Murad I
Murad I turned a frontier principality into an empire by conquering Europe before he had finished conquering Anatolia, and was killed on the field of his greatest victory. He inherited from his father a state that held a corridor of north-west Anatolia and a bridgehead across the straits, and he spent twenty-seven years making it the dominant power in the Balkans. He took Adrianople around 1363 and moved his capital there, which meant that the Ottoman centre of gravity sat in Europe for the rest of the dynasty's history and that Constantinople was surrounded a full century before it fell. He beat a Serbian and Hungarian coalition on the Maritsa in 1371, reduced Bulgaria and much of Serbia to tribute-paying vassalage, and made the Byzantine emperor a vassal who campaigned in his army. The institutions mattered more than the conquests. He is associated with the levy of Christian boys from the Balkan villages who were converted, educated and made into the sultan's own infantry and administration, a system that gave the Ottoman state a professional standing army and a bureaucracy of men with no family or landed interest of their own, at a time when every European rival depended on nobles who could refuse. He also codified the practice of leaving conquered Christian lords in place as tributaries first and annexing later, which is why the empire grew so fast and held. In June 1389 he met the Serbian prince and his allies on the plain of Kosovo. The battle destroyed the Serbian nobility and cost Murad his life, killed in his own camp by a Serb who had come in claiming to defect; his son had the other claimant to the succession, his own brother, strangled the same day. Both halves of that day became permanent: Kosovo entered Serbian national memory as the founding catastrophe and was still being invoked six hundred years later, and fratricide on accession became Ottoman practice for the next two centuries.
- Lived: 1326 CE – 1389 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
