Stefan Dušan

• 1. Introduction

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  Stefan Dušan died on the 20th of December 1355, suddenly, at his court in Prizren, while preparing to lead a crusading army against the Ottoman Turks. He was not yet fifty years old. In the decades before that death, he had transformed Serbia from a kingdom fighting off Hungarian raids from the north into an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth. He had crowned himself Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks, enacted a legal code that would outlast his empire by more than a century, and elevated his church to the rank of Patriarchate. A historian named Steven Runciman later wrote that Dušan was "perhaps the most powerful ruler in Europe" during the fourteenth century. How did a young prince who spent his childhood in exile in Constantinople, learning Greek customs in the shadow of a rival empire, end up steering an Orthodox Serbian state that threatened to swallow Byzantium whole? And what happened when his ambition outran even his own life?

• 2. A Family Forged in Civil War

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  Dušan's father, Stefan Dečanski, was blinded on the orders of his own father, King Stefan Milutin, in 1314. Milutin sent Dečanski to Constantinople to have the procedure carried out, though historians note he was never totally blinded. It was only after the intervention of Danilo, the bishop of Hum, who wrote to Archbishop Nicodemus, who in turn persuaded Milutin, that Dečanski was recalled to Serbia in 1320. He was given the appanage of Budimlje, which corresponds to the modern town of Berane. Dušan grew up watching these maneuvers. His mother was Theodora Smilets, daughter of emperor Smilets of Bulgaria, which gave him a mixed Serbian and Bulgarian royal lineage from birth. When Milutin died on the 29th of October 1321, civil war followed almost immediately. A half-brother named Stefan Konstantin was crowned king, and Dečanski had to fight for the throne, defeating and killing Konstantin. Dečanski was crowned king on the 6th of January 1322 by Nicodemus, and the young Dušan was crowned alongside him as "young king". The family had clawed its way to power through exile, blinding, and battlefield killing. Dušan learned what it meant to hold power and what it cost to lose it before he was a teenager.

• 3. Youth, Exile, and the Art of War

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  The years Dušan spent in Constantinople during his father's exile were formative in ways that shaped his entire reign. Living in the Byzantine capital, he picked up cultural customs and the Greek language, developing an intimacy with the empire he would later seek to absorb. When he returned to Serbia and was given the province of Zeta, he began demonstrating the military aptitude that would define him. In 1329, the young Dušan defeated Bosnian forces during the War of Hum. The following year, at the Battle of Velbužd in 1330, he helped defeat the Bulgarian emperor Michael III Shishman. The Serbian army at Velbužd numbered 15,000 Serbs reinforced by 2,000 Italians from the Kingdom of Naples and 1,000 German mercenaries. The victory was decisive, and it opened the question of what Serbia might do next. Dečanski's choice not to press an attack on the Byzantines afterward angered his nobles, who wanted to expand southward. That frustration would have consequences, and Dušan himself was caught in them.

• 4. The Usurpation of the Throne

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  By January or February of 1331, Dušan and his father were in open conflict. Pro-Dušan sources from the period say that advisors had turned Dečanski against his son and that the king had decided to seize Dušan and cut him out of the succession. Dečanski sent an army into Zeta, and though it ravaged Skadar, Dušan had already crossed the Bojana river. A brief period of anarchy spread across parts of Serbia before a peace was concluded in April 1331. Three months later, Dečanski summoned Dušan to meet him. Dušan feared for his life. His advisors persuaded him to resist, and he marched from Skadar to Nerodimlje, where he put his own father under siege. Dečanski fled, and Dušan captured the royal treasury and the royal family. He then pursued his father to Petrich. On the 21st of August 1331, Dečanski surrendered, and on the advice of Dušan's advisors, he was imprisoned. Dušan was crowned King of All Serbian and Maritime Lands in the first week of September. Contemporary writers described him as unusually tall, "the tallest man of his time", very handsome, and a leader of quick intelligence and dynamism. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and in adult age he wore a beard and longer hair. What followed his coronation was not consolidation but conquest.

• 5. An Empire Built on Conquest

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  Dušan's systematic offensive against the Byzantine Empire began in earnest in 1342. By the time it was done, he had taken all Byzantine territories in the western Balkans as far as Kavala, with the exceptions of the Peloponnesus and Thessaloniki. In 1345, he conquered the city of Serres on the 25th of September. He exploited the Byzantine civil war between the regent Anna of Savoy and the general John Kantakouzenos, siding with different factions as it suited him. The territory he amassed was vast: north to the Danube and south to the Gulf of Corinth, with Skopje as the imperial capital. In 1347, Dušan conquered Epirus, Aetolia, and Acarnania, appointing his half-brother Simeon Uroš as governor. In 1348, Thessaly fell too, with the military commander Preljub named as its governor. Dušan's army was a multinational force; it included Serbian feudal cavalry, 15,000 Albanian light cavalry armed with spears and swords, German knights, and Catalan halberdiers. When a Hungarian army invaded from the north in 1334, penetrating as far as the neighborhood of Zhica monastery, Dušan marched north and the Hungarians quickly withdrew. Charles I of Hungary was wounded by an arrow but survived. The Hungarians temporarily lost Mačva and Belgrade in 1335 as a consequence. At his greatest extent, Dušan ruled an Eastern Orthodox, multi-ethnic, multilingual empire.

• 6. Easter Sunday and a New Empire

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  On the 16th of April 1346, which fell on Easter Sunday, Dušan convoked a great assembly at Skopje. The Serbian Archbishop Joanikije II was there. So was the Archbishop of Ochrid, Nikolas I, and the Bulgarian Patriarch Simeon, along with religious leaders from Mount Athos. That assembly agreed on, and then ceremonially carried out, the elevation of the Serbian Archbishopric to the status of a full Patriarchate. Joanikije II, now the first Serbian Patriarch, solemnly crowned Dušan as "Emperor and autocrat of Serbs and Romans", a title whose Greek form read: "Basileus kai autokrator Serbias kai Romanias". Dušan simultaneously had his son Uroš crowned King of Serbs and Greeks, giving him nominal rule over the Serbian lands. A wave of new titles flowed from the imperial elevation. Dušan's half-brother Symeon Uroš and his brother-in-law Jovan Asen became despotes. His brother-in-law Dejan Dragaš and Branko Mladenović were granted the rank of sebastocrator. Military commanders Preljub and Vojihna were named caesars. For those acts of ecclesiastical independence, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated Dušan in 1350. The monks of Mount Athos, however, continued to address Dušan as Emperor, having accepted his supreme rule as of November 1345, when he had guaranteed their autonomy and given them substantial economic privileges.

• 7. Dušan's Code

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  Before Dušan's reign, Serbian law had run on customary tradition supplemented by the church canon code that Saint Sava had added in the early thirteenth century. Rulers could issue edicts for a specific region, or grant charters to monasteries or merchant communities, but there was no general code. Dušan changed that. The Dušan Code was proclaimed on the 21st of May 1349 in Skopje. It contained 155 clauses. A further 66 clauses were added at Serres in 1353 or 1354. Dušan himself explained the purpose of the code in one of his charters, writing that its aims were spiritual and that it would help his people save themselves for the afterlife. The first 38 clauses addressed the church. The next 25 dealt with the nobility. Civil law was largely left to earlier documents, including Saint Sava's Nomokamon and the Corpus Juris Civilis. The code's emphasis fell on criminal law and the concept of lawfulness, drawn largely from Byzantine tradition. The authors are not known, though they were probably court officials who specialized in legal matters. The original manuscript did not survive. Under Dušan's son Stefan Uroš V, the code continued as a de facto constitution. After the fall of the Serbian Empire in 1371, it was used across all the successor provinces. It remained officially in force in the Serbian Despotate until the Ottoman annexation in 1459, and continued to be used as a legal reference for Serbian communities living under Turkish rule, which exercised considerable legal autonomy in civil cases.

• 8. Legacy and the Vacuum He Left

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  Dušan died before he could take Constantinople. He had been negotiating with Venice for a naval alliance against the Byzantines, but Venice politely refused, wary of what a Serbian-dominated Constantinople would mean for Venetian trading privileges. He had corresponded with Pope Innocent VI in 1354, offering to recognize the pope as "the father of all Christians" and to unite the Serbian and Catholic churches, in exchange for papal support for a military crusade against the Turks. Those plans never materialized. When he died on the 20th of December 1355, his empire began to fracture almost immediately. His son Stefan Uroš V could not hold the feudal aristocracy together. Dušan's half-brother Simeon Uroš proclaimed himself Emperor over Thessaly and Epirus. With the death of Stefan Uroš V, the empire was definitively divided into numerous independent Serbian states, a moment historians call the Fall of the Serbian Empire. The power vacuum that followed enabled Ottoman expansion across the Balkans, a dominance that lasted until the early twentieth century. Dušan was originally buried in the Monastery of the Holy Archangels near Prizren, the foundation he had built himself. His remains were later moved to the Church of Saint Mark in Belgrade, where they rest today. He is the only monarch of the Nemanjić dynasty who was never canonized as a saint. The political ideals his empire represented did not die with him: as late as 1805, during the First Serbian Uprising, the rebel Governing Council held its sessions in Smederevo below a portrait of Emperor Stefan Dušan.