Serbian Empire

The Serbian Empire was a medieval Balkan state proclaimed at Skopje in 1346, when Stefan Dušan had himself crowned emperor of the Serbs and Greeks and raised the Serbian archbishopric to a patriarchate. Dušan had inherited a kingdom that already stretched through Macedonia and Thessaly, and in the following decade he conquered Epirus, Acarnania and much of central Greece, making Serbia the strongest power in south-eastern Europe. His realm was Orthodox and multilingual, mixing Serbian, Greek, Albanian and Vlach subjects, and its core in Kosovo was the richest and most densely settled province. Dušan codified the law in the Zakonik, promoted trade and mining, and opened the country to Byzantine learning; Skopje and Prizren served as his capitals. The empire depended on his personal authority, however. After his sudden death in 1355 his son Uroš V, remembered as the Weak, could not hold the magnates together, and the nobility broke away into semi-independent principalities. Uroš died in 1371, the same year that Ottoman victories in the Maritsa valley shattered the southern Serbian lords, and the empire dissolved. From its ruins Moravian Serbia rose under the Lazarević family and met the Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389.