The Serbian princely house that led Moravian Serbia after the fall of the Nemanjić empire — Prince Lazar, who died at Kosovo, and his son the despot Stefan Lazarević.
The house rose amid the wreckage of the Serbian Empire. After the death of Emperor Dušan the empire splintered, and the Serbian defeat at Marica in 1371 destroyed the power of the southern lords. Into that vacuum stepped Lazar Hrebeljanović, a nobleman of the Morava valley who gathered the strongest of the Serbian statelets and won recognition as the leading prince, ruling from Kruševac.
Lazar allied with the Church and other Serbian and Bosnian lords to resist the advancing Ottomans, and his reign became the last stand of an independent Serbia.
In 1389 Lazar met the Ottoman sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo. Both rulers died in the fighting — Murad assassinated, Lazar captured and executed — and though the battle was militarily indecisive it passed into Serbian memory as a sacred national catastrophe. Lazar’s young son Stefan, at first under his mother Milica’s regency, became an Ottoman vassal, and fought in the sultan’s armies at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and at Ankara in 1402.
The Ottoman collapse at Ankara, where Timur shattered Sultan Bayezid, freed Stefan’s hand. He took the Byzantine title of despot, threw off close Ottoman control, and moved his capital to Belgrade.
Stefan Lazarević presided over a remarkable cultural flowering — often called the Resava or Morava school — founding the fortified monastery of Manasija as a centre of learning and manuscript production. He was himself an author, whose lyrical "Slovo ljubve" ("Discourse on Love") is a landmark of medieval Serbian literature, and a knight of the Order of the Dragon.
He died without a son in 1427, and the despotate passed to his nephew Đurađ Branković — the last flowering of independent Serbia before the Ottoman conquest completed in 1459.