Religious Affiliations and Political Alliances in the Ottoman

Medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture Encounters in Confluence and Dialogue Medieval Encounters 13 (2007) 222-242 www.brill.nl/me

Religious Aﬃliations and Political Alliances in the Ottoman Succession Wars of 1402-1413

Dimitris J. Kastritsis University of St Andrews

Abstract Th is article examines the complex political alliances that developed during the Ottoman civil war of 1402-1413. Th is civil war, which followed Timur’s defeat of the Ottomans at Ankara and the dismemberment of Bayezid I’s empire, provided an excellent opportunity for the many Christian powers threatened by the Ottomans to cooperate against them; but in fact, apart from a failed attempt by Byzantium in 1409, there was little such cooperation. Instead, the period is noteworthy for the absence of any serious attempt at a crusade, since the interests of the main Christian powers were often at odds. It is ironic that the only large- scale alliance involving a wide array of Christian powers was engineered in 1413 by an Ottoman prince, Mehmed Çelebi (Sultan Mehmed I), who was thereby able to reunite the Ottoman Empire under his rule. In fact, the story of the Ottoman civil war is one of indi- vidual power brokers with divided loyalties trying to survive and further the interests of their constituencies. What brought these people together in 1413 was their opposition to Mehmed’s rival Musa Çelebi, who had revived Bayezid I’s policies of territorial expansion and political centralization. While there is no denying the importance of Islam and Chris- tianity both as faith systems and as rallying calls, the political scene was too complex to allow faith alone to determine political developments. In such politically fragmented times, the only way to survive was through shrewd diplomacy and alliance building.

Keywords Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Interregnum, Ottoman Civil War, Mehmed I, Musa Çelebi, Süleyman Çelebi, Byzantium, Manuel II Palaiologos, Stefan Lazarević

Th e Ottoman defeat at Ankara (28 July 1402) came at a critical time for Christian-Muslim relations. Under Sultan Bayezid I (1389-1402), Otto- man expansion in southeastern Europe had provoked widespread alarm in the Christian world. In 1396 the Ottomans had crushed a crusader army at Nicopolis, and since 1394 Constantinople had been subjected to its ﬁrst Ottoman siege. In the years preceding 1402, the situation of the Byzantine

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capital had become so dire that Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos was forced to leave the city for several years to seek assistance in various Christian courts. Given this situation, one might have expected news of Timur’s crushing defeat of the Ottomans at Ankara to have united Christendom in a new crusade to drive the Ottomans out of Europe. But neither the Otto- man defeat at Ankara, which resulted in the death of Bayezid I and the dismemberment of his empire, nor the ensuing decade of Ottoman dynas- tic wars (the interregnum of 1402-1413) resulted in any significant cru- sading activity on the part of the Ottomans’ Christian enemies. Instead, those powers followed a defensive policy of supporting whichever of Bayezid’s sons appeared to offer them the most advantages and pose the least danger. It was this policy that made it possible for Mehmed I to reunite the Otto- man Empire under his rule. In 1413, Mehmed was able to bring together most of the regional power brokers—both Christian and Muslim—in an alliance against his brother Musa, who like Bayezid I had pursued an aggressive agenda of conquest and centralization. In this manner, the Christian powers of southeastern Europe contributed to their own demise, for during the reigns of Mehmed I (1413-1421) and Murad II (1421- 1451), the ground was laid for the conquest of Constantinople and the establishment of the great Ottoman Empire of Mehmed II. Given the very real threat posed by the Ottomans prior to 1402, how is it possible to explain the neglect of the crusade during the period 1402- 1413, when the Ottomans were weak and divided? Among the obvious explanations are the disastrous results of the Crusade of Nicopolis (1396) and the European disunity of the time, which resulted in conflicting interests among the powers that might have organized such a crusade.1 To these should be added also a natural complacency: after 1402 the Ottomans no longer seemed to pose such a serious threat, and it was hoped that their civil wars might cause them to self-destruct. However obvious these explanations, the international politics of the period has received little serious

1 See, for example, Aziz S. Atiya, “Th e Crusade in the Fourteenth Century,” in A History of the Crusades, ed. K. M. Setton, 6 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 3:25: “Th e downfall of the western chivalry on the ﬁeld of Nicopolis marked the end of any hope that the Ottoman empire could be destroyed by Christendom, and Turkey was accepted as a European power...... [T]he crusade had become an anachronism.” Th e author is exaggerating somewhat when he states that “Turkey was accepted as a European power” after Nicopolis, but there is little doubt that the defeat had a chilling eﬀect on European chivalry.

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