10 June 1329
The fight below the hills
On the morning of 10 June Orhan sends 300 mounted archers down from the hills to draw the Byzantines up the slopes. The Byzantines drive them off but do not follow them uphill. Turkish horsemen come down again and again, and the fighting goes on at the foot of the hills until nightfall without either side giving way.
The coast road runs here between the sea and a line of hills. Orhan’s army holds the hills across the road to Nicomedia, and the Byzantines stand on the narrow ground below them, with the sea behind.
Late in the day Andronikos III is wounded in the leg, and Kantakouzenos is also lightly wounded. Rather than attack the hills, the Byzantines decide to withdraw to Philokrene the next morning. Some accounts place the emperor’s wound in the retreat of 11 June.
Sources
- John VI Kantakouzenos, Histories, book 2.
- Donald M. Nicol, The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of John Cantacuzene, Byzantine Emperor and Monk, c. 1295–1383 (1996), 32–33.
- Savvas Kyriakidis, Warfare in Late Byzantium, 1204–1453 (2011), 204.
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