Bayezid II

he was killed that same day according to most accounts by a serbian nobleman named milos obelic who managed to reach the sultan in the aftermath of the fighting and stabbed him the details are disputed and layered with serbian epic tradition but the death itself is not in question Murad I died on the Kosovo field, victorious and murdered in the same afternoon.

His son Bayezid took command immediately, killed his brother to eliminate any rival claim, and pushed forward.

He would reign for 13 turbulent years, a story with a dramatic and humbling end, which belongs to the next section.

But before moving past the era of the Murads, the second one deserves his place in the account.

These were not glamorous achievements in the way that a famous battle is glamorous, but they were the reason the Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years instead of 60.

The lightning and the earthquake.

Bayezid I moved fast.

This was his reputation, his defining quality, and eventually his undoing.

And then there is one of my favorite wider world Leonardo stories.

Around this period, the Ottoman ruler, Bayezid II, was interested in a bridge across the Golden Horn in Constantinople, which is nowadays modern-day Istanbul.

Yeah, exactly.

Istanbul.

another not finished project.

But the exchange itself matters.

A ruler in Constantinople knows the name Leonardo.

A Florentine artist thinks about a bridge for an Ottoman capital.

But even if the monasteries were imperfect, the question remains: why were they replaced with nothing? For two hundred years? And while England had nothing, the Ottoman Empire was running institutions so advanced that modern science is only now catching up.

The Bayezid II Hospital complex in Edirne opened in 1488 and operated for four hundred years.

The travel writer Evliya Celebi documented the entire system in his 1600s travelogue called the Seyahatname.

Ten musicians, including a reed flute player, a violinist, a harp player, and a lute player, performed three days per week.

In January 1483, Ivan Ivanovich married Yelena Stepanovna, as she was known in Russian.

Meanwhile, the Ottomans had a new sultan, Bayezid II, known as the Just.

Among other things, he gave refuge to the Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, declaring that the King of Spain had, quote, impoverished his own country and enriched mine, end quote.

In 1484, Bayezid had finally succeeded in taking the Moldovan Black Sea ports of Kiliya and Setetya Alba, now Kiliya and Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky in Ukraine.