Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [139]
What was the source of these social memories? We need to begin (at least) with the seventeenth century, if not further back. In 1683, the Ottomans, supposedly in a state of “declination,” suddenly surprised western Europe by launching a huge army toward Vienna and threatening the city. Their bold effort failed and they were driven off. Thereafter the Austrian Habsburgs took full advantage of the Ottomans’ disarray. In a series of campaigns extending over thirteen years, they pursued them, first through Hungary, then beyond the Danube, and ultimately far south into the heart of the Balkan archipelago. In 1689, an Austrian army even pushed into the region of Kosovo and proclaimed that Christianity had triumphed over Islam. The Serbs of Kosovo were happy to swear allegiance to the emperor Leopold, only to see the Austrians retreat in the following year, leaving them at the mercy of the returning Ottomans.
As an Ottoman army and their Tartar allies reentered Kosovo, they regarded many of the Serbs as traitors and rebels who had sided with their enemy. Village after village was ravaged, and, wisely, many families decided not to take the risk of remaining under Turkish rule. Led by the respected Patriarch Čarnojević of the Orthodox holy sites at Pec, they abandoned their farms and villages to trek north, then crossed the Danube with the retreating Austrians into Habsburg-ruled Hungary. In what was thereafter called Vojvodina, from the Slavonic for “duchy,” the emperor gave the Serbs a charter to establish their own community. The Habsburgs used these exiles as the first line of defense against Ottoman incursions. The “Great Migration” became the mythical equivalent of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt. The patriarch was their Moses.12 Like the children of Israel, whose identity was forged first by their slavery in Egypt, and then annealed by their later Babylonian captivity, their lost lands became a totem of a vanished golden age for the Serbs in exile.
The migration of 1690 was the second great Serb loss at the hands of the Ottomans. Exile and defeat joined to form a diptych of Serb identity, with catastrophe becoming a necessary prelude to triumph. As mentioned earlier, three centuries before, in 1389, in the heart of Kosovo, at Kosovo Polje, the army of the Serbs had been massively defeated by the Ottoman forces of Sultan Murad I. The precise factual history of the battle and its aftermath was less important than the dense network of legends and epic poems that was woven around it. From the early eighteenth century onward, few children in the Vojvodina cannot have known of saintly Prince Lazar who led the Serbs and of the many fine men slaughtered after the fight by the cruel and implacable Ottomans. They would also have learned of the evil Turkish sultan stabbed on the battlefield, in an act of divinely inspired retribution. An early Serbian chronicler began his account of the “noble and gentle Lazar” with how he
Fought the good fight
For the godliness of the land
Not allowing during his lifetime
The cursed, arrogant and cruel beast
To destroy your [Christ’s] flock
Which you gave him.
Then Lazar himself declared,
I’d rather shed my blood
Than draw near to or bow down
To the cursed and evil
Murderer, Hagar.13
The traditional language used about Islam since the seventh century—“Hagar,” “the cruel beast”—was the natural idiom to describe the Turks. The trope of triumph through martyrdom, where defeat was transmuted into a glorious victory, becomes a recurrent theme and inspiration for the Serbs’ future. The patriarch Danilo, in his late-fourteenth-century Narrative About Prince Lazar, summed up the future for the army of the Serbs in the face of their monstrous enemy: “We have lived for a long time for the world; in the end we seek to accept the martyr’s struggle and live for ever in heaven. We call ourselves Christian soldiers, martyrs for godliness to be recorded