1396
Crusade of Nicopolis routed by Bayezid
A Franco-Burgundian crusader army led by Sigismund of Hungary and John the Fearless besieged the Bulgarian Danube fortress and was crushed by the Ottoman relief column in a battle that exposed the tactical obsolescence of western chivalric warfare. Bayezid had several thousand prisoners beheaded the next day. Western Europe would not seriously threaten the Ottomans again for fifty years.
Turko-Mongol traveler Hafiz dies in Shiraz
The greatest Persian lyric poet died in his hometown after refusing repeated invitations to visit foreign courts, preferring his garden and his wine. Legend says Timur summoned him to Samarkand and grilled him about a verse offering up Bukhara and Samarkand for a beautiful Shirazi mole. Hafiz reportedly replied that such generosity had bankrupted him.
Ludovico Trevisan records Dalmatian plague
Ragusa, soon to be Dubrovnik, enforced a quarantine of thirty days, then forty, on incoming ships suspected of carrying disease. The word 'quarantine' derives from quaranta, forty. By the end of the century, coastal Italian and Dalmatian towns had institutionalized public health measures that remained the backbone of epidemic response for centuries.
Manuel II Palaiologos begs Paris for help
The Byzantine emperor began preparations for a long diplomatic tour of Western Europe, seeking crusader aid against Bayezid's encircling Ottoman blockade that was slowly strangling Constantinople. He would eventually meet Charles VI and Henry IV and charm both courts with his learning and dignity, but gather little in the way of concrete military assistance.
Ottomans plant the Ghazi warrior ethos at Nicopolis
Bayezid's victory over the crusaders was celebrated in the Ottoman court as a decisive proof that the ghazi, the frontier holy warrior, had outmatched the knight of the cross. The story, retold in chronicles and heroic poems, fed Ottoman imperial self-identification for generations after Bayezid's own catastrophic fall to Timur at Ankara six years later.