The Battle of Ankara

The Battle of Ankara, fought in 1402 on the plain near Ankara in central Anatolia, was one of the most dramatic reversals in the history of the Ottoman state. The Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, called Yildirim, the Thunderbolt, had carried Ottoman power to its first height: he had conquered widely in the Balkans, crushed a great crusade at Nicopolis, and was pressing the siege of Constantinople, when he came into collision with Timur (Tamerlane), the conqueror whose vast empire reached from Central Asia across Persia to the borders of Anatolia. The two greatest Muslim rulers of the age turned upon each other, and at Ankara their huge armies met. Timur's host, drawn from across his empire, included war elephants brought from India, a strange and terrible sight on an Anatolian field; he also won over to his side the Anatolian Turkish lords whom Bayezid had dispossessed. The Ottoman army was broken, and Bayezid himself was captured and died the following year in Timur's keeping, while Timur, having shattered Ottoman power, soon withdrew eastward and died not long after. The defeat plunged the Ottoman state into the long crisis known as the Interregnum, a decade of civil war among Bayezid's sons, before Sultan Mehmed I reunited the realm and the dynasty recovered to go on, two generations later, to take Constantinople. This scene depicts the field and the two arrayed armies, Timur's host with its war elephants against the Ottoman cavalry and janissaries on the dry upland plain near Ankara, without any graphic depiction of the slaughter; no individual is shown by likeness.