Bayezid I: the Thunderbolt sultan

Few rulers rose so fast or fell so far. In thirteen years Bayezid I pushed the Ottoman state from the Danube to the Euphrates and crushed one of the last great crusades. Six years after that triumph he was Timur's prisoner, and his empire nearly fell apart. Britannica credits him with founding the first centralized Ottoman state, built on Turkish and Muslim institutions; Halil İnalcık, the great Ottoman historian, saw in him the same ambition, a centralized state that briefly ruled from the Danube to the Euphrates.²

Early life: the Thunderbolt

Bayezid was the eldest son of Sultan Murad I. The year of his birth is uncertain: İnalcık, writing in the Turkish Islamic encyclopedia, gives 1354, while Britannica gives about 1360.³

The sources explain his famous nickname, Yıldırım, the Thunderbolt, in two ways. In İnalcık's account he earned it in 1386, on his father's campaign against the Karamanids, a rival Turkish dynasty in Anatolia, for his courage at the battle of Frenk Yazısı. Britannica ties it to the speed with which he moved his armies. Both readings fit the man.⁴

Kosovo, 1389: a throne won on the battlefield

Bayezid became sultan in the middle of a battle. At Kosovo, on 15 June 1389, he played a leading part in the Ottoman victory over the Serbs, but his father was killed, stabbed, in the accounts Gibbon collected, by a Serbian who had pretended to desert. As the eldest son, İnalcık writes, Bayezid had been named successor in his father's will, and he took the throne on the field. The Ottomans had no fixed rule of succession, and İnalcık adds that the new sultan at once had his only surviving brother put to death, on the advice of the state's officials, to prevent a civil war.⁵

Serbia, the beaten enemy, became an ally. Before crossing back to Anatolia, Bayezid reached a settlement with Lazar's son Stefan Lazarević, who sent troops to serve with the Ottomans from then on. Serbian horsemen fought for Bayezid at Nicopolis, as both Britannica and the eyewitness Johann Schiltberger record, and again at Ankara.⁶

The beyliks of Anatolia

In Anatolia the Thunderbolt lived up to his name. İnalcık counts five Turkish emirates, Aydın, Saruhan, Menteşe, Hamid and Germiyan, annexed in the winter of 1389 to 1390 alone; Britannica too describes how he annexed the Turkmen emirates of Anatolia to build a Turkish and Muslim base for his state. The hardest rival was Karaman. In 1397, both encyclopedias record, Bayezid beat the Karamanid ruler at Akçay and took Konya. Schiltberger, then a prisoner in Bayezid's service, saw the end of the campaign and says the Karamanid prince was captured and beheaded.⁷

Constantinople and the Danube, 1391 to 1395

In the Balkans, Venetian and Hungarian moves pushed Bayezid to tighten his grip. He occupied Tirnovo, the Bulgarian capital, in 1393, a conquest Britannica dates to July and İnalcık to 17 June, and took Thessaloniki in 1394. Constantinople he held under pressure for years: Britannica speaks of a blockade from 1391 to 1398, while İnalcık dates the close siege of the city from the spring of 1394.⁸

In 1395 his armies crossed the Danube and raided Hungary and Wallachia. Britannica sees that invasion of Hungary as the spark of a Hungarian and Venetian crusade.⁹ › Battle of Rovine, 1395

Nicopolis, 1396

In 1394 Pope Boniface IX called for a crusade, and in 1396 knights from France, Burgundy, Hungary, Germany and other lands marched down the Danube under King Sigismund of Hungary and laid siege to Nicopolis. Bayezid broke off the siege of Constantinople and hurried north. The battle, on 25 September 1396 by Britannica's and İnalcık's dating, was lost by the crusaders' own haste: the French knights insisted on charging first, broke through the Ottoman front and were then destroyed by Bayezid's reserves, while a Serbian force struck the Hungarian flank. Schiltberger, a Bavarian boy of sixteen in the service of a knight of the crusading army, saw the Serbian despot throw his men at King Sigismund's banner.¹⁰

Bayezid had most of his prisoners executed. Schiltberger describes the next day: the prisoners led before the sultan, bound with cords, the killing from morning until vespers, until Bayezid's own counselors begged him to stop; he himself was spared because he was under twenty. He puts the dead of that day at ten thousand. John of Nevers, the son of the Duke of Burgundy, was spared, and Gibbon records that Bayezid later released him and the surviving lords for a ransom of 200,000 ducats.¹¹ › Battle of Nicopolis, 1396

Command style

Bayezid was a field commander who led from the saddle, and his reputation rested on speed. Gibbon, writing in the eighteenth century, saw the nickname as the key to his character: he spent his fourteen years of rule constantly on the march at the head of his armies, from Bursa to Adrianople, from the Danube to the Euphrates. At Nicopolis he let the French charge spend itself before he struck back with his reserves, as Britannica describes.¹²

His judges disagree about the man. İnalcık calls him brave, energetic and an able administrator, just but harsh in temper, who organized the sultan's slave household and issued new laws. Gibbon, drawing on Byzantine and European writers, wrote of boundless injustice and cruelty in the monarch alongside strict discipline in his camp.¹³

Timur and Ankara, 1402

The conquests in Anatolia brought Bayezid face to face with Timur (Tamerlane), the Central Asian conqueror, who claimed overlordship of the Anatolian emirs and took in the princes Bayezid had driven out, while Bayezid sheltered Timur's own enemies. In August 1400 Timur besieged Sivas, which surrendered and was sacked. Britannica and İnalcık both describe this rivalry as the road to war.¹⁴

In the summer of 1402 Bayezid marched east across Anatolia in the heat, but Timur slipped behind him and besieged Ankara, and the Ottoman army had to turn back. Britannica estimates Bayezid's army at about 85,000 and Timur's at up to 140,000; Schiltberger's figures run into the millions and cannot be taken literally. The battle was fought on the Çubuk plain near Ankara, on 20 July 1402 according to Britannica and Schiltberger's editors, on 28 July according to İnalcık.¹⁵

Timur's men had dammed the stream that was the Ottomans' only water. Serbian cavalry opened the battle with an effective charge, but Bayezid's Tatar contingents went over to Timur, and many Anatolian troops deserted to their former lords. Schiltberger, who fought on Bayezid's side, saw the Tatars change sides and remembered Timur's thirty-two war elephants. Bayezid fled to a hill with about a thousand horsemen; Timur surrounded it and took him. Britannica notes that he was the only Ottoman sultan ever captured by an enemy.¹⁶

Captivity and death

Bayezid did not live long as a prisoner. Timur took him along as he plundered Anatolia, and he died at Akşehir on 8 March 1403, less than eight months after the battle. Britannica, İnalcık and Schiltberger's editors agree on the place and the year. His body was carried to Bursa, where his tomb stands, a point on which İnalcık and Gibbon agree.¹⁷

How he was treated is the subject of the most famous story about him. Timur's own court history, as Gibbon summarized it, describes a generous victor who received the sultan in his tent, promised him his throne and mourned him when he died of apoplexy. European writers told the opposite: the sultan shut in an iron cage and carried behind Timur's army. Britannica mentions, as an allegation, that Timur kept him in a golden cage as a trophy.¹⁸

The iron cage: legend and evidence

Historians have argued over the cage for centuries. Gibbon, in the 1780s, thought a cage on a wagon might have been a harsh precaution after an escape attempt. His nineteenth-century editor, Henry Hart Milman, preferred the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer's explanation: the Turkish word kafes could mean a covered litter with an iron lattice, in which Bayezid traveled and which careless writers turned into a cage.¹⁹

The eyewitness is silent. Schiltberger, who had served Bayezid for six years and passed into Timur's hands after Ankara, says nothing about a cage, and his editors of 1879 argued that he would hardly have passed over such a humiliation of his old master; they concluded there was no truth in the story. In 2023 the Ukrainian historian Valerii Zema traced the legend through Renaissance writers such as Poggio Bracciolini and Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini and argued that it was shaped by the cult of Saint Leonard, the patron of prisoners. The fair verdict is that the cage is a legend nobody can prove.²⁰

Bayezid I's family: Olivera and his sons

Before he left the Balkans after Kosovo, İnalcık writes, Bayezid agreed to marry Olivera, the sister of the new Serbian ruler Stefan Lazarević, part of the settlement that turned Serbia into an ally. The Serbian princess was still his wife in 1402. Gibbon tells how, after Ankara, Timur had the sultan's harem brought from Bursa and restored the queen Despina, the Serbian princess, to her husband, though he required her to give up her Christian faith.²¹

His sons decided what came after him. İnalcık counts six who survived him: Süleyman, İsa, Musa, Mehmed, Kasım and Mustafa. Musa was taken at Ankara with his father, and Gibbon relates that Bayezid asked for him to be sought out among the captives. Süleyman, İsa, Musa and Mehmed then fought one another for the throne. Mustafa vanished after the battle, and a man claiming to be him later resurfaced as a pretender; the Turks called him Düzmece, the False, and Gibbon himself doubted that he was really Bayezid's son.²²

What Bayezid I built: Bursa

Bayezid left his mark on Bursa, the first Ottoman capital. On the eastern side of the city he built a complex of his own between 1390 and 1399, with a mosque, a madrasa, a hospital, an inn and a bath, and beside them the tomb in which he lies, completed by his son Süleyman in 1406, according to Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism. İnalcık lists the same foundations in Bursa, from the dervish lodge and madrasa to the hospital.²³

In the heart of the city he raised the Great Mosque, the Ulu Cami, a single prayer hall under twenty domes carried on twelve massive piers, built between 1396 and 1400; the date on its pulpit shows it was finished in 1399 or 1400. UNESCO counts the complexes of the early sultans, Bayezid's among them, as the core of Bursa's World Heritage site, because each grew into a quarter of the city around its mosque, school, kitchen, bath and tomb.²⁴

Legacy and memory

His defeat threw the Ottoman state into eleven years of civil war between his sons, the period known as the Interregnum, until Mehmed I reunited it in 1413. Britannica and İnalcık both stress how near the empire came to collapse, and how it survived: the Anatolian lands shrank back almost to their size under Murad I, but the Balkan provinces held, and from them the state recovered.²⁵

İnalcık judges that Bayezid partly succeeded in replacing the old network of vassal dynasties with a centralized state: he set up an early central administration and the sultan's slave household, and for a time one government ruled from the Danube to the Euphrates. Britannica, too, names him the founder of the first centralized Ottoman state.²⁶

Read how Mehmed II finally took the city Bayezid had blockaded in the siege of Constantinople.

See his great victory at Nicopolis, meet the other great commanders of the Ottoman Empire, read about the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire, then test yourself in the Ottoman battles quiz.