August – December 1402
Bursa and Smyrna, 1402
After the battle Timur sends his grandson Muhammad Sultan with 30,000 horsemen to Bursa. Süleyman reaches the town first and carries off part of the treasury, and Muhammad Sultan’s men plunder the rest, take Bayezid’s wife Olivera and his daughters captive and set the town on fire. They also free the sons of Alaeddin of Karaman, whom Bayezid has held there since 1397.
Süleyman crosses at Gallipoli in August 1402 on Venetian and Genoese ships and takes over the Ottoman lands in Europe. Timur moves by Sivrihisar to Kütahya, spends one or two months there and gives Germiyan back to Yakub. His detachments ride on to Konya, Akşehir and Karahisar, and Süleyman sends him gifts and accepts him as overlord.
In December Timur turns against Smyrna, whose harbour castle the Knights Hospitaller have held since 1374. He arrives on 2 December 1402, and when the 200 knights under Íñigo de Alfaro refuse to accept Islam or pay tribute, his men block the harbour, mine the outer wall and break in after about two weeks. Some knights escape to their ships, the Christian inhabitants are killed and Timur has the sea castle torn down. The Genoese of Phocaea and the lord of Lesbos submit, and the Genoese of Chios and Bayezid’s son İsa send envoys to Timur at Ayasluğ.
The gate of Kadifekale, the castle on Mount Pagos above İzmirWikimedia Commons, Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Izmir Kadifekale entrance 5676.jpg)
Sources
- Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, Zafarnama (1425).
- Ibn Arabshah, ʿAjāʾib al-maqdūr fī nawāʾib Tīmūr (1435).
- Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina (about 1462).
- Giacomo Bosio, Dell’istoria della sacra religione et illustrissima militia di San Giovanni Gierosolimitano, vol. 2 (1594).
- Anthony Luttrell, “The Hospitallers at Rhodes, 1306–1421”, in A History of the Crusades, vol. 3 (1975), 278–313.
- Dimitris J. Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid (2007).
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