Siege of Nicomedia

Part of the Byzantine-Ottoman wars

Date	1333 to 1337
Location	Nicomedia
Result	Ottoman victory

Belligerents

Byzantine Empire

Ottoman Turks

Commanders and leaders

Unknown

Orhan I

Strength

20,000

7,400

Casualties and losses

Unknown

Unknown, assumed light

From 1299, the newly founded Turkic state of the Ottomans had been slowly but surely capturing territory from the Byzantine Greeks. The loss of Nicaea was the beginning of a series of Ottoman expansion that lead to final dissolution of the Byzantine Empire and its scattered Greek successor states.

Following the Byzantine defeat at Nicaea in 1331, the loss of Nicomedia was only a matter of time for the Byzantines. Andronikos III Palaiologos, the Byzantine emperor, attempted to bribe the Ottoman leader Orhan, but in 1337, Nicomedia was attacked and fell to the Ottomans. The Byzantine Empire did not recover from this defeat; the last Anatolian stronghold of Byzantium had fallen, except Philadelphia, which was surrounded by the Germiyanids until 1396.

Following the loss of Nicomedia, the situation of the Byzantine Empire remained untenable. Unlike the Byzantine Empire at 1096, the Byzantine Empire now possessed very little land, save a few cities in the Peloponnese. With its Serbian and Bulgarian neighbours pressing against its frontiers from the west and the Ottomans dismantling their hold on the east, the empire was at danger.

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