Battle of the Amselfeld (1389)

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The battle on the Amselfeld (, ) took place on the 15. June 1389 on the Amselfeld near Priština on the river course of the Lab in present-day Kosovo. The Serbian coalition army under the leadership of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and Vuk Branković was reinforced by an army of the Bosnian King Tvrtko I, allied with Lazar, under the Voivode Vlatko Vuković. Opposite them was the Ottoman army under Sultan Murad I and his sons Bayezid I and Yakub.

The conflict arose from the Ottoman offensive against the remaining independent Christian empires on the Balkan Peninsula. Murad I sought to subjugate the Serb principalities to the supremacy of the Ottoman Empire. This would have removed the last obstacle to the takeover of the Byzantine Empire with its capital Constantinople.

The battle in which the leaders of both forces fell ended without a clear winner. As a result, however, the resistance of the Serbian princes to Ottoman expansion was decisively weakened in the following years. Serbian allies, such as the Principality of Lazarevići, had to recognize the supremacy and supremacy of the Ottomans, who opposed only Vuk Branković as a prince on the territory of present-day Kosovo even after the battle. During the negotiations for a peace settlement between Princess Milica and Sultan Bayezid, the youngest daughter of Lazar, Olivera Despina, had to be handed over as a tribute to the Sultans Harem in Bursa.

Although the Byzantine Empire did not participate in the battle, it was finally eliminated as a power factor in southeastern Europe due to the weakening of the Serbian allies and their recognition of the supremacy of the Ottomans. Byzantium turned to Rome to avert, with the support of Christian Europe, the final submission of Constantinople.

The event was soon passed on in the tradition through processes of legend formation in folk poetry and especially in the reception of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the cult of Amselfeld in a strongly mythologized form. In the genre of Kosovo epics handed down orally by Guslaren over centuries in the company of the Gusle, the main themes of the martyrdom of Lazar, the betrayal of Vuk Branković and the heroic deed of Miloš Obilić formed into the national myth of Serbia (legend of the Amselfeld – Priča o boju kosovskom), in which the illusion of a Turkish victory, by economic and military drive to subject the Balkan Peninsula to the influence of the Ottoman Empire, was soon realized by historical reality. However, the opinion that the Serbian Empire had perished on the Amselfeld is fundamentally wrong, since the state existed for another seven decades and revived both economically and culturally.

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