POD: Council of Constance
The Great Ottoman War: 1490-1500
In the year of 1490, a man died unexpectedly of some unidentified cause that looked suspiciously like poison. Of course, that sentence doesnt really mean much until you consider the fact that the man was Bayezid II, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks, and Caesar of the Roman Empire. Who happened to have no clear succession at the time... Mainly because his two sons were already quite at odds.
While Ahmed and Selim went off to their own respective regions and started gathering men to strike at each other and win the throne, the leaders of Europe, dull and inbred as they were, realized it would be an amazing stroke if they could attack the Ottomans now. If they could pull it off, the great empire of the East would be smashed in short order, and perhaps they could even obliterate it in its entirety...
In short order, Venice, the Hussites, Poland, Aragon, France, Castile, Portugal, and Georgia attacked the Ottoman Empire all at once. Immediately, the empire began to stagger from these immediate hits, but it got worse.
The battles in Hungary went to the Christians from the beginning. Matthias Corvinus rebelled and was joined by Hussite and Jagellion armies from the beginning, and the battles of Budapest and Lugoj were complete routes of the Turkish armies that had been sent to oppose them. At the same time, Granada was overrun so quickly that the men of the city of the same name scarcely had time to close the gates in front of the oncoming armies of Castile.
Aragonese and Portugese armies landed on the coast of North Africa, and these possessions changed hands remarkably quickly. Venetian men started advancing down the Ionian Sea, and soon held most of the Cyclades and Dodecanese. The crusader armies of the isle of Rhodes went on the march for the first real time in two centuries, as the Pope called a crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pontus began to fall, slowly but surely, to the Georgians, and the Timurids now advanced in Mesopotamia. By early 1491, the Ottomans seemed on the point of collapse.
Finally the armies of the Ottomans came to their senses, and Ahmed was proclaimed Sultan. He led an army of over a hundred thousand to meet the Christians, but they were crushed at the battle of Adrianople, where Matthias Corvinus, nearly 50 years old, and troubled by sickness, directed the Christian armies to success, sweeping away the Ottoman armies with merely thirty thousand Hungarians, before the much larger, sixty thousand man Jagellion force could even come to the field. Ahmed was killed by a stray arrow.
Athens was assaulted by Venetians and taken after the Acropolis was stormed after three hours of fierce fighting and bombardmenthalf the Parthenon was shattered and the roof fell in, leaving only a single row of columns. With Athens as a base, they began to subjugate town after town.
Meanwhile, a French, Aragonese, Genuan, and Venetian fleet met the Ottomans at the great battle of Çanakkale. Over three hundred Christian galleys sailed forth to meet the Ottoman fleet of two hundred, but the Ottomans had created at nearly the last minute twelve massive cannon-armed galleys, who all had two guns mounted on a turntable in the aftcastle.
The battle began in the morning and raged for a day and a night. Finally, the Ottomans managed to push their right wing forward, and pin the Christian fleet against the Anatolian coast. The noose was constricted tighter with each passing hour, and finally, almost two hundred and fifty galleys (fifty having escaped under an Aragonese admiral) lay ruined, their hulks floating in the water.
The Ottomans set to salvaging the wood and building their fleet even larger, but a naval defeat did not completely discourage the Christians, in fact, it strengthened their resolve; Constantinople was under siege by the end of 1491.
Cannon pounded the walls of the Sublime Porte for months, but it was not for nothing that the wealth of the Empire had been spent on the city; Bayezid had strengthened its walls immensely, giving it the most modern of the fortifications possible, and the cannonballs were absorbed uselessly into the massive walls. A sapping attempt was countered by an Ottoman sally, and a futile Christian assault by Jagellion troops was turned back. Meanwhile, the siege was, of course, useless, as supplies were brought across the Hellespont. A stalemate ensued. Until the fifth day of the fifth month of the year. Sinco de Mayo, as the Spanish would say. But the Spanish are crazy, so I digress.
On that dawn, the sight of the white crescent on a red banner topped the horizon to the north, and the Christian sentries squinted, trying to see what was happening. The banner rose and rose, until they saw the other end of the pole, and the Turkman who was holding it. He rode until he was just out of arrowshot.
Let it be known that God has frowned upon you, for if God had smiled upon you, he would not have sent a curse like us upon you! Prepare, Christian dogs, and tremble!
Of course, it was all in Turkish, so only a few Christian sentries got chills up their spines. The rest raised the alarm, and the Christian camp was thrown into panic. As the sun peeked over the horizon, one could see the black outlines of more Turks, and to the north, as well. Even to the west. They were all around, in a giant crescent, and when a green firecracker shot off into the air, the garrison of Constantinople poured out in a massive sally.
In an hour of frenzied fighting, fifty thousand Christians were massacred. Matthias Corvinus had escaped, barely, with seven thousand Hungarian cavalry, and a few more thousand Jagellion troops had been dispersed.
The architect of this great victory was Selim the Grim, who had now taken the reigns of the Ottoman Empire. After the great Christian defeat at the Battle of Constantinople, he led a fearsome war machine on several campaigns, and crushed the Georgians at the battle of Amisus, going on to put down the Armenian rebellion with brutal efficiency, bribing some of the better cavalry units to serve in his own army.
Then, in a stunning campaign of maneuver, he shattered several Timurid armies in Mesopotamia, and forced their sultan to sign a white peace.
Striking north again, he forced to Georgians to do the same thing, and then his veteran army beat the Europeans again at another Battle of Adrianople.
In 1493, a fleet of nearly three hundred Turkish galleys began an assault with thirty thousand infantry, seizing back most of the Aegean from the exhausted Venetian troops, culminating in the capture of Crete in July. A thunderstorm sunk thirty galleys in August, and prevented them from doing further damage, but another Turkish army smashed the Venetian men that remained in Hellas in November.
A heroic defense of Rhodes failed in the meantime, and Turks captured that island, while Cyprus fell with only a few cannon shots.
However, after several more months of desperate defending in Hungary, the Turks could advance no more in the east. In the west, though...
The Ottomans hired a group of Berber tribesmen, who managed to forge an army of nearly five thousand. This group of men were ragtag and poorly armed and fed, but they managed to rout a French army at the battle of Djelfa. This shocking defeat was only the start of a full scale guerilla war that was to rage through the end of the century.
The Ottomans secured Crimea and Kerch in 1495, but other than this and the botched landing attempt on Sicily, nothing much happened.
However, in 1496, the shocking death of the military genius Corvinus shattered the Hungarian Empire, as his illegitimate child was not accepted as ruler. Those lands were rapidly secured up to Budapest by the Turks, and now the Ottomans seemed poised to finally win the war.
An overland advance led to a slight Ottoman victory at Graz, and the armies of the Hussites were forced to bring themselves to bear upon this new menace. However, they were halted at the battle of Kapfenberg, which was indecisive at best.
The real thing that broke Hussite power in Austria was the rebellion by the half-Turk Murad, bastard son of Yolande by Mehmed, now nearly forty and with bastards of his own. He managed to rally the Austrians to his cause, despite him being half French, half Turk, and not at all German. And he managed to drive the Hussites out through an extensive guerilla campaign.
Now the Turks turned their eyes to one of their greatest rivals of all, Venice. Advancing an army into Italy, the Turks besieged the island town, but were unable to reduce it before a French army descended upon them. Selim offered a truce in order to negotiate peace with the French, and soon this expanded to all fronts.
The peace of Budapest was signed in 1498. The terms of the treaty were:
1. Pre war borders in the north, excepting that Transylvania and Moldavia would form new kingdoms under Jagellion monarchs (this was due to the fact that Selim had not managed to reconquer this area), and a guarantee of Austrian independence by Hungary, Poland, Venice, Switzerland, and the Hussite Confederacy.
2. Crimea and Kerch would go to the Ottomans.
3. Prewar borders with Georgia, and a guarantee that they would not aid or abet with Armenian attempts of independence.
4. The Ottomans gave up all claims to lands form Cyrenica westward.
Thus, peace ensued. Or something resembling peace. Not really peace, not even resembling it at all, actually. Berbers still fought the French and Aragonese in the Magrebh, and they had a very hard time holding onto their colony of Algeria.
Meanwhile, French explorers attempted to colonize the isle of New Corsica (OTL Cuba), but they were barely able to hold onto a few scattered outposts due to the fierce resistance of the local tribes. Danish colonists tried the same and met the same fate on the island of Haiti, where they only held a single city.
Rebellions by natives in the Îles de Lumière (OTL Bahamas) were driving them back there, too, and in general, resistance by the five hundred thousand or so natives in the Caribbean were driving the Europeans crazy, even as the Hussites and the Portugese attempted to colonize areas as well. By 1500, the Taíno of the island of Haiti had united under a charismatic chieftain who was known to outsiders only as The Chief. A vicious guerilla war against the Danish gained him a reputation which soon spread, and after he captured European weapons, he soon gained followers from Cubanacán (New Corsica, or Cuba) as well, and Xaymaca (the land of wood and water, Jamaica), and something resembling a Taíno Empire emerged.
By 1500, too, the Portugese had arrived in India under Vasco da Gama, where the spice trade started in full earnest. They set up an outpost at Goa, and Negro Bay, and took hold of the Maldives. They had to compete for trade in the area with the new nations of Hadramaut, Oman, and Aden, all of whom had split off from the Ottoman Empire, and all of whom adapted European technologies with astonishing speed. Not to be left in the dust, the Indian states of Travancore and Calicut, too, tried to modernize as best they could.
All of this, however, might be rendered null and void, as Selim had gotten visions of grandeur into his head, and planned on expanding the control of the Ottoman fleet into the Indian Ocean, where they might even control the spice trade. By 1500, the Qana al-Suways was put under construction, between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. If it were to be completed, the Ottomans would soon be able to dominate the spice trade, and all the hard work of the Portuguese explorers would be rendered useless...
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Previous Entries:
Introduction
The War of the Roses
Europe to c. 1450
Europe: 1450-1455
Europe: 1455-1456
The East: 1450-1490
1456
1457
The New Spring
) Europe has turned rather inward looking compared to the free spirits of the very brief Age of Exploration. It is somewhat analogous to the change in the Viking civilization which led to its overall shrinkage. 
