Bayezid I

Bayezid I was called Yildirim, the Thunderbolt, for the speed with which he moved armies, and he ended his life as Tamerlane's prisoner after losing everything in an afternoon at Ankara. He took the throne on the field of Kosovo in 1389, where his father Murad was killed, and had his brother strangled the same day. He absorbed the remaining Turkish emirates of Anatolia by conquest rather than marriage, which made him enemies among their dispossessed rulers, and simultaneously pressed the Balkans and blockaded Constantinople for years. In 1396 he destroyed the last great crusade at Nicopolis, a Franco-Hungarian army that had come to relieve the city, and executed most of the prisoners. The blockade had the Byzantine capital close to starvation when Timur arrived in the east. The emirs Bayezid had dispossessed were at Timur's court asking for their lands, and the two rulers exchanged letters of escalating contempt. At Ankara in July 1402 Bayezid's Anatolian levies changed sides to their former lords during the battle and he was captured. He died in captivity eight months later, possibly by his own hand; the story that he was carried in an iron cage is probably a later embellishment of a real humiliation. The empire then spent eleven years in a civil war between his sons, the Interregnum, and Constantinople survived another fifty years because of it. Bayezid had been the first Ottoman ruler to seek the title of sultan of Rum from the Abbasid caliph in Cairo, which is a claim to be the successor of the Seljuks and of Rome at once, and Ankara made it look premature. His Serbian brother-in-law Stefan Lazarevic fought loyally for him at Ankara and was among the last off the field.

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