Elegy for Kosovo (2 page)

Other rumors hinted at newly sealed alliances among the princes of the peninsula, and then, as was to be expected, newer rumors immediately announced their rupture. Envoys of the pope arrived in Durrës from Rome every week. Messengers set out from Belgrade to Walachia. “I am bringing with me my two sons, Yakub çelebi and Bayezid,” the sultan was said to have written in his letter. “Bring your sons as well. Either you will extinguish my line completely, or I shall extinguish yours.” “What about your third son, the one you blinded, Cuntuz? Why will you not bring him too?” “I would love to bring him, upon my Faith! But what am I to do?—Allah has called him to His side.”

It was said that the Albanian princes had allied themselves with Lazar of the Serbs and Tvrtko of the Bosnians. Emperor John V was wavering, and there was still no word from Prince Constantine. Nor from Mirçea of Rumania. As for the other Serb, Marko Kraljevic, all the omens showed that he was preparing for a new betrayal.

“My greetings to you! I hope that we shall come to an agreement!”

“So come, and may you never leave again!”

“I shall come, I shall find you, and I shall cover you with earth!”

“It would be better for all concerned if we could reach an agreement about where we are to meet. Why tire ourselves out by hunting each other down in vain? On the Plains of Nish, or on the Field of the Blackbirds, Kosovo, as you call it.”

“Go to the devil, Sultan Murad!”

The Turkish capital was bustling with preparations. The army's vanguard had already set out, and the sultan's younger son, Bayezid, begged his father to take elephants along, but the monarch refused. His other son, Yakub, was expected to arrive any day now with vassals gathered from far and wide. More than forty honey merchants were beaten with sticks in the market square for having tried to cheat during the weighing of the honey destined for the army. “Shame! Shame!” the crowd shouted. To swindle with the honey that will give soldiers strength as they go to battle, and that might very well turn out to be their last meal in this world, was truly an infamy. The royal chief historian was dismissed for having begun his war chronicle with the very same words that he had used some years earlier for the military campaign against the emir of the Karamans: “Our illustrious Grand Sovereign Light of the World, was in his garden harking to the song of the birds when the message came unto him that the infidels were preparing an insurrection.” His rival, who had waited twenty years to supplant him, spent a sleepless week contriving
his
introduction, which differed only slightly from his predecessor's: “Our superbly illustrious Grand Sovereign the Light of our Universe, was in his garden harking to the murmuring of the fountains when the message came unto him that the infidels were preparing an insurrection.” He, too, was dismissed, and even beaten with a stick, as were all the other candidates, while everyone waited for a Jewish historian from Erzurum, of whom it was said that he had lost his mind one day but that it had come back and was even more brilliant than before. In the meantime, in his gigantic chamber, Sultan Murad stood before a map of Europe, listening to the explanations of his pasha of the seas: “Europe is like a bad-tempered mule, Grand Sovereign, and these three peninsulas dangling down there are like three little bells. Once we have silenced the first, the Balkan lands, we shall attack the second, Italy, land of the cross and the infidel. And then we shall strike the third bell, the land of the Spaniards, where Islam once reigned but was driven out.“

The peninsula was preparing itself to confront the onslaught with just as much commotion. Weapon forges and taverns stayed open late into the night. Dignitaries tied and untied allegiances. Bellies were eager to be impregnated. The last weddings were held, and, as the war could start at any moment, the procession of the groom's family coming for the bride would march with banners so that the men would be ready at a moment's notice to change course if there should be a call to arms.

The minstrels had already begun to compose their songs, each in his own language. They resembled the ancient songs; even the words were not that different. The Serbian elders chanted: “Oh, the Albanians are preparing to attack!” and the Albanian
lahuta
¹
minstrels sang: “Men, to arms! The pernicious Serb is upon us!“

“Are you out of your minds or are you making fools of us?” the people asked. “The Turks are marching on us, and you are singing the same old songs — The Serbs are attacking, the Albanians are attacking!'” “We know, we know!” the minstrels answered. “But this is where we've always turned to find parts for our songs, and this is where we will always turn. These parts are not like those of weapons that change every ten years. Our models need at least a century to adapt!”

In the meantime, the Ottoman army had already set out, and truths and untruths were spawned. But there was something that unsettled the people of the peninsula even more than the approaching army: the word
Balkan.
Before the Turks even set foot on the peninsula, they baptized it and its people with this name, and this name stuck to them like new scales on the body of an aged reptile. The people were at their wits' end. They twisted in their sleep as if they were trying to shake off this name, but the result was the opposite — the name clung to them all the more forcefully, as if it wanted to become one with their skin. They now realized that, divided as they had always been, they had never given their peninsula a name. Some had called it “Illyricum,” some “New Byzantium”; others had opted for “Alpania” because of the peninsula's alps, or “Great Slavonia” because of the Slavs, and so on. Now it was too late to do anything, and so, without a common name but with a name bestowed upon them by the enemy, they marched to battle and defeat.

The imperial Turkish army did not surface in Nish, as had been expected, but headed for the Plains of Kosovo. The Balkan princes rushed there like wild torrents that change their course after a storm. When they arrived, the Turks were already waiting. The Balkan army positioned itself across from them on the side of the plain that the Turks had deliberately left open for them. Tvrtko of the Bosnians was the only king among them, but Prince Lazar of the Serbs was elected commander in chief, as he had the greatest number of troops. To his left were the battalions of Mirçea of Rumania, and to his right the Albanian counts Gjergj Balsha and Demetër Jonima with their soldiers. There were also other battalions, which had arrived over the past few days. Some thought they might be Croat, others Hungarian, but like so much else in this war, no one was certain what they were.

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
gusla
²
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.”

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: