions than had first been imposed. Manuel authorized the establishmentof a Mohammedan tribunal in the Sirkedji quarter, and to give seven hundred houses within the city walls to Moslem settlers. Half of Galata, from the Genoese Tower to the Sweet Waters, was ceded to Bayezid, who placed there a garrison of six thousand. The tribute was once more increased, and the Ottoman treasury was allowed a tithe on the vineyards and vegetable gardens outside of the city.[476]From the minarets of two mosques, the call to prayer echoed over the imperial city, which, from this time, began to be called by the Osmanlis Istambul.[477]This was the city of promise.
From 1391 until the advent of Timur, Constantinople was blockaded on the land side.[478]The Galata garrison and the posts at Kutchuk and Buyuk Tchekmedje were always alert to bully and harass travellers and provision sellers.
The Grand Vizier, Ali pasha, used the grandson and namesake of John V Palaeologos to make trouble for Manuel. It was in his blood to become the willing tool of the Osmanlis. In 1393, Ali pasha tried to get the inhabitants of the cityto depose Manuel in order that John, as heir of the older son of the late emperor, might take the place which was rightfully his.[479]Two years later John actually attacked the city with Ottoman troops, but was repulsed.[480]
The overtures of Manuel for aid and money from Christian princes were received with little enthusiasm. On account of the schism in the Latin Church, Manuel could look for no papal support. Venice refused his offer to sell Lemnos.[481]The time had passed when the Senate set even the slightest monetary value upon a Byzantine deed of sale to an Aegaean island.
In 1395, at Serres, Bayezid held his first court as heir of the Caesars. He summoned before him Manuel and Theodore and John, the son of Andronicus. Theodore, who had been ruling in the Morea (Peloponnesus), sole remaining Byzantine theme, was charged with having encroached upon the rights of the lord of Monembasia. The few remaining Serbian princes were also present. Bayezid contemplated ridding himself altogether of the Byzantine imperial family. In fact, he ordered the death of all the Palaeologi. Ali pasha succeeded in putting off the execution long enough for Bayezid to change his mind. The sentence was revoked, but warning was given by cutting off the hands and putting out the eyes of several Byzantine dignitaries. The Palaeologi, and Constantinople, had been saved only by the intervention of a creature of Bayezid’s, who did not want to see the imperial family perish and the imperial city fall because these ghosts of princes were a source of revenue to him!
The peril at Serres had been so real that the Byzantine and Serbian princes plotted immediately to throw off the Ottoman yoke, and swore to each other that they would never again answer a summons from Bayezid. The compact was sealed by the marriage of Irene, daughter of ConstantineDragash, to Manuel.[482]But Dragash died shortly after the marriage,[483]and Vuk Brankovitch died three years later.[484]They were the last of the Serbians of Dushan’s following in Macedonia. The disaster of Nicopolis soon crushed the hopes of the conspirators.
Urban VI, the first Roman pope of the Great Schism, did practically nothing against the Osmanlis. He sent, in 1388, two armed galleys for the defence of Constantinople, and issued letters broadcast promising indulgences to all who would take part in a crusade.[485]But he did not work for a league of the states which recognized him. His successor, Boniface IX, whose reign covered the same period as that of Bayezid, was too occupied in combating the Angevin party in Naples, and in trying to preserve intact the papal states and cities, to pay much attention to the Ottoman menace.
In 1391, Boniface urged George Stracimir, who called himself king of Rascia (Serbia), to conquer Durazzo from the ‘schismatics’, and commanded the Catholic archbishop of Antivari to prevent the Christians of Macedonia and Dalmatia from allying themselves with the Osmanlis.[486]Idle words these were, revealing at once the short-sighted policyof Boniface and his bigotry. For the Osmanlis, in the spring of 1393, were threatening Durazzo.[487]With warring Christian sects, their success was certain.
In Greece the interference of the Latin popes was becoming more and more bitterly resented. Ecclesiastics and laymen alike resented proselytizing and the invariable introduction of a bargaining clause in every appeal for western aid. In March 1393, Dorotheus, metropolitan of Athens and exarch of Greece, who had been justly charged by the Duke of Athens with wanting to introduce into his duchy the Osmanlis, was a fugitive at Constantinople. Tried on the charge brought against him by the Duke, a synod of eight bishops acquitted him.[488]This action was indicative of the feeling throughout the Eastern Church,—better the Osmanlis than the Franks with their Catholic missionaries. Even the changed attitude of Bayezid towards Christianity did little to modify this sentiment.
Although France was supporting the Avignon papacy, Boniface wrote in 1394 to Charles VI, asking him to help Sigismund or at least to allow his subjects to fight under the Hungarian standards.[489]In the course of the same year he twice ordered a crusade to be preached.[490]This was, however, rather an attempt to take under his wing, and give sanction to, a secular movement to help Hungary than an initiative which had originated the movement. For most of Sigismund’s allies were adherents of the other papacy.
At Avignon, Benedict XIII, a Spaniard, mounted the throne in 1394. His influence with the Duke of Burgundy, who dominated the insane French king, was almost as negligible as that of his Roman rival.
Philippe de Mézières, who had taken up the work of Marino Sanudo, and gave his life to the promotion of a crusade, left Cyprus in 1378, and settled in Paris, where he preached and wrote impassioned appeals to Christendom to rescue the Holy Sepulchre. His ‘Order of the Passion’, which was to furnish a race of fighters against the Moslem holders of Jerusalem, had replaced the celibate vow of the earlier orders by a vow of marital fidelity, so that ‘defenders of the Holy Sepulchre’ might be propagated, and trained from infancy for their mission. The whole idea of Philippe de Mézières was an anachronism. The age of the crusades had passed. After 1390 the new order fell into oblivion.[491]Like Marino Sanudo, Philippe de Mézières had actually contributed to the aggrandizement of the Osmanlis; for he turned the minds of those who were moved by his appeals from the real menace of Islam to a quixotic and wholly useless dream. The crusades had only emphasized the axiom of history that Syria, including Palestine, must be held either through Mesopotamia or through Egypt.
Against the Osmanlis as against the Moslems of the Holy Land, the Church was no longer able to move Europe. The Nicopolis crusade was undertaken and carried through by secular agencies. It had neither religious motive nor religious backing.
The interest of Hungary in checking the progress of Ottoman conquest was hardly second to that of Venice and Genoa. To the two Italian republics, who had not hesitated to stake their very existence a decade before upon the mastery of the Aegaean Sea and the free passage of the Dardanelles, one would suppose that the battle of Kossova would have been a salutary warning, and that they would have seen the necessity of opposing the Osmanlis to the full extent of theirresources. The archives of these cities, however, during the entire reign of Bayezid, reveal a record of double-dealing and insincere diplomacy which was as futile and disastrous as it was shameful.
Immediately upon hearing the news of Kossova, the Venetian Senate sent to Andrea Bembo, who had been negotiating with Murad, a letter instructing him as to the course he should follow in view of the death of Murad. He was to seek out the son who had survived, or, if both sons were alive, to be very cautious until one son had killed or defeated the other. In the meantime, he was to make overtures to both, telling each one, without letting the other know, that the Senate ‘had heard of the death of his father, and on that account had great sorrow. For we have always regarded him as a most particular friend, and we loved him and his state. Likewise we have heard of his happy elevation to the power and lordship of his country, concerning which we have been very happy, because, in like manner as we have sincerely loved the father, we love and are disposed to love the son and his dominion, and to regard him as a particular friend.’ Then Bembo was to speak of the commercial privileges desired by the Senate, and to disclaim the action of the Venetian admiral, Pietro Zeno, who had attacked the galleys of Murad.[492]
Immediately upon hearing which son had become the successor of Murad, the Senate sent Francesco Quirini to Bayezid with gifts to secure the renewal of the commercial treaty concluded several years before with Murad. Bayezidreadily offered to protect Venetian commerce, but he gave no guarantee.[493]
The appearance of the Osmanlis on the Aegaean Sea, and their sacking of Chios, Negropont,[494]and Attica, greatly alarmed the Senate. Fear was expressed for the safety of the Venetian fortresses in Negropont and Crete.[495]All garrisons were ordered, provisioned, and reinforced.[496]In 1393, forgetting their sincere love for Bayezid, the Senate decided to treat with Sigismund for an offensive alliance against the Osmanlis.[497]So it cannot be believed that the Venetians did not see the growing danger.
In September of the next year they responded favourably, although vaguely, to a letter in which Sigismund notified them that in the coming springtime he would ‘go against the Turks to their loss and destruction’.[498]But when, in May 1396, a Hungarian embassy arrived in Venice to announce the readiness for a forward movement, and to secure the promised aid, Venice pledged herself only to the extent of four galleys, and that on condition that Rhodes, Chios, and Mytilene would co-operate with the Venetians.[499]A high-sounding letter was sent to Tommaso Monicego, ordering him to move against the Osmanlis ‘for the preservation of the city of Constantinople and for the honour of the republic’.[500]Too weak and too inexperienced to withstand the hardened mariners of Italy, the Osmanlis disappeared from the sea for the moment. Their navy was only six years old, and could not yet match itself against theghiaours. Monicego fought no battle, for there was noenemy to oppose him. But he made no effort to hinder the passage of the Osmanlis from Asia to Europe and from Europe to Asia. The sincerity of the naval co-operation in the Nicopolis crusade is open to the gravest suspicion.[501]
While the Senate was putting off Sigismund with assurances and promises that never materialized, they continued to treat with Bayezid and Manuel. In September 1394, the Osmanlis appeared in the Adriatic at the mouth of the Boyana, and seized Venetian subjects there. The danger to Durazzo was imminent, for the Osmanlis were now masters of the valley of the Drin. When the Senate deliberated on measures for securing the release of the prisoners and for the defence of Durazzo, they decided to make representations rather than threats to Bayezid.[502]He naturally paid no attention to the Venetians. They did not intend to apply force, so he continued the subjugation of Albania and Greece.
To Manuel the Senate wrote a letter in 1394, recommending him ‘to trust in God, to trust in the measures which the Christian princes would know how to take, to write to the pope and to these (the Christian princes), promoting a general alliance’.[503]But one finds in the deliberations of the Senate no speech or motion or letter from which one could infer that they themselves had any hope whatever of the efficacy of the procedure suggested to Manuel. In fact, within six months, in spite of the imminence of the Hungarian offensive campaign that was to ‘drive the Turks out of Europe’, the Senate actually decided to send ambassadorsto Bayezid to urge upon him the advisability of an accord with the Byzantine emperor.[504]It was only because the crusade of Sigismund was already launched, and they realized the uselessness of it, that they gave up this questionabledémarche, and discussed measures for the safety of the Venetian fleet, and for preventing Constantinople from falling into Bayezid’s hands without coming into any open rupture with the Osmanlis.[505]Did Venice, while ostensibly co-operating with the crusaders, fear that a victory at Nicopolis would bring about the hegemony of Hungary in the Balkan peninsula, and secretly wish for the success of the Osmanlis?
As for Genoa, no other policy was considered than that of outbidding Venice for Bayezid’s favour. Fulsome congratulations upon his succession were sent to Bayezid. In the autumn of 1390, a Genoese embassy appeared at Adrianople to remind Bayezid of the traditional friendship of the Consulta for his father and grandfather. Their assurances were backed up by valuable gifts.[506]While cultivating the friendship of the Osmanlis, the Consulta levied a compulsory tax upon all the communes where they could enforce their authority for the purpose of increasing the Genoese fleets in the Aegaean Sea and at Constantinople.[507]A watchful eye was kept on the Venetians and the Osmanlis. Neither Sigismund nor Manuel received real aid from Genoa.
For the necessary outside support and assistance in the crusade which appeared to him indispensable for the safety of Hungary, Sigismund had to look elsewhere than to the divided papacy, and to the republics of Venice and Genoa. Whether Sigismund’s fears of the ability of the Osmanlis to destroy Hungary were well founded is open to question. But there is no doubt that his activity prevented the capture of Constantinople in the early years of the reign of Bayezid.
As early as 1384, the French Court was aware of the remarkable progress of the Ottoman conquest. The character and ambitions of Murad were presented to the boy-king Charles VI in a striking way. He was told that Murad, in a dream, had seen Apollon, one of his false gods, who offered him a crown of gold before which were prostrated thirteen princes of the Occident.[508]This childhood impression was revived in 1391, when Charles was at the zenith of his emancipation under the Marmousets. He received an embassy of pilgrims from the Holy Land, who brought news of a defeat they had experienced while fighting with the King of Hungary ‘against the Turks of Lamorat Baxin’. When Charles asked them about the genealogy and antecedents of the prince, whose name they confused with that of his father, they knew nothing of him except that he was ‘a vassal of the King of Persia’.
But of his character and ambitions they made a statement which we are justified in quoting, because it throws light upon the notions prevailing in the minds of the French aristocracy who went to their death at Nicopolis. ‘He was’, said the pilgrims, ‘a man of wisdom and discretion, who feared God according to the superstitious traditions of the Turks ... humane towards the conquered, because he oppressed them very little with exactions, and did not expel them from their lands so long as they were willing to promise allegiance under an annual tribute, however small. He kept his promises, and permitted them to live under their own laws.... His seal was so respected in his army that whoever saw it fell upon his knees. He had interpreters and spies in Europe to instruct him about the kings and their policies.He told the pilgrims that he would come to France after he had finished with Austria.’[509]
The chronicler from whom this report is taken added that Charles was much excited by this threat. He was anxious to make peace with England, in order that he could accept the challenge of Bayezid, and go to fight him in single combat at the head of his army. But Charles, in the following year, so completely lost his mental balance that he could no longer maintain any personal power, and fell under the influence of the princes of the lilies. But his sympathies remained steadfastly attached to every scheme for fighting the Osmanlis.
In the spring of 1395, the Dukes of Berry and Burgundy, uncles of the king, who had for the moment all the power of the French crown in their hands, received at Lyons ambassadors from Sigismund, who came to demand aid against the Osmanlis. Philip of Burgundy was greatly interested in this mission. It is extremely improbable that he had any interest whatever in the Christians of the Balkan peninsula, the aggrandizement of Hungary, or even the preservation of Constantinople from Moslem sacrilege. But, since Flanders, Artois, and the county of Burgundy had come to him through his wife on the death of Louis le Mâle, Philip had begun to dream of establishing a new kingdom in Europe. It was the dream which was to plunge France into the most bitter of her civil wars, to call forth Jeanne d’Arc from the seclusion of Domrémy, and end in the death of his great-grandson under the walls of Nancy.
Philip had every reason in the world to aid the project of Sigismund. Apart from the fact that his immediate hold over the insane king, Charles VI, would be strengthened by the absence from France of the energetic scions of noblefamilies, who, if successful in the struggle against Bayezid, might push on to the Holy Land and find permanent interests—or a grave—there, Sigismund was well worth cultivating. The elder brother of the king of Hungary, Wenceslaus, was Roman emperor, but insecure in his position. At that very moment, Wenceslaus was negotiating with Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti to create him Duke of Milan in exchange for his support.[510]Galeazzo was the father-in-law of Louis of Orleans, younger brother of the French king, and Philip’s formidable rival. The future of the Valois of Burgundy demanded anententewith the German imperial family. As this could not be concluded with Wenceslaus, and as Wenceslaus might at any moment be deposed, it was policy for Philip of Burgundy to come into close contact with Sigismund, whose future in Bohemia and in the empire Philip foresaw. At the very least, by lending aid to Sigismund, Philip had an excellent chance of getting Luxemburg, which was essential to the consolidation of the new Burgundy in the Netherlands.
As earnest of the aid which would be forthcoming the following year, the Duke of Burgundy allowed the Comte d’Eu to proceed immediately to Hungary with some nobles and six hundred horsemen.[511]After the Hungarian envoys had gone through the formality of an audience with the king at Paris, they returned to Sigismund bearing a letter in which Philip promised substantial aid in cavaliers and mercenaries, under the command of his own elder son, Jean Valois, Comte de Nevers.
From England, the Netherlands, Savoy, Lombardy, and all parts of Germany, Sigismund received assurances that the cream of chivalry would flock to his standards, and that he could rely upon Europe to back him in the expedition which was to drive Bayezid out of Europe.
The crusade which ended in the disaster of Nicopolis is one of the most interesting events of the close of the Middle Ages, not only by reason of the historical importance of those who took part in it, but also because it was the last great international enterprise of feudal chivalry. It is the end of an epoch in the history of Europe. So widespread was the interest in Sigismund’s call to arms against the Osmanlis that there came to meet him at Buda in the spring of 1396 not only the French volunteers, but also scions of noble families from England, Scotland, Flanders, Lombardy, Savoy, Bohemia, and all parts of Germany and Austria. The English war in Normandy had ceased, Milan was supreme in northern Italy, and for the moment there was peace in the Holy Roman Empire. It was a favourable time to attract adventurers to unknown lands.
This expedition furnishes the most absorbing pages in the last portion of Froissart;[512]it is mentioned in more or less detail in a number of other French, Italian, German, and Latin chronicles. Several participants have left graphic accounts of the gathering of the chevaliers, the march down the Danube, the battle and its aftermath of massacre, the captivity and ransom of the prisoners. The archives of Dijon and Lille tell the cost of the fitting out of the French contingent and of the ransom of the prisoners. For thiscrowning event in Bayezid’s career, we have more source material than for any episode of Ottoman history until the fall of Constantinople.[513]
The French chevaliers numbered about a thousand. They were accompanied by six or seven thousand attendants and mercenaries. They gathered at Dijon, under the command of Jean de Nevers, the oldest son of Duke Philip of Burgundy, and grandson of King John, who had been captured in the battle of Poitiers. He was only twenty-two, and had just won his knighthood. The fact, though, that he was heir to Burgundy, and a prince of the royal blood, gave him the command. Philip charged the Sieur de Coucy, one of the boldest and most experienced warriors in France, to have an eye on the boy, and to guide the expedition with his counsel.[514]
Prominent among the French chevaliers were Philippe d’Artois, Constable of France, Henri and Philippe de Bar, cousins of the king, the Sieur de Coucy, Guillaume de la Trémouille, Jacques Bourbon de Vienne, admiral of France and prince of the royal blood, Boucicaut, marshal of France, the Sieur de Saint-Pol, and three Flemish princes who were the brothers of Jean de Nevers’s mother. The heir to the duchy of Bavaria was anxious to join the French chevaliers, but was restrained by the wise words of Duke Albert: ‘William, since you have the desire to travel and go to Hungary and Turkey, and carry arms against people and countries which have never done anything to us, and you have no reason for going there, except the vainglory of this world, let John of Burgundy and our cousins of France dotheir enterprises, and you do yours, and go into Friesland and conquer our inheritance ... and in doing this I shall help you.’[515]
The chevaliers travelled through Germany and Bohemia, and were hospitably received by the Duke of Austria. ‘On the way they spoke of Amorath-Bacquin[516]and admired little his power.’ When they reached ‘a city called Buda, the king made them a great reception and good cheer, and indeed he ought to have done so, for they had come far to see him and bear arms for him’.[517]At Buda they found the other chevaliers who had responded to the invitation of Sigismund, among whom were the Bastard of Savoy,[518]Frederick of Hohenzollern, grand prior of the Teutonic Order, Philibert de Naillac, grand master of Rhodes, with a contingent of chevaliers of Saint-John, the Elector Palatine, and John, Burgrave of Nürnberg, ancestor of the Houseof Brandenburg.[519]A scholarly biographer of Henry IV of England has recorded that he, as Count of Lancaster, was one of the participants in the Nicopolis expedition.[520]This error has found its way into one, at least, of our most reliable modern historians.[521]Although the successor of Richard II was not, as a matter of fact, at Nicopolis,[522]the blood of the Nicopolis crusaders is in the veins of the British royal house, as in that of practically every ruling family of Europe.
Sigismund claimed to have been assured by Bayezid that the Osmanlis would invade Hungary in the spring of 1396. When there were no signs of an Ottoman invasion, the crusaders decided that, as Bayezid did not come to seek them, they had best take advantage of the summer months to go and find the arch-enemy of Christendom.[523]Arrangements had been made with Mircea, voïevode of Wallachia, to break with the Osmanlis and join the coalition. Manuel, who had been invited to co-operate with the invaders, prepared secretly to declare against Bayezid.[524]
According to the chronicles, the invasion of Bulgaria was rather a picnic than a serious military operation. This wastrue, at least, for the western chevaliers, who had brought with them wine and women in plenty. Their baggage contained all the luxuries to which they were accustomed at home. The French auxiliaries travelled from Buda to the Danube by way of Transylvania and Wallachia, crossing the Carpathians through the pass between Brassó (Karlstadt) and Sinaia.
The Hungarians, following the Danube, spread out into Serbia, pillaging and murdering the inoffensive Christian population more thoroughly than Ottoman akindjis would have done.[525]In spite of a lack of opposition, they persisted in acting as if they were in the enemy’s country. Widin surrendered without a struggle, and Orsova after five days.[526]In September, the armies joined before the fortress of Nicopolis, whose surrender to the Osmanlis three years before had marked the disappearance of Bulgarian independence. They were destined to go no farther.[527]
For sixteen days Sigismund and his allies encamped in front of Nicopolis without giving assault.[528]They had noidea of the whereabouts of Bayezid. It was believed among the French (whose ignorance of geography and of distances equalled ours of modern times) that Bayezid was in Egypt, gathering a great army of all the Moslem world to oppose the triumphant march of the crusaders. One reads in Froissart that Bayezid was ‘in Cairo in Babylonia [sic] with the sultan to get men’, that he left the sultan there and rallied his forces at Alexandria and Damascus, that ‘under the command and prayers of the khalif of Bagdad and Asia Minor’, whose mandate went forth ‘to Persia, to Media, and to Tarsus’, Bayezid received a ‘mass of Saracens and miscreants’, and that in his army were ‘people of Tartary, Persia, Media, Syria, Alexandria, and of many far-off countries of the miscreants’.[529]
Sigismund made a speech to the chevaliers from western and central Europe, in which he declared: ‘Let him come or not come, in the summer which will return, if it pleases God, we shall get through the kingdom of Armenia and shall pass the Bras Saint-George and shall go into Syria and shall get from the Saracens the gates of Jaffa and Beirut and several other [cities] to go down into Syria, and we shall go to conquer the city of Jerusalem and all the Holy Land. And if the Sultan, with all the strength he can muster, comes before us, we shall fight him, and there will be no going away without the battle, in God’s pleasure.’ Froissart naïvely adds immediately after his report of this speech: ‘But it turned out very much in another way.’[530]