Chapter III: Murad (3)

The battle was begun by the Osmanlis. Murad sent forward an advance guard of two thousand archers.[416] The allies responded with a charge in which the left wing of the Ottoman army was broken through by Lazar. For a while the issue seemed in doubt. Bayezid held out against the impetuosity of the Serbians, but the Osmanlis made no attempt to take the offensive. At this critical juncture, when the battle was by no means decided, Vuk Brankovitch, another son-in-law of Lazar, quietly withdrew from the field with twelve thousand men. This desertion, which had probably been arranged for with Murad, so weakened the Serbians that they broke and fled. Lazar and many of his leading noblemen, and thousands of his soldiers, were taken prisoners. It was not a fight to the bitter end.[417]

Murad won the battle of Kossova at the cost of his own life. From the story which Clavijo de Gonzáles heard fifteen years later, one might infer that Murad was killed in the course of the battle, and that the fighting was renewed around his body.[418] It was then that Bayezid cut down Lazar with his own sword. Pray declared that the two sovereigns were mortally wounded in a personal combat.[419] The Ottoman historians believed that Murad met his death when walking across the field after the battle. A wounded Serbian soldier, who was believed to be dead, rose with a supreme effort to his knees and thrust his sword into Murad as he passed.

According to the Serbian songs, whose testimony the Byzantine historians corroborate, and whose story has been followed by some Osmanlis as well, Murad was assassinated after the battle, or perhaps while the battle was in progress, by Milosh Obravitch. Stung by the unjust accusation of treason in the speech of Lazar on the eve of the battle,[420] Milosh determined to prove his loyalty beyond any question. He got through the Ottoman ranks as a deserter, of whom there must have been many on that fatal day. His claim of high rank, which was attested by his princely bearing, secured for him an audience with Murad. When he was face to face with the emir, he plunged his dagger into the destroyer of his country’s liberties. It is a commentary on the Serbian character that this questionable act has been held up to posterity as the most saintly and heroic deed of national history.

In the seventeenth century it was believed, and this belief has been reproduced as a fact by some modern writers on the Ottoman Empire, that the custom of holding a foreign ambassador’s arms when he entered the presence of the sultan, originated from a regulation to prevent the recurrence of such a crime.[421] Like many other Ottoman customs, however, this consistorial ceremony is found among the usages of the Byzantine court,[422] and has persisted in some oriental courts to the present day. It has been explained on the ground that ‘a stranger before the sovereign is so overwhelmed by the effulgence of his rays that he cannot stand without support’.[423]

The statements of the numbers engaged in the battle of Kossova are so conflicting that it is impossible to determine how many men took part in the action, or which side was the stronger. The Serbian folksongs dwell upon the tremendous number of the enemy, while the Ottoman historians report that the Osmanlis mustered so few in comparison with the reported strength of the Serbians that there was serious question before the battle of the advisability of taking so great a risk as to engage a foe whose numerical advantage was so marked. Including the prisoners, who were massacred when Murad’s death was learned by the soldiers, the Serbians calculated their loss at seventy-seven thousand killed, while only twelve thousand of the Osmanlis fell. One important fact we do know. The loss of life during the battle and subsequent massacre on the part of the Serbian nobility was so great that the nation, for the third time within thirty years, found itself without leaders.

Tvrtko hurried away from Kossova so fast that he did not realize how overwhelming had been the defeat. In fact, when he learned of the death of Murad, he wrote to Florence announcing the glorious victory won under his leadership, and the death of the arch enemy of Christendom.[424] The Florentines, therefore, celebrated the news of Kossova with a _Te Deum_ in the cathedral. Either this perverted account also reached France, or too great significance was placed upon the death of Murad, for Charles VI went to Notre Dame to render thanks to God in all solemnity for what had happened at Kossova![425] The Serbians themselves were not deceived. To them, Kossova was the death-knell to independence. The Hungarians, also, awoke immediately to a sense of the danger that threatened them.

XVIII

For thirty years Murad had guided the destinies of the Osmanlis with a political sagacity surpassed by no statesman of his age. It is only because we know so much more of Mohammed the Conqueror and of Soleiman the Magnificent that Murad has never received his proper place as the most remarkable and most successful statesman and warrior of the house of Osman. When we measure the difficulties which confronted him, the problems which he solved, and the results of his reign, against the deeds of his more dazzling successors, we see how easily he stands with them, if not above them. The transformation effected in his lifetime is one of the most wonderful records in all history. His conquests were to endure for five centuries, until the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878: some of them have survived the cataclysm of the recent Balkan wars.

His energy and zeal for fighting, so like his father’s, and yet put to the test of being extended over a field of action far wider than his father ever dreamed of, did not flag. He never had a disagreement with any of his generals or administrators. His system of conquest and of government, unsupported by tradition or the background of a gradual growth, fitted every condition for which it had been framed. His treatment of the Greeks showed superb skill in estimating their character. Although an infidel and enemy of Christ in the eyes of the Byzantine ecclesiastics, he handled them so much better than the popes that he won their sympathies. No more striking proof of his complete success in a problem of assimilation, at once racial as well as religious, can be found than the letter of the Orthodox patriarch written to Pope Urban VI in 1385, in which it is stated that Murad left to the Church entire liberty of action.[426] In the records of the Greek patriarchate from 1360 to 1389,[427] one does not find a single instance of complaint received of ill treatment of the priesthood by the Osmanlis.

Osman gathered around him a race, Orkhan created a state, but it was Murad who founded the empire.