Bayezid took Despina, daughter of Lazar, as wife by a formal marriage act, which was read in the mosque of Aladja Hissar, near Krutchevatz, at the foot of Mount Iastrebatz, twenty miles north-west of Nish.[440] This was the last marriage ever contracted by a sovereign of the house of Osman.[441] It sealed an alliance that proved very advantageous to Bayezid. Throughout his life he was devoted to Despina, and his brother-in-law Stephen in turn was a devoted and steadfast friend. The Serbians were faithful allies to the Osmanlis, and fought with them at Nicopolis and Angora. On his side, Bayezid kept the allegiance of the Serbians by giving them opportunities for winning booty in the raids against the Albanians, Dalmatians, and Hungarians, and by favouring the Orthodox Church. When we see how complacently and cheerfully the Serbians--except the poets--took upon themselves the Ottoman yoke, we must believe that Kossova was regarded as a terrible calamity only by the generations of after centuries, who found the Ottoman rule harder than it had been for their ancestors. Bayezid placed a strong Ottoman colony in Uskub, and settled Moslems in the country between Uskub and Nish.[442] There were probably many also who saw that conversion was to their advantage. However that may be, Bayezid never had any trouble from the Serbians during his reign. Stephen Tvrtko, kral of Bosnia, did not consider Kossova a defeat. Seeing that his great enemy Murad and his great rival Lazar had found death on the battle-field, and that the Osmanlis did not follow up their victory, this view-point was natural. After Kossova, Tvrtko increased in power and prestige. He called himself king of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Dalmatia. Like Stephen Dushan, he was planning ‘for great things’ when he died in March, 1391, after a reign of thirty-eight years.[443] Shortly before his death, Tvrtko had successfully resisted an Ottoman invasion with the help of a Hungarian army sent to him by Sigismund. His successor, Stephen Dabitcha, however, departed from this wise policy. He quarrelled with the Hungarians, and played into Bayezid’s hand by opposing Sigismund in his final effort to stem the tide of Ottoman invasion. The Bosnians paid to the full the penalty of their king’s folly. In 1398, Bosnia was invaded by a great army of Osmanlis and Serbians, who ‘destroyed almost all the country and led away the people into slavery’.[444] In spite of the sweeping assertion of the chronicler, this must have been only a raid. For, from 1398 to 1415, the Bosnians, still independent, were fighting with Ragusa and Hungary. In 1415, they voluntarily allied themselves with the Osmanlis, and repeated the same old story of the other Balkan races. Mohammed I was called in to help them against the Hungarians.[445] The Osmanlis came, and they remained. III