Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/32

 factions under Vukašin, Lazar and others, and the crowd of vassal potentates, refusing allegiance to Urosh, strove each to establish complete independence within his own domain.

It is quite possible, as Freeman thought, that if Tsar Dushan had lived to seize Constantinople, a bulwark would have been raised capable of withstanding the Turks: "Servia would have been the body and Constantinople the head. As it was the Turks found in Servia a body without a head, and in Constantinople a head without a body ."

In 1359, four years after Tsar Dushan's untimely death, the warlike Suleiman was thrown from his horse and killed, but his brother. Sultan Murad I, carried on with resistless energy the policy of aggression. "By the pale and fainting light of the Byzantine annals," says Gibbon, "we can discern that he subdued without resistance the whole province of Romania or Thrace from the Hellespont to Mount Haemus and the verge of the capital, and that Adrianople was chosen for the royal seat of his government in Europe." Adrianople fell to Murad in 1361, Philippopoli in 1363. In 1371 he overthrew Vukašin in the battle on the Maritza—the ancient Hebrus—and in 1375 he took Nish (Nissa), the birthplace of Constantine. Events were now moving to a crisis. The capture of Nish gave the Turks a position of such military advantage that unless they could be ejected it was certain that the invaders would ultimately reduce the Balkans to servitude. Once more the dire need of some sort of united action seems to have penetrated the Slav consciousness, and roused the chiefs to at least a partial realisation of the extremity of their common peril. It was now that the Lord of North Serbia, Knez Lazar (the Tsar Lazar of the ballads), made