What happened at the Battle of the Maritsa?
On 26 September 1371 an Ottoman force under the frontier commanders of Sultan Murad I surprised the army of the Serbian King Vukašin and his brother, Despot Jovan Uglješa, at Chernomen (Çirmen) on the Maritsa River in Thrace. The Serbs had marched to drive the Turks out of Thrace, but a night attack threw their camp into chaos; many were killed or drowned in the river, and both brothers died. The Serbian lords of Macedonia became the sultan's vassals, and the way into the Balkans lay open.1
By the late 1360s the Ottomans had a firm hold on Thrace. Murad I had taken Adrianople, the later Edirne, and with it the valley of the Maritsa that led into the central Balkans. Britannica notes that the Christian states of the region tried to drive him back, but their first efforts failed, and in 1366 the Bulgarians were forced to become his vassals.2
The man who most feared the Turks was Jovan Uglješa, the Serbian despot of Serres, whose lands bordered both the Byzantines and the Ottomans. Halil İnalcık, in his article on Murad I in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, writes that Uglješa saw the advance of Evrenos in the south and of Hacı İlbey and Lala Şahin in the Maritsa valley as a mortal danger. Ottoman raiders had reached as far as the monasteries of Mount Athos.3
An alliance against the Turks
Uglješa looked for allies. His envoys went to Constantinople offering a marriage alliance and money, İnalcık writes, and despite opposition in the city the Byzantines accepted. The dispute between the Serbian and Byzantine churches was settled in 1368, and in May 1371 their union was proclaimed. In western Macedonia Uglješa's brother and ally, King Vukašin, ruled Prilep, Skopje and Prizren; the historian George Ostrogorsky, as İnalcık notes, took Vukašin's presence on the campaign as a sign of how much the Serbs staked on it.4
The decision to attack was taken in the spring of 1371. The army drew on Greek and Serbian forces from Thrace to Albania. A Serbian monk named Isaiah, quoted by İnalcık, put it at 60,000 men; Britannica gives Vukašin 70,000.5
The sultan far away
In Thrace Lala Şahin, Murad's old tutor and now commander in Rumelia, asked the sultan for help as the Serbian army advanced. Abdülkadir Özcan's TDV article on Lala Şahin records that he had taken Ihtiman and Samokov in 1370 and 1371. The Serbs marched down the left bank of the Maritsa as far as Chernomen without meeting serious resistance, and Edirne itself was threatened. Chernomen, Çirmen to the Turks, was a fortified town on the Maritsa northwest of Edirne, today in Greece, as Yusuf Halaçoğlu describes it in the TDV.6
Murad gathered his Anatolian troops but could not cross to Europe: the Byzantines, now allied with the Serbs, held the straits and Gallipoli. Instead, İnalcık writes, the Ottoman council of war decided to take the fortress of Biga (Pegae) on the Anatolian shore, and the sultan spent the summer of 1371 besieging it by land while his fleet cut it off from the sea.7
A night attack
The battle was won without him. In the Ottoman tradition, as İnalcık summarizes it, the vanguard under Hacı İlbey fell on the Serbian camp in a sudden night attack. In the confusion the Serbs turned on one another, many fell into the Maritsa and drowned, and the army was routed. Britannica describes the same scene: the Serbs, halted at Chernomen, were surprised by a much smaller Turkish force that killed large numbers of them, among them Vukašin, and drove many survivors into the river.8
Lala Şahin played a large part in the victory, Özcan writes, though the Ottoman sources tell the story in different ways: the anonymous chronicles give the credit to Hacı İlbey, while Âşıkpaşazâde and Neşri tell it in detail. The chronicles also date it wrongly to 1364 or 1365; Christian sources give the true date, 26 September 1371. The field became known as Sırp Sındığı, the rout of the Serbs; Britannica renders it as the Serbs' destruction.9
Macedonia opened
Uglješa and Vukašin both died, and no member of Uglješa's family took up his lands. Vukašin's son, King Marko, the despot Dragaš and his brother Konstantin submitted to Murad and agreed to pay tribute. The Byzantine emperor granted his son Manuel the Greek towns freed from Serbian rule. In 1372 Pope Gregory XI warned the king of Hungary that the Turks had brought the Serbian magnates under their rule and now stood between Hungary, Serbia and Albania, and he tried, without success, to gather the Latin powers of the Levant for a crusade.10
For Britannica, the Maritsa destroyed the independent kingdom of the southern Serbs, confirmed Bulgaria as an Ottoman vassal and exposed Macedonia and, in time, the rest of the Balkans to conquest. Lala Şahin went on to take Kavala, Drama and Serres in the campaigns that followed, and eighteen years later the Ottomans fought the Serbs again at Kosovo, in 1389.11
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”; Abdülkadir Özcan, “Lala Şâhin Paşa”; Yusuf Halaçoğlu, “Çirmen”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”; Abdülkadir Özcan, “Lala Şâhin Paşa”. ↩
- Halil İnalcık, “Murad I”. ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”; Abdülkadir Özcan, “Lala Şâhin Paşa”. ↩
Sources
- Halil İnalcık, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, “Murad I”
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of the Maritsa River”
- Abdülkadir Özcan, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, “Lala Şâhin Paşa”
- Yusuf Halaçoğlu, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, “Çirmen”
