This TL's going to be what many would call an Otto-wank. However, as it begins with a massive disaster, it's more of a Timur-wank (at first). The Battle of Ankara and the subsequent Ottoman reforms turned the nomadic Anatolians into a 'proper' gunpowder empire. Well, here's a more shall we say, thorough, Timur.
1402. the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit is defeated in the battle of Ankara by Timur Khan. A heated exchange of letters had occurred between the two for several months until all out war broke out which led to the Ottoman disaster, where some 11,000 sipahis were killed along with 1,500 of the new Janissaries and the Sultan himself is captured. His three sons manage to escape across Anatolia into Europe. Here the oldest, Suleyman, gathered any survivors together and moved to secure his holdings by immediately executing his brother Ise. His second brother, Murad, had at the time of the battle been in Edirne, and was therefore far from the scene of events and survived the fratricide. When news reaches him of his father’s death, he fortified his holdings and executed any disloyal elements in the forces under his command. Despite this, Ottoman politics is in a deadlock, with little manpower and broken morale the two claimants to the throne sit in their respective power centres, the capital of Edirne and the fortress of Gallipoli, waiting for events to unravel.
Timur, seeking to revenge himself yet further on the Sultan, gathered all his forces from the Golden Horse to India and launched a campaign of devastation against Anatolia. He unleashed thousands of steppe horsemen on the sedate populations of the western coast, and fiercest of all were the Azabs from the Caucasus who showed to quarter. The population centres of Bursa, Izmit and Izmir were ravaged, tens of thousands killed. This caused a massive population shift, as the whole Turkish people, men women and children, moved west. Chased by the Mongol hordes they frantically crossed the Dardanelles and settled in Europe. The Turks were relative newcomers to Anatolia, the Seljuks had only arrived two hundred and fifty years ago and a strong nomad tradition was still evident even in the early 15th century. The Patriarch of Constantinople went to see the refugees and estimated half a million people had crossed (modern estimates vary between 150,000 and 300,000). Whatever the precise numbers, a new people had emerged in Europe and they needed homes.
Many swore fealty to the service of Sultan Suleyman in Gallipoli, who promised them rich lands in the Balkans for a brief military tenure. However, some 40,000 moved north to Edirne where they swore loyalty to Murad, who accepted them as his own. These were generally held to be the more fanatical, and Murad had made it clear previously that he intended to go north and earn land and a place in Paradise for himself and all who followed him. some 40,000 households, therefore, arrived outside Edirne and on March 4th 1404 Murad raised his seven horsetail standard and they moved north.
This move was greeted with relief across Europe. For some time Murad had been considering marching on Hungary and Poland, yet when he saw that his brother was already moving to the west he decided not to fight him for so small a plot of land (Suleyman still had vastly superior forces to him). Murad renounced all title, swore himself as a Ghazi as did his followers and in total around 60,000 horsemen set off with him, including 500 janissaries. They went due north, crossing the Danube and passing through Wallachia and Moldavia, greeted with fear and resignation by the people, the horse encountered little resistance and indeed many members of the small Muslim population joined in with them. They therefore passed peaceably into Crimea, land of the Tartars.
Meanwhile, Timur had turned south. He made it his mission to take Egypt, where he saw the Mamluk Caliph as a puppet, unfit to lead the Islamic world. He issued his own Fatwa against the Caliph and the Mamluk Sultan. He led an army of 300,000 south through Aleppo (which he had previously taken) and then Damascus (which surrendered). He was days from Jerusalem when the mamluks made their counter-attack. 30,000 mamluks with a further 60,000 infantry and archers met Timur on an open plain just east of the River Jordan. The Mamluk Sultan Faraj had previously fought Timur and lost, so he was under no illusion as to who he was facing. However, the result was almost foregone. Timur’s cavalry encircled the Mamluks who fought almost to the last man, killing their horses and hiding behind them As cover from the incessant hail of arrows that blackened the skies. Once the mamluks were defeated, Timur once more encircled the infantry and forced them to surrender. 20,000 joined his army while all others were massacred.
Timur continued south to Egypt, taking Gaza two weeks after the battle (Jerusalem surrendered) and reaching the outskirts of Cairo a month later. The siege was furious, the walls were dilapidated and the mamluk garrison depleted. After three weeks the siege was over, Cairo was taken. Timur oversaw the taking of 90,000 prisoners. He demanded that each soldier bring him a head, and such was the terror to meet this expectation that the solders killed captives taken earlier in the campaign to meet their quota. A city of 180,000 was reduced to 8,000 over five days butchery. The citadel was destroyed utterly, as were the houses yet as many mosques were saved as possible. Timur ordered a pyramid of skulls to be erected in place of the old citadel. Travellers to came to Cairo after the siege say it was 100 feet high and held together with mortar in some places.
The rural population of Egypt, long slaving under the yolk of foreign oppression, took this opportunity to escape. A second exodus occurred, with the ships in Alexandria harbour filled to bursting with refugees. For Timur had ordered the Nile dammed and the rich fields sowed with salt so that no one could live there. So terrifying was Timur and so dire was the situation that at least 50,000 people fled into the desert with little food or water. They kept to the coast and quickly learned the process of boiling sea water to make it drinkable. Food, however, was extremely scarce and only 2,000 made it back to civilisation. These 2,000 were promptly sold into slavery, yet they were so weak that there were no buyers, and they were thrown into the sea; worthless.
Finally, in 1404, Timur withdrew to central Asia where he died on campaign in India. The world breathed easy once more.
In 1405 Murad conquered the city of Kiev. He took 20,000 prisoners and sold them all into slavery. He formed an alliance with the Crimean Tartars, who had converted to Islam, and they swelled his forces considerably. He re-built Kiev and proclaimed himself Sultan of the Rus. His land’s population was mainly nomadic yet there were thousands of serfs whom he freed from bondage to the soil. These men were given their own land, so long as they paid taxes to their Bey, who took a cash tax. The main problem with this was that the peasants had no coin to pay with, and so were forced to sell their crops and then buy them back. This raised food prices and caused much trouble, including starvation in come areas. This was therefore scrapped and replaced with the formation of estates. Each Bey was given land and the property to it. he then employed the peasants to till it and tend it. He would then take 5% of the crop for his own use and a further 10% to sell to raise money to pay tax. This system forced farmers to raise productivity, and this was aided by a flow of ideas from the Islamic world north. Wind mills were employed to grind grain and more efficient threshers were used, as were better ploughs and even better strains of wheat were sowed rather than the course kinds grown previously which the Turks found unpalatable.
The Islamic world, however, was in turmoil. The Caliphate was vacant, and whomsoever provided one would gain huge political power. In 1406 Suleyman of Rumelia found an Abbasid whom he installed in Edirne. This was part of his plan of consolidation. He had already taken Belgrade and built forts on the Danube and was now moving against Constantinople. The ancient Imperial capital had crumbled into anonymity, the Hagia Sophia barely standing after centuries of neglect and the city so depopulated that there were extensive farmlands between several smaller enclosed villages whose combined population was around 60,000. It was to defeat this city that Suleyman gathered 150,000 men. He needed a victory in order to cement his control over his lands. His reign had been born of abject failure and disasters and his own reign although competent was not sufficiently proactive to prevent the erosion of his own power. On April 3rd 1406 Suleyman pitched his tent by the Golden Horn. Constantinople was cut off from land but by sea it could be easily re-supplied and the Emperor Andronikos sent urgent appeals to the west, especially to the Pope and the King of Sicily. His entreaties fell on deaf ears, however, as the rulers of Christendom saw the Turks as less of a threat than Timur, who was still thought to be in Egypt despite his death some 5,000 miles from Rome. Venice sent some 400 soldiers and Genoa 700 yet the Doge of Venice negotiated with Suleyman that if his men took no part in the siege and withdrew, Venice would gain Genoa’s colonies in Galata. The Venetians thereby withdrew, and a force of 6,000 with no clear leader, as the Emperor was a boy. The burden of leadership fell to the Genoan captain John Craneoli who led the defence as best he could. The Theodocian walls were crumbling and there was little time to reinforce them. Neither side had heavy cannon, and so the siege was set to be long.
The Ottoman position seemed favourable, although their lack of artillery and sea power meant that an assault would be difficult and a blockade was impossible. Suleyman therefore ordered the digging of a series of trenches. This was carried out at night and carried the infantry to the walls themselves where furious Byzantine arrow fire took a terrible toll. Mines were laid beneath the walls and breaches made in three places. Immediately, thousands of infantry and then horseman poured through the defences and entered the city. Once they were inside the battle was a foregone conclusion. The Genoans left as soon as they could, yet John Craneoli fought to the death. Constantinople fell on May 6th 1406.
The fall sent shockwaves through Europe. Despite the fact that huge parts of the continent were Turkish it seemed that for the first time the crowned heads of Europe took notice. The Venetians and Sicilians sent envoys to Suleyman whereas other such as the Holy Roman Emperor (and King of Hungary) Sigismund, demanded a crusade. There was some movement for one, and finally in August 14,000 knights set off from Bratislava to re-take Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade had begun. The Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Poland, the Duke of Austria, the King of Bohemia and the Electors of multifarious German states rode with it with their knights. They took Belgrade on 28th of August in a torrent of rain that continued into September, rusting armour and destroying roads. From then on progress was painfully slow- they only moved 100 miles in a month. All this while, Suleyman was marshalling his forces. He sent envoys to his brother in Kiev who sent 10,000 horsemen who passed within 50 miles of the Crusade unmolested. He also gathered numerous other forces from the Balkans and even Egypt, where the dispossessed mamluks were looking to re-build. They sent forces so as to gain a good reputation with the Sultan (who was the most powerful Muslim lord in the Middle East at that time). Altogether, 100,000 men gathered to fight the Crusaders. Suleyman wintered in Edirne, away from the shivering wreck of Constantinople. He felt no need to re-build the city quite yet, although he had his architects draw up plans for a new capital on the Golden Horn. The Crusaders froze and drowned and gradually their soldiers melted away. By March there were only 60,000 men out of 120,000 who had set out. The knights remained however and they were the driving force of the movement. The infantry were mere decoration.
Suleyman met the Crusaders 300 miles north west of Edirne on 15th April 1407. The Crusaders, seeing the Turkish horsemen apparently disorganised, attacked immediately. The Turks fell back, putting up little resistance. The knights charged right through them, scattering them. However, they soon met with the janissaries. These men were slave-soldiers, trained since boyhood to be fanatically loyal and grimly martial. They formed a dense block with pikes and halberds. The knights broke themselves on this solid mass of some 5,000 men. finally, the horsemen, who were mostly Anatolians who had fled in 1402, rounded on the knights and surrounded them. Of the 14,000 knights only 900 survived. 3,000 were captured including the Duke of Austria and the King of Poland. All others were slain. The infantry, outstripped by the knights, were speedily massacred. It was the greatest disaster to occur on European soil for centuries. With Christendom decapitated Suleyman moved speedily into Bosnia and Hungary, extending his borders up the Danube with little resistance. When he was informed of the disaster, King Henry IV of England merely said: “The followers of Christ have met their Cannae. Let us hope this Turk is a lesser man than he whom he emulates."
That's the first bit, I kow it's a little long but I want to spark your interest. Coming up we'll have the fall of Moscow, the siege of Vienna and the capitulation of Venice as well as the Diet of Frankfurt and the Anglo-French war (yay, Henry V!)
You commenters know what to do. . .
1402. the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit is defeated in the battle of Ankara by Timur Khan. A heated exchange of letters had occurred between the two for several months until all out war broke out which led to the Ottoman disaster, where some 11,000 sipahis were killed along with 1,500 of the new Janissaries and the Sultan himself is captured. His three sons manage to escape across Anatolia into Europe. Here the oldest, Suleyman, gathered any survivors together and moved to secure his holdings by immediately executing his brother Ise. His second brother, Murad, had at the time of the battle been in Edirne, and was therefore far from the scene of events and survived the fratricide. When news reaches him of his father’s death, he fortified his holdings and executed any disloyal elements in the forces under his command. Despite this, Ottoman politics is in a deadlock, with little manpower and broken morale the two claimants to the throne sit in their respective power centres, the capital of Edirne and the fortress of Gallipoli, waiting for events to unravel.
Timur, seeking to revenge himself yet further on the Sultan, gathered all his forces from the Golden Horse to India and launched a campaign of devastation against Anatolia. He unleashed thousands of steppe horsemen on the sedate populations of the western coast, and fiercest of all were the Azabs from the Caucasus who showed to quarter. The population centres of Bursa, Izmit and Izmir were ravaged, tens of thousands killed. This caused a massive population shift, as the whole Turkish people, men women and children, moved west. Chased by the Mongol hordes they frantically crossed the Dardanelles and settled in Europe. The Turks were relative newcomers to Anatolia, the Seljuks had only arrived two hundred and fifty years ago and a strong nomad tradition was still evident even in the early 15th century. The Patriarch of Constantinople went to see the refugees and estimated half a million people had crossed (modern estimates vary between 150,000 and 300,000). Whatever the precise numbers, a new people had emerged in Europe and they needed homes.
Many swore fealty to the service of Sultan Suleyman in Gallipoli, who promised them rich lands in the Balkans for a brief military tenure. However, some 40,000 moved north to Edirne where they swore loyalty to Murad, who accepted them as his own. These were generally held to be the more fanatical, and Murad had made it clear previously that he intended to go north and earn land and a place in Paradise for himself and all who followed him. some 40,000 households, therefore, arrived outside Edirne and on March 4th 1404 Murad raised his seven horsetail standard and they moved north.
This move was greeted with relief across Europe. For some time Murad had been considering marching on Hungary and Poland, yet when he saw that his brother was already moving to the west he decided not to fight him for so small a plot of land (Suleyman still had vastly superior forces to him). Murad renounced all title, swore himself as a Ghazi as did his followers and in total around 60,000 horsemen set off with him, including 500 janissaries. They went due north, crossing the Danube and passing through Wallachia and Moldavia, greeted with fear and resignation by the people, the horse encountered little resistance and indeed many members of the small Muslim population joined in with them. They therefore passed peaceably into Crimea, land of the Tartars.
Meanwhile, Timur had turned south. He made it his mission to take Egypt, where he saw the Mamluk Caliph as a puppet, unfit to lead the Islamic world. He issued his own Fatwa against the Caliph and the Mamluk Sultan. He led an army of 300,000 south through Aleppo (which he had previously taken) and then Damascus (which surrendered). He was days from Jerusalem when the mamluks made their counter-attack. 30,000 mamluks with a further 60,000 infantry and archers met Timur on an open plain just east of the River Jordan. The Mamluk Sultan Faraj had previously fought Timur and lost, so he was under no illusion as to who he was facing. However, the result was almost foregone. Timur’s cavalry encircled the Mamluks who fought almost to the last man, killing their horses and hiding behind them As cover from the incessant hail of arrows that blackened the skies. Once the mamluks were defeated, Timur once more encircled the infantry and forced them to surrender. 20,000 joined his army while all others were massacred.
Timur continued south to Egypt, taking Gaza two weeks after the battle (Jerusalem surrendered) and reaching the outskirts of Cairo a month later. The siege was furious, the walls were dilapidated and the mamluk garrison depleted. After three weeks the siege was over, Cairo was taken. Timur oversaw the taking of 90,000 prisoners. He demanded that each soldier bring him a head, and such was the terror to meet this expectation that the solders killed captives taken earlier in the campaign to meet their quota. A city of 180,000 was reduced to 8,000 over five days butchery. The citadel was destroyed utterly, as were the houses yet as many mosques were saved as possible. Timur ordered a pyramid of skulls to be erected in place of the old citadel. Travellers to came to Cairo after the siege say it was 100 feet high and held together with mortar in some places.
The rural population of Egypt, long slaving under the yolk of foreign oppression, took this opportunity to escape. A second exodus occurred, with the ships in Alexandria harbour filled to bursting with refugees. For Timur had ordered the Nile dammed and the rich fields sowed with salt so that no one could live there. So terrifying was Timur and so dire was the situation that at least 50,000 people fled into the desert with little food or water. They kept to the coast and quickly learned the process of boiling sea water to make it drinkable. Food, however, was extremely scarce and only 2,000 made it back to civilisation. These 2,000 were promptly sold into slavery, yet they were so weak that there were no buyers, and they were thrown into the sea; worthless.
Finally, in 1404, Timur withdrew to central Asia where he died on campaign in India. The world breathed easy once more.
In 1405 Murad conquered the city of Kiev. He took 20,000 prisoners and sold them all into slavery. He formed an alliance with the Crimean Tartars, who had converted to Islam, and they swelled his forces considerably. He re-built Kiev and proclaimed himself Sultan of the Rus. His land’s population was mainly nomadic yet there were thousands of serfs whom he freed from bondage to the soil. These men were given their own land, so long as they paid taxes to their Bey, who took a cash tax. The main problem with this was that the peasants had no coin to pay with, and so were forced to sell their crops and then buy them back. This raised food prices and caused much trouble, including starvation in come areas. This was therefore scrapped and replaced with the formation of estates. Each Bey was given land and the property to it. he then employed the peasants to till it and tend it. He would then take 5% of the crop for his own use and a further 10% to sell to raise money to pay tax. This system forced farmers to raise productivity, and this was aided by a flow of ideas from the Islamic world north. Wind mills were employed to grind grain and more efficient threshers were used, as were better ploughs and even better strains of wheat were sowed rather than the course kinds grown previously which the Turks found unpalatable.
The Islamic world, however, was in turmoil. The Caliphate was vacant, and whomsoever provided one would gain huge political power. In 1406 Suleyman of Rumelia found an Abbasid whom he installed in Edirne. This was part of his plan of consolidation. He had already taken Belgrade and built forts on the Danube and was now moving against Constantinople. The ancient Imperial capital had crumbled into anonymity, the Hagia Sophia barely standing after centuries of neglect and the city so depopulated that there were extensive farmlands between several smaller enclosed villages whose combined population was around 60,000. It was to defeat this city that Suleyman gathered 150,000 men. He needed a victory in order to cement his control over his lands. His reign had been born of abject failure and disasters and his own reign although competent was not sufficiently proactive to prevent the erosion of his own power. On April 3rd 1406 Suleyman pitched his tent by the Golden Horn. Constantinople was cut off from land but by sea it could be easily re-supplied and the Emperor Andronikos sent urgent appeals to the west, especially to the Pope and the King of Sicily. His entreaties fell on deaf ears, however, as the rulers of Christendom saw the Turks as less of a threat than Timur, who was still thought to be in Egypt despite his death some 5,000 miles from Rome. Venice sent some 400 soldiers and Genoa 700 yet the Doge of Venice negotiated with Suleyman that if his men took no part in the siege and withdrew, Venice would gain Genoa’s colonies in Galata. The Venetians thereby withdrew, and a force of 6,000 with no clear leader, as the Emperor was a boy. The burden of leadership fell to the Genoan captain John Craneoli who led the defence as best he could. The Theodocian walls were crumbling and there was little time to reinforce them. Neither side had heavy cannon, and so the siege was set to be long.
The Ottoman position seemed favourable, although their lack of artillery and sea power meant that an assault would be difficult and a blockade was impossible. Suleyman therefore ordered the digging of a series of trenches. This was carried out at night and carried the infantry to the walls themselves where furious Byzantine arrow fire took a terrible toll. Mines were laid beneath the walls and breaches made in three places. Immediately, thousands of infantry and then horseman poured through the defences and entered the city. Once they were inside the battle was a foregone conclusion. The Genoans left as soon as they could, yet John Craneoli fought to the death. Constantinople fell on May 6th 1406.
The fall sent shockwaves through Europe. Despite the fact that huge parts of the continent were Turkish it seemed that for the first time the crowned heads of Europe took notice. The Venetians and Sicilians sent envoys to Suleyman whereas other such as the Holy Roman Emperor (and King of Hungary) Sigismund, demanded a crusade. There was some movement for one, and finally in August 14,000 knights set off from Bratislava to re-take Constantinople. The Fifth Crusade had begun. The Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Poland, the Duke of Austria, the King of Bohemia and the Electors of multifarious German states rode with it with their knights. They took Belgrade on 28th of August in a torrent of rain that continued into September, rusting armour and destroying roads. From then on progress was painfully slow- they only moved 100 miles in a month. All this while, Suleyman was marshalling his forces. He sent envoys to his brother in Kiev who sent 10,000 horsemen who passed within 50 miles of the Crusade unmolested. He also gathered numerous other forces from the Balkans and even Egypt, where the dispossessed mamluks were looking to re-build. They sent forces so as to gain a good reputation with the Sultan (who was the most powerful Muslim lord in the Middle East at that time). Altogether, 100,000 men gathered to fight the Crusaders. Suleyman wintered in Edirne, away from the shivering wreck of Constantinople. He felt no need to re-build the city quite yet, although he had his architects draw up plans for a new capital on the Golden Horn. The Crusaders froze and drowned and gradually their soldiers melted away. By March there were only 60,000 men out of 120,000 who had set out. The knights remained however and they were the driving force of the movement. The infantry were mere decoration.
Suleyman met the Crusaders 300 miles north west of Edirne on 15th April 1407. The Crusaders, seeing the Turkish horsemen apparently disorganised, attacked immediately. The Turks fell back, putting up little resistance. The knights charged right through them, scattering them. However, they soon met with the janissaries. These men were slave-soldiers, trained since boyhood to be fanatically loyal and grimly martial. They formed a dense block with pikes and halberds. The knights broke themselves on this solid mass of some 5,000 men. finally, the horsemen, who were mostly Anatolians who had fled in 1402, rounded on the knights and surrounded them. Of the 14,000 knights only 900 survived. 3,000 were captured including the Duke of Austria and the King of Poland. All others were slain. The infantry, outstripped by the knights, were speedily massacred. It was the greatest disaster to occur on European soil for centuries. With Christendom decapitated Suleyman moved speedily into Bosnia and Hungary, extending his borders up the Danube with little resistance. When he was informed of the disaster, King Henry IV of England merely said: “The followers of Christ have met their Cannae. Let us hope this Turk is a lesser man than he whom he emulates."
That's the first bit, I kow it's a little long but I want to spark your interest. Coming up we'll have the fall of Moscow, the siege of Vienna and the capitulation of Venice as well as the Diet of Frankfurt and the Anglo-French war (yay, Henry V!)
You commenters know what to do. . .