Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, episode 168, the Ottomans from Osman to Nicopolis, which is also episode five of season nine, the Reformation. Before the Reformation, for over 400 years, ever since the battle on the Lechfeld in 955, Western Europeans did not have to fear an enemy on their eastern flank. It was in fact the other way around. Christian warriors had expanded relentlessly southwards in the Crusades, trying to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim rule.
Northwards, where crusaders and knightly orders converted pagan Slavs by fire and sword. And eastwards as German speaking settlers spread across Central Europe and the Balkans. By then, on a clear September morning in 1396, that era of unchecked expansion came to a dramatic halt. Outside the city of Nikopol in Bulgaria, the mightiest knights and princes of Europe gathered, their breastplates and polished helmets blazing in the rising sun.
Their battle hardened horses, bred to crush enemies underfoot, shifted restlessly, sensing the tension of the moment. This was not a battle against some pagan tribal warrior clan or the defence of a crusading castle far away from home and hearth. This was something altogether new. Before them stood an army unlike any they had ever faced. To men like the Count of Nevers, soon to be known as John the Fearless of Burgundy, this strange, audacious enemy had it all wrong.
Their horse regiments were made up of lightly armored archers, no match for the tank like knights. And what height of foolishness their center, where their leader was clearly visible, wasn't held by his elite cavalry, but by the weakest of medieval military forces, the infantry. And these infantry soldiers there weren't even free men fighting for their honor. They were just slaves that the great prince and warrior thought will be a walk in the park.
The Count of Nevers demanded the honor of leading the charge himself, envisioning the glory of victory and with it the greatest prize of all, the union of the Orthodox and Roman Church that the Emperor of Constantinople had promised should they defeat this new foe they called the Ottomans.
But before we can ride with John the Fearless into lines of janissaries, I have to tell you again, and I am very sorry about that, but again, the history of the Germans is advertising free except for these brief little skits.
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I do apologize for dropping a saint, and I accept the additional 10,000 years in purgatory this obviously warrants. And with that, back to the show. Almost exactly a century before the knights of Christian Europe gazed upon the unfamiliar sight of turbaned riders and thousands of slave soldiers, a young man, the son of an Anatolian warlord, visited his neighbour, the venerable Sheikh Ida Bali. The name of this young man was Osman.
Having been fed and watered as an honored guest, the young suitor had fallen asleep in Idabali's garden and dreamt. From the bosom of Idabali rose the full moon, and inclined towards the bosom of Osman, it sank upon it, and was lost to sight. After that a goodly tree sprang forth, which grew in beauty and in strength.
Ever greater and greater still did the embracing verdure of its boughs and branches cast an ampler and an ampler shade, until they canopied the extreme horizon of the three parts of the world. Under the tree stood four mountains, which he knew to be Caucasus, Atlas, Taurus, and Haemus. These mountains were the four columns that seemed to support the dome of the foliage of the sacred tree, with which the earth was now centered.
From the roots of the tree gushed forth four rivers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Nile. Tall ships and barques innumerable were on the waters. The fields were heavy with harvest, the mountainsides were clothed with forests. Thence in exulting and fertilizing abundance sprang fountains and rivulets that gurgled through thickets of the cypress and the rose. In the valleys glittered stately cities with domes and cupolas, with pyramids and obelisks, with minarets and towers.
The crescent shone on their summits. From their galleries sounded the muezzines called to prayer that sound was mingled with the sweet voices of a thousand nightingales and with the prattling of countless parrots of every hue. Every kind of singing bird was there. The winged multitude warbled and flitted around beneath the fresh living roof of the interlacing branches of the all overarching tree. And every leaf of that tree was in their shape like unto a scimitar.
Suddenly there arose a mighty wind and turned the points of the sword leaves towards the various cities of the world, but especially towards Constantinople. That city, placed at the junction of two seas and two continents, seemed like a diamond set between two sapphires and two emeralds to form the most precious stone in a ring of universal empire. Osman thought that he was in the act of placing that visional ring on his finger when he awoke.
His host, the venerable Sheikh Ida Bali, told Osman that this dream was a sign that he and his descendants would once rule one of the world's greatest empires. And since he wanted to be along for the ride, Sheikh E da Bali joined the young men's emerging confederation and gave him his daughter as his wife. The rest is history. Under Osman's successors, all of this dream came true. Well, maybe excluding the huge tree, the birdsong and the bountiful harvest. But how did they manage?
When Osman took command of his father's little warband, world domination was nowhere on the horizon, not even as a fictitious dream. Osman was just one of dozens of Turkic beys in western Anatolia, squeezed in between the Mongols who had taken over the Seljuk Rum Sultanate and the Byzantine Empire. In the west, the sea routes were dominated by Genoese and Venetian fleets. And remnants of the Crusader states in their chivalric order, still clung onto bits of the Middle East.
To understand Osman's journey, we must go back to the origin story of the Turks in Anatolia. The Turkic people first emerged in the vast expanses of Central asia in the 6th century. A people of the steppe. Kin to the fearsome Huns, Magyars and Mongols, they were born to a life on horseback, their existence defined by the rhythm of the open plains and the wild gallop of their hardy steeds.
Their composite bows, masterfully crafted from horn, wood and sinew, were powerful weapons of astonishing range, allowing the Turks to shoot with lethal accuracy even in the chaos of a high speed charge. Like phantoms, they would advance, release a deadly volley and retreat before their enemies could react, only to return in relentless waves, wearing their opponents down before swooping in for the kill.
Over the centuries, horse archers have bested the armies of the settled empires of Asia and Europe again and again. But once they had conquered these rich civilizations, they faced a stark choice. Their military advantage was bound to the grasslands. Their lean, swift horses depended on the pastures of the steppe. And while their composite bows were marvels of engineering, they were also fragile.
The glue that held the layers together could soften and lose its power in the damp climates, leaving their bows as vulnerable as they were fearsome. One option was therefore to return to their homelands, wade down with the spoils and leave behind these fertile lands that promised permanence and power. Or they could adapt to a settled life, integrating with the lands and cultures they had conquered. The most successful of these horse archer empires did exactly that.
They co opted the existing elites into their empire, tasked them with the management of their complex societies. They recruited the engineers to develop their siege engines and they used the artisans to design their palaces. Over time, they mixed with the existing population and created a new culture that combined elements of both. And this process repeated throughout history again.
And the Magyars in Hungary, the Bulgars, the Mongols in China, the Mamluks in Egypt, and the Delhi Sultanate, just to name a few. Now, one of these groups, a Turkic tribe called the Seljuks, had gained a foothold in Mesopotamia, which they expended until in 1055, they were able to take over Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliph, the leader of the Islamic world. They became the sultans, the protectors of the Caliph.
And like other Turkic tribes before they integrated into their host culture, adopted Islam, learned Persian and built impressive mosques. One subgroup of the Seljuk Turks then moved on further west into Byzantine Asia Minor. And they very much liked what they found there. There was an arid plateau, Anatolia, with wonderful grassland for their horses and a climate that suited their composite bows. As they settled in, they ran up against the Byzantine Empire had ruled these lands for centuries.
The conflict culminated in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, where a huge Byzantine army was destroyed. This defeat triggered Emperor Alexis Komneno's request for help to Pope Urban ii. That in turn kicked off the Crusades. But neither Byzantine armies nor crusaders could shift the Seljuks out of central Anatolia. They had settled down and they had established their capital at Konya, where they reigned as the Seljuk Sultans of Rum, Rum being the Turkish and Arabic word for Rome.
In 1176, a last ditch attempt to remove the Seljuqs and regain central Anatolia ended with the defeat of Myriocephalon. If you remember, Barbarossa did actually defeat the Seljuks a few years later and took Konya in the Third Crusade. But that did not change anything, as the Emperor died a few weeks later and Konya returned to the Sultan.
When the Seljuks arrived in Anatolia, they numbered at absolute maximum about 500,000, whilst the population of Anatolia, once the richest part of the Eastern Empire, was likely several million. Moreover, the Seljuqs were Muslims, while the population of Anatolia were overwhelmingly Christian, mostly Orthodox, but also Armenian and various smaller sects, as well as a sizable Jewish community. And again, a classic step nomad pattern repeated itself.
The Seljuks employed the local bureaucrats to run their new principality and allowed them to retain their religion and culture. The Quran, like in fact the Bible, prohibits the forced conversion of unbelievers. And whilst the Christians did not always adhere to that premise, Muslim conquerors in the pre modern period, by and large did.
Now, I very much doubt them was a function of some sort of moral superiority, but much rather down to the fact that the Muslim conquerors tended to be a comparatively small group in a sea of peoples adhering to a different religion and culture. Tolerance was a necessity, not a choice. The same happened with the Normans in Sicily, where coexistence of Catholic Orthodox Muslims and Jews was the only viable option to build a sustainable political entity.
The seljuk Sultanate lasted 200 years and in this period transformed Christian Byzantine Asia Minor into Muslim Turkish Anatolia, not by force, but by a slow drip drip of cultural infusion. As Muslim rulers, they embarked on a huge building program, establishing mosques and madrassas in all the major cities. Sufi lodges called techi appeared all over the countryside, as did the turbe. A turbe is the tomb of a venerated person, a Muslim saint, or sometimes just a very devout person of prominence.
Cut off from Constantinople, the Christian churches of Anatolia lacked educated priests and bishops. And over time the structures themselves deteriorated, partly from shortage of funds, general neglect, and then the frequent earthquakes. As these churches collapsed, Muslim structures took their place and they impressed the population with their splendor and invited them in. But at the heart of this transformation was the magnetic figure of Jalal Al Din Muhammad, better known simply as Rumi.
Born in the rich cultural center of Khorasan in Persia, Rumi was and is one of the world's most celebrated poets, a Muslim jurist, and above all, a mystic whose influence would extend far beyond the lands of his birth. Rumi believed that through music, dance and poetry, one could come closer to the divine. His vision was that of unity of the soul with God, of cultures with one another. And this belief culminated in what would become known as the Mevlevi Order of the Whirling Dervishes.
These Dervishes, with their rhythmic entrancing rotations and soulful melodies, were not merely performing rituals, but embodying a path to transcendence, a surrender to the mysteries of the universe. And the people of Anatolia, wary of the divides that had marked their past, embraced this mystical vision of life. The impact was profound. The Mevlevi Order that Rumi had founded spread across Anatolia, and with it, a new cultural synthesis emerged.
Turkish language began to take root, blending with the linguistic traditions of those who had lived on this plateau for centuries. The kitchen transformed too, with Turkmen flavors. Thick yogurts and the famous airan drinks joined Mediterranean tastes, creating a cuisine that balanced the settled with the nomadic. Within a few generations, the identity of Asia Minor shifted. It was no longer solely Byzantine, Christian or entirely Turkmen. Instead, it had become its own thing, Turkish Anatolia.
This model of tolerance and gradual assimilation is what the Ottomans inherited from the Seljuks and that they will deploy across all the lands they will conquer. If we compare the conquest and transformation of Anatolia with the conquest of Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, they happen roughly around the same time. And they'll be discussed in episodes 130, following, where we can see how the Turkish approach was much more sustainable.
The forced conversions and aggressive immigration policies of the Teutonic Knights left the Prussian state susceptible to repeated uprisings and ultimately a defeat against the coalition of the locals and neighbours, something the Ottomans rarely experienced. Despite all these achievements, the Seljuk Sultanate of Konya collapsed when the mongol invaded in 1242, which happened to be the same year that they had appeared simultaneously in Poland and Hungary.
And the sultanate broke down into dozens of small vassal principalities called the Beyliks. And to get away from the powerful Moguls, these beys moved westward, infiltrating the ailing Byzantine Empire. The power of the emperor in Constantinople had taken a devastating blow in 1204, when a Western crusading army sacked the great city. In the wake of this I can only call a crime.
A Latin emperor reigned in Constantinople, who spent most of his time fighting several Byzantine breakaway principalities. Though the Latin empire fell in 1262 and an Orthodox emperor returned to the Blachanae palace, the ancient realm has only a shadow of its and it wasn't organizationally set up to deal with these Turkish beys. The Byzantines were used to fight Large organized states much like themselves. It was all geared up for that one decisive battle.
So the Emperor would muster an army, march to the area threatened by a Turkish Bey, offered battle, but then nobody showed up. After a few weeks of marching back and forth, money ran out and the Byzantines had to return back to Constantinople. At which point the Turkish base returned and occupied the countryside and harassed the rich cities of western Anatolia.
You do this a couple of times and the urban population concludes that it makes more sense submitting to the base who would provide safety and security, rather than hoping for another Christian relief army. And submission was made easy because the base maintained the Seljuk policy of religious tolerance. Christian communities were allowed to retain their religion, their churches and bishops. Yes, there were second class citizens and had to pay a special tax levied on non believers.
But most cities along the shore of the Aegean were happy to take that if the alternative was constant low level war, oppressive imperial taxes and in its wake, economic contraction. Our man Osman was in one of these Beys. His headquarters were in Sugut, a small town, if not at the time just a village about 80 miles from Bosa and the Sea of Marmara. His was neither the largest nor the richest of the Beyliks.
So how come he ended up founding an empire and all the other beys disappeared down the orcus of history? An anonymous early Ottoman writer, whose chronicle is today preserved in the Bodleian Library, wrote about Osman's success. One must consider the that the sultanates and most other sultans came about through injustice towards their predecessors and by conquering, overpowering and subjugating the Muslims.
But Osman Bey and his forefathers attacked the infidels and the borderlands with their swords, occupying themselves with Gaza. That's holy war. And sustaining their communities with plunder. This was long interpreted as Gaza, that is holy war being at the heart of Ottoman success. But one can also read it in another way. Osman was popular amongst the Turks of Anatolia because he refrained from fighting with other Beyliks.
So the other base did not stop him recruiting their fighters to come along on his campaigns. And he was a successful general who provided great opportunities for plunder. If we think about it, the empire builders of the steppe, the Genghis Khans and Tamerlanes of this world, they were exceptional power brokers. How do you think Genghis Khan conquered the largest empire that ever existed? Surely not.
With just a few hundred members of his own tribe, he found a way to attract diverse groups to his great conquests. Some were Mongols, other were Turks and even settled peoples who preferred to ride with the conqueror than being conquered. And Osman was no different, just on a smaller scale.
Many of those willing to ride with him were fellow Anatolian Turks, veterans of the internecine warfare between the various bays, but also Mongols, unhappy with their leadership, and Byzantine soldiers dismissed by or otherwise disaffected with the Emperor. In Constantinople. In just a few years after Osman had taken over, his coalition had become so powerful, the Emperor sent his one and only field army to crush the upstart. And this time the Turks did not disappear into the woods.
At the Battle of Baphis, Osman's forces routed the Byzantines. This victory cemented Osman's reputation as a great warlord and attracted even more fighters from all across Asia Minor to join his banner. Over the next 30 years, Osman and his equally gifted son Orhan used these forces to conquer the ancient province of Bithynia, once a heartland of the Byzantine Empire, just on the other side of the Bosporus from Constantinople. One by one, its great cities fell to the ottomans.
Bursa in 1323, Nicaea in 1331 and Nicomedia in 1337. Bursa became the first capital of the Ottoman state. But this battle at Bafos had a further impact as it set in motion a sequence of events that would accelerate the empire's. The Emperor Andronicus II had lost his last field army and like many of his predecessors, had to reach out for Western help.
This time these helpers weren't crusaders, but an army of battle hardened Catalan mercenaries, veterans of the long wars between the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples. Their leader was a man called Roger de Flore, or Roger Bloom, whose father had been a German, a falconer at the court of our old friend, the Emperor Frederick ii. Andronicus II promised this Roger gold and titles in abundance if he just got rid of that Turkish menace in western Anatolia.
Roger's forces crossed over to Bithynia in 1304 in search of the Ottoman army. Osman saw the strength of this force and reverted back to type. He ran for the hills. The Catalans went here and there, always thinking that their foe would be just around the next corner. But Osman never showed. Time went by and money ran out. The mercenaries did what mercenaries do and plundered the land, stealing indiscriminately from Muslims and Christians. The emperor protested.
The mercenaries said, where is our money? The Emperor said, do not worry, the check is in the post. The mercenaries believed the Emperor needed a nudge and crossed the Dardanelles and fortified Gallipoli. The emperor responded by having Roger de Floor murdered. The Catalans were now genuinely angry and besieged Constantinople. The Theodosian walls held, but that was the only good news.
The Catalans then left Constantinople, devastated Thrace and finally cut out their own little place in the sun, the Duchy of Athens. The impact on the empire was devastating. The treasury was empty. Western Anatolia was lost for good. The European lands were in ruins. A sudden rush for Byzantine real estate ensued. The Turkish Beys, the Bulgars, the Serbs, the Knights Hospitalis, the Venetians, the Genoese, they all got a piece of that once great state.
For a while it looked as if the Serbs, under their leader Stefan Dujan, had picked up the biggest chunk, would take over the capital and make themselves the successors of Constantine. It is testament to the incredible resilience of this mortally wounded empire that it did not collapse right away. But things went into another tailspin when in 1341, John V, the child of eight, became emperor. As was Byzantine tradition, a drawn out civil war over the regency ensued.
In this war, both sides used the best mercenary fighters that the Levant had on offer, which happened to be the Ottoman cavalry. And as before, money ran out before the mercenaries could be packed off home. These Turkmens reacted to the unpaid bills and broken promises in exactly the same way as the Catalans. They moved into the defences they had left behind. In Gallipoli. The emperor said, give it back. They said, where is the money? The emperor said, checks in the post.
But this time the mercenaries did not march on Constantinople. Instead, they did something that would ultimately break that age old Empire. In 1354, they offered Gallipoli to their true lord, Orhan, the son of Osman. And with that, the Ottomans gained the bridgehead on the European continent. And as luck would have it, the then undisputed strongman on the Balkans, Stephane Dujan, had died in 1355, leaving the door wide open for Ottoman conquest.
Again, city after city fell to Orhan and then his son, Murad I. And again, the Ottomans deployed their well honed tactics. Bring the population on side. The first point of order was indeed that order. Orhan and Murad insisted on the strictest of discipline in the ranks of their army. No burning, no plundering. No raping. And as before, the Orthodox population was permitted to retain their religion, their customs, their bishops and everything else.
And finally, the Ottomans brought the kind of stability the inhabitants of the collapsing empire had been craving for a century now. Various rulers within the empire had fought each other, had raised oppressive taxes to defend the borders and had given the Venetians and The Genoese the lion's share of the trade profits. Under Orhan and his successors, taxes were manageable, the roads were safe, the borders secure and trade flourished. No wonder they liked it.
The Ottomans now had a veritable state, which meant military tactics had to change. Retreating into the steppe and wearing out an enemy was no longer an option. The Ottomans had to get set up for decisive pitched battles. And their new military structure was based on two sipaes and janissaries. The sipae were the cavalry force and they were paid through timoths. A tima was a share in the income from an estate the soldier received in exchange for his military service.
Now, that sounds a bit like a medieval fief, but it was nothing of the sort. Ownership of the tima remained with the state and could be reassigned should the tima holder fail to show up or was otherwise unfit for the job. Tima holders were rotated between Anatolia and the new lands conquered on the European side. To prevent the establishment of close knit aristocratic family groups, as it had happened in Europe.
And in order to undermine the social status of tima holders, the sultans and their generals would regularly assign timas to slaves or peasants who had shown bravery in the field. Each tima holder had to show up with a specifically prescribed equipment, which included a horse, weapons, light armor and a squire. They were organized into districts of 100 riders under a commander who then himself reported upwards to the provincial governor.
Both the commander and the governor were chosen on merit and were awarded timas to maintain their office and as compensation for their service. And like the other tima holders, there could be and were regularly rotated around the empire to stop them getting entrenched. Now, the second pillar of the Ottoman army were the famous janissaries. These were slave soldiers recruited from subjugated lands.
In their first iteration, they were put together, using prison as a war, made during the conquests, mainly in the Balkans. But as early as the late 14th century, the main recruitment model was the div shirme, or collection. That meant every five to 12 years, each province, on a rotating basis, had to hand over one boy for every 40 households. These boys, most of them Christians, received military training, a thorough education and converted to Islam.
They were the elite force and personal bodyguard of the sultan. Janissaries fought on foot, initially armed with bows and swords, later with various forms of firearms. Though they were technically slaves, they received a salary of 2 aksha per day, which means roughly 700 a year, which was actually very generous. To put that into context, the tima for a cavalry soldier yielded somewhere between 500 and 3,000 ACE. But with that, he had to also cover the cost of his equipment.
Slave soldiers were no Ottoman invention. Long before the janissaries would make their indelible mark on Ottoman warfare, the practice of forging elite armies from men who had been taken as slaves was a well established tradition across Asia. The Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad had their Gilmen, while Egypt was run by the famed Mamluks. This distinctive brand of soldier was bound not by tribal loyalties or regional ties, but by the singular identity impressed upon them from a young age.
Strangers to the local nobility and cut off from traditional kinship networks, they offered their loyalty not to their homeland or family, but to the commanders who had crafted them. If they felt detachment, it was for their fellow janissaries, who they had grown up with, trained with, lived with and fought with. Standing firm where other troops might falter, they fought with a resolve that came from knowing their brothers in arms would do the same.
On June 15, 1389, this new force was put to the test for the first time in an epic battle against the Serbs, a battle known as the Battle on the Kosovo Field. As I said, the great Serbian leader Stefan Dujan had conquered large parts of southeastern Europe and had declared himself emperor of a multilingual and multiethnic realm that included not just Serbs, but also Bulgars, Greeks and Albanians.
But after his death in 1355, this empire declined and by 1389 had broken up into multiple territories, the largest of which was ruled by Lazar Rebaljanovich. By 1380, the Ottoman forces had defeated all the buffer states that stood between them and Lazar's principality. A final showdown with the sultans was inevitable. Lazar had several years to Prepare, and by June 1389, the time for the decisive battle had come.
Lhassa gathered all his forces and all his allies near Pristina on the field of Kosovo, and squared up to Sultan Murad I and his son Bayezid the Thunderbolt. Now, how exactly this battle unfolded is overlaid with so much nationalist narrative that I will not even try to break it down. Bottom line is that the Turks won. Both commanders, the Sultan Murad I and Prince Laza, perished. Serbian lore has it that the sultan was killed by a nobleman called Milos Obeli.
But Turkish sources have him losing his life in pursuit of Bosnian troops. And again the Turks were magnanimous in victory. Contrary to the commonly told story, they did not dissolve the Serbian state. They left Lazar's descendants in charge of what became known as the despotate of Serbia, a client state of the Ottomans, but one where Orthodox Christians could retain their patriarchs and way of life.
Some sources even claim that Serbia enjoyed a cultural and economic renaissance under Ottoman rule. At the next great battle, on September 25, 1396, Lazar's son, Stefan Lazarevi was standing alongside his father's foe, Sultan Bayezid I, when they surveyed the grand European army that had gathered outside Nikopol on the Hungarian border. This was the first time a Western army went toe to toe with an Ottoman force.
But before we talk about the actual battle, let's talk about why we suddenly find French princes, Burgundian dukes and German nobles in a muddy Balkan field. After the Battle of Kosovo, the situation for Constantinople had become completely untenable. They were surrounded on all sides by the Ottoman Turks. And likewise, the Ottoman Turks could not feel completely in control of their recently acquired empire when there still was a Byzantine Empire behind the mighty Theodosian walls.
Who could attack their rear at any time. The situation needed to be resolved one way or another. So in 1395, Ottoman forces laid siege to constant. The Byzantine Empire had exhausted all its military and economic resources, but it still had one last trump card. Ever since the Eastern and Western churches had parted way in 1055, it had been a papal ambition to rejoin the two parts of Christ's body.
And that desire was even stronger now, when there were two popes competing for supremacy of the Western Church. The Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos knew this and made an offer to the Roman Pope, Boniface ix. He could not refuse. If the Bishop of Rome was to preach a crusade to free Constantinople, then he, Emperor Manuel ii, would bring the Orthodox Church under Roman obedience.
And even though all the precious stones on Manuel's crown had been replaced by Swarovski diamonds, this was a prize that would confer immeasurable prestige on both the pope who achieved it and the military commander who defeated the Turks. And the timing was almost ideal, because right around that time, the French had subtracted their obedience from the obstinate Pope Benedict XIII in Avignon, paving the way for a crusade to be preached even in the lands not following the Roman pope.
The call for a crusade was picked up enthusiastically after 50 years of conflict between France and England and endless feuds in Italy and the Empire. Europe's elite, the knights, dukes and princes, knew only one way of life, and that was sticking swords in other people in the best possible chivalric taste. Echoing in their minds were the stirring words of the blind king, John of Bohemia.
Take me to the place where the noise of battle is the loudest, that I may strike one last stroke with my sword. And in 1396, there weren't as many options to go to war as there used to be. The Hundred Years War had gone into a temporary hiatus as the two kings were negotiating peace and marriage. The Prussian Reisen had become less popular now that the Lithuanians had stopped being pagan. So a crusade down to the Balkans to fight some Saracens. That sounded exactly like what the doctor ordered.
The crusading army gathered in Buda. It comprised the host, King Sigismund of Hungary, the second son of Emperor Karl iv, his Hungarian magnates and German nobles, the Connetable and the Marshal of France, Lord Angourand de Coucy, who. Who fans of Barbara Tuchman's distant mirror might remember Ivon Stratismir, the Tsar of Bulgaria, Mircea the Elder, the Voivode of Wallachia and father of Vlad the Impaler. That is Dracula to you and me.
Then there was the head of the Knights Hospitallers and most noble amongst them all, John the Count of Nevers and future Duke of Burgundy. The army was also supported by a Genoese and a Venetian fleet. Estimates ranged from 17 to 20,000 troops. This formidable force, the flower of European chivalry, saw itself facing an Ottoman army of similar, maybe even smaller, size. When the Turks moved into view, Jean of Nevers insisted to charge them immediately.
The seasoned Balkan rulers, who had encountered the Turks before, tried to dissuade him. King Sigismund demanded he postpone the attack for two hours so that his scouts could report back the exact size and position of the enemy. But nothing can sway the mind of a 25 year old who has been born with a golden spoon in his mouth the size of a spade. The Count of Nevers insisted, and his knights, all shiny and full of vigor, charged at the enemy. As they thundered down the field.
The Ottoman cavalry on their swift horses shot one arrow after another into this mass of riders who could not retaliate in any way. Meanwhile, the janissaries also discharged their bows and arrows rained down on the Burgundian and French. Now, if you've ever seen a phalanx of riders come at you, you will know that the only sensible reaction for anyone on foot is to run. That's why we have mounted police at demonstrations. But that is not what happened at Nikopol.
The janissaries were positioned on top of a hill and organized in five to seven rows. As the knights crashed into the front row of Ottoman infantry, the Line held and the janissaries killed the horses with sharpened sticks. Those of the unhorsed knights that had survived fought on on foot. Meanwhile, the Ottoman cavalry had regrouped and attacked the flanks. At that point, the Hungarian, German and Balkan allies joined the fray, but got dispersed between attacking Turks and retreating Frenchmen.
The initial attack force had finally managed to push the janissaries back when 1500 Serbs under Stefan Lazarevi appeared. That is, when the Burgundians and the French surrendered. Sigismund realized that there was nothing left to do and he fled in a fishing boat up the Danube. The battle was a catastrophic defeat for the crusaders. Thousands had perished. The richest had been taken hostage to be released against huge ransom payments. The remaining Balkan statelets fell under Ottoman rule.
Sigismund could barely hold the Hungarian frontier. But the hero of the battle, the great tactician John of Never, was given the honorific epithet the Fearless. For his chivalric madness. Sultan Bayezid returned to his siege of Constantinople. This should be by all accounts the end of the empire of Constantinople that had lasted a thousand years already. But the Byzantines were given another 50 year lease of life by someone who nobody expected, Timur or Tamerlane.
This new ruler of the steppe nomads had come down through Persia and Iraq, had sacked Baghdad in 1401, where he left one of his much admired pyramid of human skulls. And in 1402 he had appeared in Anatolia. Bayezid rode out to meet him and was comprehensively beaten at the battle of Ankara. The victor of Nikopol ended his life in a metal cage that Timur had devised for him. His sultanate was dismantled and split between two of his sons.
It would take 30 years before the next Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed I, was able to stitch the Ottoman Empire back together again. From then on, the superior military infrastructure and tactics, combined with a well honed system to integrate newly subjugated populations in the empire, made the Ottomans an irresistible force that will dominate imperial and Central European politics all the way into the 18th century.
The fear of Turkish tents rising up outside Vienna will occupy the mind of emperors for the next centuries and is one of the reasons The Reformation of 1525 could proceed largely unchecked. But for now, Timo had given Europe a 30 or 50 year breather, enough to sort out the Great Schism and to deal with the Hussite revolt. How that happened we'll get to soon. But before we get there, we'll still have to do one more of these background episodes.
Next week we'll spend some more time with a man who we've just seen running away from the field of Nikopol Sigismund the King of Hungary, soon to be King of the Romans and convener of the Council of Constance, where all these strains of history will combine. I hope you will join us again. And just before I go, remember today, October 31st is the last day you can sign up on the Patreon app without incurring the 30% Apple surcharge.
If you want to avoid that, use the patreon website@patreon.com historyofthegermans or go to my website historyofthegermans.com support.