Tamerlane vs Bayezid I in Battle of Ankara

Battle of Ankara is a battle between the Ottomans and the Timurids.  The decisive battle of Ankara, or battled of Cubukabad, was fought at Cubukabad near Ankara on July 20, 1402.

Timur (1336-1405), known in the west as Tamerlane, from Samarkand, had founded a vast Eurasian empire stretching from India to Russian.

Regarding himself as the legitimate successor of the Mongol ruler, he considered Bayezid I’s ambition to conquer Muslim states a challenge to his authority.

Sultan Bayezid I led an Ottoman army against a force led by Timur. Bayezid became sultan in 1389 after the assassination of his father Murad on the battlefield at Kosovo.

In battle of Ankara, Bayezid’s army was a hardened and disciplined force of 85,000 men, while Timur commanded between 140,000 and 200,000 men.

The Ottoman troops fought heroically and some 15,000 Turks and Christians are said to have been fallen in the attempt to break the Mongol lines.

When the rest had fled, Bayezid and his rearguard continued to resists far into the night until they were overwhelmed.

Defeated and taken prisoner, Bayezid I was first chivalrously treated by Timur, but later after attempting to escape is said to have been locked up and carried around in an iron cage.

While still in Timur’s custody he died on March 8, 1403, according to some sources by his own.

The Ottoman defeat at the battle of Ankara was a serious blow to the merging new empire, which did not recover until the period of Mehmed II.
Tamerlane vs Bayezid I in Battle of Ankara

Tokhtamysh–Timur war

The Tokhtamysh–Timur war was fought in the 1380s and early 1390s between Tokhtamysh, khan of the Golden Horde and the Mongol warlord and conqueror Timur, in the areas of the Caucasus mountains, Turkistan and Eastern Europe.



Timur, conqueror of much of western and central Asia and founder of the Timurid Empire in Central Asia.



Tokhtamysh, a member of the Chingisid dynasty and a descendant of Juchi. Throughout the 1380s, friction between Tokhtamysh and Timur mounted as both sought dominance over Khwarezm and Azerbaijan.



During 1385 and the next two years, Timur legions marched through Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and northern Mesopotamia, expelling Tokhtamysh’s garrisons, massacring tens of thousands of the inhabitants and laying waste untold numbers of towns and cities.



In 1391, Timur defeated Tokhtamysh in a major battle east of the Volga River.



In 1395, Timur himself moved westward to try to destroy Tokhtamysh, who had concluded alliances with Moscow, Poland, and Lithuania to consolidate his position.



Timur pursued a policy of laying waste the lands of opponents.



Timur defeated Tokhtamysh again at a battle on the Terek River, north of the Caucasus. Timur chased Tokhtamysh toward Bulgar-on-the Volga.



He finally destroyed the power of Tokhtamysh and thus made himself master of the entire area up to the Mediterranean coasts and the frontiers of Asia Minor.

Tokhtamysh–Timur war

The Mongol Conquests

The Mongol Conquests
Over the course of the centuries preceding the great revolutionary movement of the eighteenth to the twentieth century, terror was practiced above all in times of war, and almost always through recourse to the military apparatus rather than that of the police. The army has always been a formidable instrument of state terror.

Before the emergence of modern totalitarian systems, nomad warrior societies practiced large-scale terrorism with fearsome effectiveness. Of all such tribes, the Mongols were the best organized the most terrifying, and the most destructive. At the height of its power, the Mongo Empire was the largest of all time, encompassing practically the entire Eurasian continent.

The Mongols under Genghis Khan had at their disposal a military instrument that was superior to every other army of its time. This superiority was a product of their Spartan way of life, their immersion in the military arts from earliest childhood, their military organization, their mobility, and undisputed preeminence in the rigors of discipline. One further asset available to them was the systematic practice of terror against peoples.

By comparison to sedentary society, nomad society is demographically quite feeble. Thus, the superiority of the nomad warrior had nothing to do with numbers. It was through the concentration of forces and the element of surprise that nomads sought to overwhelm their adversaries as well as through the psychological impact of their attacks on populations ill prepared for such a scourge. They therefore relied in the terror they inspired in civilian populations and armies to prevent uprisings in their wake. Thus terror became a basic tool of nomad strategy of conquest.

Tamerlane was Genghis equal, in military terms, his every operation enjoying success, even though he sometimes met the same adversaries in battle on several occasion. The key characteristics of his style of warfare was his frequent assaults on great cities, including, Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Delhi and Ankara. His adversaries were far from negligible.

The systematic use of terror against towns was an integral element of Tamerlane’s strategic arsenal. When he besieged a city, surrender at the first warning spared its people their live. Resistance on the other hand, was brutally punished by the massacre of civilians, often in atrocious circumstances. When the sack of a city was complete, Tamerlane raised pyramids of decapitate heads. In the 1397 taking Isfahan, a city of about half million inhabitants, observers estimated the number of dead at 100,000 to 200,000.

After the massacre, Tamerlane had some fifty pyramids built, each comprised of thousands of heads. In doing so Tamerlane hoped to persuade other besieged city to surrender at firsts notice. The tactic did not always work, and many towns still refused to capitulate. After the rape of Isfahan however, Tamerlane moved on to Shiraz, which offered no resistance. By his reckoning, this approach prevented bloodshed, at least among those reasonable enough to lay down their weapons without fight. The practice of terror remained methodological at all times and he took pains to spare elites, theologians, artists, poets, engineers, architects and so on.
The Mongol Conquests