THE SECRET OF THE BATTLE OF KOSOVO

The battle of Kosovo, 630 years later, still hides many secrets, including the one about the circumstances in which the earthly life of the Turkish sultan ended.

DECEPTION, OR THE HURRICANE BURST OF SERBIAN ARMORED MACHINERY

"...They cleared the way with the sword through the enemy companies and rows of camels, butchering with the Agarenes around the sultan's tent..." (from the reply letter of the Florence Municipality to King Tvrtko I, October 20^th, 1389).

It is well known that the Turks arrived to Kosovo with a powerful army, led by the sultan and two of his sons, carried on the wings of a fierceness that had not abated since the Battle of Maritsa in 1371. It is then when they, admittedly, cut down the Serbian forces while they were sleeping, killed King Vukašin and his brother Uglješa, easily forgetting the latter's defeats by Prince Lazar at Dubravnica near Paraćin in 1381, and especially ignoring Lazar's victory at Pločnik in 1386* in which the Serbian heavy cavalry destroyed the Turkish units.

The generally accepted view of Murat's death is that Miloš Obilić tricked the Turks - he turned his spear upside down, presented himself as a defector and a renegade, reached the sultan to bend the knee as a subject, and then roused him "from the mouth to the white throat". In the Serbian tradition, this description of the event is unreservedly accepted and sung.

In the centuries-long history of the Ottoman Empire, never again, neither before nor after Kosovo, did the sultan lose his head on the battlefield.

There are many documents in Turkey, as well as in the surrounding countries at the time, which testify to the suffering of Murat. However, it is very doubtful that the descriptions of Murat's death in the Turkish documents are not only sketchy but also contradictory. There is even a version that Murat died while visiting the wounded on the battlefield, when Miloš, lying among the bodies of the dead and wounded, jumped up and stabbed him with a spear.

One should not be too clever to conclude that with such a "story" the Turks tried to posthumously decorate their sultan-martyr with the halo of a caring and humane ruler.

Without any doubt, they had plenty of good reasons to describe the Sultan's death as an act of fraud and deception.

Admitting that the Serbian cavalry strong as a steel fist scattered them like a herd, passed through their elite units and got hold of the padishah himself, would be something that the powerful empire, which like Hydra will be scattered on three continents, was under no circumstances able to accept.

The Ottoman Empire was orderly and disciplined. It was distinguished by a meticulous bureaucracy that duly recorded even less important events, so it is strange to say the least that an event of cataclysmic proportions, Murat's death, remained very modestly documented.

* Related to the mentioned battle, there are sources that claim: "...in this battle near Pločnik, the Duke of the Emperor Lazar, Miloš Obilić, the latter hero of Kosovo, became the most famous."

It was not without reason that the statement about the Turks, which the Dubrovnik chronicler Mavro Orbin wrote in the context of the Kosovo battle:

"This people is steadfast in being silent and keeping secrets that are not favorable to them!"

Was Emperor Dušan Obilić before Obilić?

Therefore, it will be the closest to the truth that Sultan Murat paid with his head for the same mistake that the Bulgarian emperor Michael III Shishman made on July 28^th, 1330, in The Battle of Velbazhd (today's Kyustendil). In that forced battle against the Bulgarians, the Serbian army was led by King Stefan Dečanski, and one of his knights and commanders was his son, the twenty-two-year-old "young king" Stefan Uroš IV Dečanski, the future emperor Dušan Silni.

At Velbazhd, the well-trained and courageous Serbian heavy cavalry, led by King Dušan, broke right into the heart of the enemy's forces, targeting the emperor himself... The Bulgarian army was in disarray, Shishman fled... It is known that he did not survive the battle, and according to some sources, Emperor Dušan later claimed that he ended his life.

After the Kosovo battle itself, the son of prince Lazar, prince and then despot, Bayezid's vassal and brother-in-law - Stefan Lazarević, led the Serbian cavalry near Nicopolis in the battle against the Hungarian king Sigismund and the European (last Crusader) coalition. Historians agree that the furious performance of the Serbian cavalry decided the course of the battle... The Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 brought European fame to Stefan Visoko and his horsemen, and during the Battle of Ankara in 1402, the Serbian cavalry would amaze even Tamerlane himself and be crowned with glory in the East as well.

Therefore, there are many examples that illustrate the power of the Serbian cavalry in the 14^th century, so a simple question arises from everything - how was its role in the Battle of Kosovo abandoned, neglected, humiliated and forgotten? Why do we ourselves cherish a surreal story in which the knight of the opposing army can, in the midst of a bloody battle, go straight to the ruler of the opposing empire as if he had gone over the fence to pick a few neighboring cherries?

Why did we rob a knight whose cheek was more expensive than his head, whose honor was more valuable than life, that chivalry that made him timeless and put him in an endless group of petty players who play cheating?

Is it not enough that others steal from us and twist our history like a turkey upside down, so we do it ourselves?

Why, I wonder, would Murat's suffering not be a direct consequence of the relentless and fearless onslaught of the Serbian cavalry, which, like a hawthorn stake, drove straight into the heart of the Ottoman military force?

In a written document from the same year 1389, in a letter sent by the Florence Municipality on October 20^th to King Tvrtko I, who as a confirmed friend and ally of Prince Lazar sent his detachments to Kosovo under the command of Vlatko Vuković, it is stated that:

"... Murat was killed by the duke of Lazar, Miloš Kobilić (Obilić) with twelve Serbian noblemen. They cleared the way with the sword through the enemy companies and rows of camels, butchering with the Agarenes around the sultan's tent, while Miloš stabbed the Turkish emperor's throat and stomach with a knife."

In the Florence letter, special recognition is given to "knight Kobilić, the one of the aforementioned twelve, who fulfilled his vow and performed a heroic deed, killing a great enemy."

The secret of Lazar' seal

It will happen at the end of this story, quite unexpectedly, that Prince Lazar himself will try to help us shed light on the great Kosovo secret.

Less than four years ago, in the fall of 2015, in the Drenje site, in the ruins of the medieval town of Rudnik, archaeologists found a matrix for printing the seal of Lazar Hrebeljanović - a seal with an engraved royal coat of arms and the inscription - "Lord Lazar, Prince of all Serbian lands".

The Seal of Lazar is a priceless archaeological treasure in itself, and its analysis has determined that it is an authentic alloy - a unique composition of copper, lead, tin, zinc and silicon, made by local metallurgists.

Prince Lazar's seal was hidden for six and a half centuries, only recently to confirm to us that Serbia in the 14^th century had metallurgical and technological knowledge that enabled it to produce authentic alloys necessary for the manufacture of weapons, but also for the manufacture of armor and shields, which it used Serbian heavy cavalry.

Having easy, reliable and efficient weapons, light and durable armor, which provides maximum protection, but also ease and freedom of movement, meant a huge advantage on the battlefield. If knightly virtues, warrior skill and courage are added to that, you have a Serbian knight-in-armor, dominant on the battlefield and able to strike like a thunderbolt not only on the enemy army, but also on their emperors and sultans!