March – July 1402
The march to Ankara, 1402
In March 1402 Timur holds a council of his princes and emirs in Karabagh, where many of the emirs speak against a war between two Muslim rulers. A comet seen that spring is read by his astrologers as a sign of victory in the west. He waits two months at Avnik, then gathers his army at Erzurum, and his grandson Muhammad Sultan takes Kemah after a siege of about ten days and hands it back to Taharten. At Sivas Timur receives Bayezid’s envoys and has his army parade before them from dawn to noon.
Timur reviews his army in the plain of Sivas in 1402, in the Zafarnama made for Ibrahim Sultan in 1436Wikimedia Commons, unknown painter, Public domain (Timur reviews his troops in the plain of Sivas in the battle of Ankara in mid-summer 1402. Zafarnama of 1436, facing folios 356r (left), 355v (right).jpg)
Bayezid lifts the blockade of Constantinople and gathers his army at Bursa, İznik and İzmit, with troops from Rumelia and Anatolia and those of his Christian vassals. It marches in two columns, by İzmit, Bolu and Gerede and by Geyve and Beypazarı, and camps around Ankara at the end of June. Against the advice of the grand vizier Çandarlı Ali Pasha, who wants to wait there, Bayezid leaves his baggage at Ankara, crosses the Kızılırmak and camps at Tokat to hold the mountain roads west of Sivas.
Timur’s envoy before Bayezid in 1401, in an Ottoman manuscript of about 1600, British LibraryWikimedia Commons, unknown Ottoman painter, Public domain (Timur's envoy before Bayazid I (1401). Bayazid's retinue includes janissaries, azebs, kapicis and ulema. Manuscript Or. 5736 f172v British Library.jpg)
Timur avoids the mountain roads and turns south down the Kızılırmak valley. He reaches Kayseri in about six days, spends four days there gathering the new harvest for his army and marches on by Kırşehir, where his scouts meet the Ottoman outposts. Three days later he reaches Ankara and besieges the castle. Bayezid turns back and marches for eight days in the summer heat, by Yozgat and Kalecik in Ömer Halis Bıyıktay’s reconstruction, while Halil Çetin has him follow Timur’s road by Kırşehir. The Ottoman army reaches the plain north-east of Ankara tired and short of water.
Sources
- 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).
- Marie-Mathilde Alexandrescu-Dersca, La campagne de Timur en Anatolie (1402) (1942).
- Halil Çetin, Ankara Savaşı ve Timur’un Anadolu Seferi (2012).
- Patrick Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries (1977).
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