Po redaktohet VICKERS (paragraf)

=== The battle of Kosovo ===

This was the background to the battle destined to decide the fate of the Balkans. It took place in Kosovo Polje (the Field of Blackbirds -- the Serbian kos means blackbird) outside Pristina, on St Virus Day, 28 June 1389. On the eve of the battle, the northern parts of Kosovo were in the possession of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic and parts of Metohija belonged to his brother-in-law Vuk Brankovic. The Turks first demanded that Lazar accept Ottoman suzerainty and pay tribute. He refused and, realising that he would be faced with an invasion, sought aid from his neighbours Tvrtko and Vuk Brankovic. Tvrtko sent a large contingent under the command of Vlatko Vukovic, the commander who had defeated the Turkish force at Bileca. Vuk Brankovic came himself, leading his own men. Thus the Serbian army was composed of three contingents under these three leaders, none of whom was then a Turkish vassal. It is said that Vuk accepted the offer agreeing to desert with his troops in the course of the coming battle, and he has accordingly been cast as a traitor in Serbian folk history. The Ottoman chroniclers, however, fail to mention these specific facts. Nevertheless, morale was certainly low in the Serbian camp, which led not only some Serbian but also several Bulgarian princes to offer their services to the Sultan. But in spite of this a large coalition army led by Serbian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Bosnian and Albanian nobles gathered on the wide plain of Kosovo to confront the Ottoman army. Albanian princes were at that time close allies of the Serbs, the result of their shared desire to oppose the Ottomans. In many districts the Slavonic and Albanian elements existed side-by-side, and numerous examples are known of close economic and political ties between Serbs and Albanians during the medieval period.

Sultan Murad succeeded in surprising Lazar's army. The sudden attack caused considerable disorder among the Christian troops who were forced on the same afternoon to disperse in total confusion and disarray. Both Murad and Lazar were killed in the head-on collision between the two armies (approximately 30,000 troops on both sides). As the battle ended, what remained of the Turkish army held the field while the surviving Serbian (Lazar's and Brankovic's) and Bosnian (Vlatko Vukovic's) troops withdrew. However, the Turks then withdrew as well, for Bayezid needed to hurry back east to secure his position as the new sultan against his brothers; also, he did not have enough troops remaining to carry on an offensive against the Balkan Christians. Thus, since the Turks also withdrew, one might conclude that the battle was a draw. They had indeed lost a vast number of troops, but they had many more in the east and were able in the following years to return and raid, and continue their successful push into the Balkans. The Serbs were left with too few men to resist successfully, and although they did not lose the battle, they lost the war over the next two to three years because they could no longer resist the Turks effectively; and their losses at Kosovo were, of course, the main reason why they had so few men left to defend Serbia.

Although no true military victor emerged from the battle, Tvrtko's emissaries told the courts of Europe that the Christian army had defeated the infidels, although Prince Lazar's successors were exhausted by their heavy losses and immediately sought peace by agreeing to become vassals of their new sultan. Vuk Brankovic resisted them until 1392, when he was forced to do the same. The Ottomans took Brankovic's lands and gave them to a more loyal vassal, Stefan Lazarevic (the son of Prince Lazar), thereby creating a rift between their heirs. Stefan appointed as his successor his nephew Djurad Brankovic, whose rule was marked by fresh conflicts and finally the fall of the whole of Kosovo to the Ottomans in 1455. A feeling of despair permeated Lazar's lands after the prince's death and, conscious of the need to combat pessimism in Serbia and create hope for a bright future, the monastic authors of the day wrote eulogies and sermons in praise of Lazar in which they interpreted the events of the time for their own contemporaries. They portrayed Lazar as God's favoured servant and the Serbian people as the chosen people of the New Testament -- the `new Israel'. Like the Hebrews in Babylonian captivity they would be led out of slavery to freedom. According to accounts in epics, Lazar dreamed on the eve of the battle that he was offered either a heavenly or an earthly kingdom and, being a man of his time, he chose the heavenly one. It was also prophesied that he would be betrayed in the battle.

Because the epic account was designed to parallel the New Testament, a Judas Iscariot also had to be found. Thus it was he who on the morrow would betray his master when the prophesy was revealed; Milos Obilic was accused by Vuk Brankovic of being the one in secret contact with the Turks. When Lazar faced Milos with the charge, Milos denied it, saying, `Tomorrow my deeds will show that I am faithful to my lord.' To prove his loyalty, shortly before dawn on 28 June, Milos slipped out of his camp and announced himself to the Turkish sentries as a Serbian deserter. Taken to the Sultan, he pulled out a knife hidden in his garments and stabbed Murad, fatally wounding him. We do not know whether there had actually been any accusations in the Serbian camp before the battle, but it is a fact that a Serb named Milos Obilic (or Kobilic) did desert and murder the Sultan. Lazar's death is depicted as the triumph of good over evil -- a martyrdom for the faith and the symbol of a new beginning. Responding to contemporary needs, the medieval writers transformed the defeat into a kind of moral victory for the Serbs and an inspiration for the future. The Serbian epic tradition only developed these ideas further and established them firmly in the consciousness of the Serbian people.

These epics influenced the Dalmatian historians who wrote about the great battle in the seventeenth century, but because their early versions had propagandistic motives and religious overtones, they are inevitably suspect. Not only were they partisan on behalf of the Serbs and Christians against the Turks and Muslims, but they also gave prominence to certain Serbian families against others. Therefore, much concerning the Battle has remained controversial. The church also romanticised the Nemanjic tradition for the masses, and by removing any of the negative aspects of feudalism helped to convey the image of a once glorious state. The Serbs therefore viewed the collapse of the medieval Serbian state as the central event in their history and found its explanation in the Battle of Kosovo. Indeed, the epic cycle of Kosovo became the longest, most beautiful and most important of all the Serbian epics. It was not so much the loss of the battle itself as the subsequent loss of statehood that so impressed the minds of ensuing generations of Serbs. These epic myths eventually became institutionalised as part of the nineteenth-century Serbian national programme, as poetic licence did away with historical fact. Nearly five centuries later two British travellers, after hearing a succession of accounts of the Battle, declared: `Every Serb between the Danube and the Adriatic is as familiar with the names of all here mentioned as with those of his own brothers.'

As late as 1866, only 4.2 per cent of the Serbian population were able to read and write -- in rural areas the proportion was as low as 1.6 per cent. Decasyllabic epics chanted by bards and easily memorised by generations of listeners were instrumental in preserving the Serbian national identity; the heart of the national consciousness being the Kosovo myth and its covenant. By transforming the national defeat into a metaphor for survival, the poems about Kosovo served a double function, providing a rationalisation of the past that was a salve to wounded pride and at the same time containing a radical programme for the future. The Tsar's curse on all those who do not fight for Kosovo would serve as a reminder to Serbs for all time. Five hundred and sixty years later, following the Second World War, a 25-metre-high monument was erected in 25 acres of pasture on Kosovo Polje where every summer hundreds of thousands of bright red poppies bloom, supposedly the blood of the fallen Christian heroes. Each year the battle's anniversary on 28 June (Vidovdan) is still commemorated.