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Six centuries ago, Serbia heroically defended itself in the field of Kosovo, but it also defended Europe. Serbia was at that time the bastion that defended European culture, religion, and European society in general …
Speech given in 1989 by Slobodan Milošević, at the Gazimestan monument on the Kosovo field, commemorating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. The stoking of ethnic tension between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo was the Serbian president’s clear intent.
By 1363 the Ottomans were impinging on regions claimed by Serbia, Bulgaria and Hungary, and a coalition army under Louis I of Hungary challenged the new Ottoman Sultan Murad I’s army near Adrianople. It was destroyed in short order on the banks of the Maritsa River. The venture had a papal blessing but was not called as a Crusade. In 1371 the Serbs and Bulgarians tried again to take Adrianople, now renamed Edirne and the Ottoman capital. The Christian army was annihilated, again on the Maritsa River. Such was the magnitude of slaughter that the Ottomans referred to the battle as the ‘Destruction of the Serbs’.
Bulgaria began to fall apart under Ottoman raids and the sultan’s armies entered Albania and captured the city of Nis. Serbia disintegrated as a buffer against the Turks and in many ways the second battle of Maritsa was far more significant than the more famous first battle of Kosovo in 1389. The Ottomans also began to enslave women and young Christian boys:
They harvested the young men. They took one in every five prisoners captured in the raids and delivered him to the Porte. They then gave these young men to the Turks in the provinces so that they should learn Turkish, and then they sent them to Anatolia. After a few years they brought them to the Porte, and gave them the name Yeni Ceri. Their origin goes back to this time …
These Yeni Ceri, ‘new men’, were of course the Janissaries and their rigidly disciplined regiments took Sofia and made Constantinople a captive island in a Turkish sea. Sultan Murad took forces from his new Serbian vassals to campaign in Anatolia, and the Serb heavy cavalry with its composite bows, maces and horse-armour was particularly effective against the Ottomans’ Turkish enemies.
In Serbia, Prince Lazar took the opportunity of Murad’s absence to form a union of Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegrin nobles. He maintained his vassalage to the sultan but continued to conspire against him. In 1389 he challenged the Ottomans as Murad had again been forced to campaign in Anatolia. Unfortunately for Lazar, Murad returned to the Balkan theatre with incredible rapidity. The battle took place on Kosovo Polje, ‘the Field of Blackbirds’. Both Murad and Lazar were killed, and the battle ended as a vicious, bloody draw. What turned it into an Ottoman victory was the collapse of the Serbian nobles’ resistance after the battle. Virtually all the boyars took vassalage under the new sultan, Bayezid.
A Crusade against the Turks was called after Bayezid reportedly claimed that he intended to conquer Hungary and Italy and to water his horse in the altar of Saint Peter’s. Both Boniface X, the Pope in Rome, and his rival Benedict VIII, the Antipope in Avignon, supported the venture and by September 1396 a force comprised of Hungarians, French knights and troops and contingents from the Holy Roman Empire had reached the city of Nicopolis after a march from Buda and a crossing of the Danube River that took some eight days. Those doughty Crusader enemies of the Muslims, the Knights Hospitallers, also sent a detachment from their new home of Rhodes.