Only experience or an iron will could have held together in those rough times a kingdom relying for its protection on the swords of a quarrelsome nobility; and Serbia broke up into a number of small principalities, her disintegration assisted by the ambitious jealousy of Louis the Great of Hungary, who lost no opportunity of dismembering and weakening this sister kingdom that might otherwise prove a hindrance to his own imperial projects. With the career of Louis we have dealt in other chapters, and have seen him humbling the Venetians, driving Joanna I out of Naples, acquiring the throne of Poland, fighting against the Turks and the Emperor Charles IV. Because he spent his energy recklessly on all these projects, Louis remains for posterity, apart from the civilizing influence of his court life, one of the arch-destroyers of the Middle Ages, the sovereign who more than any other exposed Eastern Europe to Mahometan conquest. Had he either refrained from his constant policy of aggression towards Serbia, thus allowing her to unite her subject princes in the face of the invading Turks, or had he even been powerful enough to found an Empire of Hungary that would absorb both Serbia and Constantinople and act as a bulwark in the East, mediaeval history would have closed on a different scene. Instead, the famous victories of Louis over the Turks, that made his name honoured by Christendom, were rendered of no avail by other partial victories over Christian nations who should have been his allies. [Sidenote: Battle of Kossovo] On the field of Kossovo, in 1389, the Serbians, shorn of half their provinces and weakened and betrayed by the Hungarians, met the Turks in battle. Both sides have left record of the ferocity of the struggle. ‘The angels in Heaven’, said the Turks, ‘amazed by the hideous noise, forgot the heavenly hymns with which they always glorify God.’ ‘The battle-field became like a tulip-bed with its ruddy severed heads and rolling turbans.’ ‘Few’, wrote the Serbian chronicler, ‘returned to their own country.’ When the day closed, both the Serbian king, Lazar, and the Turkish sultan lay dead amid their warriors, and the victory, as far as the actual fighting was concerned, seemed to rest neither with Christian nor Moslem. Yet, in truth, the Turk could supply other armies, as numerous and as well-equipped, to take the place of those who had fallen, while the Serbians had exhausted their uttermost effort: thus the fruits of the battle fell entirely into the hands of the infidel. ‘Things are hard for us, hard since Kossovo,’ is a modern Serbian saying, for the Serbs have never forgotten the day when they fought their last despairing battle as champions of the Cross, and lost for a time their ambition of dominating Eastern Europe. There resteth to Serbia a glory, (runs the old ballad) * * * * *