Who won the Battle of Kosovo?
The Ottomans held the field, so in military terms Kosovo, fought on 15 June 1389, was an Ottoman victory. But Sultan Murad I and Prince Lazar of Serbia were both killed, losses were heavy on both sides, and the first reports even hailed a Christian triumph. Many historians call it close to a costly draw.1
On a June morning in 1389, on a wide plain in the heart of the Balkans, the Serbian prince Lazar led his own men, the forces of Vuk Branković and a Bosnian army against the Ottoman sultan Murad I. By evening both rulers were dead. What happened in between is one of the most argued-over days in European history, and the story Serbs told about it became the founding myth of a nation.2
Why did the Ottomans march on Kosovo?
By the 1380s the Serbian empire of Stefan Dušan had long fallen apart into rival lordships, and the Ottomans had already crushed the strongest Serbian lords of the south at the Maritsa in 1371. The largest Serbian state left was that of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, ruled from Kruševac and rich in the silver mines of Novo Brdo and Rudnik. Murad I took Niš from him in 1386.3
For the Ottomans the campaign of 1389 had its own logic. Kosovo was one of the great crossroads of the central Balkans, and from there, as Britannica notes, Murad could strike at Serbia or at Macedonia. In 1388 a Bosnian army under Vlatko Vuković had ambushed and destroyed an Ottoman raiding force at Bileća. Noel Malcolm reads the march on Kosovo as revenge for that defeat and a step toward Bosnia, and Halil İnalcık’s account of Murad’s reign also sets the Bosnian raid just before it.4
Later Ottoman historians gave the war a legal frame. Mehmed Neşri, writing in 1512, made Lazar a vassal who had broken his oath and had to be punished. Historians disagree about it. Malcolm doubts that Lazar was ever a vassal, since the only evidence is Neşri, whose story of broken promises justified the campaign. İnalcık holds that Lazar did submit after the fall of Niš in 1385, sending silver and promising troops, and broke with Murad only after the Bosnian victory of 1388. For the full sweep of the conflict, see the Ottoman wars in Europe.5
Who fought at the Battle of Kosovo?
On the Christian side three forces stood under Lazar’s overall command: Lazar’s own army, the men of Vuk Branković, lord of most of Kosovo and, Malcolm notes, Lazar’s son-in-law, and a strong Bosnian contingent that King Tvrtko I sent under Vlatko Vuković. Britannica adds contingents from beyond the Balkans, among them Czechs and Wallachians, and Malcolm thinks Hungarians likely, since Lazar had married a daughter into the Hungarian nobility.6
Murad led the Ottoman army in person with his two sons. The accounts put the younger, Bayezid, on the right wing, and Malcolm adds the elder, Yakub, with the Anatolian troops on the left, while the sultan held the center. The earliest report of the battle, a letter of the Florentine senate in October 1389, mentions a line of chained camels in front of Murad, and the Ottoman chronicler Neşri tells of a council of war over whether to use them.7
Nobody counted the armies. Neşri gave Lazar 500,000 men, three times the Ottoman force, a figure both Malcolm and Emmert dismiss as inflation meant to magnify the victory. Malcolm sets out three sets of modern estimates. The common ones, 40,000 to 60,000 Ottomans against 100,000 for Lazar, he calls impossibly high for Lazar. Serbian military historians have proposed 40,000 against 25,000, or 27,000 to 30,000 Ottomans against 15,000 to 20,000 Christians, and the last estimate is the one the leading Western authority on the medieval Balkans accepts. Britannica likewise judges Lazar’s army to have been less than half the size of Murad’s.8
How was the battle fought?
There is not one eyewitness account of the fighting. The fullest description, Neşri’s, was written more than a century later, and both Malcolm and Emmert warn that it shapes everything later historians say. In outline it runs like this: the Serbian heavy cavalry charged and broke the Ottoman left wing, there was hard fighting in the center, and Bayezid on the right counterattacked and turned the battle.9
Britannica gives the same shape: Ottoman archers blunted the Serbian cavalry charge, armored knights pushed into the Turkish lines, and an Ottoman counterattack routed the Serbian infantry. İnalcık, the leading Turkish historian of the early Ottoman state, writes that the Ottoman left first collapsed and that the day was won through Bayezid’s effort on the right. Since Bayezid became sultan that same day, Malcolm notes dryly, one would hardly expect the story to be told any other way.10
How did Sultan Murad I die at Kosovo?
The death of a sultan in battle was without precedent, Malcolm notes, and every early source agrees that he died at Kosovo at Christian hands. They agree on almost nothing else. Britannica states plainly that historians consider the famous tale of the knight Miloš Obilić a later legend. What can be traced is how the story grew.11
The earliest version comes from Bosnia. King Tvrtko sent news of a victory to Florence, and in October 1389 the Florentine senate wrote back praising twelve loyal lords who cut their way through the enemy lines and the circle of chained camels to Murad’s tent, where one of them stabbed the sultan in the throat and belly. Emmert calls this letter a critical document; Malcolm calls it the closest thing we have to the events.12
The Ottoman chroniclers of the fifteenth century tell a different story. In the earliest, by Ahmedi, Murad was waiting on the field while his army pursued the fleeing enemy, when a Christian hidden among the corpses rose up covered in blood and stabbed him with a dagger. In others the man asked to kiss the sultan’s hand and struck as he bent forward. For the Ottoman writers Murad died a martyr for the faith, and Neşri, Emmert notes, has him praying through the night before the battle and offering himself as a sacrifice.13
The Serbian tradition took longer to form. Constantine the Philosopher, writing at the court of Lazar’s son in the 1430s, tells of a noble wrongly accused of disloyalty who rode to the sultan as a false deserter and killed him to prove his loyalty. He gives no name. Emmert names the former janissary Konstantin Mihailović, writing in the 1490s of Miloš Kobila, as the first writer to give the name; Malcolm reads an earlier Bulgarian chronicle of about 1413 to 1421 as already calling the knight Miloš. The modern form Obilić, Malcolm writes, was an eighteenth-century editor’s improvement.14
So the record supports only that Murad was killed by a Christian soldier during or just after the battle. The name, the deserter’s trick and the dramatic night before belong to tradition. Malcolm even weighs a Catalan text written before 1402 in which a Hungarian knight rode at Murad with a lance, and concludes only that the sultan was killed by someone quite possibly a Hungarian, whose name was, or became, Miloš Kobilić.15
What happened to Prince Lazar?
Lazar died on the field as well. The Ottoman historians say he was captured at the end of the battle, brought before Bayezid and executed on his orders, and the earliest Serbian chronicle agrees, adding that Bayezid had him tortured and beheaded him himself. Other accounts have him cut down in the fighting. Britannica sets the two versions side by side.16
Bayezid also ordered the death of his brother Yakub, the other commander of that day, so that no rival could contest his succession. İnalcık records that Murad’s body was taken to Bursa for burial together with Yakub’s.17
Who won the Battle of Kosovo?
The Ottomans held the field, and Britannica records an Ottoman victory. Yet the answer is less simple than the legend suggests. Emmert stresses that the surviving contemporary sources do not even show with certainty which side won, and the earliest reports speak of a Christian success.18
News of the battle spread to Byzantium and western Europe, and what it carried above all was the death of the sultan. Tvrtko announced a victory, the Florentines celebrated it, and the French writer Philippe de Mézières repeated it. Early Serbian eulogies of Lazar speak of a shining victory before his martyrdom; Patriarch Danilo III wrote that both sides were exhausted and the battle simply ended. A Ragusan chronicle of the late fifteenth century says that because of the great losses neither side won.19
Malcolm sums up the view of most modern historians: something close to a draw, but technically an Ottoman victory, because the Serbian army broke and the Ottomans ended the day in possession of the field, and strategically a Serbian defeat, because the Ottomans could return with fresh armies and Serbia could not. İnalcık, writing from the Ottoman sources, is firmer: the battle ended in a decisive Ottoman victory.20
How many died at Kosovo?
No source gives a reliable figure. All agree that losses were heavy on both sides: Britannica speaks of huge losses, including both leaders and much of the Serbian nobility, and Patriarch Danilo wrote of a countless multitude of Serbs and enemies lying on the field. The anonymous Florentine chronicler stressed the Turks’ heavy losses in the battle and on the retreat, which Emmert reads as a Pyrrhic victory at best.21
Did Vuk Branković betray Lazar?
In the Serbian epic, Vuk Branković is the traitor who abandons Lazar and costs him the battle. The historical record does not support it. The earliest Serbian chronicle only wonders whether Lazar was betrayed by one of his own or fell by God’s judgment; a Catalan writer said that Vuk left the field after Lazar was dead; and Mihailović blamed lords who watched the battle through their fingers, without naming Vuk.22
The charge of a deliberate plot appears in written history only in the early seventeenth century, Malcolm writes, and his and Emmert’s accounts of what Vuk did next tell against it. He kept his lands and held out against becoming an Ottoman vassal, gave up Skopje to Bayezid only in 1392, and was later deposed by the Ottomans and died in prison. Malcolm concludes that this is not the record of a pro-Turkish conspirator.23
Why is the Battle of Kosovo important?
Kosovo did not end the Serbian state, and it was not the battle that broke the Serbian empire; both Malcolm and Emmert make that point. The Ottomans withdrew at once to Edirne so that Bayezid could secure the throne, and Lazar’s widow Milica went on ruling for her young son Stefan. But when Sigismund of Hungary invaded from the north in the autumn of 1389, she accepted Ottoman vassalage in 1390, paying tribute, sending troops and giving her daughter Olivera in marriage to Bayezid.24
Serbian troops now fought for the sultan. Lazar’s son was with Bayezid on his campaign of 1396, and at Nicopolis a Serbian force helped to destroy the crusader army. Serbia survived as a vassal despotate for seventy more years, until Smederevo fell to Mehmed II in 1459, six years after the fall of Constantinople.25
The memory proved stronger than the outcome. The Serbian Church venerated Lazar as a martyr and saint, and in the nineteenth century, Malcolm notes, Vidovdan, St Vitus’ Day, became the national and religious day of Kosovo. Eulogies and epic songs told his death as a sacrifice for the faith and for his people, and the story became, in Malcolm’s words, a talisman of Serbian identity. In 1989, at the 600th anniversary, Slobodan Milošević addressed a vast crowd at the Gazimestan memorial, conceding in his speech that it was now hard to say whether the battle had been a defeat or a victory. Malcolm compares the adulation Milošević received that day to the cult of Tito.26
Where was the Battle of Kosovo fought?
The battle was fought on Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, a few miles northwest of Pristina near the meeting of the rivers Lab and Sitnica. The Gazimestan memorial tower stands on a rise above the plain, and it is there that Serbs mark Vidovdan, as they did at the great anniversary of 1989.27
A short distance away stands the Meşhed of Sultan Murad, the tomb the Ottomans raised on the spot where he was wounded and died. İnalcık writes that his internal organs were buried there and his body taken to Bursa, and the Hürriyet Daily News describes the same tomb on the outskirts of Pristina, built to hold them. For more on the Ottoman wars of conquest, read the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire or the story of Mohács.28
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