Battle of the Maritsa, 1371: the night the Serbian lords were destroyed

By the late 1360s the Ottomans had a firm hold on Thrace. The fall of Adrianople, the later Edirne, and of Philippopolis had given Sultan Murad I the valley of the Maritsa that led into the heart of the Balkans, and he made Adrianople his capital. In 1371 the Serbs of Macedonia tried to take it all back, and lost everything in a single night on the river.²

Background: the heirs of Dušan

The Ottomans had come into Europe through Gallipoli in the 1350s and then spread across Thrace. Demotika, Adrianople and Philippopolis marked the progress of their arms: Adrianople opened its gates, Lala Şahin carried the war up the Maritsa valley as far as Philippopolis, and Murad made Adrianople the capital of his growing state.³

The Christian states that might have stopped them were divided. Bulgaria was split among the sons of Tsar John Alexander, who died in 1365, and its rulers quarreled with the Byzantines and the Hungarians instead of uniting against the Turks.⁴

The great Serbian empire of Stephen Dušan broke into pieces after his death in 1355. His son, Stephen Uroš V, kept the imperial title, but real power passed to the magnates. Among the strongest were two brothers: Vukašin, who made himself king and held the Serbian lands of the southwest around Prizren and Prilep, and Jovan Uglješa, despot of Serres, whose lands in eastern Macedonia bordered both the Byzantines and the Ottomans.⁵

The man who most feared the Turks was Uglješa. Ottoman raiders were already striking into his country, and he looked for allies. He sent envoys to the patriarch in Constantinople offering to end the schism Dušan had opened by founding an independent Serbian patriarchate, and after long negotiation the Serbian and Greek churches were reconciled. Gibbons reads the reconciliation as part of a plan of united action with his brothers against the Ottoman advance.⁶

Armies and commanders

The brothers raised a large army of Serbs and Wallachs, with Greek contingents from Uglješa's lands, and Vukašin brought his own forces from the west to join it.⁷

The Ottoman side was far weaker. The Cambridge Medieval History calls it a greatly inferior Turkish force. Where Murad himself was is told in two ways. Halil İnalcık, using the Ottoman sources, has the sultan in Anatolia that summer, besieging the fortress of Biga while the Byzantines, now allied with the Serbs, held the straits against him, so that the frontier commanders in Thrace had to fight alone. Herbert Gibbons, writing in 1916, has Uglješa hearing that a great army was gathering at Adrianople to await Murad's return from Bulgaria. Either way, the sultan was not on the field.⁸

The Ottoman chronicles give the credit for the victory to the begs of the frontier, above all Hacı İlbey and Lala Şahin, Murad's old tutor and commander in Rumelia. Gibbons, who believed that the chronicles had mixed this battle up with an earlier one on the same river, places Lala Şahin in command at that first battle in the 1360s.⁹

The battle in phases

The advance. The Serbian army marched east down the Maritsa toward Adrianople, the Ottoman capital. It halted at Chernomen, called Çirmen by the Turks and Chirmen in some Western histories, a place on the river between Philippopolis and Adrianople, about twenty miles west of the latter.¹⁰

The surprise. There the Serbs were caught in their camp. The Ottoman tradition speaks of a sudden night attack; the Cambridge Medieval History and Temperley place it at dawn. Either way, a much smaller force fell on a great army that was not ready to fight.¹¹

The rout. In the confusion the Serbian army broke. Thousands were cut down, and many more were driven into the Maritsa and drowned. Temperley writes that the battle took its name from the river, which ran scarlet with blood.¹²

Turning point: the death of the brothers

Both brothers died, though the accounts disagree on how. Gibbons has Uglješa drowned in the river and Vukašin escaping only to be murdered by his own servant for the gold chain he wore; the Cambridge Medieval History also has Vukašin killed by his servant, and calls it poetic justice for a man it regards as a traitor; Temperley has Vukašin drowned with thousands of his men. With them fell most of the lords who had shared Dušan's conquests in Macedonia.¹³

The date, too, was long confused. The Ottoman chronicles, which are not contemporary, put the battle in 1364 or 1365; Christian sources give 26 September 1371. Gibbons thought there had really been two battles on the Maritsa, in 1363 and 1371, whose accounts later historians could not separate.¹⁴

Aftermath

Macedonia now lay at the mercy of the conqueror. Vukašin's son Marko kept Prilep and the lands around it, and Konstantin, lord of the country around Velbužd, kept his, but only as tributaries who paid the sultan and served in his wars. In the campaigns of 1371 and 1372 the Ottomans took Kavala, Drama and Serres.¹⁵

A contemporary, the monk Isaiah of Serres, left a lament for the land that Gibbons quotes and Temperley echoes: the Turks spread over the country like birds of the air, killing or enslaving the people, until, in Gibbons's translation, the dead were envied by the living.¹⁶

Within months the Serbian state lost its last legitimate ruler as well. Stephen Uroš V, the last of the Nemanjić dynasty, died that same year, and Prince Lazar rose to lead what remained of Serbia. In the West, Pope Gregory XI tried in 1371 and 1372 to rouse the Christian powers against the Turks, without success.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

The Maritsa has been overshadowed in memory by Kosovo, where the Ottomans fought the Serbs again in 1389 and where Murad I was killed. Temperley noted that the Turkish historians laid more stress on the Maritsa than on Kosovo, and called it the Serbian defeat; the Cambridge Medieval History records that the battlefield itself was long known as the Serbs' destruction.¹⁸

For the South Slavs the defeat lived on in poetry. Vukašin's son, the vassal king Marko of Prilep, became Kraljević Marko of the ballads, in the Cambridge Medieval History's words the greatest hero of South Slavonic poetry. Temperley found it an irony that the national hero of the Serbs should have been a Turkish vassal, and recorded the legend that Marko sleeps in a cave near his castle at Prilep and will return when the Serbs need him.¹⁹ › The Greatest Battles of the Ottoman Empire