power. On the 20th of July, 1402, the decisive conflict took place. The Mongol army is said to have exceeded 800,000 men, and it certainly was far more numerous than that led by Bajazet, who could not have brought more than 100,000 into the field; and not only in numbers, but in equipment, in zeal, and in the skill with which they were directed, the superiority was on the side of the Mongols. Except the corps of Janizaries, who were under the Sultan's immediate orders, and the Servian auxiliaries who fought gallantly for the Ottomans under their king, Stephen Lazarevich, Bajazet's troops showed little prowess or soldiership at Angora. The arts of Timour's emissaries had been effective; and, when the action commenced, large numbers of the Tartars who were in Bajazet's service, passed over to the ranks of his enemies. The contingents of several of the Asiatic tributary princes took the same course; and it was only in the Ottoman centre, where Bajazet and his Janizaries stood, and in the left centre, where the Servians fought, that any effective resistance was made to the fierce and frequent charges of the Mongol cavalry. Bajazet saw that the day was irreparably lost, but he rejected the entreaties of his officers to fly while escape was yet practicable. He led his ten thousand Janizaries to some rising ground, which he occupied with them, and there beat off all the attacks of the enemy throughout the day. But his brave Janizaries were sinking beneath thirst, fatigue, and wounds; and it was evident that the morning would see them a helpless prey to the myriad enemies who swarmed around them. At nightfall

Bajazet attempted to escape from the field, but he was marked and pursued; his horse stumbled and fell with him; and Mahmoud, the titular Khan of Jagetai, who served in Timour's army, had the glory of taking the great Sultan of the Ottomans prisoner. Of his five sons who had been in the battle, three had been more fortunate than their father. Prince Solyman had escaped towards the Ægean Sea, Prince Mahomet to Amassia, and Prince Issa towards Caramania. Prince Musa was taken prisoner; and the fifth, Prince Mustapha, disappeared in the battle, nor was his fate ever certainly known.

Bajazet was at first treated by Timour with respect and kindness; but an ineffectual attempt to escape incensed the conqueror, and increased the rigour of the Sultan's captivity. Thenceforth Bajazet was strictly watched by a numerous guard, and was placed in fetters every night. When the Mongol army moved from place to place, Timour took his captive with him ; but, in order to avoid the hateful sight of his enemies, Bajazet travelled in a covered litter with iron latticework. The similarity of sound between two Turkish words caused the well-known story that the Tartar king carried the captive Sultan about in an iron cage.* The real ignominy which Bajazet underwent was sufficient to break a proud heart, and he died in March, 1403, eight months after the battle of Angora. Timour had

* In Marlowe's play of "Tamburlaine," Bajazet and "the Turkess," his wife, brain themselves against the bars of the cage on the stage. Though he stoops to much bombast and extravagance, Marlowe breathes nobly the full spirit of the ferocious energy and fiery pride of the great Oriental conqueror. His Tamburlaine " is immeasurably superior to the benevolent Tamerlane of Rowe, both as a dramatic character, and as an image of historic truth.

sufficient magnanimity to set at liberty Prince Musa, Bajazet's son, and to permit him to take the dead body to Brusa for honourable interment in the burial-place of the Ottoman sovereigns. He himself did not long survive his fallen rival. He died at Otrar, on the 1st of February, 1405, while on his march to conquer China. In the brief interval between his victory at Angora and his death, he had poured his desolating armies throughout the Ottoman dominions into Asia Minor, sacking the Turkish cities of Brusa, Nice, Khemlik, Akshehr, Karahissar, and many more, and then assailing the great city of Smyrna, which had escaped the Ottoman power, and had been for half a century held by the Christian Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. Timour directed the siege of Smyrna in person. In fifteen days a mole had been thrown across the harbour, which deprived the besieged of all succour, and brought the Mongol troops close to the seaward parts of the city; large portions of the landward walls had been undermined; huge moveable towers had been constructed, from which the besiegers boarded the city's battlements, and Smyrna was taken by storm, notwithstanding the heroic defence of the Christian knights. Timour ordered a general massacre of the inhabitants without mercy to either age or sex.

It was the custom of the Tartar Conqueror to rear a vast pyramid of human heads, when any great city had been captured by his troops. The garrison and population of Smyrna proved insufficient to supply materials for one of these monuments on his accustomed scale of hideous grandeur. But Timour was resolved not to

leave the site of Smyrna without his wonted trophy; and he ordered that the supply of heads should be economised, by placing alternate layers of mud between the rows of heads in the pyramid. After other similar acts of gigantic cruelty in Asia Minor, he marched into Georgia to punish the Prince of that country for not having come in person when required to the Tartar camp. The unhappy Georgians perished by thousands for the imputed fault of their sovereign, and seven hundred towns and villages were destroyed by the troops of Timour. In 1404, the Conqueror rested for a short time from blood-shedding, and displayed his magnificence in his capital city of Samarkand, which he had not seen for seven years. But the unslaked thirst of conquest and slaughter urged him onward to the attack of the Chinese empire before the year was closed; and that wealthy and populous realm must have been swept by his destroying hordes, had it not been saved by the fever which seized him at Otrar, after his passage of the river Sihoon on the ice in February, 1405. Timour died in that city, at the age of seventy-one, having reigned thirty-six years, during which he shed more blood and caused more misery than any other human being that ever was born upon the earth.

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VOL. I.

CHAPTER IV.

INTERREGNUM AND CIVIL WAR MAHOMET I. REUNITES THE EMPIRE-HIS SUCCESSFUL REIGN-HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER-ACCESSION OF AMURATH II-SIEGE OF CONSTANTINOPLE-CIVIL WAR IN ASIA-WARS WITH THE SERVIANS, HUNGARIANS, AND OTHER NATIONS VICTORIES OF HUNYADES-TREATY OF SZEGEDDIN-BROKEN BY THE CHRISTIANS BATTLE OF VARNA-SCANDERBEG-SECOND BATTLE OF KOSSOVA-DEATH OF AMURATH.*

THE Ottoman Empire, which during the fourteenth century had acquired such dimensions and vigour, lay at the beginning of the fifteenth century in apparently irretrievable ruin. Besides the fatal day of Angora, when its veteran army was destroyed, and its long-victorious sovereign taken captive, calamity after calamity had poured fast upon the House of Othman. Their ancient rivals in Asia Minor, the Seljukian princes of Caramania, Aidian, Kermian, and other territories which the three first Ottoman sovereigns had conquered, were reinstated by Timour in their dominions. In Europe the Greek Empire accomplished another partial revival, and regained some of its lost provinces. But the heaviest and seemingly the most fatal of afflictions was the civil war which broke out among the sons of Bajazet, and which threatened the utter dismemberment and destruction of the relics of their ancestral dominions,

* See Von Hammer, books 8, 9, 10, 11.