Ismail Kadare - Elegy for Kosovo

“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:

“Anastasios, why. . despite everything, am I entranced by. . their madness?”

His tutor did not answer immediately. He stood for a moment with his head bowed, as if a heavy rock, not a thought, had entered his brain.

“This means that new ideas are being generated in your head,” he said in a muted voice. “But tonight is not the right time. Prince. You must rest at all costs. Tomorrow. .”

He did not manage to finish his sentence, as Bayezid had already slipped into his tent.

The day was coming to an end, and with it came the end of the Balkan troops. Several times fate appeared to smile on them, only to immediately abandon them. They followed all the rules: they had invoked spells, made ancient signs of death, blown trumpets, chanted hymns to Christ and the Virgin Mary, and then sung praises to Prince Lazar and maledictions on Kraljevic the traitor, and then again praises to the other princes, to the Rumanian chiefs, the counts, and King Tvrtko, and curses on those who pretended to be more heroic than they. Finally, when they saw that all this was of no avail, they began to cheer on holy Serbia, glorious Walachia, Bosnia the immortal, Albania begot by an eagle, and so on, but it was too late for all of this, too. The Turks facing them, who had never seen anything like this before, charged, shouting only the name of Allah, in the simple conviction that they had come here to take this evil region, which was a blot, a scandal on the face of the earth, and bring it back to the right path; in other words, to make it an Islamic region.

In the boundless confusion, it was the Balkan troops who faltered. One after the other, banners with their crosses, lions, one-headed and two-headed eagles fell, and finally the banners with white lilies fell, as if they had fallen on a graveyard. Torrents of Christian and Turkish blood mingled more forcefully than they would have in a thousand years of intermarriage.

In the twilight, when victory was certain, Sultan Murad decided to rest a while. He had not slept for such a long time that even the taste of victory was as acrid as a bitter potion.

Outside, cheers of triumph came from afar.

“I shall doze a little,” the monarch said, and when the viziers told him that his soldiers wanted to see him, even just for a moment, he cut them short. “Send them my double.”

They gazed at their sovereign with flashing feverish eyes, not like his eyes, which were hazy from lack of rest.

The sultan immediately fell asleep. He had a dream in which an officer or a cook who had been dead for some time was complaining to him about something.

“I don’t understand what you are saying,” the sultan said. “You are dead, dead and gone, it’s all over and done with!”

“I am not asking you for anything important, no,” the man answered. “It’s just the wound that I have, bad and crooked as it is — how am I supposed to bear it throughout death? I wanted to fix it, but you didn’t take me along with you to the Plains of Kosovo.”

The sultan wanted to tell him, “What strange ideas, my dear fellow!” But the man continued, “Be that as it may, the best have died. They have also killed your double. Be careful, my lord!”

He spoke the last words in a different voice. The sultan opened his eyes. He heard the words again, but this time not from the dead man but from his viziers.

“Your double has been killed. Grand Sovereign. A Balkan infidel. . hurled himself on him. . onto his horse, like a wild cat.”

The sultan shook his head to wake up. It was true, there they were, dragging the body of his double to the entrance of the tent. He was wearing the sultan’s heavy wool cloak, his plumes and emblems, and right in the center, the dagger planted in his heart.

The sultan looked at him, taken aback for a moment. “My death,” he thought, “but outside myself.” He raised his eyes and looked at his viziers, amazed that they did not congratulate him on his escape. He wanted to ask them: “Why are you standing there like that? Are you so distraught at the death of my double?” And he looked back down at the corpse. He remembered an ancient proverb that when the oak tree falls its shadow falls with it, and he wasn’t sure whether the proverb had conjured itself up in his memory or if he had just heard one of his viziers say it. For a split second he thought that the officer or cook was reappearing in the drowsiness that was once more overpowering him, Before he lost consciousness, he heard the grand vizier speak: “Bring his son, Prince Yakub! Tell him that his illustrious father wishes to see him.” He struggled to open his mouth, and with his entire strength and with all his impatient fury and rage wanted to howl, “Why Yakub? Why my eldest son?”

REPORT OF THE SECRET ENVOY TO THE

PLAINS OF KOSOVO.

TO BE PLACED SOLELY IN THE HANDS OF

HIS HOLINESS THE POPE.

As you will already have been informed, the Battle of Kosovo Is over. Charles VI of France was in too much of a hurry to sing the victory Te Deum in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The defeat of our Christian allies was total. Within ten hours the Balkan wall fell, and Christianity has been left open to the wrath of the Ottomans.

The greatest defeat was suffered by the Serbs. Their Prince Lazar and his sons were taken captive. The other allies, the king of Bosnia, the Walachian lord, the Albanian counts, and the Hungarian and Croat boyars were completely routed.

It seemed as if fate wanted to offer a consolation to the defeated by murdering Sultan Murad I, but Heaven’s intervention came far too late. All it did was make the river of blood flow more strongly. Before the sultan’s martyred body they held a kurban — that is what they call sacrifices — the like of which has never before been seen. They slaughtered thousands of prisoners like cattle, among them Prince Lazar of the Serbs with his sons and dozens of other boyars.

Yakub Çelebi, the sultan’s oldest son, was also killed, and his younger brother Bayezid was declared sultan.

A great enigma is connected with the Turkish sultan’s death. It arose right after the murder, even before night had fallen. There are two versions of how he was killed. In the first, he died in his tent during the last moments of the battle, struck by a Balkan dagger. In the second, he was killed after the battle, while he was on horseback surveying the bloody battlefield, again struck by a Balkan dagger. Both versions are quite suspect. The first, the one with the tent, is extremely implausible; anyone with even a perfunctory knowledge of Turkish customs would be aware that no one could possibly approach the sultan’s tent, especially not during battle. As for the second version, in which he was murdered as he rode his horse — this is no less suspect. First, how could a Balkan soldier lying among the dead get up and approach the sultan, who was on horseback, surrounded, as everyone is aware, by a great number of guards? Another even more difficult question is how the killer could have leaped up from the ground with lightning speed, reached the sultan’s horse, and with the single stab of a dagger manage to strike the sultan’s heart or throat, when it is obvious that even the simplest breastplate, let alone the breastplate of a sultan, would have made that impossible. But all the aforementioned suspicions are dwarfed by a much graver question. In that blood-drenched twilight, right after the death of the sultan, the viziers convened to avert a struggle for power between the two princes and cold-bloodedly killed one of them. The following question remains: Why did they kill the sultan’s older son, Yakub Çelebi, his legal heir, and not his younger son, Bayezid?