Late Middle Ages · Europe · War

1393

Tarnovo falls: Bulgarian Empire ends

1393

After a three-month siege, Bayezid I's troops took the Bulgarian capital. Patriarch Evtimiy was exiled, the royal church burned, the last Tsar Ivan Shishman captured and later beheaded on the sultan's orders. Bulgaria disappeared as an independent state and would remain Ottoman territory for nearly five centuries, until the nationalist revival of the nineteenth century.