98 ISLAM AT WAR
territories. A decisive battle finally occurred on July 27, 1402, at Cubuk,
outside Ankara. The battle lasted for fourteen hours, and initially Bayezit’s
Turks did well. However, some of the sultan’s allied troops defected to
the Tartars, and this turned the battle into a Turkish defeat. The record is
unclear; some sources indicate a force of Turkoman auxiliaries defected
and others indicate the Serbians. Bayezit was taken captive and the Ot-
toman army was routed. Tamerlane would remain in Anatolia for eight
months, ravaging, pillaging, and murdering as he saw fit. Bayezit and his
sons Musa and Mustafa remained captives until Tamerlane died in 1405.
Bayezit was in captivity, but only the Ottoman field army had been
destroyed. The bulk of the Ottoman garrisons remained intact and under
control of Ottoman princes who struggled for ascendancy. The old sultan’s
grandson, Murat II, succeeded in 1421 but would find himself facing a
further challenge from the West. This time the threat would be subtler
than the charge of European nobility, and in the end much more dangerous.
The first challenge occurred in 1425 when the Venetians sought to un-
dermine Ottoman power in Macedonia by setting up a false Ottoman
prince claiming to be Murat’s brother Mustafa. This war would drag on
until 1430 because the Ottomans had no naval presence of significance
and could not deal with the seagoing Venetians. However, Murat even-
tually succeeded establishing his control over all of the Macedonian ports,
and forced Venice to accept this at the Treaty of Lapseki.
With the Venetian defeat, agitation arose in Europe for a new crusade
against the rising Turkish power. The Hungarian hero, John Hunyadi, the
voivode,or war leader, of Transylvania, who had risen to prominence
because of a series of victories over Turks in 1442, sparked the movement.
The West believed he was the leader who would end the Muslim threat,
and groups of crusaders flowed east to join the Hungarian army under
King Ladislas. Hunyadi organized his crusade at Ofen and marched into
Moravia, confident that with the sultan absent in Anatolia, he would be
victorious. He pushed into southern Serbia, brushing aside the local Ot-
toman garrisons and frontier troops, eventually reaching over the Balkan
Mountains into Bulgaria, taking Sofia by winter.
Upon learning of the invasion, Murat reacted sharply. He rapidly
marched what he could of his army, the Janissary corps, to the west.
Unable to match the crusaders in numbers, he chose to hold the Trayan
gate, through which the enemy must pass to reach the lowlands. The
crusaders were initially successful, but when the weather closed in, Hun-
yadi was forced to abandon the expedition for the year. He slaughtered
thousands of Muslim prisoners and returned to Hungary for the winter.