326 BALKAN BALLADS

forgotten. It Is in these ballads that the Serbian nation truly lives;
and the peasant-soldiers who crossed the plain of Kosovo with
reverent awe in 1912 were completing a ritual act begun by the
self-sacrifice of Tsar Lazar.

The remoter causes of the disaster are stated to have been the
treachery of the south Serbian King Vukasin and the Laodiceanisna
of the northern Tsar Lazar. The ballads are thus originally from
North Serbia. Vukasin's treacherous character is seen in The
Founding of Skadar (Karadzic, ii. 25), which is borrowed from the
Greek Bridge ofArta, but used to calumniate that king, and again
in Uros and the Mrnjavcevici (Karadzic, ii. 33). Marko Kraljevic,
though son to Vukasin, decides against his claims in competition
with the legitimate successor of Stepan Dusan. These ballads are,
perhaps, quite recent. Tsar Lazar's fault, as described by The
Founding of Ravanica (Karadzic, ii. 34, 35) is more venial. He has
neglected to build monasteries. When reminded of his fault he is
even over-anxious to make amends, but the warning voice tells him
it is too late. The immediate cause of the Serbian disaster is, how-
ever, the quarrel between the hero Milos Obilic and the traitor Vuk
Brankovic (Duric, iv. 8, n). The Tsar insulted the hero and
favoured the traitor. In this ballad wre are entering the area of
songs contemporary with the event. In actual fact Milos pene-
trated the Turkish camp before the battle and killed Murad. It
was a feat of immense daring; but it was rendered vain by the
promptitude with which Bajazet suppressed all news of the disaster,
so that the Turks remained undismayed in face of the Serbs. The
ballad was presumably composed by some poet bitterly hostile to
the powerful family of the Brankovici, who later bore the brunt of
Turkish attacks on the Serbian valleys. He insinuates a cause for
Milos's action which may not have been historically true; but the
feat itself is historic, and appears in the earliest reports. A ballad
of Queen Milica and Vladeta (Duric, iv. 7) reinforces this contrast,
and one of Milos among the Latins (Karadzic, ii. 36) relates other
evidence of his prowess; in a visit to Ragusa he tossed his club over
the roof of a church.

The battle is described in The Fall of the Serbian Kingdom
(Karadzic, ii. 45). Waves of myriads of Turks roll forward, are
checked by a hero and a small band, and routed—but the hero also
lies dead. The nine sons of Jug Bogdan perish along with their
father (there is a ballad entitled Milica and the Jugovici which