Battle of Kosovo

The Battle of Kosovo was fought on 15 June 1389, by the Julian calendar, on the Field of Kosovo near today's Pristina, between a coalition led by the Serbian Prince Lazar and the army of the Ottoman sultan Murad I. Both rulers died. The battle itself was not a clear victory for either side, but it drained Serbia's strength and opened the way for Ottoman dominance in the Balkans. It later became one of the central events in Serbian national memory.

In the second half of the fourteenth century the Ottoman Empire expanded rapidly from north-western Anatolia into south-eastern Europe. The Serbian Empire built by Stefan Dušan had broken up after his death in 1355 into regional lordships, and in 1371 the Ottomans crushed the lords of southern Serbia and Macedonia at the Maritsa river, turning many of the region's rulers into vassals. Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, who ruled the strongest of the northern Serbian states, became the leading Serbian figure. In 1386 and 1388 Ottoman forces suffered setbacks against Serbian and Bosnian troops, and Murad gathered a large army to restore his position.

Lazar was joined by the lord Vuk Branković, who ruled Kosovo, and by a contingent sent by King Tvrtko I of Bosnia under Vlatko Vuković. Murad brought his sons Bayezid and Yakub, along with troops from Anatolia and from Christian vassals. The size of both armies is disputed. A common modern estimate puts the Serbian-led army at around 15,000 to 20,000 men and the Ottoman army at around 27,000 to 30,000, though higher figures are also proposed.

Detailed contemporary accounts are scarce, and much of what is told comes from later sources and legend. It appears that the Christian forces had some early success against one Ottoman wing before Bayezid's counter-attack turned the battle. Murad was killed, according to tradition by the Serbian knight Miloš Obilić, who is said to have reached the sultan by pretending to defect; the circumstances are uncertain, and some accounts place the killing after the fighting. Lazar was captured and executed, or killed in the fighting. Both armies suffered very heavy losses.

The first news to reach western Europe presented the battle as a Christian victory. In fact both sides withdrew. Bayezid, who had his brother Yakub put to death on hearing of their father's death, hurried away to secure the throne. But the Ottomans could replace their losses from a large empire, while Serbia could not. Within a few years Lazar's widow, Milica, ruling for their son Stefan Lazarević, accepted Ottoman overlordship, and Stefan fought as a vassal for Bayezid. Serbia survived as a dependent despotate until the Ottomans took Smederevo in 1459. Vuk Branković, often blamed in legend for betraying Lazar, later lost his lands and died an Ottoman prisoner.

The battle became the core of a cycle of Serbian epic poetry and church tradition. Lazar was venerated as a martyr who chose a heavenly kingdom over an earthly one, and the battle's anniversary, Vidovdan, celebrated on 28 June in the modern calendar, became a major national and religious day. The Kosovo legend shaped Serbian identity through centuries of Ottoman rule and nationalist movements. On the 600th anniversary in 1989, Slobodan Milošević gave a speech at the Gazimestan memorial before a large crowd, an event often seen as a prelude to the Yugoslav Wars. Kosovo, which has an Albanian majority, declared independence in 2008, a step that Serbia does not recognise.

Our 1400 map shows the Ottoman Empire after its advance into the Balkans, a decade after the battle.