20 July 1402, or 28 July
The battle lines
On the morning of the battle Bayezid draws up his army facing south. He stands in the centre on a low rise with about 10,000 janissaries, the azaps in front of them, his sons İsa, Musa and Mustafa and the grand vizier Çandarlı Ali Pasha. Stefan Lazarević holds the right wing with his Serbian horsemen, his brother Vuk and Đurađ and Grgur Branković. Süleyman Çelebi holds the left with the Anatolian troops, among them the men of Aydın, Saruhan, Menteşe and Germiyan, and Mehmed Çelebi commands the reserve in the rear.
Timur commands the centre, with the war elephants in front of it. His son Miran Shah leads the right wing and his son Shah Rukh the left, and his grandsons Muhammad Sultan, Abu Bakr, Pir Muhammad and Khalil Sultan lead the vanguard and divisions of the wings. Bayezid leaves troops on a hill behind his line, the hill Bıyıktay calls Çataltepe, against an encirclement.
A battle in a Zafarnama, the history of Timur by Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, 1485–1486, Metropolitan Museum of ArtWikimedia Commons, unknown painter, CC0 ("Battle Scene", Folio from a Zafarnama (Book of Victories) of Sharaf al-Din 'Ali Yazdi MET DP159392.jpg)
Nizam ad-Din Shami and İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı put the Rumelian troops with Süleyman on the left and the Anatolian troops on the right beside the Serbs. In later Turkish accounts Timur’s right under Abu Bakr opens the battle with arrows, and the Ottoman left drives it back.
Sources
- Nizam ad-Din Shami, Zafarnama (1404).
- Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, Zafarnama (1425).
- Ibn Arabshah, ʿAjāʾib al-maqdūr fī nawāʾib Tīmūr (1435).
- Ömer Halis Bıyıktay, Yedi Yıl Harbi İçinde Timur’un Anadolu Seferi ve Ankara Savaşı (1934).
- İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 1 (1947).
- Spencer C. Tucker, “Battle of Ankara”, in Battles that Changed History (2010), 139–141.
- Dimitris J. Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid (2007).
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