Battle of Kossovo
On the field of Kossovo, in 1389, the Serbians, shorn of half their provinces and weakened and betrayed by the Hungarians, met the Turks in battle. Both sides have left record of the ferocity of the struggle. ‘The angels in Heaven’, said the Turks, ‘amazed by the hideous noise, forgot the heavenly hymns with which they always glorify God.’ ‘The battle-field became like a tulip-bed with its ruddy severed heads and rolling turbans.’ ‘Few’, wrote the Serbian chronicler, ‘returned to their own country.’
When the day closed, both the Serbian king, Lazar, and the Turkish sultan lay dead amid their warriors, and the victory, as far as the actual fighting was concerned, seemed to rest neither with Christian nor Moslem. Yet, in truth, the Turk could supply other armies, as numerous and as well-equipped, to take the place of those who had fallen, while the Serbians had exhausted their uttermost effort: thus the fruits of the battle fell entirely into the hands of the infidel.
‘Things are hard for us, hard since Kossovo,’ is a modern Serbian saying, for the Serbs have never forgotten the day when they fought their last despairing battle as champions of the Cross, and lost for a time their ambition of dominating Eastern Europe.
There resteth to Serbia a glory, (runs the old ballad)
* * * * *
Yea! As long as a babe shall be born,
Or there resteth a man in the land—
So long as a blade of corn
Shall be reaped by a human hand,
So long as the grass shall grow
On the mighty plain of Kossovo—
So long, so long, even so
Shall the glory of those remain
Who this day in battle were slain.
From the day of Kossovo the ultimate conquest of Eastern Europe by the Turks became a certainty. Lack of ambition on the part of some of the sultans and a life and death struggle in which others found themselves involved in Asia Minor against Tartar tribes merely deferred the time of reckoning, but it came at last in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Mohammed II, ‘the Conqueror’, determined to reign in Constantinople.
This Mohammed, famous in mediaeval history, was the son of a Serbian princess, and he is said to have grown up indifferent alike to Christianity or Islam. He is described as having ‘a pair of red and white cheeks full and round, a hooked nose, and a resolute mouth’, while flatterers went still farther and declared that his moustache was ‘like leaves over two rosebuds, and every hair of his beard a thread of gold’. In character, from a fierce, undisciplined boy he grew into a self-willed man, intent upon the satisfaction of his ambitions and desires. He could speak, or at least understand, Arabic, Greek, Persian, Hebrew, and Latin; and chroniclers record that it was in reading the triumphs of Alexander and Julius Caesar that he was first inspired with the thought of becoming a great general.
His rival, Constantine XI, the last and best of the Paleologi, was a man of very different type from the Turk, or indeed from his own ancestors. He was devoted to the Christian religion and Greece—brave, simple, and generous. When he first became aware of Mohammed’s aggressive hostility he attempted to disarm it by liberating Turkish prisoners. ‘If it shall please God to soften your heart’, he sent word, ‘I shall rejoice; but however that may be, I shall live and die in the defence of my people and of my Faith.’ His words were put to the test when, in the autumn of 1452, the siege of Constantinople began.