Battle of Kosovo

After Dušan’s empire broke up and much of the Serbian nobility perished at the Maritsa in 1371, Prince Lazar of Moravian Serbia became the most powerful of the Serbian lords. Following Ottoman defeats at Pločnik (1386) and Bileća (1388), Murad I marched through present-day Bulgaria and North Macedonia and reached Pristina on 14 June 1389. Lazar commanded the centre, Branković the right and the Bosnian voivode Vlatko Vuković the left; Murad held the centre, with his sons Bayezid and Yakub on the wings. Reliable accounts are scarce: no participant left a first-hand report, and Serbian, Ottoman and Western writers shaped the story to their own ends. According to Noel Malcolm, the estimate most widely accepted by Western scholars puts Lazar’s army at 15,000–20,000 men and Murad’s at 27,000–30,000, while the Ottoman chronicler Neşri, in the early 16th century, spoke of half a million Christians.

The Serbian heavy cavalry broke the Ottoman left, but Bayezid’s counter-attack drove the Serbs back. Lazar was captured; Branković withdrew to save as many of his men as he could, and the remaining Serbian and Bosnian troops left the field. Lazar was executed. Murad too was killed, though accounts of his death differ: the Florentine reply to Tvrtko of October 1389 tells of twelve Serbian lords who cut their way through the Ottoman lines to the sultan’s tent and of one who stabbed him; later tradition named him Miloš Obilić and said he had feigned desertion, while Ottoman chroniclers wrote that Murad was killed while inspecting the field after the battle. On hearing of his father’s death Bayezid had his brother Yakub killed and became sultan.

Tvrtko announced a Christian victory in letters to Trogir and Florence, and historians often describe the battle as tactically a draw; but the losses were ruinous only for the Serbs, and their principalities soon accepted Ottoman overlordship — Lazar’s son Stefan Lazarević became Bayezid’s vassal and fought for him at Nicopolis in 1396. The battle grew into the central legend of Serbian tradition: Lazar’s choice of the heavenly kingdom, Branković’s supposed treachery (a story first told by Mavro Orbini in 1601 and considered unfounded by historians) and Obilić’s self-sacrifice. Vidovdan, still kept on 15 June in the Julian calendar (28 June in the Gregorian), is a Serbian national and religious holiday.