Serbia

A family of saints

Drafted from Ćirković, The Peoples of Europe (2004)formation

Stefan Nemanja was one of several Serbian princes in the Byzantine orbit in the 1160s, and by his abdication in 1196 he had made his family the only one that mattered. What he did afterwards is the more consequential half.

He became a monk. He went to Mount Athos, where his youngest son Sava was already living as one, and the two of them founded Hilandar — a Serbian monastery on the Holy Mountain, granted by an imperial charter, which still exists and has been a Serbian institution for eight hundred and thirty years. Nemanja died there in 1199 and was canonised as Saint Simeon.

The argument the dynasty made

Most dynasties that claim divine favour claim it as a mandate: the right to rule comes from above, the king is the god's steward, the throne is held on trust. The Nemanjići claimed something narrower and stranger, which is that the family itself was holy. Nemanja was Saint Simeon; Sava was Saint Sava, the first Serbian archbishop and the country's patron; and most of the line after them was canonised too, with a cycle of royal saints' lives written by their own descendants and a set of monastery churches — Studenica, Žiča, Mileševa, Gračanica, Dečani — endowed by successive rulers, each containing a fresco of the family tree with the founder at the root.

It is a genealogy that is also a hagiography, painted on the wall of a building the subject paid for. Descent and sanctity are not two arguments here but one, and the fresco is how it was published: an illiterate congregation standing in a church endowed by the king could look up and see the king's great-grandfather with a halo, at the root of a tree whose topmost branch was the man who had built the room they were standing in.

1219

Sava's other achievement came from an unexpected direction.

In 1219 he travelled to Nicaea, where the Byzantine government had been sitting in exile since the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople fifteen years earlier, and obtained from the exiled patriarch an autocephalous Serbian archbishopric with himself as its head.

The Greek hierarchy at Ohrid, which had jurisdiction over Serbia and was not consulted, protested at length. It made no difference. A patriarch with no city and a claim to be the Roman empire had one thing left to dispose of, which was ecclesiastical authority, and he disposed of it to a Serbian monk on the strength of an argument about the church's needs.

Serbia therefore had a church answerable to nobody in the region a hundred and twenty-seven years before it had an emperor — and when it eventually wanted an emperor, the church Sava had obtained was what made one possible.

What kind of state

Small, mountainous, and between things. Serbia in 1200 was a principality in the Morava and Ibar valleys with a Catholic Hungary to the north, a Byzantine world to the south and east, and the Adriatic ports of a Venetian sphere to the west. Nemanja's sons quarrelled over which way to face — one was crowned by a papal legate in 1217 and is known as the First-Crowned, and his brother the monk got the Orthodox archbishopric two years later — and the state ended up with both, which is a fair description of where it sat.

What changed the scale of it was not a decision. It was silver.

The silver

Drafted from Ćirković, The Peoples of Europe (2004)expansion

In the 1240s, after the Mongols had wrecked Hungary and moved on, Serbian rulers invited German miners in.

They are called the Sasi — Saxons — in the Serbian sources, they came from the mining districts of Hungary and Transylvania, and they arrived with their own law, their own courts, their own technical vocabulary and their own terms. The charters granting them privileges survive. Within a generation there were mines at Brskovo, then Rudnik, Trepča, Janjevo, Srebrenica — the name means silver — and finally Novo Brdo, which was the largest.

What that did

Serbia became a mining state, which almost nothing else in medieval Europe outside the Alps and Bohemia can be called without qualification.

Serbian silver was a substantial share of European production in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Novo Brdo alone is estimated to have produced several tonnes a year at its height, some of it glama — silver naturally alloyed with gold, which sold at a premium. The mines were royal, the crown took a share of production, and Ragusan merchants ran the export.

Ćirković treats that as the engine of everything else. A mountainous principality of no particular consequence acquired, within about fifty years, an income that let it retain foreign cavalry for decades, mint its own coin in quantity, endow monasteries at a rate that is still visible on the ground, and finance an expansion into Byzantine territory at exactly the moment Byzantium could not pay its own troops.

The other side of the same fact

It also brought in people the state did not govern in the ordinary way.

The Saxons had their own law and were not subject to Serbian courts in mining matters. The Ragusans who bought the silver had colonies with their own consuls in the mining towns and along the roads to the coast. Dušan's Code has articles about both, which is a state legislating around communities it has invited and cannot simply command.

It is the ordinary price of an economy that runs on somebody else's expertise and somebody else's ships, and it was being paid all over the eastern Mediterranean in these decades — by the Byzantine emperor whose customs the Genoese were collecting across the Golden Horn, and by every crusader port with an Italian commune holding streets inside it.

And what it could not do

Silver buys soldiers and does not make them.

Serbia's army was a feudal levy on land grants — the baština held outright and the pronija held on condition of service, the second borrowed under its own Greek name from the Byzantine administration Serbia was expanding into. Beside it were the mercenaries the mines paid for, of whom the best documented is a German captain called Palman who commanded Dušan's heavy cavalry for something like twenty years.

It was enough to beat Bulgarians, Byzantines and Epirotes. Whether it would ever have been enough against the Ottomans is a question that never got asked in the form that would have answered it, because by the time the Ottomans arrived the empire the silver had built had already come apart for reasons of its own.

Dušan

Drafted from Ćirković, The Peoples of Europe (2004)peak

Stefan Dušan deposed his father in 1331 and had him strangled at Zvečan the following year. He was twenty-three. He then ruled for twenty-four years and roughly tripled the state.

Velbazhd, first

The year before he took the throne, in 1330, a Serbian army destroyed a Bulgarian one at Velbazhd and the tsar Michael Shishman was killed in the field. Dušan commanded a wing of it.

The balance in the Balkans passed to Serbia for the next thirty years, and Bulgaria spent them as a junior partner. It was the second time in a century that one battle between these two states had settled which of them mattered, and the first had gone the other way: at Klokotnitsa in 1230 a Bulgarian tsar destroyed the army of Epirus and held everything from the Danube to the Aegean for a decade.

What he took

Almost all of it from Byzantium, and almost all of it while Byzantium was fighting itself.

The Byzantine civil war of 1341 to 1347 pitted a regency in Constantinople against John Kantakouzenos, and both sides went looking for outside help. Dušan supplied it to whichever side suited him and took payment in territory: Albania, most of Macedonia, Epirus, Thessaly. By 1348 the Serbian state ran from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth and Dušan held more of the Byzantine empire's European territory than the Byzantine emperor did.

Thessalonica held out and Constantinople was never seriously attempted, for the reason that had stopped Krum and Simeon three and four centuries earlier and had not changed since. Serbia had no fleet. An army that cannot cross water cannot take a city on a strait, however much of the empire behind it that army holds.

1346

On Easter Sunday 1346 at Skopje, Dušan was crowned basileus and autokrator of the Serbs and the Greeks.

Three weeks earlier he had raised the Serbian archbishopric — Sava's, from the first chapter — to a patriarchate, because a patriarch was needed to perform the coronation and Constantinople was not going to provide one. The Bulgarian patriarch and the archbishop of Ohrid attended, which supplied the appearance of canonical assent.

Constantinople excommunicated the Serbian church for it, and the excommunication was not lifted for twenty-nine years.

What the title was for

Four rulers in six centuries claimed the Roman imperial office from outside Constantinople without holding the city: Simeon of Bulgaria in 913, the Latin emperors in 1204 who at least had the ceremonial, Dušan in 1346, and Mehmed II in 1453, who had the city and therefore does not quite belong on the list. Dušan's is the most elaborately staged of them — a coronation, a title on seals and charters, and a patriarchate manufactured three weeks beforehand for the sole purpose of performing it.

The excommunication is the best evidence of how it was read. Constantinople did not treat this as a Slavic ruler translating a local dignity into Greek. It treated it as a man taking the emperor's office, and responded with the heaviest instrument it had left.

What Dušan meant by it is argued about. The maximal reading is that he intended to replace the emperor in Constantinople and was assembling the means. The minimal one is that Serbs and Greeks is a description of the population he actually ruled, which by 1346 included more Greeks than Serbs. Ćirković is cautious, and there is no settling it: the man died with an army on the road and left no statement of what the army was for.

He died in December 1355, aged forty-seven, on his way somewhere with an army. The empire lasted nine years after the coronation and did not survive him by much.

The Code

Drafted from Ćirković, The Peoples of Europe (2004)peak

In May 1349, at a council at Skopje, Dušan promulgated a law code. He enlarged it at a second council in 1354. Together the two parts run to something over two hundred articles, and they survive in a couple of dozen manuscript copies.

It is a working code rather than a statement of principle. It legislates the jurisdiction of church and secular courts; the status and obligations of the dependent peasantry, the sebri, including how many days a week they owe; the protection of church property; robbery and the collective liability of villages for it; judicial procedure and the standing of witnesses; the Saxons and the Ragusans, whose privileges it both confirms and limits; and heresy, which it treats severely.

What it does not say

Who inherits the throne.

Two hundred articles on the jurisdiction of courts, the days of labour owed by a peasant, the liability of a village for a robbery committed on its road, the privileges of German miners and Ragusan merchants, the punishment of heretics — and not one word about the succession to the imperial crown its author had put on his head three years earlier.

The silence is not an accident of what survived. The document is here, complete, in two dozen copies.

Why that is remarkable

States do sometimes write down who inherits, and there is a pattern in which ones do. Telipinu legislated the Hittite succession after a century of murdered kings. Esarhaddon made the Assyrian nobility swear to his arrangements after a civil war caused by his father's assassination. The Golden Bull of 1356 — issued seven years after this code and four hundred kilometres away, and about almost nothing else — was Charles IV settling three centuries of disputed imperial elections.

A written succession rule is nearly always a scar. It gets written by people who have watched the alternative.

Dušan had watched the alternative from closer than any of them. He deposed his own father three years into that father's reign and had him strangled in the fortress at Zvečan; his grandfather had been deposed by a son as well. The man in Europe best placed to know exactly what an unregulated succession costs a dynasty sat down and legislated the hire of oxen.

Nine years later he died at forty-seven, leaving a nineteen-year-old son and an empire assembled out of somebody else's provinces in under a decade. The great lords stopped obeying inside five years, and there was no rule anybody could appeal to, because the one man who could have written one had chosen not to.

What happened next

Dušan died in 1355 and was succeeded by his son Uroš, who was nineteen and inherited an empire assembled in nine years out of provinces taken from a neighbour in civil war.

It held together for about five years and then did not. The great lords of Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly — most of them Dušan's own appointees and several of them his relatives — stopped obeying, and Uroš spent the rest of his reign being nominally emperor of territory that other men governed. He is called Uroš the Weak, which is the traditional verdict and is at least partly a judgement on somebody else's arrangements.

The men who ended the arrangements had by then been in Europe for seventeen years.

The Maritsa

Drafted from Ćirković, The Peoples of Europe (2004)contraction

On the night of 26 September 1371 an Ottoman force surprised the camp of the Serbian lords of Macedonia on the river Maritsa near Chernomen and destroyed them. Vukašin Mrnjavčević, who had made himself king in the Serbian lands, and his brother Uglješa, who governed Serres, were both killed. Many of the men who drowned in the river gave the battle its Turkish name, the rout of the Serbs.

Uroš V died two months later without children, and the Nemanjić dynasty ended two hundred and five years after Stefan Nemanja took the grand principality.

Two endings, and only one of them Serbia's

It is worth being precise about what did and did not end in 1371, because a reader arriving at a page called Serbia will reasonably expect the state to stop when the dynasty does.

The empire of 1346 ended. Macedonia south of the Šar passed under Ottoman suzerainty within a few years, Thessaly and Epirus went their own way, and the imperial title lapsed because nobody was in a position to use it.

The state did not end. Serbian principalities north of the Šar continued under their own rulers, and within about a decade Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović had assembled most of them into something governable again, with a capital at Kruševac and the church's excommunication finally lifted.

The distinction matters and it is easy to blur. Bulgaria next door genuinely did stop: a hundred and sixty-seven years of direct Byzantine administration with no Bulgarian ruler anywhere, and then a restoration that had to claim continuity because there had visibly been a gap. Serbia had no gap. The Nemanjić line ended and Serbian rulers went on governing Serbian territory without a break, and the country's most impressive stretch of institutional life — a legal code for the mines, a mint, a fortress at Smederevo, seventy more years — is on the far side of 1371.

The seventeen years

The other thing worth stating plainly is that the Ottomans were not a surprise.

They had crossed into Europe permanently in 1354, ferried across the straits by one side in a Byzantine civil war that had hired them, and had taken Adrianople by about 1369. The Maritsa is seventeen years after the crossing and two years after the new capital.

What they arrived into is the point. Byzantium was fighting itself. Serbia had come apart on the death of an emperor who had left no rule for who came next. Bulgaria had divided itself between two of Ivan Alexander's sons. Nobody in the Balkans was in a position to face a unified power, and not one of them had become disunited because of the Ottomans.

Ćirković's account and Fine's agree on this and it is worth resisting the tidier version. The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans was not a collision between a rising power and a settled order. It was a rising power arriving in a place that had just dismantled itself for reasons of its own.

Fifty thousand out, two hundred thousand in

Drafted from Broquière, The Travels of Bertrandon de la Broquière to Palestine, and His Return from Jerusalem Overland to France, During the Years 1432 and 1433 (1807)contraction

In 1433 a Burgundian sent east to work out whether a crusade could be got through rode across Serbia, and his notes are a balance sheet. Bertrandon de la Broquière was surveying a route, so he counted what a quartermaster counts: what the ruler paid out, what he took in, where the forts were, and who would fight.

The arithmetic

The despot was Đurađ Branković, and Broquière sets out his position in two figures.

He pays the Turk an annual tribute of fifty thousand ducats. And on the river towards the borders of Bulgaria, Slavonia, Albania and Bosnia, he holds a town with a mine producing gold and silver at the same time, which yields him more than two hundred thousand ducats a year — as well informed people assured me.

Then the conclusion, which is the whole history of the despotate in one clause:

without this, he would be soon driven out of his dominions.

That is Novo Brdo, and it is the same silver the Serbian state had been built on for two centuries, now doing a different job. The mines that had once paid for Dušan's armies and his code were paying the Ottoman tribute that bought the despot his remaining years.

What the country looked like

Broquière rode up the Nišava and the Morava through what he calls a pleasant, well-peopled country full of villages where all your wants may be supplied, and past the castle of Kruševac at the confluence — once a strong place, now part of a wall and a tower.

From there, he notes, it is a hundred miles to the Danube, and in all this distance, there does not subsist any fort, or place of defence, except a village and a house with a mosque built by a Turkish bey on a hillside.

At the river mouth the Turk kept eighty to a hundred galleys and rafts to ferry his cavalry across in time of war, guarded by three hundred men relieved every two months. Broquière could not see them, because no Christian was allowed near them, but a man worthy of belief told him.

Whose subjects

The other thing he recorded is the muster.

Everywhere from Macedonia through Bulgaria and Serbia, the Turk had proclamation made that whoever owed service should hold himself ready to march. Those who fed a horse were exempt from the tax; Christians who preferred not to serve paid fifty aspers a head; and some were compelled to go when reinforcements were needed.

Belgrade had belonged to the despot and he had ceded it to the king of Hungary four years earlier, for fear of losing it to the Turk as he had lost Golubac — which Broquière calls a heavy loss to Christendom, and thinks the loss of Belgrade would be heavier still, the place being stronger and able to hold five or six thousand horse.

Two days after he arrived there, twenty-five men came in as garrison. They told him they were Germans, and explained why Germans had been sent for when Serbs and Hungarians were next door: the Serbs were subjects and tributaries of the Turk and could not be trusted, and the Hungarians were so frightened of him that if he appeared they would not dare defend the place however strong it was.

What the survey adds up to

A ruler with the richest mine in Europe paying a quarter of its output to an empire whose musters were already being proclaimed in his own villages; a hundred miles of open country between his second river and the Danube with nothing on it; a fortress ceded to Hungary to keep it out of Turkish hands; and a garrison of foreigners hired because nobody local could be relied on.

Broquière was writing to advise a crusade, and everything he set down argues that one was needed and that it would be difficult. Twenty-six years after he rode through, the despotate ended at Smederevo, and the mine went on producing for the people who took it.

Kosovo

Drafted from Ćirković, The Peoples of Europe (2004)end

On 15 June 1389, on the field of Kosovo, Prince Lazar met Murad I. Both rulers died. Murad was killed in his own camp, which is the only occasion on which a reigning Ottoman sultan was killed by an enemy; the Serbian tradition names Miloš Obilić and describes a feigned defection and a concealed knife. Lazar was captured and executed on the field.

Both armies were wrecked. Bayezid, Murad's son, had his brother strangled in the camp to secure the succession and withdrew.

Who won

Nobody could agree at the time, and nobody agrees now.

News of Kosovo reached western Europe as a Christian victory and was celebrated as one. There was a Te Deum in Paris. The Florentine senate wrote to the Bosnian king congratulating him. Contemporary Ottoman accounts claim it just as firmly for the other side. Modern historians mostly call it a draw at best, and some call it an Ottoman victory that both sides took time to recognise.

It is an unusual kind of dispute. The battle's importance has never been in question; what is in question is the result — which is roughly the reverse of the normal situation, where everyone knows who won and argues about whether it mattered.

What is not disputed

The result. Serbia had no army left and Lazar's son Stefan became an Ottoman vassal within a year, married his sister to Bayezid, and fought for the Ottomans at Nicopolis in 1396 against the crusade — and at Ankara in 1402 against Timur, where the Ottoman chroniclers single out the Serbian heavy cavalry as the only contingent that did not break.

The Ottomans replaced their sultan inside a day and their losses inside a season. That asymmetry is the whole of it: a state that can absorb the death of its ruler and the loss of an army, against one that cannot.

Seventy more years

Serbia after Kosovo was a vassal state, and then for two generations something a good deal better than that.

Stefan Lazarević took the title despot from Constantinople in 1402, moved the capital to Belgrade, and ran a working state with a legal code for the mines, a mint, and a court that produced a good deal of literature. Đurađ Branković built the fortress at Smederevo in the 1430s with money still coming out of Novo Brdo. The Despotate is the part nobody remembers, and it outlasted Dušan's empire by a factor of seven.

The silver held out almost to the end. The Ottomans took Novo Brdo in 1455 and Smederevo in June 1459, six years after Constantinople. The state that had been built on a mine ended four years after the mine was taken.

The field of blackbirds

Drafted from tradition, Serbian Ballads (1916)afterlife

For five centuries after Smederevo there was no Serbian state, and the country's history was maintained instead by men with one-stringed fiddles.

The gusle is a bowed instrument with a single string, and what was recited to it was a body of unrhymed decasyllabic verse with a caesura in the middle of each line, transmitted orally, without authors, revised continuously by whoever was singing. A whole cycle of it centres on the battle of 15 June 1389 — 28 June by the modern calendar, Vidovdan, the feast of Saint Vitus — on the field of Kosovo, the field of the blackbirds.

Seton-Watson's summary of what it was for is exact: during five centuries of Turkish rule the songs kept alive the memory of Serbia's lost glories, surrounded the dim figures of her medieval heroes with a halo of romance, and encouraged the faith of a downtrodden people in a resurrection that was certain to come.

What the ballads say happened

The cycle opens with Murad's letter to Lazar demanding the keys of the fortresses and seven years of taxes, on the ground that it never was known and never can be that two should rule in one empire. Lazar reads it and weeps, and then curses anyone who fails to come to the field:

He who does not come to the Field of Blackbirds, Let nothing prosper in his hands, Neither the gold-white wheat in the field, Nor the vine on the mountain side, Nor the children playing at home.

Then he holds his nameday feast at Kruševac and raises the cup, and works through who deserves it — by age, by rank, by affection, by beauty, by height — before drinking it to Miloš Obilić for prowess and accusing him, in front of the table, of intending to betray the army in the morning. Miloš stands up, thanks him for the toast and not for the speech, swears he will kill the sultan on the field and plant his foot on his throat, and names the man sitting at the prince's own knee drinking wine from a silk-draped glass as the real traitor.

Both men keep their word. Miloš kills Murad. Vuk Branković is remembered as the betrayer, on the strength of the poem, for six hundred years.

The mother of the Jugović

The other pole of the cycle is not heroic at all.

The mother of the nine Jugović brothers prays for the eyes of a falcon and the wings of a swan so that she can fly to Kosovo, and God grants it, and she finds her nine sons and their father dead with nine spears above them and nine falcons on the spears. She does not weep. She takes the horses and the falcons home. She does not weep when the nine widows and the nine orphans come out to meet her, nor when the horses whinny, nor at midnight when Damian's grey horse begins to groan for a master it will never carry again.

In the morning two ravens come, bloody to the shoulders, with foam round their beaks, and drop a hero's hand into her lap with a wedding ring on it. Damian's wife identifies the ring. The mother turns the hand over and fondles it and speaks to it:

O my hand, my fresh green apple, Where didst thou grow, where wert thou plucked? 'Twas on my bosom thou didst grow. The plucking, 'twas on Kosovo's plain.

Then she dies.

That is the poem a people without a state recited to itself for five hundred years, and it is worth noticing what it is not. It is not a call to arms and it does not promise anything. It is a woman holding a piece of her son.

What the ballads got wrong, and why it did not matter

Lazar was a prince and the songs make him a tsar. The Serbian nobility at Kosovo was not a unified nation and the songs make it one. Vuk Branković's treachery is not in any contemporary source and is probably an invention of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, looking for someone to blame. The battle's outcome, which nobody at the time could agree on, becomes in the cycle an unambiguous catastrophe and simultaneously a moral victory — Lazar choosing the heavenly kingdom over the earthly one, which is a theological idea and not a military report.

None of that made the songs less useful. A people with no schools, no aristocracy, no state and no written history had a portable account of who they had been, in a metre that could be memorised, performed anywhere, by anybody, for free. It is not history and it was never trying to be. It was a nation kept in the only container available.

Threepence, London, June 1916

Which brings the cycle to its strangest appearance.

These translations were made by R. W. Seton-Watson and published in London for the Kossovo Day Committee, at threepence, dated the 5th of June 1916. Serbia at that point had been overrun; its army had retreated across the Albanian mountains in winter with catastrophic losses; and a British committee organised a public commemoration of the five hundred and twenty-seventh anniversary of a defeat, to raise sympathy and money for the country's survivors.

The choice of anniversary was not sentimental. Vidovdan was already the date on which a Bosnian Serb had shot the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo two years earlier, which is what had started the war the pamphlet was published in the middle of.

Seton-Watson's preface notes that the last generation of Serbian bards produced a whole new cycle about the war of liberation a century before — Karađorđe, Hajduk Veljko, Miloš Obrenović — with the old fire and the same vivid word-painting. That is the thing to end on. The form did not stop when the state came back. It simply took the new leaders and put them in the metre, beside the old ones, on the same one string.