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By Root 1468 0

most of Serbia belonged to the Greek Church, as opposed to Hungary, which belonged to the Latin and was resented for its efforts to impose Roman Catholic clergy and gain political dominion over its neighbors. Mircea, voyevod or ruler of Wallachia, fought against the Turks at Kossovo, but, because of old animosities, was not anxious to make common cause with Hungary against the common enemy. The same was true of the Serbs, who in any case were precluded from doing so once they accepted the Sultan as overlord. This had been Murad’s policy: to neutralize the Balkan rulers by leaving them in place under the obligation of homage. Because their kingdoms lacked unity, being no more than loose federations of semi-autonomous rulers, each could be picked off individually. One by one, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Wallachian rulers paid homage in order to avoid continuous Turkish raids. In areas of direct conquest, Murad divided the territory as fiefs among his followers, rooting them in Europe. Half the Turkish army at Kossovo already held land on the far side of the Bosporus.

Bajazet lost none of the impetus of his forebears. Chosen Sultan on the battlefield of Kossovo, he began by strangling his brother with a bowstring, a customary Turkish precaution, and proceeded at once to the business of shaking the Byzantine throne by assisting John VII to overthrow his grandfather. When John was in turn overthrown by his uncle, Manuel II, Bajazet besieged and blockaded Constantinople for seven years. In the meantime, he expanded his hold in Bulgaria, invaded Macedonia and Attica, and ravaged Bosnia and Croatia—taking more prisoners, it was said, than he left inhabitants. He was bold, enterprising, always on horseback, “equally avid for the blood of his enemies as he was prodigal with that of his soldiers.” His vanguard of ghazis, instruments of Allah, fought with the extra zeal of holy war against the Christian infidels. A ghazi, according to Turkish definition, was “the sword of God who purifies the earth from the filth of polytheism,” by which was meant the Christian Trinity.

In 1393, after occupying Tirnovo, capital of the eastern Bulgarian kingdom, Bajazet captured Nicopolis, the strongest Bulgarian fortress on the Danube. Situated on a height above the town of Nicopolis on the river’s edge, it commanded what was then a ford of the Danube protected by a Wallachian fortress on the opposite bank. Two tributary rivers entered the Danube at the base of the castle which thus controlled communications through the interior as well as down the Danube. At this strategic site the European-Ottoman clash was to come.

When the Bulgarian Czar, Ivan Shishman, refused, though a vassal, to support the Turks’ further advance with troops and provisions, Bajazet imprisoned him in Nicopolis. Growing impatient with the vassalage system, the Sultan subsequently had his prisoner strangled, reduced his kingdom to the status of a Turkish sandjak or province, and moved on against Vidin, capital of the western Bulgarian kingdom. When Sigismund, King of Hungary, sent envoys to demand by what right the Sultan abrogated Bulgarian sovereignty, Bajazet answered without words by simply pointing to the weapons and war trophies that hung upon his walls. Behind him he constructed a huge tower to fortify Gallipoli and a permanent port for his galleys. He raised imposing mosques at Adrianople and built caravansaries along the path of his advance. While his armed horsemen thrust forward in Europe, he continued to campaign and extend his hold in Anatolia. For the “fiery energy of his soul” and the speed of his marches, he earned the surname Ilderim, meaning Thunderbolt.

Following the capture of Nicopolis, King Sigismund’s appeals to the West for help grew more pressing. His country was now the last organized state in Eastern Europe resisting the Turks and it still remembered the terror of the Mongol ravages that had swept and receded over the Danube plain in the last century. Though Hungary was “Queen of the surrounding countries,” the resistance she could offer to the