Tulipomania - Mike Dash [6]
Bayezid proved to be a ruler of immense energy and ambition. He tightened the Ottomans’ grip on the Balkans and, in 1396, utterly defeated the last great crusading army, a force of some sixteen thousand men, at Nicopolis in Bulgaria. After the battle the sultan personally supervised the beheading of about three thousand Christian captives. It was hardly surprising that his subjects began to call him Yildirim, the “Thunderbolt.”
For fully thirteen years, in fact, Bayezid triumphed at every turn, crushing Christian resistance in the Balkans and slaughtering Persians in the east. But the power of his talisman had now exhausted itself. In 1402, near Ankara, he fought a ruler even greater and more implacable than himself: Tamerlane, a crippled Mongol born in the shadow of the Pamirs, a soldier almost as able as Genghis Khan but even more bloodthirsty. Bayezid’s army was scattered, and the sultan himself was overtaken by Mongol archers as he fled the field, and he was brought to grovel at the feet of his conqueror in Tamerlane’s own tent.
The tulip king was shown no mercy. Tamerlane seized the women of the sultan’s harem for himself and forced Bayezid’s wife Despina to wait on him, naked, at his table. The sultan he confined within an iron cage, which the Mongols took with them as they traveled. On state occasions Tamerlane had the once-proud Bayezid dragged before him so he could use him as a footstool.
Bayezid survived only eight months of this treatment. His end remains obscure; some say he died of apoplexy, but the playwright Christopher Marlowe, in Tamburlaine the Great, has him dash out his own brains against the bars of the cage in despair at his plight. At any rate he was dead before the tulips flowered in 1403.
The sultan’s capture temporarily halted the tulip’s westward progress and left the fledgling Ottoman Empire in a state of chaos, from which it took the Turks half a century to recover. The principal beneficiaries were the shattered remnants of the Christian states that had ruled the Balkans before the sultan’s time, particularly the Greeks of Byzantium. Bayezid’s greatest ambition had been to take Constantinople and make it the new center of his empire, and he had even besieged the city for five years at the end of the fourteenth century, but he was never able to break down the massive fortifications that enclosed it.
Admittedly Constantinople was something of a shadow city by 1400, its decline reflecting the fading fortunes of its Byzantine rulers. In fact it was more than half empty, the seven long miles of its walls enclosing a town of no more than fifty thousand people, scattered now among what were effectively large villages separated by ruins, working farms, and orchards. But in size and situation and repute, it was still the greatest city in the world. It was fit to be the capital of the Ottoman Empire—and the new home of the tulip too.
Bayezid’s demise did not save the Byzantines; it merely postponed their end. Within half a century the Ottomans had regrouped and returned under the command of the dead sultan’s great-grandson, Sultan Mehmed. This time Constantinople was weaker, and the Turkish army considerably larger and equipped with the latest cannons and catapults. In 1453, after a desperate siege lasting less than two months, Mehmed’s troops forced a breach in the walls, and the Turks poured into Constantinople. The last Byzantine emperor threw away his imperial insignia and sought an anonymous death in the press of the fighting. Then amid terrible scenes of massacre, the Ottomans took Constantinople and made it Istanbul.
Even by the remarkable standards of the Ottoman sultans, Mehmed—who was henceforth always known as Mehmed the Conqueror—was a complicated character. Warlike but cultured, sensuous but implacable, he was a ruthless monarch but a humble man. When he gave thanks for his victory at the Byzantine cathedral of St. Sophia on the day Constantinople fell, he knelt and scattered a handful of earth over his turban as an act of obeisance to God.