The small fortress south-east of Novo Brdo, held hereditarily by the Hrebeljanović family and traditionally the birthplace of Prince Lazar about 1329.
Prilepac was a Serbian fortress in the southern Serbian lands traditionally associated with the early life of Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, who died at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The site reflects the geography of Serbian noble power in the fragmented lands that followed Stefan Dušan’s death.
It stands about thirteen kilometres south-east of Novo Brdo, near Kamenica in what is now Kosovo. It was never a great castle; it was a small strong place holding a particular piece of ground, and the ground was worth holding.
There is more than one place of the name, and they are easily confused. This article is about the medieval fortress by Novo Brdo, not the village of Prilepac in the municipality of Vlasotince, some fifty-five kilometres away in southern Serbia, which has no connection to Lazar.
The distinction matters because almost everything said about Prilepac is said in connection with a single family and a single mining district, and moving the site moves the whole story off its foundations.
Novo Brdo was the richest mining town in the Serbian lands, producing silver — much of it the argentum glama, silver naturally alloyed with gold — on a scale that funded rulers and drew Saxon miners and Ragusan merchants into the interior. Its wealth was the prize of every faction in fourteenth-century Serbia.
Prilepac, together with the nearby fortress of Prizrenac, guarded the mines and the settlements around Novo Brdo. Both were held hereditarily by the family of Pribac Hrebeljanović, who served as logothete — chancellor, keeper of the ruler’s writing office — at the court of Stefan Dušan. A chancellor holding the fortresses above the silver was a man of consequence whatever his formal rank.
Lazar was born at Prilepac about 1329. He went to court and held the modest but privileged rank of stavilac, an office of the ruler’s table that kept its holder physically close to the throne, and about 1353 he married Milica, of a branch of the ruling Nemanjić house.
When Dušan died in 1355 his empire began to come apart, and Lazar’s career stalled: he was still only stavilac under Dušan’s son Uroš V, and he left the court around the middle of the 1360s to build a lordship of his own in the north, taking the mining centre of Rudnik by 1370.
The Ottoman destruction of the Mrnjavčević brothers on the Marica river in 1371 removed the strongest rivals in the south at a stroke, and Lazar moved into the vacuum. He took Priština and Novo Brdo, and with them his family’s own fortress of Prilepac.
A Ragusan document of 22 April 1371 names him Comes Lazarus, knez, which is the title he carried for the rest of his life. He had come back to the place he was born holding far more than his father ever had, and he died eighteen years later on Kosovo Field, a day’s ride to the west.