Stefan Dušan
Stefan Dušan deposed his father, doubled the Serbian kingdom at Byzantium's expense in a decade, had himself crowned Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks at Skopje in 1346, issued the law code that bears his name, and died on the road to Constantinople at forty-seven; the empire lasted sixteen years after him and the code outlived it. He was born about 1308, the son of Stefan Dečanski, and spent part of his childhood as a hostage at Constantinople while his father was in exile there. The nobles who wanted more war with the Greeks than his father would give them put him on the throne in 1331 and the father died in prison at Zvečan within the year. The Byzantine civil war of the 1340s was his chance. He took Albania, Epirus, Thessaly and all of Macedonia except Thessalonica by 1348, mostly by having the cities open their gates, so that his state ran from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth, and at Easter 1346 the Serbian archbishop, raised to patriarch for the purpose, crowned him emperor in Skopje with the Bulgarian patriarch and the monks of Athos attending. The Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated the lot. The code of 1349, added to in 1354, was read to the assembly of nobles and clergy at Skopje. It had two hundred articles on the church, the nobility, the serfs, the courts and the roads, with the emperor himself subject to the law of the code, and Greek Byzantine law kept for the Greek towns. He kept a Byzantine court, Greek titles and a mercenary guard of Germans, and planned to take Constantinople with a fleet Venice would not lend him. He died suddenly in December 1355, of a fever, and the magnates he had raised took the provinces apart under his son Uroš, so that the Ottomans met them one at a time on the Maritsa in 1371 and at Kosovo in 1389. The code is on the banknotes and the empire on the maps every Serbian nationalist has drawn since 1804.
- Lived: 1308 CE – 1355 CE
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: emperor, monarch, lawgiver
