Battle of Ankara

July 20, 1402

Timur's horse archers met Sultan Bayezid I on the Anatolian plateau and obliterated Ottoman power in an afternoon. Bayezid was captured alive and, legend says, carried in an iron cage until his death months later. The Ottoman state fractured into an eleven-year civil war that nearly erased it. The aftershocks rippled across three continents, granting Byzantium an unexpected reprieve and reshuffling power across the Balkans.