Stefan Lazarević

Stefan Lazarević was born in 1377 at Kruševac, the court of his father Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović, who ruled the Serbian principality commonly called Moravian Serbia. His mother, Princess Milica, belonged to a collateral branch of the Nemanjić dynasty. After Lazar was killed at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, Stefan succeeded as prince while still a child, with Milica acting as regent. The principality accepted Ottoman suzerainty; one of Stefan’s sisters, Olivera, was sent to the household of Sultan Bayezid I as part of that settlement. As an Ottoman vassal in his youth and early manhood, Stefan led Serbian contingents in Bayezid’s wars, including the Battle of Rovine against Wallachia in 1395 and the Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396. He also had a younger brother, Vuk Lazarević, and several other sisters whose marriages tied the family to neighboring dynasties.

The defeat and capture of Bayezid by Timur at the Battle of Ankara in 1402 transformed Stefan’s position. Returning from Anatolia, he visited Constantinople, where a Byzantine emperor conferred on him the court title of despot, the highest rank in the imperial hierarchy after the emperor. Thereafter he ruled as Despot of Serbia. He broke with Ottoman overlordship and entered a lasting alliance with King Sigismund of Hungary, from whom he received Belgrade, the region of Mačva, Golubac, and other lands. Belgrade became his capital and was fortified and enlarged under his rule. In 1408 he was among the founding members of Sigismund’s Order of the Dragon. The years after Ankara were also marked by conflict with his nephew Đurađ Branković and with his brother Vuk, struggles bound up with the Ottoman civil war among Bayezid’s sons. Stefan later supported Mehmed I. In 1421, after the death of Balša III of Zeta, he inherited substantial territories on the Adriatic hinterland that Balša had bequeathed to him.

Stefan was an energetic administrator as well as a soldier. In 1412 he issued a mining code that regulated the silver mines of Novo Brdo and other sites, a principal source of Serbian wealth in the period. He promoted church building in the Morava architectural school. His chief foundation is the fortified Monastery of Manasija, also called Resava, begun in the early fifteenth century; its church and defensive walls remain a major monument. A school of copyists and translators associated with Resava made the monastery a center of Slavic literacy. Stefan himself wrote in the Serbian recension of Church Slavonic. The work most securely attributed to him is Slovo ljubve (A Discourse on Love), a rhetorical epistle. Constantine the Philosopher (Konstantin Kostenetski), who later composed a Life of Despot Stefan, and other contemporaries portrayed him as a learned, physically imposing, and chivalrous prince.

In 1405 he married Helena (Jelena) Gattilusio, daughter of Francesco II Gattilusio, lord of Lesbos. The marriage produced no children. Stefan died suddenly on 19 July 1427, of a stroke or heart attack, while hunting in the Šumadija region near the village of Crkvine in what is now the municipality of Mladenovac. He was buried at Manasija. By prior arrangement his nephew Đurađ Branković succeeded him as despot. The Serbian Orthodox Church venerates Stefan Lazarević as a saint, commemorating him on 1 August (19 July in the Julian calendar).