Miloš Obrenović
Miloš Obrenović led the second Serbian rising in 1815, bargained rather than fought his way to an autonomous principality with himself as hereditary prince, murdered the leader of the first rising to keep it, governed as an Ottoman pasha would have, was driven out by his own oligarchs in 1839, and came back at seventy-eight to die on the throne. He was born in 1780 to a peasant family in the Rudnik hills and took his half-brother Milan's surname; under Karađorđe he was a captain and, when the leaders fled in October 1813, one of the few who stayed and made his peace with the returning Ottomans, which made him the man on the spot. He rose on Palm Sunday 1815 at Takovo with a demand carefully limited to the removal of the worst abuses, beat the local Ottoman forces in a summer, and then negotiated. He dealt with the vizier of Belgrade in 1815, through the Russian embassy for the next fifteen years, and with the sultan's firmans of 1830 and 1833, which recognised Serbia as an autonomous principality under his hereditary rule, with the Ottoman garrisons kept in six fortresses and the tribute paid in one sum. Karađorđe came back in 1817 and Miloš had him killed and sent the head to the sultan, which the sultan appreciated. He ruled as he had learned from the pashas: the state's revenue, the salt and the livestock trade were his, the headmen were his creatures, and dissent was beaten or shot. He was also the man who freed the peasants from the spahis' dues, brought in the first printing press and schools, and kept the Ottomans out. The chiefs he had made rich wanted a constitution that would bind him, Russia and the Porte imposed one in 1838. In June 1839 he abdicated to his son and left. Nineteen years later, in December 1858, the Serbian assembly threw out the Karađorđević prince and called the old man back; he ruled for twenty months and died in September 1860, leaving the throne to his son Michael, who was shot in a park in 1868. He could not read.
- Lived: 1780 CE – 1860 CE
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: prince, monarch, revolutionary
