The upland plain of the central Balkans where Prince Lazar and Murad I both died at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and Murad II destroyed the army of John Hunyadi in 1448, marked by the türbe of Murad I, the lost column of Stefan Lazarević and the Gazimestan memorial.
Kosovo Field, the Field of Blackbirds, Kosovo polje in Serbian and Fusha e Kosovës in Albanian, is the broad upland plain at the centre of the modern Republic of Kosovo, running north-west to south-east from near Mitrovica almost to Kaçanik at 500 to 600 metres above sea level. Two great battles were fought on it. At the Battle of Kosovo in June 1389 the Serbian and Bosnian army of Prince Lazar met the Ottoman army of Murad I, and both rulers died; in October 1448 Murad II destroyed the crusading army of John Hunyadi on the same ground.
The plain mattered because roads cross it. Routes from Skopje and Thessaloniki ran north over it to the Ibar valley and the Morava, Ragusan merchants reached it from the Adriatic by way of Prizren, and the silver of Novo Brdo, in the hills to the east, travelled out along those roads. The Ottomans came onto the field in 1389 to break the Serbian lords who held that crossroads, and Hunyadi marched there in 1448 hoping to meet Skanderbeg's Albanians coming from the west.
The field is a basin drained northward by the Sitnica, which gathers the Lab from the north-east and joins the Ibar near Mitrovica. Low hills close it to the east, where Priština grew at the foot of the slopes, and the Drenica hills rise to the west. In late Roman times the city of Ulpiana, refounded by Justinian as Justiniana Secunda, stood on the plain south of Priština, and in the Middle Ages the nearby bishopric of Lipljan kept that church tradition alive.
Under the Nemanjić kings the plain lay at the heart of the Serbian realm. Stefan Milutin rebuilt the church of Gračanica on its south-eastern edge in 1321 as the seat of the bishop of Lipljan, and the kings kept residences on the plain at Svrčin, Pauni and Nerodimlje; Stefan Dušan was crowned king at Svrčin in 1331. By the 1380s the field belonged to Vuk Branković, whose lands reached from here to the Lim valley, while the mines of Novo Brdo made the district among the richest in the Balkans.
The Battle of Kosovo was fought on 15 June 1389, St Vitus's Day in the Julian calendar, now kept by the Serbian Orthodox Church as Vidovdan on 28 June. Prince Lazar, with his son-in-law Vuk Branković and a Bosnian force sent by King Tvrtko I under Vlatko Vuković, faced the army Murad I had brought from Anatolia. Murad was killed, Lazar was captured and executed, and Bayezid I, proclaimed sultan on the field, had his brother Yakub put to death. The Ottoman army then withdrew east to secure the succession, and within a year Lazar's widow Milica had accepted Ottoman overlordship for their son.
Where exactly the armies met rests on tradition and on the position of Murad's tomb, because no contemporary account describes the ground. Serbian and Ottoman memory alike place the fighting north-west of Priština, between the Lab and the Sitnica, near the village of Mazgit where the türbe stands, and Jevto Dedijer's map of 1913 draws the two armies there. By tradition Lazar's men took communion before the battle at the church of Samodreža by the Sitnica.
The first reports were thin and contradictory. News of the sultan's death reached Venice by 23 July 1389, when the Senate's instructions to an envoy mention reports that Murad and one of his sons had been killed. The Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, answering Tvrtko in October, congratulated him on a Christian victory in which twelve lords had cut their way to the sultan. Ottoman writers from the poet Ahmedi in the early fifteenth century told of a Christian who rose from among the corpses and stabbed Murad. Constantine the Philosopher, writing his life of Stefan Lazarević in the 1440s, describes a slandered nobleman who proved his loyalty by pretending to desert and killing the sultan, but gives no name.
The name came later. Enveri's Ottoman chronicle of 1465 calls the assassin Miloš, the Athenian historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles, writing late in the century, calls him Miloes, and the form Obilić appears only in eighteenth-century histories. The charge that Vuk Branković betrayed Lazar by leaving the field has no support in the sources of 1389: Vuk resisted the Ottomans until 1392 and died their prisoner in 1397. Noel Malcolm has suggested that the betrayal story borrowed from 1448, when Vuk's son Đurađ Branković refused to join the Christian army on the same plain.
The epic tradition grew around these fragments. Church writers of the 1390s, among them Patriarch Danilo III and the nun Jefimija, presented Lazar as a martyr. The oral songs of the Kosovo cycle, collected and published by Vuk Karadžić in the nineteenth century, gave him a choice between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly one, made Miloš the loyal hero and Vuk the traitor, and added the Kosovo Maiden who searches the field among the wounded for her betrothed. They are evidence for how the battle was remembered, not for how it was fought.
Memorials appeared on the field almost at once. Murad's internal organs were buried where he died, and his body was carried to Bursa for burial in his own mosque complex. The site, known in Ottoman usage as the Meşhed-i Hüdavendigâr, the place of martyrdom of the sovereign, became a place of Muslim pilgrimage. Tradition credits Bayezid I with the first tomb, but the present domed türbe is probably a later Ottoman rebuilding. Evliya Çelebi described it in 1660, Sultan Abdülmecid had it substantially repaired in 1848 and appointed a keeper of Bukharan origin, and it was restored with Turkish funding between 2003 and 2005.
On the Serbian side, Stefan Lazarević raised a marble column on the field in 1404, two years after he received the title of despot, in memory of his father. The column is lost, but its text was copied into later manuscripts: it addresses the traveller entering Serbian lands, describes the field as strewn with the bones of the dead, and has the stone itself standing among them as cross and banner. Stefan had fought as Bayezid's vassal at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and at Ankara in 1402, and the column served the cult of Lazar that gave his family's rule its legitimacy. A modern stone bearing the inscription stands at Gazimestan.
Fifty-nine years after the Battle of Kosovo the plain saw a second great battle. John Hunyadi, regent of Hungary, set out in September 1448 to avenge the Battle of Varna with Hungarians, German and Bohemian mercenaries and Wallachian and Moldavian contingents, perhaps 22,000 to 30,000 men, and planned to link up with Skanderbeg. Despot Đurađ Branković of Serbia, bound by a truce with the sultan, refused to join, and Skanderbeg never arrived. Murad II broke off his Albanian campaign and reached the field with a much larger army; by Ottoman accounts his sixteen-year-old son, the future Mehmed II, fought his first battle there.
The fighting lasted from 17 to 20 October. Hunyadi drew up behind a wagon fort, opened with cavalry attacks on the Ottoman wings and tried a night assault with wagons and guns against the sultan's centre. On 19 October Ottoman cavalry enveloped and cut down his left wing, and his own charge through the janissaries was stopped at the Ottoman camp. On the last day the Wallachians were said to have gone over to Murad, a claim some historians doubt, and the janissaries overran the remaining defenders. Hunyadi escaped, only to be seized by Branković's men on his retreat and held until he agreed terms that left his elder son László at Smederevo as a hostage.
The defeat ended Hungary's hopes of an offensive war against the Ottomans and left Mehmed II free to turn on Constantinople in 1453. Novo Brdo fell to the Ottomans in 1455, an Ottoman tax register of the same year already lists the villages of the plain among the former lands of the Brankovićs, and the fall of Smederevo in 1459 ended the Serbian Despotate.