Timur Captures Sultan Bayezid at Ankara

In the summer of 1402, two expanding empires collided on the plains of central Anatolia. Sultan Bayezid I had spent years pushing Ottoman control deep into the Balkans and Anatolia, lifting his blockade of Byzantine Constantinople in 1400 to confront a rival power advancing from the east. That rival was the Central Asian conqueror Timur, who had built a vast empire across Central Asia and Persia and had sacked Delhi in 1398. Tensions rose as Bayezid expanded into Anatolian principalities whose displaced rulers looked to Timur for protection. After seizing Ottoman Sivas and campaigning through Syria, Timur directed his experienced army westward toward Ankara.

Bayezid responded by marching his troops rapidly eastward through harsh midsummer heat. Modern estimates put his force at no more than about 85,000 men, comprising elite Janissaries, levies from Anatolian vassal principalities, Tatar contingents, and Christian Balkan allies led by figures such as the Serbian prince Stefan Lazarevic. Britannica and other modern accounts estimate that Timur commanded roughly 140,000 soldiers, though some scholars think both armies were much smaller. Contemporary chroniclers gave tallies in the hundreds of thousands or even over a million, figures that modern scholars treat as exaggerations.