Nothing but a brilliant victory could have galvanized into unity the ill-compacted alliance of the Sclaves. We need not dwell upon the incidents of the fight.[86] How the hero Miloš met the wassail taunts of treachery by rushing to his doom and stabbing ‘the Turkish Czar Murad’ in his pavilion; how the head of the Serbian Knez Lazar was held aloft by its grey hairs to glut the glazing eyes of the Turkish Sultan; how the Bosnian Voivode, metamorphosed into his Herzegovinian successor,—‘ducal Stephen,’ struck down nine Pashàs and sank himself before the tenth; of the lightning charge of Bajazet, the thunder-stroke of his iron mace, the crowning treachery of Vuk; or how, long afterwards, the Serbian wayfarers on the Field of Thrushes found the body of their sainted King, and Knez Lazar was borne at last by priestly hands ‘to beauteous Ravanica in the mountain forest,’ there to lie amidst his kindred in the convent of his rearing: all this, with many a legendary aftergrowth, lives as fresh in the minds of the Southern Sclaves as if it were of yesterday. There is not a name in that heroic muster-roll which is not a household word wherever the Serbian tongue is spoken. Epic lays of the fatal day of Kóssovo are still sung every day to throngs of peasant listeners by minstrels of the people, whose rhapsodies, set to the dolorous strains of the ghuzla, resound in a great national dirge along the willowed banks of Save and Danube, through the beechwood glens of Bosnia, the dark recesses of the Balkan, the mountain strongholds of the Czernagora, till, far away across the Illyrian desert, they find an echo in that caverned waste of rock that frowns above the blue waters of the Adriatic. The battle of Kóssovo has grown and grown on the imagination of oppressed peoples who only realized its full significance long afterwards. Tragic and romantic as were the actual incidents of that great contest, they stand out against the disastrous twilight that succeeded, in fantastic and supernatural relief, lit up by the lurid conflagrations of after ravages. At the time, we have the most direct evidence that the battle was regarded by one at least of the principal actors as a great victory for Christendom. Amurath was slain, the Turks had retired from the field of battle, and the brave Bosnian General had returned to his sovereign with unbroken forces. Tvartko wrote word to the citizens of Traù and Florence that he had once more triumphed over the Infidel, and Te Deums of thanksgiving for the success of the Christian arms were celebrated in the cathedral of Notre Dame and in the presence of the king of France.[87] Yet the death-knell of the Serbians and Bulgarians had already sounded, the last confederacy of the Southern Sclaves was broken up, the imperial aspirations of the Bosnian King were dashed for ever, and the doom of Bosnia itself was but postponed.