Facing the Balkan army, alongside the Turks and their Asian vassals, were the troops of Prince Constantine and the traitor Marko Kraljevic. Absent — though no one knew why — was John V of Byzantium.
It was late June. The day seemed to last forever, the afternoon even more so. When it seemed that the waiting would never stop, the Turks lit wet straw in front of their tents, creating a wall of smoke. The Balkan troops did the same, each side to shield their opponents from view, showing that they could no longer bear the sight of each other. Or, they wanted to hide something.
When night finally came, it seemed darker because of the long wait. Now that the two sides could no longer see each other, they grew increasingly anxious instead of calming down. Everything their eyes had seen that long afternoon became larger and more frightening: the expanse of the Turkish encampment, the myriad banners of the Balkan troops, the conjectures in the ubiquitous darkness as to where the sultan’s tent might be.
As if to precipitate an answer to this last question, Mirçea of Rumania lit a fire next to his tent. The other princes followed suit, but the sultan’s tent remained steeped in darkness. Nor did the shouts of the Balkan troops provoke a response on the other side. Except for the wailing voices of the muezzins, which the Balkans now heard for the first time and which seemed to them like a deadly lullaby, no sound came from the Turkish camp.
Provoked by this, the Balkan soldiers, who had sworn before their council that they would not drink wine, especially on the eve of the battle, broke their resolve. First the princes, then the other commanders, sent each other gifts of wine, and then, after the exchange of wine, they took their guards and their minstrels, which each had brought from his own land to sing his glory on the morrow, and went to visit their allies in their tents.
They did not hide that they were certain of victory, that they could not wait for the sun to rise; some even wanted to attack before the break of day. A few of the commanders were already busy calculating how many slaves they would each get and at which market they could be sold for the greatest profit — in Venice or Dubrovnik — and all the while the minstrels sang their ancient songs without changing anything, as was their custom. The Serb prince, Lazar, and the Albanian count, Gjergj Balsha, laughed out loud when they heard the Serbian gusla2 player — “Rise, O Serbs! The Albanians are taking Kosovo from us!” — and the Albanian lahuta player — “Albanians, to arms! The pernicious Serb is seizing Kosovo!”
“This is how things come to pass in this world,” one of the princes is supposed to have said. “Blood flows one way in life and another way in song, and one never knows which flow is the right one.”
Footnote
2 A Montenegrin bowed string instrument.
VI
Prince Bayezid could not fall asleep. Finally he got up and went outside his tent. From far away the wind brought waves of boisterous din from the Balkan side. “What a horror!” he said to himself and tried to make out in which direction his father’s tent lay.
“You are not tired?” It was the gentle voice of Anastasios, his Greek tutor. Wrapped in a heavy woolen cloak, he sat to the left of the sentries like a tree stump. “Besides the soldiers who are really asleep, there are those tonight who are merely feigning sleep.”
“You think so?” the prince said. “I did manage to catch a few winks; I even had a mad half dream. This cursed clamor seems to have awakened me.”
“Hmm,” his tutor said. “It has come to my attention that the young officers, even some of the viziers, have been somewhat unsettled at the sight of the Balkan troops.”
“That is to be expected.” Bayezid said. “Many of them have never come face to face with a Christian army.”
“Perhaps the order to raise the curtain of smoke was given too late,” the tutor replied.
“Much too late!” the prince said. “To tell you the truth, even though I was fully aware it was only a Christian army, I myself felt somewhat disconcerted.”
“I know what you mean,” Anastasios said. He coughed several times, as if he wanted to give his voice the unwavering resonance of the bygone days when he had recounted ancient tales and legends to the young prince. It was a distinctive way of speaking that flowed with conviction, not allowing for the slightest interruption. “You are unsettled by the wild jumble of their troops, my prince. All those banners and icons and crosses and multicolored emblems, and the trumpets, and the long and resonant names and titles of their dukes and counts, and then the musicians and poets poised to sing the glory of each and every one of them for generations to come. I fully understand you, my prince, especially when you compare that wild jumble to the dusty monotony of our army. I understand you, but let us wait till tomorrow, my prince. Tomorrow you shall see that the real instrument of war is not theirs, but ours — dusty and drab like mud, with a single banner, a single commander, and no emblems or flamboyant poets, no commanders thirsting for glory or sporting long titles, names, and surnames. Obedient, sober, mute, and nameless like mud — that is the army of the future, my prince. The day before we marched off I happened to look through the rosters of our soldiers. The majority were listed only by their forenames — no distinguishing features, not even a surname. More than thirteen hundred Abdullahs, nine hundred Hassans, a thousand or so Ibrahims, and so on. It is these shadows, as they might appear to an onlooker, who will face those strutting Balkans and slash their names, their long peacock-tail titles, and ultimately slash their lives. Mark my words, Prince!”
He went on speaking for quite a long time, and Bayezid, just as when he was a boy, did not interrupt him. The Greek said that the Ottoman army was uniform, that it had an unfathomable face, he said, like that of Allah. The Christians had lost their future ever since they had given a human likeness — Christ — to their God. There were times when the Christians tried to mend their error by melting away his face and transforming it into a cross, but it was too late.
Anastasios sighed. After so many years he had earned the right to show his regret at the defeat of Christianity, his own faith. He wanted to tell the prince that if there was a power in the world that they should be afraid of, it wasn’t foolish Europe but the Mongolian hordes. They were even more nameless, and therefore even more apocalyptic. It would be like being attacked by the wild weeds and thorns of the steppes. But Anastasios said nothing, because he did not want to demoralize the prince on the eve of the battle.
“You must rest now,” he told him, peering at the horizon for the first signs of dawn. “If I am not mistaken, tomorrow — that is to say, today — you will be leading the right flank of the army.”
“That is true,” the prince replied.
The prince turned around and walked to his tent, but before entering it he turned back again and, with a low, timid voice, almost like when all those years ago he had confessed his sin and spoken of his first temptation with a woman, he said to his tutor:
“Anastasios, why . . . despite everything, am I entranced by . . . their madness?”
His tutor did not answer immediately. He stood for a moment with his head bowed, as if a heavy rock, not a thought, had entered his brain.
“This means that new ideas are being generated in your head,” he said in a muted voice. “But tonight is not the right time. Prince. You must rest at all costs. Tomorrow . . .”
He did not manage to finish his sentence, as Bayezid had already slipped into his tent.
VII
The day was coming to an end, and with it came the end of the Balkan troops. Several times fate appeared to smile on them, only to immediately abandon them. They followed all the rules: they had invoked spells, made ancient signs of death, blown trumpets, chanted hymns to Christ and the Virgin Mary, and then sung praises to Prince Lazar and maledictions on Kraljevic the traitor, and then again praises to the other princes, to the Rumanian chiefs, the counts, and King Tvrtko, and curses on those who pretended to be more heroic than they. Finally, when they saw that all this was of no avail, they began to cheer
on holy Serbia, glorious Walachia, Bosnia the immortal, Albania begot by an eagle, and so on, but it was too late for all of this, too. The Turks facing them, who had never seen anything like this before, charged, shouting only the name of Allah, in the simple conviction that they had come here to take this evil region, which was a blot, a scandal on the face of the earth, and bring it back to the right path; in other words, to make it an Islamic region.
In the boundless confusion, it was the Balkan troops who faltered. One after the other, banners with their crosses, lions, one-headed and two-headed eagles fell, and finally the banners with white lilies fell, as if they had fallen on a graveyard. Torrents of Christian and Turkish blood mingled more forcefully than they would have in a thousand years of intermarriage.
In the twilight, when victory was certain, Sultan Murad decided to rest a while. He had not slept for such a long time that even the taste of victory was as acrid as a bitter potion.
Outside, cheers of triumph came from afar.
“I shall doze a little,” the monarch said, and when the viziers told him that his soldiers wanted to see him, even just for a moment, he cut them short. “Send them my double.”
They gazed at their sovereign with flashing feverish eyes, not like his eyes, which were hazy from lack of rest.
The sultan immediately fell asleep. He had a dream in which an officer or a cook who had been dead for some time was complaining to him about something.
“I don’t understand what you are saying,” the sultan said. “You are dead, dead and gone, it’s all over and done with!”
“I am not asking you for anything important, no,” the man answered. “It’s just the wound that I have, bad and crooked as it is — how am I supposed to bear it throughout death? I wanted to fix it, but you didn’t take me along with you to the Plains of Kosovo.”
The sultan wanted to tell him, “What strange ideas, my dear fellow!” But the man continued, “Be that as it may, the best have died. They have also killed your double. Be careful, my lord!”
He spoke the last words in a different voice. The sultan opened his eyes. He heard the words again, but this time not from the dead man but from his viziers.
“Your double has been killed. Grand Sovereign. A Balkan infidel . . . hurled himself on him . . . onto his horse, like a wild cat.”
The sultan shook his head to wake up. It was true, there they were, dragging the body of his double to the entrance of the tent. He was wearing the sultan’s heavy wool cloak, his plumes and emblems, and right in the center, the dagger planted in his heart.
The sultan looked at him, taken aback for a moment. “My death,” he thought, “but outside myself.” He raised his eyes and looked at his viziers, amazed that they did not congratulate him on his escape. He wanted to ask them: “Why are you standing there like that? Are you so distraught at the death of my double?” And he looked back down at the corpse. He remembered an ancient proverb that when the oak tree falls its shadow falls with it, and he wasn’t sure whether the proverb had conjured itself up in his memory or if he had just heard one of his viziers say it. For a split second he thought that the officer or cook was reappearing in the drowsiness that was once more overpowering him, Before he lost consciousness, he heard the grand vizier speak: “Bring his son, Prince Yakub! Tell him that his illustrious father wishes to see him.” He struggled to open his mouth, and with his entire strength and with all his impatient fury and rage wanted to howl, “Why Yakub? Why my eldest son?”
REPORT OF THE SECRET ENVOY TO THE
PLAINS OF KOSOVO.
TO BE PLACED SOLELY IN THE HANDS OF
HIS HOLINESS THE POPE.
As you will already have been informed, the Battle of Kosovo Is over. Charles VI of France was in too much of a hurry to sing the victory Te Deum in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The defeat of our Christian allies was total. Within ten hours the Balkan wall fell, and Christianity has been left open to the wrath of the Ottomans.
The greatest defeat was suffered by the Serbs. Their Prince Lazar and his sons were taken captive. The other allies, the king of Bosnia, the Walachian lord, the Albanian counts, and the Hungarian and Croat boyars were completely routed.
It seemed as if fate wanted to offer a consolation to the defeated by murdering Sultan Murad I, but Heaven’s intervention came far too late. All it did was make the river of blood flow more strongly. Before the sultan’s martyred body they held a kurban — that is what they call sacrifices — the like of which has never before been seen. They slaughtered thousands of prisoners like cattle, among them Prince Lazar of the Serbs with his sons and dozens of other boyars.
Yakub Çelebi, the sultan’s oldest son, was also killed, and his younger brother Bayezid was declared sultan.
A great enigma is connected with the Turkish sultan’s death. It arose right after the murder, even before night had fallen. There are two versions of how he was killed. In the first, he died in his tent during the last moments of the battle, struck by a Balkan dagger. In the second, he was killed after the battle, while he was on horseback surveying the bloody battlefield, again struck by a Balkan dagger. Both versions are quite suspect. The first, the one with the tent, is extremely implausible; anyone with even a perfunctory knowledge of Turkish customs would be aware that no one could possibly approach the sultan’s tent, especially not during battle. As for the second version, in which he was murdered as he rode his horse — this is no less suspect. First, how could a Balkan soldier lying among the dead get up and approach the sultan, who was on horseback, surrounded, as everyone is aware, by a great number of guards? Another even more difficult question is how the killer could have leaped up from the ground with lightning speed, reached the sultan’s horse, and with the single stab of a dagger manage to strike the sultan’s heart or throat, when it is obvious that even the simplest breastplate, let alone the breastplate of a sultan, would have made that impossible. But all the aforementioned suspicions are dwarfed by a much graver question. In that blood-drenched twilight, right after the death of the sultan, the viziers convened to avert a struggle for power between the two princes and cold-bloodedly killed one of them. The following question remains: Why did they kill the sultan’s older son, Yakub Çelebi, his legal heir, and not his younger son, Bayezid?
All the evidence points to the fact that the Turkish sultan was probably not killed by the Balkans but by his own people under mysterious circumstances, possibly as the result of a secret conspiracy that had been hatched some time previously. This seems to have resulted from two factions that had recently surfaced in the palace: one faction insisting that the empire center itself in Asia, the other that it expand westward. Since, according to facts already verified, Prince Yakub, like his father, supported the Asian faction, both his murder and that of his father point to political intrigue. From this standpoint, the assassination of the sultan and the heir apparent has been to our disadvantage, because it has opened the way for Ottoman aggression against us.
SUPPLEMENT TO THE REPORT
The above statement is further validated by the symbolism behind the sultan’s partial interment on the Plains of Kosovo. The bizarre decision that the monarch’s body be taken to the Ottoman capital but that his blood and intestines should be buried in the Christian soil of Kosovo has a clear significance. As is commonly known, the ancient Balkan people believed that everything linked with blood is eternal, imperishable, and guarded by fate. The Turks, who had at that point interacted with the Balkan people for over half a century, had apparently assimilated some of this symbolism. By pouring the monarch’s blood on the Plains of Kosovo, they wanted to give that plain, just as they had done with the invasion, a direction, a fatality, both a curse and blessing at the same time; in other words, a “program,” as one would call it today.
The Great Lady
I
He had never before been on the losing side in a war, but nevertheless, late that afternoon, the first cracks began to appear. He closed his eyes wearil
y, but when he opened them again the view was still the same: soldiers and officers spinning in all directions as if caught up in a whirlwind. Two or three times he heard his name being shouted — Gjorg Shkreli! — but he was quick to realize that it was just his imagination. He didn’t recognize a single person in the confusion — he had lost sight of his Albanians since noon. On a battlefield the minstrels are always the last to fall, Prince Lazar had said the preceding night, and gave the order that they should all gather on a small mound not far from his tent — the Serbs with their guslas, the Walachians and the Bosnians with their flutes, and the players of the one-string lahuta from the Cursed Peaks — so that they could all follow the battle without risking their heads. “Those minstrels have always been the darlings of fate!” one of the men said with a faint smile and a twinkle of envy in his eyes, but the prince was quick to point out, “If we lose them, who will sing our glory?”
All afternoon the minstrels stood outside the commander in chief’s tent, their eyes at times clouded with tears as they watched the troop movements.
A scorching blanket of heat lay over the Plains of Kosovo, immersing them in a harsh, dreadful light. In the crazed glare the movements of the troops did not seem to make sense. The minstrels heard shouts of triumph from the commander in chief’s tent when, under the pressure of the Christian forces, the center of the Turkish lines started to bend back like a bow. The shouts came several times, but the minstrels could not figure out what was happening. With eyes grown weary from the light they struggled to follow the movement of the banners bearing crosses that were being slashed to pieces by the Turkish crescent. The harsh light spread a great dread. Just as the intoxicating wine had the night before. “They are advancing too far!” an old Bosnian minstrel said. The preceding night he had warned that no one must drink before going into battle, not even princes.