15 June 1389
The Serbian charge
The battle opens with the Ottoman archers shooting at the Serbian heavy horse. The Serbian horsemen form a wedge and charge. They break through the Ottoman left wing under Yakub and inflict heavy losses on it, but gain less ground against the centre and the right.
In the centre the Serbian troops push the Ottomans back. On the Ottoman right Bayezid’s wing barely holds against the Bosnians of Vlatko Vuković, who inflict heavy losses on it.
Murad is killed, the only Ottoman sultan to die in battle. A letter from Florence to King Tvrtko, dated 20 October 1389, says that twelve lords cut their way through the Ottoman lines and the ring of chained camels to Murad’s tent, and one of them stabbed him in the throat and the belly.
The killing of Murad I at Kosovo in the Hünernâme, 1584, Topkapı Palace MuseumWikimedia Commons, Nakkaş Osman, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Slaying of Serbian knight at Kosovo, by Nakkaş Osman.png)
Serbian tradition knows the killer as Miloš Obilić, a name first recorded in the late 15th century. In some accounts he pretends to desert and is brought before Murad early in the battle. The early Ottoman accounts have a Christian lying among the dead stab Murad as he rides over the field after the fighting.
Sources
- Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (1998), 64–72.
- Thomas A. Emmert, “The Battle of Kosovo: Early Reports of Victory and Defeat”, in Kosovo: Legacy of a Medieval Battle (1991).
- Thomas A. Emmert, “Miloš Obilić and the Hero Myth”, Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 10 (1996).
- Halil İnalcık, in Kosovo: six siècles de mémoires croisées (2000), 25.
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