Note 631 — Chapter IV · BAYEZID THE OSMANLIS INHERIT THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE (continued 2)

Schiltberger, p. 21, says that he retreated to this hill with 1,000 horsemen. Hammer is in error in saying that Bayezid ‘resisted like a hero at the head of his ten thousand janissaries with whom he had occupied the slope of a hill’: ii. 91. There were never as many as ten thousand janissaries enrolled in the Ottoman army until a century after Bayezid’s death. See above, p. 119. In oriental historians numbers are almost invariably exaggerated at least tenfold.