1402
Battle of Ankara
The setting
Cubuk plain, near Ankara, Anatolia (in present-day Turkey)
Open Anatolian plain in midsummer, suitable for large cavalry armies and dependent on control of local water sources.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideTimurid Empire (Timur / Tamerlane)
Recorded resultdecisive victory
Decisive Timurid victory; Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I was captured and died in captivity.
How the atlas explains it
Timur brought a larger, fresher, better-supplied army - including Indian war elephants and superior cavalry and logistics - against a Bayezid force worn down by hard marching in brutal midsummer heat. Timur controlled the water sources on the Cubuk plain, leaving the Ottomans parched. The decisive blow was political: the Anatolian Turkmen beylik contingents Bayezid had recently annexed by force, along with some Tatar horsemen, defected to Timur in the middle of the battle, collapsing the Ottoman wings. With his army disintegrating, Bayezid I was captured - the only Ottoman sultan ever taken alive on the field.
What followed
One of the great turning points of late-medieval history. The defeat nearly destroyed the young Ottoman state: the army was shattered and Sultan Bayezid I was captured, dying in Timur's captivity in 1403. His sons then fought the Ottoman Interregnum (the Fetret Devri civil war, roughly 1402-1413) over the wreckage. The collapse delayed the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople by about fifty years and gave Byzantium and the Balkan states a decades-long reprieve.