1402: The Two Sultans
A start-date conversion for Europa Universalis V — 1 August 1402, in the wreckage after the Battle of Ankara.
On the plain of Çubuk, north of Ankara, on 28 July 1402, the Ottoman century broke. Bayezid I — Yıldırım, the Thunderbolt, the sultan who had swallowed the Balkans and held Constantinople under siege for eight years — watched his Anatolian levies desert to the enemy and his army come apart around him. By nightfall he belonged to Temür, the first and last Ottoman sultan taken alive. He would die a captive the following spring.
This mod begins four days later, on 1 August 1402, with the throne empty and the succession decided by cavalry.
The house of Osman does not fall. It divides. Süleyman Çelebi carries the European inheritance behind the walls of Edirne; İsa holds Bursa and the Bithynian heartland; Mehmed gathers Anatolia to himself from Amasya, and a fourth brother, Musa, waits offstage for his war. For eleven years there will be more sultans than thrones — the Fetret Devri, the Interregnum, the near-death the dynasty would spend the rest of its history trying to forget. The title keeps only the two poles of that quarrel: one sultan in Europe, one in Asia, each convinced he is the only one.
Around the ruin, 1402 is Temür’s year and no one else’s. Delhi has lain gutted since 1398, and out of its wreck stand the Sharqi kings of Jaunpur and the Bahmanis of the Deccan; Aleppo and Damascus have been bled; Baghdad has fallen; Tokhtamysh and the Golden Horde have been shattered on the steppe. The conqueror stands at the summit of the known world with three years left to live and his empire already parcelled among sons and grandsons — Shah Rukh in Khorasan, the princes of Fars and Isfahan — a lattice of appanages waiting for the day the center goes quiet at Otrar.
Farther west, the reprieve travels outward. Constantinople exhales for the first time in a generation. The Latin Church wears two tiaras at once, Rome against the Avignon obedience of Benedict XIII. Margaret’s Kalmar Union binds three northern crowns under one hand, and the Union of Vilnius-Radom has just yoked Poland to Lithuania on the road that ends at Grunwald. The plague still moves through it all, patient and periodic.
You inherit this world at the instant of maximum possibility, before any of it has hardened into what the textbooks made of it.
- The fractured house of Osman — play Rumelia (Süleyman, Edirne), Bursa (İsa), or Amasya (Mehmed), with the Ottoman state itself reachable only by reunifying the realm as a formable.
- A Balkans off the leash — Kastrioti, Dukagjini, Zenebishi, and the other lords Bayezid had pressed flat, standing back up while Rumelia looks inward.
- Temür at his apogee — the Timurid colossus and its princely appanages, drawn as they stood in 1402 rather than in hindsight.
- A shattered Delhi — the independent successor sultanates of Jaunpur and the Bahmani Deccan, and the Shaybanid Khanate of Sibir on the Jochid frontier.
- A divided Latin West — the Avignon papacy as a playable obedience, the Kalmar Union with a path to a single Scandinavian crown, and the Pact of Vilnius with a path to a united Polish-Lithuanian throne.
- Turkoman warfare — tribal host mechanics and Turkoman units for the Anatolian frontier.
This is an in-progress conversion, built in phases on a working 1402 start date. The successor states, international organizations, and frontier systems above are in place; the full political repaint of the map is rolling out in stages, so expect some vanilla holdovers in outlying regions until later phases land. Feedback and bug reports are welcome.
Subscribe, then enable 1402: The Two Sultans in a playset from the launcher’s DLCs and Mods view and Apply. For a total conversion it’s best run on its own, without other map or setup mods in the same playset.
