Siege of Nicomedia

From 1299, the newly founded state of the Ottoman Turks had been slowly but surely capturing territory from the Byzantine Greeks. The loss of Nicaea was the beginning of a series of Ottoman expansions that led to the final dissolution of the Byzantine Empire and its scattered Greek successor states.

Siege of Nicomedia
Part of the Byzantine-Ottoman wars
Date1333 to 1337
Location
Nicomedia
(modern-day İzmit, Kocaeli, Turkey)
Result Ottoman victory
Belligerents
Byzantine Empire Ottoman Beylik
Commanders and leaders
Unknown Orhan
Strength
20,000 7,400
Casualties and losses
Unknown Unknown, assumed light

Siege

While the Turks were occupying and devastating Lydia and Mysia, Osman attempted, after the Battle of Bapheus, to take the great pass leading to Bythinia. Devastating everything in their path, the Ottomans overran the population in the countryside, which, at that time of the year, was busy with heavy field work while gathering the harvest. Many peasants were massacred, others taken as slaves. A few managed to find refuge in the nearby fortified towns. The majority of the refugees took shelter in the port of Nicomedia. Osman Decided not to attack it for the time being due to its strong walls. Byzantine historian George Pachymeres reports that every day, "A veritable anthill of panic-stricken, exhausted people arrived in Nicomedia. Not one of these fugitives had been spared the loss of his property or the sorrow of lamenting the death of a near relative. The women bewailed the death of their husbands, mothers—the death of their children, sisters—the death of their brothers. Along the roads leading to Nicomedia lay women, the elderly, and abandoned children. In the city itself, filled with refugees and besieged by the enemy, famine and sicknesses soon made their appearance."[1][2][3]

Following the Byzantine defeat at Nicaea in 1331, the loss of Nicomedia was only a matter of time for the Byzantines. Andronikos III Palaiologos, the Byzantine emperor, attempted to bribe the Ottoman leader Orhan, but in 1337, Orhan laid siege to Nicomedia and it fell to the Ottomans. The Byzantine Empire did not recover from this defeat; the last Anatolian stronghold of Byzantium had fallen, except Philadelphia, which was surrounded by the Germiyanids until 1396.

Aftermath

Following the loss of Nicomedia, the situation of the Byzantine Empire remained untenable. Unlike the Byzantine Empire at 1096, the Byzantine Empire now possessed very little land, except a few cities in the Peloponnesian Peninsula. With its Serbian and Bulgarian neighbours pressing against its frontiers from the west and the Ottomans dismantling their hold on the east, the Empire was at bay. What's more, this long-held history of Nicomedia in the Greco-Roman hands since the Alexandrian Conquest, including Diocletian's first eastern court in the Roman history which is to evolve into concept of its own court in the Greek East - ultimately Constantinople - irreversibly ended.

See also

References
  1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-turkey/byzantine-empire-from-the-eleventh-to-the-fifteenth-century/7DE17C43B4E2DE655964028881800182
  2. Lindner, Rudi Paul (2007). Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory. ISBN 978-0472095070.
  3. Pachymeres, George (2 February 2012). Georgii Pachymeris de Michaele et Andronico Palaeologis libri tredecim. ISBN 9781108043281.
  • R.G. Grant, Battle: A Visual Journey Through 5,000 Years of Combat, Dorling Kindersley Publishers Ltd, 2005. ISBN 0-7566-1360-4


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