Portrait of Bayezid I

Bayezid I earned the nickname Yildirim, the Thunderbolt, for the speed with which he moved his armies, and for a decade around 1400 he looked unstoppable. He drove the Ottoman advance deep into the Balkans and held Constantinople under blockade. Then in 1402, near Ankara, he met a still greater conqueror, Timur, the ruler out of Central Asia, and lost everything in a single day, taken prisoner on the field. He died in captivity within the year. Later European legend, almost certainly untrue, had Timur carrying his royal prisoner from camp to camp in a golden cage.