SERBIA

Serbia became, briefly, a military superpower during the middle part of the 14th century under the dynamic Stephen (Stefan) Urosh IV Dushan (1331-55), who succeeded in conquering an empire — largely at the expense of the Byzantines — that included Macedonia, Albania, Epiros and Thessaly, reaching from the Drina and Danube rivers as far south and east as the Gulf of Patras and the Rhodope Mountains by 1350. He set his sights on Constantinople itself, dividing his lands into ‘Serbia’ and ‘Romania’ and, after 1345, calling himself Emperor {Tsar) of the Greek Lands of Romania; he even modelled his court on that of Constantinople, calling his officials by Byzantine titles such as caesar, despot, sebastokrator and logofet (logothete). However, following his death this empire disintegrated under his successor Stephen Urosh V (1355-71). One Byzantine chronicler noted with evident satisfaction that the Serbian nobility were soon divided into ‘10,000 factions’, while John VI Cantacuzene wrote that Dushan’s empire fell ‘into a thousand pieces’. The principal individual despotates, as they were called, that resulted from this disintegration were based on Serres, Prilep, Skoplje, Trikkala, loannina, Epiros, Kossovo and Kjustendil (Velbuzhd, held by a Bulgarian dynasty). Prilep took pre-eminence in the south, until the defeat and death in 1371 of its despot Vukashin (made king and co-ruler of Serbia by Urosh V c. 1365) at the hands of the Turks enabled Stephen Lazar to take control — to a greater or lesser degree — of most of the country, especially after the defeat in 1373 of his most powerful rival, Zupan Nikola Altomanovic. It was Lazar who led the Serbs in one of their only major victories over the Ottomans, in 1387, though he was spectacularly less successful at Kossovo Pole in 1389, which engagement he lost along with his life. His son Stephen Lazarevic succeeded him, but as an Ottoman vassal acknowledging the suzerainty of the sultan. He reigned until 1427, to be succeeded in turn by his cousin George (Djuradj) Brankovic, whom the sultan distrusted to the extent that several punitive expeditions were launched against the despotate, including that which all but liquidated it in 1439. The final conquest of Serbia dates to June 1459, when its last capital, Smederevo, fell to the Turks, upon which its despot went into exile in to Hungary.

The Serbian army was feudal in nature, though its system of military landholding was inherited from the Byzantine pronoia rather than the Western European fief. The pronoia itself — hereditary by some accounts, non-hereditary by others — is only first recorded in Serbia under that name in 1299 (the Serbs spelt it pronija, or pronya, and called its holder a pronijar), but even from as early as Stephen Nemanja’s reign (1186-96) every able-bodied man possessing a bashtina (a grant of hereditary freehold land, the holder being called a bashtinik or voynici14) had been obliged to attend the army whenever required, only monastic tenants being exempted in exchange for performing part-time garrison duties in local fortresses and fortified monasteries. The building and maintenance (gradozadanje) of such fortresses, and equally the maintenance of their permanent garrisons (gradobljudenije) was an additional aspect of the feudal responsibilities of the population of each zupa (district), who were also responsible for guarding their own frontier. The holders of both bashtinas and pronijas constituted the nobility (though many of the former were only upper-class peasants), and these were the principal native element of every Serbian army, serving as heavy cavalry (the pronijars) and infantry (the voynici). In fact most armies included only the nobility (the vlastelini, or ‘holders of power’) and their retinues, maintained at their own expense, but in times of emergency the arriere-ban, called the Zamanitchka Voyska (‘All Together’), would be summoned. As elsewhere, this comprised all the nobility and every able-bodied freeman. For further details of Serbian feudal organisation see Armies of Feudal Europe (2nd Edition).

In border regions all land-grants appear to have been called krayina and their holders vlastele krayishnik (‘border lords’), whose duty it was to guard the frontier. The ‘Code Dushan’ of 1349 (the Zakonik, extended and completed in 1354) actually states that any damage inflicted by an invading army had to be compensated for by the border-lord through whose lands the enemy had entered, another article stating that similar pillaging committed by brigands had to be repaid seven-fold. The Byzantine chronicler Gregoras, as ambassador for Andronikos III to Dushan, encountered some krayishnici (men of a border-lord) on crossing the frontier. He wrote: ‘When we passed the Struma River... and came into thick woods, we were suddenly surrounded by men clad in black woollen garments, who darted forth from behind trees and rocks like devils out of the earth. They wore no heavy armour, being armed only with spears, battle-axes, and bows and arrows.’

From the 11th century on the commander-in-chief of the army was the king (krai), a veliki vojevoda or ‘high military chief, equivalent to the Byzantine Grand Domestic, being appointed in his absence. However, since any call to arms had to be approved by the Sabor (the National Assembly) the king actually had limited military power, in effect being no more than a glorified Grand Zupan, or elected tribal leader. Although Dushan stripped the Sabor of much of its power, the crown’s dependence on a permanent nucleus of mercenaries that was not subject to the assembly’s whims had by then already evolved, constituting the core of all Serbian armies throughout this period. Under Stephen Urosh II Milutin (1282-1321) these mercenaries included such diverse elements as Cumans; Anatolian Turks (some 1,500 were employed in 1311 from amongst those who had been allied to the Catalans in Thrace and Macedonia); Tartars from South Russia; and Christian Ossetians {Jasi in Serbian and Russian sources) from the Caucasus. However, it was Western European heavy cavalry which soon came to predominate. As early as 1304 a certain Franciscus de Salomone is mentioned in an inscription in Trevise as having distinguished himself in the service of ‘Orosius, rex Rascie’ (i. e. Urosh, king of Serbia). Mercenaries in Stephen Urosh Ill’s army that defeated the Bulgarians at Velbuzhd in 1330 were comprised of 1,500 Aragonese, Spaniards and Germans, and it was the latter who seem to have predominated during Dushan’s reign. The papal legate to his court reported seeing 300 German mercenaries there under the knight Palmann Bracht, who held the rank of capitaneus. In addition we know that the Serbian troops supplied to the Byzantine Emperor, John VI Cantacuzene, in 1342-43 were Germans, and that the troops garrisoning Berroia in Macedonia in 1341-50 were German mercenaries too. Even at the Battle of Kossovo in 1389 it is significant that many of Lazar’s men were German and Hungarian mercenaries according to a Florentine account, while a mid-15th century Ottoman source reports that his army included Wallachians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Albanians, Bulgarians and Franks, doubtless chiefly mercenaries. Another says he employed many mercenaries from among the Serbians themselves as well as the Hungarians, Bosnians and Albanians. Serbian documents indicate that as well as Germans the other predominant European mercenary elements comprised Spaniards (possibly as many as 1,300-strong at one point) plus Hungarians, Frenchmen, Italians and Swiss. One prominent name to appear in their ranks was that of Philippe de Mezieres, in later life Chancellor of Cyprus and one of the last protagonists of the Crusade. Inevitably, in the 15th century Ottoman auxiliaries were also used, for example by Vuk Lazarevic against Stephen, 1409-13. In addition to the king or despot, the larger cities also employed some mercenaries of their own to back up their militia.

When the Ottoman hold on Serbia weakened after the Battle of Ankara, Stephen Lazarevic took advantage of the situation to establish his independence from the Turks. Recognising the king of Hungary as his overlord he built up a small regular army, on the basis of a newly imposed levy known as the vojstatik, which was stationed in the country’s 11 major fortresses as well as several of its small walled towns. This army included many Hungarians and was well-equipped with cannon and handguns; for example, there were 2 cannons in the fort guarding the large silver mine at Srebrnica in 1425, and in Belgrade, Lazarevic’s capital, there was a large bombard (called Humka, meaning ‘Knoll’) captured from the Bosnians the same year. In 1455 there were as many as 3 large cannon, 5 other guns and 55 handguns in the fort guarding the great silver mine at Novo Brdo.

Serbia had adopted gunpowder artillery from Dubrovnik (Ragusa), where a centre for the manufacture of wrought-iron cannon existed by 1363. (The first gun foundry in the Balkans, casting bronze cannons, was also established at Dubrovnik, in 1410.) Neighbouring Bosnia had cannon by 1380, and they were in use in Serbia by 1382-86 at the very latest, probably served and certainly made by Ragusan engineers. In fact M. Orbini claims that Despot Lazar used guns against Nikola Altomanovic even as early as 1373. Guns were apparently employed in the field by the Serbians as early as 1389 at the Battle of Kossovo, being clearly mentioned in one later Ottoman chronicle (Neshri) and alluded to in a contemporary Serbian source which says that ‘fiery explosions thundered, the earth roared greatly, and the air echoed and blew around like dark smoke’; we know too that King Tvrtko of Bosnia (1353-91) brought one gun, a gift of the Italians, with him to the battle. The Serbian contingent in the Ottoman army defeated at Ankara in 1402 also had artillery, but as at Kossovo it failed to affect the outcome, probably for the same reasons on both occasions — i. e. the guns were too small to be effective in order that they might be manoeuvrable on the battlefield. In siege-work trebuchets and ballistae remained in service alongside gunpowder artillery for a long time.

In addition to her land forces, Serbia occasionally also had a very small fleet, provided by the communes of Dulcigno (modern Ulcinj), Budua (Budva) and Cattaro (Kotor), sometimes by Ragusa (in exchange for a year’s tax-exemption), and briefly by Venice (which provided 4 new galleys, the galee domini imperatoris, in 1350, the subsequent fate of which is unknown). King Tvrtko of Bosnia too later constructed his own small fleet, with a Venetian as its admiral, and was similarly given a galley by Venice, this time fitted with a cannon.*