Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [120]
Suleiman was thrown from his horse while hunting and died of his injuries. It was his son Murad who succeeded his grandfather Orhan as sultan around 1361. In fifteen months his ghazis had brought terror to the land. Adrianople surrendered rather than risk the fate of Chorlu, where the Turks had slaughtered everyone within the walls, only saving the commander for a formal execution. Soon the Turkish domain in Europe extended from the Bosphorus to the foothills of the Balkan mountains. The Byzantine emperor in Constantinople accepted the Ottoman power, but other Christians were not so quiescent. The Serbs, with some Hungarians in alliance, crossed the river Maritza, only to be “caught as wild beasts in their lair,” and driven back into the river “as flames driven before the wind,” in the words of an Ottoman chronicler.28 In 1366, the Ottomans crossed the river Maritza and pushed north until by 1369 they had taken the mountain passes and the land before Sofia. Then Murad turned west into Macedonia. In three years the Turks had reached the river Vardar at the town of Skopje, and their European dominions at that point extended from the Thracian plain to the Dinaric Alps. The sultan also extended his territories in Anatolia, but the bulk of his domain lay north of the Hellespont, so he shifted his capital from Bursa to Adrianople. By 1386 most of the main, Christian cities of the southern Balkans, including Sofia, Monastir, and Nish, were in his hands. Only Belgrade on the Danube and Constantinople remained beyond his power. In 1388, Murad launched his armies against the Kingdom of Serbia to complete his conquest of the Balkan lands.
On June 20, 1389, on the plain of Kosovo Polje, the “field of the crows” where the corvines feasted on the bodies of the dead, Murad, with his Asian and European armies, and backed by all his Christian tributaries, defeated Lazar, the leader of the Serbs. At this moment of triumph, the sultan was killed on the battlefield and immediately succeeded by his son Bayezid, who was commanding the Turkish right flank. In the aftermath of the battle, the surviving Serb princes submitted to Turkish power. After Kosovo, the Ottomans turned their attention to the one remaining obstacle to their domination of the southern Balkans. In 1391, they laid siege to Constantinople itself, but once again the great walls protected the city. A contingent of 600 men-at-arms and 1,600 archers led by Boucicault, the marshal of France, arrived in 1398, breaking the Ottoman blockade and stiffening the Byzantines’ resistance. Yet even this reinforcement could not remove the Turkish threat, so a year later Boucicault withdrew and the siege was lifted in exchange for concessions that effectively made the Byzantine emperor a vassal of the sultan.
Western Christendom had finally recognized the power of its new enemy. Over roughly fifty years (1396–1448), four Crusades were mounted with the intention not of recapturing Jerusalem, but of attacking the Ottoman infidels in the Balkans. After 1389, the Muslim enemy was not in Asia but on the banks of the Danube, with Tartar horsemen raiding into Hungary and the borderlands of Austria. Six years after Kosovo, Crusaders responded to the urgent appeal of Pope Boniface IX and a Christian army marched east. They were crushed on September 26, 1396, by the well-organized Ottoman troops of Sultan Bayezid Ilderim (“the Thunderbolt”) before the town of Nicopolis