Serbia became an Ottoman tributary after the decisive defeat of Vukashin at Cernomen in 1371, and a vassal state, with her nobility individually swearing loyalty to the sultan as his vassals, as a result of Stephen Lazar’s catastrophic defeat at Kossovo. According to most authorities it was from 1390 on, as a result of this latter humiliation, that the despot of Serbia was obliged to pay an annual tribute of 1,000 lbs of gold and to provide the sultan with a contingent of 1,000 cavalry when called upon. Finlay and Creasy, however, maintained that it was ‘the treaty of 1376’ that first imposed this obligation, while Gibbons says 1386; certainly there were Serbs as well as Bulgarians and Byzantines in the Ottoman army that fought against the Karamanli Turks in Anatolia in 1387 (the Serbs being promised booty in return for their services), and there were even Serbs, and Greeks too, in Murad’s army during the Kossovo campaign, under Konstantin Dejanovic of Kjustendil and Konstantin Dragash of Serres (though they were not actually involved in the battle — probably Murad did not trust them). Finlay says in one of his books that Sultan Bayezid actually demanded the service of the same number of Serbians as the Byzantines had called for after Manuel’s subjugation of Serbia in 1150, i. e. 2,000 to armies serving in Europe and 500 to armies serving in Asia; but in another book he says that the figure was only ‘subsequently increased to 2,000 men’ when Bayezid was gathering his forces to confront Tamerlane in 1402. Bertrandon de la Brocquiere, in his ‘Travels’ of 1432-33, recorded of the despot of Serbia that ‘every time the sultan sends him his orders, he is obliged to furnish him with 800 or
1,000 horse, under the command of his second son.’ Elsewhere he adds how he had heard that ‘in the most recent army [supplied to the sultan] from Greece, there were 3,000 Serbian horse, which the despot of the province had sent under the command of one of his sons. It was with great regret that these people came to serve him, but they dared not refuse.’ (This army was probably that which campaigned against Albania in 1430-31, in which Serbs are known to have been present.) Konstantin Mihailovic reports that when the treaty with Serbia was renewed under Mehmed II the obligatory tribute was set at 1,500 lbs of gold and a contingent of 1,500 cavalry.
Amongst the battles in which Serbs fought for their Ottoman masters were Rovine, against the Wallachians and Bulgarians, in 1395; Nicopolis in 1396, where apparently their contingent comprised 5,000 cavalry; and
‘Technically an Hungarian tributary state, Bosnia became a kingdom in 1377 when its ban, Tvrtko, proclaimed himself king of Serbia, Bosnia and the coastal regions after occupying a ‘large and important pan of Serbia’. The kingdom managed to last only until 1463 (when the Ottomans occupied it), chiefly by playing Turks and Hungarians off against one another. Its armed forces comprised the feudal retinues of its zupans, each based on a nucleus of kinsmen, often backed up in the 15th century by Ottoman auxiliaries only too willing to assist disaffected Bosnians to kill other disaffected Bosnians.
Ankara in 1402, where Doukas says there were 5,000 ‘encased in black armour’ and Chalkokondyles that there were an unlikely 10,000 (though the Ottoman chronicler al-Anwari says that there were 10,000 Serbs and Wallachians altogether). George Brankovic even supplied an unwilling contingent (of 1,500 horse under the voivode Jaksa Brezicic according to Mihailovic) for the final siege of Constantinople in 1453, plus some silver-miners from Novo Brdo whom Sultan Mehmed employed as sappers. In 1473 the army that marched against Uzun Hasan included ‘many Christians — Greeks, Albanians and Serbians — in their number.’
World History
