How Did Timur Lenk Build The Byzantine Empire

The Ottomans, successors to the Seljuks in the Balkans, were planning a decisive assault on the Byzantine Empire. Sultan Bayezid using the Balkans as his base, hoped to join Europe with Asia by taking Constantinople and western Anatolia. In 1402 Timur routed Bayezid’s forces at the battle of Ankara. The sultan himself was captured by Timur. Timur used Bayezid as a footstool. Imprisoned in a cage so small, Bayezid died.

Constantinople was saved from Ottoman assault, but Timur’s victory gave no comfort to the Christians. Timur moved east to prepare his forces for the largest invasion of his career, but while doing so he drank more wine than his 69-year-old body could absorb and died of alcohol poisoning in 1405. Timur Lenk was an impressive

When he died, nothing could hold his lands together. He leveled everything in his path and then vanished, leaving others to rebuild what he had destroyed.

The Seljuk Turks, the Mongols, and Timur Lenk had brought war and destruction, but none proved to hold empires together. Timur conquered in the name of Islam, not as its enemy. And Mongol advances in Southwest Asia were stopped by Egypt’s Muslim Mamluk rulers, conquered by invaders known as the Ottoman Turks. A Turkic-speaking nomadic group led by a man named Osman arrived in Anatolia, fleeing westward from the Mongols. They were polytheists but were eventually converted to Sunni Islam by the Seljuk Turks. The Seljuk state collapsed, and the Ottomans took over as champions of the Muslim.

Murad was an exceptional ruler who refused to impose Islamic or Ottoman forms of government in the Balkans. He laid the foundation of a religiously and ethnically pluralistic society that would create a stable Ottoman Peace. The primary concern of Murad and his successors was to promote Islam. Murad, slain by a Serb at Kosovo in 1389, was succeeded by his son Bayezid

A sensible and enlightened ruler, Iletmish did what he could to reconcile India’s Hindu majority to Islamic rule. The Delhi Sultanate’s authority crumbled rapidly. The losses weakened Delhi so profoundly that it was unable to resist the catastrophic invasion of Timur Lenk.

India in 1500 was a land in turmoil, divided by religion, culture, and politics. Into this situation stepped the last Timurid, Babur, whose name means “the Panther,” a fifth-generation descendant of Timur Lenk and a 13th-generation descendant of Genghis Khan. The Mughals called themselves Gurkani, a Mongolian term for son-in-law; Timur Lenk had married two descendants of Genghis Khan. But Arabic- and Persian-speaking Muslims called them alMughul, or Mongols, and the name