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 132 DESTEUCTION OF THE GEE^K EMPIEE attacks upon the empire. The number of Turks in Asia Minor and in Europe had now so much increased that their leaders began to dream, perhaps were already planning, the conquest of as wide a territory as had fallen before the immediate successors of the prophet. They had already almost succeeded in completing a ring of conquered states round Constantinople itself. The defeat of the Bulgarians and South Serbians on the Maritza, the great victory over the Serbians at Cossovo-pol, in 1389, enabled them to join forces with the Turks in the Morea and at isolated places on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Nearly all Asia Minor acknowledged the rule of the Ottomans, and it was to the European portion of the empire that the attention of the Turk would now be turned. 1 An observer looking back upon all that was going on in Eastern Europe during the first half of the fifteenth century can now see that all the great events were part of a gigantic struggle against the hordes of Asia, represented by the Turks on the south of the Danube and in Asia Minor and the races whom it is convenient to call Tartars to the north of that river. The humiliation of the emperors to obtain aid from the West, the proceedings at Florence, the repeated calls upon Hungary and other Christian nations, were all incidents of that struggle. The statesmen of the West were gradually learning that the Ottomans had developed into a nation of fighters, and that it was not merely the remnant of the Greek empire which was threatened, but Christendom itself. Reign of Upon the assassination of Murad at Cossovo-pol, his Bajazed, son Bajazed became sultan. He had already acquired, or ac- 1389-1403. q U i re £ shortly after his accession, the nickname of Ilderim or the Thunderbolt. He commenced his reign by strangling his elder brother, Jacoub. Ducas declares that he was an irreconcilable enemy 1 Caramania was the Turkish state which remained longest outside Ottoman dominion. At one period it extended from the river Sangarius to Adana. Ordinarily its boundaries did not extend further north than Konia. See Stanley Lane-Poole's Mohammedan Dynasties, p. 134.