Konstantin Mihailović

Konstantin Mihailović was a Serbian who served as a Janissary during the 15th century for the Ottoman Empire. Born in the village of Ostrovica, near Novo Brdo, Mihailović is remembered for having kept memoirs of his service and in doing so he allowed a unique insight into life in the Ottoman Army.

Memoirs

His memoirs give no insight into his early life. Instead, they begin in 1455, when an army under the command of Sultan Mehmed II laid siege to the castle of Novo Brdo for forty days. The Ottoman Army had marched from Edirne via Sofia in a campaign to establish certain control over the area that is now Kosovo. At the time, Novo Brdo was a rich mining city for silver. The garrison surrendered on June 1, 1455. According to Mihailović, the Sultan stood at the small gate of the castle and sorted the boys from the girls. He then sorted the women on one side of a ditch, and the men on the other. He then ordered all men of any distinguished rank or importance decapitated. The young women and girls, some 700 of them, were taken to serve as wives to soldiers and Ottoman commanders. [http://www.kosovo.net/batak5.html]

Following this, the young boys, some 320 of them, were taken to be trained as members of the janissaries, to include Mihailović and his two brothers. He wrote later that he and nineteen other boys ran away during the night near a village called Samokovo, only to be recaptured, bound, and beaten. The area in which he was referring to was most likely Samokovo in Serbia, located about 63 kilometers north of Pristina, and 204 kilometers south of Belgrade. [http://nona.net/features/map/placedetail.1444974/Samokovo/] He writes that one year later he was present at the Siege of Belgrade. While it is likely that he was present, he had not been with the Ottomans long enough to have become a janissary by that time. Mihailović goes into great detail about that siege and the events that followed.

Campaign against Vlad III and in Bosnia

After completing his janissary training, he next serves with the Ottoman Army during its advance against Vlad III of Wallachia, who would later be the inspiration for the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker. In this segment, Mihailović confirms the use of impalement by Vlad III, and adds the fact that Vlad III often cut off the noses of Ottoman soldiers and sent them to Hungary to show the number of enemy soldiers he had killed. He states that in one battle, while the Ottomans were crossing the Danube, some 250 janissaries were killed by the Wallachians, but the sheer numbers of the Ottoman force eventually drove Vlad III's forces away.

He also records that during the night the Ottomans were most fearful of Wallachian attack, and that they protected their camps with wooden stakes and around the clock guards. This still did not prevent attacks, and they lost many soldiers, camels and horses. He gives some mention of the "forrest of the impaled" that has since become legend, in which Vlad III is alleged to have lined the roadways with thousands of impaled Turkish soldiers, but Mihailović never actually saw this, being in the rear of the army, thus writing about it on the word of others.

His next writings were about the campaign to take Bosnia in 1463. He details the sieges involved in that campaign, and as it comes to a close he and a garrison of janissaries are left to hold the fortress at Zvecaj. By this time he seems to have had a considerable rank. His force was not able to withstand a siege led by Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and Mihailović was one of the prisoners taken. After his identity and ethnicity was discovered, he was repatriated back into his own culture.

External links

* [http://www.ottomanonline.net/history/5.html Konstantin Mihailović]
* [http://www.kosovo.net/batak5.html Kosovo and Metohija History]
* [http://www.deremilitari.org/resources/articles/emmert.htm Battle of Kosovo and After]
* [http://www.tripwiser.com/trip_destination-Novo_Brdo_Serbia?itiNodeId=8a8c80fe152a92f401152af7f75d08c5&eType=site History of Novo Brdo]
* [http://serbianna.com/blogs/bozinovich/?m=200707 Blog]
* [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006CJF08/serbiannacom "Memoirs of a Janissary" (currently out of print)]
* [http://famous.adoption.com/famous/janissaries.html Famous Janissaries]