← Back to the front page

Distinctive Facts About The Mighty Ottoman Empire

Khalid Elhassan August 13, 2020 35 min

Battle of Ankara - Timurid Empire — Tamerlane gloating over the captured Bayezid I. Wikimedia

28. Trash Talk Backfires

Tamerlane gloating over the captured Bayezid I. Wikimedia

In addition to destroying cities and massacring people by the hundreds of thousands at a go, Tamerlane was into piling up pyramids of severed heads, cementing live prisoners into the walls of captured cities, and erecting towers of his victims’ skulls. Not provoking such a figure seems like common sense. However, Ottoman sultan Bayezid seemingly abandoning his senses, got into a flame war with Tamerlane, swapping insulting letters with him for years.

It ended when Tamerlane finally showed up in 1402, defeated Bayezid, and took him captive. The Ottoman sultan was then humiliated by being kept in a cage at his conqueror’s court, while Bayezid’s favorite wife was made to serve Tamerlane and his courtiers, naked.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.