15 June 1389
The battle lines
On the morning of 15 June the two armies face each other across the plain. In the usual reconstruction Lazar commands the centre, Vuk Branković the right wing and Vlatko Vuković the left, which also holds the foreign contingents. The Serbian heavy horse stands at the front, with lighter horsemen armed with bows on the flanks.
Murad commands the Ottoman centre, where the janissaries stand with Murad and his cavalry guard behind them. His son Bayezid and the frontier lord Evrenos lead the troops from the European provinces on the right wing, and his other son Yakub Çelebi the Anatolian troops on the left. About 1,000 archers stand in front of each wing.
Ottoman sources say that Murad also places camels in front of his line to frighten the Serbian horses, and a Florentine letter of October 1389 speaks of a ring of chained camels. Some accounts give Bayezid the left wing and Yakub the right.
Sources
- Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (1998), 64.
- Rade Mihaljčić, The Battle of Kosovo in History and in Popular Tradition (1989).
- Thomas A. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (1990).
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