Journal of Medieval History

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One among many renegades: the Serb janissary

Konstantin Mihailović and the Ottoman conquest
of the Balkans

Philippe Buc

To cite this article: Philippe Buc (2020): One among many renegades: the Serb janissary
Konstantin Mihailović and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, Journal of Medieval History, DOI:
10.1080/03044181.2020.1719188

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JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2020.1719188

One among many renegades: the Serb janissary Konstantin

Mihailović and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans
Philippe Buc
Institut für Geschichte and Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Konstantin Mihailović, a Serb born in Novo Brdo, was taken by the Received 29 October 2018
Ottomans and became a janissary in Mehmet II’s army. After he Accepted 24 April 2019
returned to the Christian side, he penned a report on Ottoman
KEYWORDS
governance, religion, military structures and tactics. It explained by Konstantin Mihailović;
organisational advantages, fairness to subjects of all faiths coupled Ottomans; treason;
with deceit vis-à-vis enemies, divisions within Christendom, and janissaries; Balkans;
providential history’s retributive measures, why the ‘heathen’ had autobiography; apostasy
the upper hand. But the author, Konstantin, remained discreet.
Autobiographical details on his years as a janissary are scarce. He
had risen high in the Ottoman system. While conveying his expertise
about the enemy to Christian courts was his key to a further career,
he also had to conceal that he had been an important member of
the janissary corps, and probably had converted to Islam. The first
imperative, sharing expertise, complicated the second, self-silencing,
and made it impossible to dissimulate fully.

Even by late medieval standards, Konstantin Mihailović’s so-called Memoirs of a Janissary

(better entitled the Report and Chronicle) would count as a confused and confusing
source.1 First of all, this fifteenth-century account, penned by a Serbian military man
who, for a while, served the Ottoman Turks, is not a memoir, if by memoir one under-
stands something approximating an autobiography or a sustained narrative of events in
which the author presents himself as playing a role (the events being the Ottoman takeover
of the Balkans, including Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest in 1453 of Constantinople, of Bosnia

CONTACT Philippe Buc philippe.buc@univie.ac.at Institut für Geschichte and Institut für Österreichische
Geschichtsforschung, Universität Wien, Universitätsring 1, Vienna 1010, Austria
1
The following abbreviation is used in this paper: Memoirs: Konstantin Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary, trans. from
the Czech by Benjamin Stolz, with a commentary by Svat Soucek (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975), here used
with slight modifications.
Soucek discusses this in the notes to the Memoirs: they were being worked on at least as late as 1490, the date of
King Matthias Corvinus’ death (197). There is a German translation, based on a 1912 edition of the Polish version
(itself based on one manuscript, but taking into account variants from other known Polish versions and the Czech
version), by Renate Lachmann, Memoiren eines Janitscharen oder Türkische Chronik (Graz: Styria, 1975; reprint
with a revised introduction Paderborn: Schöningh, 2010). See Victor Louis Ménage’s review of both translations in
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 40, no. 1 (1977): 155–60. The Polish text was translated from
the Czech version (which may have been original, or itself based on a now lost Serbian version). The German translator
from the Polish, Lachmann, herself accepts the Czech text’s priority. For this reason, the Czech version and its English
translation are used here. There is also a French translation of the Polish version by Charles Zaremba, ed., Mémoires
d’un janissaire: chronique turque (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2012). The core bibliography can be found in Gilles Veinstein,
‘Konstantin Mihailović’, in Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History, vol. 5: 1350–1500, eds. David
Thomas and Alexander Mallett (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 603–8.
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 P. BUC

and of Serbia). We do not have in this document, transmitted in two Slavic languages, Polish
and Czech, anything comparable to Philippe de Commynes’ famous Mémoires.2 Nor does
Konstantin’s so-called Memoirs exhibit any of the orderliness and sophistication deployed
by the Frenchman’s account of the diplomatic manoeuvres and sometimes deadly tricks
played by the Burgundian court and its Parisian rival. Konstantin himself calls his oeuvre
a ‘report and chronicle’, and it will be simplest to adhere to this title.3 He tells us very
little about himself; in the source, he places himself in a limited number of episodes, and
the information he gives seems not always coherent.4 Yet it will be this elusive Konstantin,
precisely because of his elusiveness, who will detain us in the second half of this article.5 We
shall read between the lines of the Report and Chronicle to reconstruct his likely trajectory as
a loyal servant of the Sultan, based on discrepancies and oddities, some of which were first
underlined by Victor Louis Ménage in 1977, but since then left unexplored.6 The first half of
the essay will exploit the text’s explicit information; much there is worth underlining to
make sense of Konstantin’s authorial strategy. Such an approach is classic hermeneutics
for authors known only through a single work, and for whom no external biographical infor-
mation is available. Some of the textual data have to be trusted if one is to decipher another
part of this data as betraying authorial intention.
The Report and Chronicle’s non-autobiographic contents can be subsumed under five
categories, as Konstantin himself makes clear in his introduction. First, information about
a contemporary Islam deeply dyed by Sufi and Shi’a influences; secondly, information
about Ottoman diplomacy, warfare and governance, including the imperial treatment of
religious minorities; thirdly, Ottoman history; fourthly, detailed information about the
Ottoman army;7 and finally, explanations of the inability of Christians to counter the Otto-
mans. Periodically, Konstantin exhorts Christendom to unity. This last theme also frames
the source: it constitutes the core message of the introduction and conclusion. Konstantin
closes the introduction with a prayer to God, ‘Aid the Christians against the accursed
heathens’; he repeats himself in the conclusion: ‘Lord God Almighty, help faithful Christians

2
See most recently Joël Blanchard, Philippe de Commynes (Paris: Fayard, 2006), and before him the classic study by
Jean Dufournet, Le destruction des mythes dans les Mémoires de Philippe de Commynes (Geneva: Droz, 1966), and other
works by the same author.
3
Memoirs, 1 (foreword).
4
As noticed by Soucek, Memoirs, xxi, xxx; see also the notes on 218, 221, 229.
5
I assume here that the bulk of the Report and Chronicle is by a single author. Contrast Lachmann, Memoiren (2010
ed.) 30–3, 54–7, basing herself on Angiolo Danti, who thinks the programmatic calls to war were added in a later his-
torical context. This must have been the hopes for a grand coalition involving the Polish king and the king of Bohemia
and Hungary, hence the two languages in which the work has survived. But see the discussion in Ménage, ‘Review’, 157,
who demonstrates convincingly the text’s coherence, an argument for single authorship. Furthermore, given the pol-
itical history of the second half of the fifteenth century, it is probable that the author would have first written it in Czech
at the court of the Jagiellonian king of Bohemia, and then once his brother became king of Poland, a Polish version
would have made sense. Finally, the oddities of the autobiographical information suggest that it is authentically by
Konstantin. On this, see Stephen Turk Christensen, ‘The Heathen Order of Battle’, in Violence and the Absolutist
State. Studies in European and Ottoman History, ed. Stephen Turk Christensen (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag,
1990), 75–135 (130–5).
6
An approach which duplicates that of Reinhard Klockow for George ‘of Hungary’, whose fine introduction I read
after having done the basic research for this article. See Reinhard Klockow, ‘Einleitung’, in Georgius de Hungaria, Trac-
tatus de moribus, condictionibus et nequicia Turcorum – Traktat über die Sitten, die Lebensverhältnisse und die Arglist
der Türken. Nach der Erstausgabe von 1481, ed. Reinhard Klockow (Cologne: Böhlau, 1993), 20–2, 25, 42–3; Ménage,
‘Review’, 157–8, the ‘Memoirs are partly designed to exculpate himself … [and] to rehabilitate himself by putting his
first-hand knowledge of the enemy at the disposal of Christian masters’. Ménage’s line is followed by Tijana Krstić,
Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2011), 57–8.
7
Information exploited by Christensen, ‘Heathen Order of Battle’.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 3

against the sinful heathens, to wipe them out, Amen.’8 And no wonder, for it was a struggle
to the death, since Muhammad’s successor (sic) ʿAlī, also a prophet (sic), enjoined others on
his deathbed to ‘torment’ the Christians and invade them, lest they go on the offensive.9
Konstantin reports Muslim sermons and teachings, probably specifically directed at the
janissaries. As is well known, these men constituted the Sultan’s elite troops. They were
recruited either from the empire’s Christian subjects or pressed-ganged Christian captives
of war (a body called the devshirme, which also produced non-military staff and admin-
istrators), trained in the military arts and converted to Islam.10 In the case of one of the
religious debates that Konstantin attended, we learn in passing that the shrewd Grand
Vezir Mahmut Pasha (1456‒66, 1472‒4), a convert from the devshirme, likely Greco-
Serbian, known to contemporaries as the ‘Bassa Machmut’, and possibly the Sultan’s
most efficient and most cultivated Grand Vezir, directed a disputation where a fable invol-
ving 800 ghost camels was presented.11 The author tells us that ‘he never missed their
sermons’, in order to understand Muslim teachings.12 The preaching and disputations
held at court understandably conveyed Islam’s superiority over the religion that the janis-
saries had left behind, Christianity. Next to classic Islamic explanations of the final revel-
ation’s truth, the sermons denigrated Christendom. It was a divided community:
‘The kaury [the term used for Christians, meaning lost or confused people] wish one another
nothing good: brother robs and betrays brother, and friend friend, believing that the Lord has
helped … [The Christian] devours his own flesh and blood and boasts that it has gone well
for him.’

Its punchline addressed the Ottoman soldiers: ‘And this is well known to you who are at
war with them.’13 Throughout the Report and Chronicle, as with many other writers in his
age, Konstantin bemoaned Christian divisions. Conflict within Christendom, including
the rift between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, made for Ottoman strength. He may well
have purposefully placed this critique in Muslim mouths, a classic tactic since late anti-
quity. And conversely, Muhammad’s deathbed message, enjoining mutual kindness and
justice to Muslims (and manumission of slaves, a message former captives taken into to
the janissary corps would have appreciated),14 explained the spread of Islam as an exemp-
lary faith.15 It accounted also for the strength and cohesion of the Ottoman realm. Kon-
stantin underscored that the Muslims ‘are just to themselves and among themselves and to

8
Memoirs, 1 (foreword); 197 (conclusion: translation lightly modified).
9
Memoirs, 9 (chapter II). This ʿAlī is evidently much more Shi’a than Sunni, even if the lines were not drawn in the
fifteenth century as they were later, after the rise of the Iranian Safavid dynasty, with its Twelver Shi’a Mahdism. See
in this direction the remarks of Krstić, Contested Conversions, 59–60; also Lachmann, Memoiren (2010 edn.), 39–40,
55–6.
10
For the janissaries, see, e.g. Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650. The Structure of Power, 2nd edn. (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave, 2009), 116–28, 267–8.
11
The exact ethnic identity of the Pasha is hard to reconstruct; see however Theoharis Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs.
The Life and Times of The Ottoman Grand Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelovic, 1453–1474 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 73–5;
earlier, Constantin Jireček, Geschichte der Serben. 2 vols. (Gotha: Perthes 1911‒18), 2, part 1: 208–9, 211–12. Kritovou-
los, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Westport: Greenwood, 1970), 88–9 (I § 301–4).
12
Memoirs, 17 (chapter IV).
13
Memoirs, 21 (chapter V); for the explanation of kaury, 5 (chapter I).
14
Manumission is reaffirmed as a duty in a sermon reported in the Memoirs, 23 (chapter V); Konstantin explains later,
Memoirs, 157–9 (chapter XXXIX), that janissaries levied as adolescents from the Sultan’s own lands were free to
bequeath their wealth to whomsoever they wanted; janissaries who began as captives from dar el-harb, however,
were not, unless the Sultan granted them this boon owing to some exploit. Free inheritance is identified with
freedom tout court.
15
Memoirs, 7 (chapter II).
4 P. BUC

all their subjects, whether Christians or Jews, and to all who are under them’.16 A grue-
some incident exemplified this justice. A Christian woman accused a soldier of having
drunk the milk of her cow without paying. The Sultan dealt with this claim in a Solomonic
manner. Either the soldier confessed or his stomach would be opened up to check the pres-
ence of milk. If the fluid was found there, he would of course die. If there was no milk, the
woman would be executed.17
ʿAlī’s alleged last will – ‘torment’ the Christians – was reiterated in mosque preaching.
The muezzin entered with a sword and ascended the minbar, to proclaim:
‘Your Mohameddan faith is above all others; pray for all souls and for those who are fighting
against the kaury; and when you see them riding back from war, grant them honour and peace,
kissing their hands and feet. You will all have a part in that war. Please Mohammed. For God
almighty gave us the sword that we might defend ourselves and torment the kaury.’18

The contemporary Dervish author Ahmad bin Yahya, also known as Aşıkpaşazade
(ʿĀs̲h̲ ı̊k -Pas̲h̲a-Zāde, d. c.1484), refracts this same zeal. Aşıkpaşazade probably desired
to motivate Ottoman elites to holy war by painting all Sultans from the line of Osman
as ghazis, unremittingly devoted to fighting for Islam, no matter how on occasion (as
we know from other sources also) they struck tactical compromises with the infidel.19
George ‘of Hungary’, who spent 20 years in Turkish captivity before returning to Christian
lands and joining the Dominican Order, documents the same zeal for holy war.20 George
too had reasons to highlight Ottoman militant fervour, since he ended up as confessor in
Rome to Turkic renegades.21 But notwithstanding their respective motives, these two tes-
timonies converge with Konstantin’s own and make it credible.
The fable of God’s 800 ghost camels compensated – to a point – radical assertions of
Islamic superiority. This transport army journeyed by night to Muslim graveyards,
there to empty graves of bad Muslims and take these bodies to Christian graveyards.
The good Christians were then taken to the Muslim graves. Good Christians and good
Muslims will thus stand together on Judgement Day, to be led by Muhammad to
Heaven, while Jesus will take the (bad) Christians (and bad Muslims) to Hell.22 This
myth speaks simultaneously of superiority and commonality. It fitted an audience of

16
Memoirs, 29 (chapter VIII).
17
Memoirs, 189 (chapter XLVI).
18
Memoirs, 13 (chapter III).
19
Ahmad bin Yahya bin Salman bin Ashik-Pasha, alias Aşıkpaşazade, Tevārīh-i Āl-i ʿOsmān, Vom Hirtenzelt zur
hohen Pforte: Frühzeit und Aufstieg des Osmanenreiches nach der Chronik »Denkwürdigkeit und Zeitläufe des
Hauses ʿOsman« vom Derwisch Ahmed, genannt ʿAsik-Pasa-Sohn, trans. Richard Kreutel (Graz: Styria, 1959). See
Halil İnalcık, ‘How to read ʿĀshiķ Pasha-zāde’s History’, in idem, Essays in Ottoman History (Istanbul: Eren, 1998),
31–50 (35–6), a history meant also to be read aloud to the ghazis. For early Ottoman historiography in general, see
Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), chapter 2.
20
See Nora Berend, ‘Violence as Identity: Christians and Muslims in Hungary in the Medieval and Early Modern
Period’, Austrian History Yearbook 44 (2013): 1–13.
21
George, Tractatus, ed. Klockow, 236–41 (XI, R12b.12–13a.16), especially 240 (R13a.4–7): ‘They say that they are
blessed if they can die on the battlefield among lances and arrows and not at home among the tears and sobs of
women. And about those who so die, not only do they not mourn but proclaim them and praise them as holy and
victorious.’ Much historiography on converts or ‘renegades’ concerns the better documented sixteenth and especially
seventeenth centuries: see e.g. Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman
Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan’s Renegades: Christian-European Con-
verts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
22
Memoirs, 25 (chapter VI).
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 5

janissaries, converts from Christianity to Islam, to think that the better among their rela-
tives and erstwhile neighbours would end up with them on the right side of God. One can
well understand why such a story would have been propounded in the presence of the
Grand Vezir Mahmut Pasha, also a convert, and why Konstantin Mihailović heard it
(although he nowhere speaks of his conversion to Islam; as a janissary, he had to be at
least nominally Muslim). Interestingly, Mahmut came from Konstantin’s own home
town, Novo Brdo.23
Christians betray other Christians, in God’s providence a fountainhead for divine
curses, and in worldly practice a cause for military weakness; the Ottomans betray the
word given to infidels systematically, a reason for their success. In what may have been
a purposefully negative foundation legend for the Ottoman dynasty, Konstantin had its
eponymous first Sultan, Osman, obtain his first success by deceit.24 With such origins,
Ottoman politics were pure betrayal of the enemy. The Report and Chronicle warns
many times against Ottoman tricks, including oaths given on a false Qur’an, a book
made of soap. The granting of peace or truce meant nothing, being intended as a
deceit.25 The refusal to honour promises is attested by contemporary sources. Laonikos
Chalkokondyles’ Apodeíxis historion (History of the Decline of the Greek Empire, compiled
in the 1480s, but stopping in 1463–4), which saw treachery on all sides, attributed some
broken oaths to the practical impossibility of fulfilling them, and even recognised
Turkish ‘virtue’ (arete).26 Aşıkpaşazade, devoted to the ideal of holy war, considered it
proper and necessary to trick the Christians into friendship and to treat them fairly so
as more efficiently to conquer them.27 And that French lover of wily foxes, the career dip-
lomat Philippe de Commynes, appreciated the Sultan as such: ‘Mehemet’ had been ‘a wise
and valiant prince who employed more wisdom and ruse (cautelle) than boldness and
courage’.28 According to Konstantin, it was through false oaths that the Ottomans took
the Morea, Mytilene and Bosnia.29 Further, they mobilised manpower from the Serbs to
seize what was left of Byzantium, before turning against them. Such was Mehmet the Con-
queror’s method: ‘He was very crafty: he deceived under [the guise of] truce wherever he
could; afterwards he paid no heed that he had not kept a truce with someone.’30 Without

23
Stavrides, Sultan of Vezirs, 73–5. See Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Apodeíxis historion, VIII, xviii, § 71; French trans. as
Histoire de la décadence de l’empire grec et establissement de celuy des Turcs, comprise en dix livres, trans. Blaise de
Vigenère (Paris: Nicolas Chesneau, 1577), 572; English trans. as The Histories, ed. and trans. Anthony Kaldellis. 2
vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2: 261: captured with his mother, ‘Machmut son of
Michel’ was made a page in the Sultan’s chamber, and quickly became a very important figure. See also Vojislav
S. Jovanović, ‘Novo Brdo, Mediaeval Fortress’, in Novo Brdo, ed. Vojislav S. Jovanović (Belgrade: Institute for the Pro-
tection of Cultural Monuments of the Republic of Serbia, 2004), 10–161 (55), but not adding much to Jireček,
Geschichte der Serben, 2: 208–9.
24
Memoirs, 31–3 (chapter IX). I owe this detail to my student Georg Buchbauer.
25
Memoirs, 29 (chapter VIII). Perfidia was commonly attributed to the Turks. As a cliché, it may have been relatively
novel and a specificity of the Ottomans; earlier Muslim enemies were spared it. See Claudius Sieber-Lehmann, Spät-
mittelalterlicher Nationalismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1995), 255.
26
Laonikos Chalkokondyles, Apodeíxis historion X, iv–vi, § 27–35, trans. De Vigenère, 701–7, ed. & trans. Kaldellis, 2:
434–45, where the Ottoman ruler refuses to honour the securities given by Mahmud Pacha, and beheads (or skins
alive) the trusting man. See Jonathan Harris, ‘Laonikos Chalkokondyles and the Rise of the Ottoman Turks’, Byzantine
and Modern Greek Studies 27, no. 1 (2003): 153–70. Stavrides, Sultan, 257, underlines that under Mehmet II, the Sultan
was not expected to be conciliatory and peace-loving, and left peace overtures to his representatives. This tension in the
public image may account for the frequent accusations of treachery.
27
Aşıkpaşazade (as n. 19).
28
Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, vol. 2, ed. Joseph Calmette (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1965), 337–8 (vi.12).
29
Memoirs, 111 (chapter XXX); 135 (chapter XXXIII); 139–41 (chapter XXXIV).
30
Memoirs, 87 (chapter XXV).
6 P. BUC

deceit, Mehmet would never have taken Constantinople, a statement the Report and
Chronicle hammers in twice, against (our) better knowledge.31
Konstantin takes the mosque sermon’s statement about Christian disunity to the level
of Christian providential history by recounting Serbia’s original sin.32 Once upon a time,
the Serbian king and the Bulgarian czar went to war, yet they chose to make peace without
coming to blows. On each bank of the river across which their armies faced off, each ruler
built a church. Matters would have stayed there but Stefan, the Serbian king’s son, in a
surprise attack took the czar prisoner.33 Saddened, the Serbian king gave a banquet, hon-
ouring the captive with a higher seat. The drama, however, was not over. Stefan (the future
Czar Stefan Dušan, r. 1331–55) suddenly appeared, and crushed the Bulgarian’s head with
his mace. Later, he strangled his father in his sleep.34 Despite Stefan’s ultimate remorse and
penance, patricide laid a curse on the dynasty. Stefan Dušan’s own son and successor had
two brothers; they betrayed him and went over to the Ottoman side. This defection
enabled Sultan Murad to defeat and kill the king (and he also did away with the two trea-
sonous siblings). The next Serbian ruler, a relative of Stefan Dušan by alliance, was Prince
Lazar. His rule was weakened by disunity, ‘and wherever there is no unity, it cannot be
good for anything in this world’. On the battlefield of Kosovo (1389), where Lazar
fought against Murad, some nobles served loyally,
but the others, looking through their fingers, watched. And through such disloyalty and envy
and the discord of evil and disloyal men this battle was lost.

Not that it profited the traitors. Bayazid, Murad’s son, had them beheaded (here as in the
case of Dušan’s son, Konstantin meant to give a lesson). Brought before Bayazid, Prince
Lazar, about to be martyred, admitted that ‘perhaps the Lord God has deigned to have
it so for our transgressions’.35
A second original sin stemmed from the Carolingian usurpation of the imperial office.
Constantine had fully translated the empire to Byzantium, taking there ‘all the Roman
might’ and reproducing architecturally the houses of Rome’s chief men. ‘And in these
times’, Konstantin goes on, the emperors were powerful, since ‘there was unity in the
Holy Church’. But then a pope and the Romans made Charlemagne emperor. This
discord provided Muhammad with the opportunity to compose the new religion and
create a sultan ‘in place of the Roman emperor’. Constantine had succeeded in making
a unitary flock, by reducing heathen idolatry to nothing, but now heathenism spread
and heresies multiplied. Thus at the end of times Lucifer will shepherd into hell a

31
Memoirs, 93, 95 (chapter XXVI): ‘The Turkish emperor would never have taken it with all his might had it not been
for ignoble treachery’; ‘Thus was Constantinople conquered through ignoble falsehood and their heathen truce.’
32
The myths of Christian solidarity have been put to rest by, among others, Oliver Jens Schmitt; see his ‘Introduction’
to idem, ed., The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans. Interpretation and Research Debates (Vienna: Verlag der Öster-
reichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2016), 7–44.
33
For Stefan Dušan’s reign wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, see John V.A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical
Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987),
286–344, and earlier Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, 1: 367–412.
34
For the demise of Stefan Uroš III, see the versions discussed by Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, 1: 365–6. Konstantin’s
version belongs therefore to a fairly widespread black legend.
35
Memoirs, 47, 49 (chapter XVI). The Serbian expression ‘looking through their fingers’ means ‘looking down’ on the
king, that is, not caring about him, being disloyal; my thanks to Dr Sichalek for this explanation. For the battle of
Kosovo, see the caustic reconstruction of the events and the debunking of the modern nationalist myth by Noël
Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London: Pan Books, 1994); earlier Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, 1: 119–22.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 7

multitude of human beings. Only action by the now shamefully inactive pope and German
emperor can turn the tide, and unify Christendom to procure its salvation.36
A substantial part of the Report and Chronicle is devoted to detailed information on the
Turkish enemy’s military forces and tactics.37 Along with stories about the dynasty, infor-
mation about Ottoman strength was a staple in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century histories
as well as in reports by travellers (such as the famed Bertrandon de la Broquière, envoy of
the duke of Burgundy).38 Konstantin, further, gave advice on the best way to confront the
Ottoman machine. He even asserted that during the campaign against Walachia he had
tested stealthily a trick – shooting a burning arrow at the camels of the army’s supply
train to start a stampede.39 Quantitative data about the Ottoman forces served to demon-
strate to timorous Christians that the opposing army was not ‘innumerable’, and could not
be easily replenished after casualties.40 Data and counsel were Konstantin’s passport to the
favour of Christian princes. He underlined his own importance as a source of intelligence
against the Ottomans indirectly yet forcefully, by mustering the image of the one Balkan
lord, Skanderbeg (George Kastriota, d. 1467), who gained fame at the time for successfully
thwarting the Turks. Skanderbeg too had sojourned as a janissary at the Sultan’s court:
Taken as a youth into the janissaries during the reign of Emperor [Czar, i.e. Sultan] Morat,41
he [Skanderbeg] scrutinised all the Emperor’s affairs in order that he might return to his own
land by finding the Emperor’s favour. … Later Emperor Morat his master, who had given
him this [his hereditary land] came and attacked him, but he could do nothing, and they
had to leave him until his death. For it is far easier for one who is familiar with the Turks
to defend himself against them than for one who does not know their customs.42

Thus as long as a janissary returned to Christendom with knowledge to offer, earlier apos-
tasy or dissimulation might be excused, and made useful to his brethren. Skanderbeg’s
career between Ottoman court and resistance spoke positively for Konstantin Mihailović’s
own trajectory, as he portrayed it.
So much for the information that the Serb peddled to the courts he visited – certainly
France, and almost certainly Bohemia and Poland-Lithuania. This dossier, made up of
serious military data and sometimes colourful explanations for Christendom’s weakness
and Ottoman strength, was Konstantin’s safe conduct and perhaps his breadwinner.
But how had he accumulated the information about the Turks? Otherwise put, what
had been Konstantin’s actual trajectory in Mehmed II’s service? Besides what he states

36
Memoirs, 55–7 (chapter XVIII). As a student in my seminar remarked, the chapter opens with a praise of the
strength and activity of the Timurid Great Khan, probably an implicit contrast.
37
As is often the case in late medieval crusade projects, see Jacques Paviot, Projets de croisade, vers 1290–vers 1330
(Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, 2008); in particular for so-called travelogues in the Ottoman
world, which provided such data to potential crusaders, see Almut Höfert, Den Feind beschreiben. »Türkengefahr«
und europäisches Wissen über das Osmanische Reich 1450–1600 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2003), 79–82.
38
Andrei Pippidi, Visions of the Ottoman World in Renaissance Europe (London: Hurst & Co., 2012), 36–44; earlier,
Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517) (Nieuwkoop: B. de
Graaf, 1967).
39
Memoirs, 169–71 (chapters XL–XLI).
40
Memoirs, 175 (chapter XLI).
41
Interestingly, Konstantin does not use the Turkic word ‘sultan’, or a Slav variant, preferring instead the term used in
the Balkans for the Byzantine ruler (or for a Slav king pretending to this level of rule). This could be a reflection of
Mehmet’s adoption of Byzantine titles.
42
Memoirs, 135 (chapter XXXIII), syntax slightly modified for clarity. For the real Skanderbeg, legends and facts, see
Oliver Jens Schmitt’s splendid Skanderbeg: der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan (Regensburg: Pustet, 2009), in particu-
lar 37–51 for his time at the Ottoman court and betrayal, based principally on much later information. Schmitt does
not indicate that Skanderbeg was a janissary, just a court page.
8 P. BUC

in the Report and Chronicle, one knows nothing about him. One can only read his own
words – and do so sometimes between the lines. Konstantin appears discreetly within a
collective ‘we’ in his narration of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453; then, as a
captive taken at the fall of Novo Brdo in 1455;43 subsequently as an observer in a
Serbian plot to assassinate Mehmet II; and finally in a series of military expeditions.
The first person is used in the description of the campaign against the rump Byzantine
empire of Trebizond on the Black Sea in 1461; for the Sultan’s expedition of 1462
against Vlad III Drakul ‘the Impaler’ (whom Konstantin calls Voivode Dracula the
Younger) in Walachia, the Report and Chronicle uses ‘we’ repeatedly. In this campaign
Konstantin belonged to the vanguard that heroically crossed to Danube to create a bridge-
head. Dispelling any doubt that Konstantin was a janissary, the story is worth citing in full
(with key referents in italics):
Emperor Machomet spoke to his janissaries, saying: ‘My sweet lambs, what is mine is also
yours, especially my treasures. Give me advice, for it depends on you. How could I cross
to the other side against my enemy?’ They answered the Emperor: ‘Fortunate Lord, order
boats prepared or made ready and immediately in the night we will risk our necks and
cross to the other side.’

The text is still here in the third person; but as is common in medieval historiography, it
switches to the first person:
Then the Emperor immediately ordered that they be given 80 large and well-rigged boats and
other necessities for shooting: guns, short-barrelled cannons, light cannons and hand-held
cannons. And when it was already night we boarded the boats and pushed off downstream
in the river so that oars and men would not be heard. And we reached the other side some
furlongs below where the Voivode’s army lay, and there we dug in, having emplaced the
cannon, and encircled ourselves with shields and having placed stakes around ourselves so
that cavalry could do nothing to us. Then the boats went to the other side until all the janis-
saries had crossed to us.

Note that the boats and cannons are both given to ‘the janissaries’ and belong to ‘us’.
Then having fallen into formation we moved a little towards the [Valachian] army, keeping
the stakes, shields and cannon. And when we had approached quite close to them, having
halted we emplaced the cannon, for they killed 250 janissaries with cannon fire. And the
Emperor himself must have been very sad, seeing such a battle on the other side and not
being able to do anything about it himself. And he was greatly afraid, fearing that all his janis-
saries would be killed. Then, seeing that so many of us were dying, he quickly prepared, and
having 120 cannon, immediately began to fire them heavily and thus we drove all the army
from the battlefield and established and fortified ourselves. Then the Emperor released the
other infantry, which is called the azapi, like our footsoldiers, to come to us as quickly as
possible.44

Dracula gave up opposing the crossing. Mehmet crossed, granted the bridgehead troops
30,000 gold pieces ‘to be divided among ourselves’ and gave to the janissaries who had ori-
ginated as captives in razzias their freedom (that is, freedom to bequeath one’s
inheritance).

43
For which see Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, 2: 202; Jovanović, ‘Novo Brdo’, 59–63.
44
Memoirs, 131–3 (chapter XXXIII). Christensen, ‘Heathen Order of Battle’, 82, notes the episode, but Konstantin is
not a janissary, just a soldier participating ‘with the janissaries’.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 9

While the Czech-born editor of the Report and Chronicle, Svat Soucek, doubts in the
main that Konstantin could have been a janissary, identification in this episode is clear:
‘So many of us were dying’, us, that is, the ‘250 janissaries’. And when he speaks of ‘the
other infantry’, therefore, Konstantin does not count himself as belonging to this ‘other’
but to the first infantry corps he identified, the janissaries. From the very introduction
of his narrative, Konstantin himself makes clear what he was. This author, he says (speak-
ing of himself), was ‘taken by the Turks into the janissaries at the court of the Turkish
Emperor Machomet [Mehmet II]’.45 Hesitations as to Konstantin’s status are, however,
warranted, for the author gives very little direct information about himself.
How did Konstantin Mihailović enter the Ottoman world? There are two beginnings.
One, in which ‘we’ (the pronoun is repeated) went to the siege of Constantinople as one
among 1500 horsemen pledged by the Serbian despot.46 Konstantin’s excuse here is that
the Serbs did not know that Mehmet was going to use them against Byzantium, and that
once on the road there was no going back, since the Sultan had given orders that should
they turn recalcitrant, they would be killed. ‘Therefore we had to ride forward to Stambol
[Istanbul] and help the Turks conquer’ it, ‘but the city would never have been conquered
by our help’ (an obscure coda).47 Taking seriously this ‘we’, Soucek wonders how Konstan-
tin could have been a mature cavalryman, given that in the next episode, Konstantin
describes himself as a helpless youth, unable to kill his Ottoman captors. Was he then
an assistant or minor?48 Soucek suspects that the author wanted to inscribe himself on
this momentous event, the Fall of Constantinople, without, however, bearing the guilt
for it.49 But other incidents strongly suggest that Konstantin may have been dissimulating
with regard to his participation in this key event of 1453. The following chapter in the
Report and Chronicle, in which the author presents himself as too weak for violent resist-
ance, is most puzzling. Konstantin’s city of Novo Brdo falls to the Ottomans, again
through trickery; 320 boys and 74 females were led away captive.50 They included the
author and his two brothers. Konstantin tells us that ‘whenever we came to forests or
mountains, there we always thought of killing the Turks and running away by ourselves
among the mountains, but our youth did not permit us to do that.’ So there was no
killing. Rather, Konstantin, with 19 others, escaped, soon to be caught and beaten. This
was not the high point of the drama, for martyrdom was soon to come – a martyrdom
in which Konstantin was both present and absent. Mehmet having made into chamber-
lains ‘eight youths of this same group’ of 20, they ‘agreed to kill the Emperor on night
watch, saying among themselves, “If we kill this Turkish dog, then all of Christendom
will be freed; but if we are caught, then we will become martyrs before God with the

45
Memoirs, 1 (foreword).
46
The number is half what, according to the Burgundian spy Bertrandon de La Broquère, the despot George (Đurađ)
Branković owed c.1433 to Murad II (Mehmet’s father): 3000 horsemen (chevaulx de service) commanded by one of the
despot’s sons. See Charles Scheffer, ed., Le voyage d’Outremer de Bertrandon de la Broquière, écuyer tranchant et con-
seiller de Philippe le Bon, duc de Bourgogne (Paris: E. Leroux, 1892), 185.
47
Memoirs, 91 (chapter XXVI). A late seventeenth-century Polish manuscript adds: ‘Yet our help was of little use to the
Turks’; see Lachmann, Memoiren (2010 edn.), 103.
48
A hypothesis presented as textual fact by Lachmann, Memoiren (2010 edn.), 33, even though the Polish version she
translated provides no direct evidence.
49
Memoirs, 91–3 (chapter XXVI); 218, n. 4 ; also noticed by Ménage, ‘Review’, 157–8.
50
Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 103 (II, § 46–7), does not mention any prisoners; to the contrary, all
inhabitants were spared along with their belongings. While this may be an artefact of his pro-Ottoman position, were
he right, then Konstantin’s story of his forced enlistment as a janissary is a lie.
10 P. BUC

others.”’ And martyrs they were to be, for one among the eight revealed the plot to
Mehmet. They were first tortured, then beheaded and, finally, in secret, piously revered:
‘ … several of us having taken the bodies in the night, buried them besides an empty
church.’ The group’s calamitous travails were not quite over. Since Mehmet no longer
wanted Serbian boys as chamberlains, he ordered six to be castrated; they were to serve
as eunuchs in the harem. One died in the process. Konstantin cursed the traitor Dmitar
Tomasic, later known by his ‘heathen name’ as Haydari, and honoured the would-be
assassins and martyrs;51 but he was neither martyred nor castrated. Let us tally: 20 captives
from Novo Brdo tried to escape; out of these 20, eight conspired, six more were castrated,
which left in all only six, including Konstantin, his two brothers, and three others, alive
and bodily entire.
In fact, Konstantin and at least one brother survived in fine form, and with the Sultan’s
trust, as a later episode shows. To set up this self-serving anecdote, we are told that Kon-
stantin’s youngest brother ‘was entrusted with the treasury, so that he went nowhere from
it’.52 One day as Konstantin paid him a visit, the two brothers had to hide in a hurry: the
two greatest men of the court, the vezirs Mahmut Pasha and Isaak Pasha, had come to
discuss in private how they would trick the Bosnian envoys. These ambassadors had jour-
neyed to Adrianople to request a 15-year truce; Sultan Mehmet kept them waiting while
mustering his army precisely to invade King Tomas’ lands. Isaak proposed that the truce
should be granted, but that the army should follow on the heels of the ambassadors as they
travelled back to their king. Here is evidence that Konstantin’s brother was not a small
man; that Konstantin was able to go to the ambassadors’ quarters the next day to warn
them and convince them of Ottoman deceit – as it turned out, without success – also
suggests that he was important enough to navigate the palace’s ingresses and egresses.
The events in 1463 followed: King Stephen Tomašević of Bosnia was attacked; besieged,
he surrendered with Mahmut Pasha’s safe-conduct (which Konstantin says was an oath
sworn on a fake Qur’an); the promise was broken and the king beheaded.53
The narrative of this initially stealthy Bosnian campaign provides more evidence of
Konstantin’s importance in the Ottoman apparatus. Mehmet gave him ‘50 janissaries
for the garrisoning of the fortress [of Zvečaj]’, plus 30 other Turks. Konstantin took
pride in this final episode of his Ottoman career; the Report and Chronicle’s preface
states that ‘he was called the kechaya of Zweczai (steward of Zvečaj)’ at the Ottoman
court and at the court of ‘the French king Charles’ (Charles VIII, r. 1483–98).54 It was
the last episode: besieged by the Hungarian king’s army, Konstantin held out for more
than eight weeks, ‘ceaselessly’ repairing day and night a wall battered by artillery. Once
the neighbouring fortress of Jajce has surrendered,55 King Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458–90)
came in person to the siege of Zvečaj, ‘and we also had to surrender [at the end of

51
Memoirs, 99–101 (chapter XXVII). Konstantin speaks of Raksan boys, not Serbians; he often uses the pairing Serbian
and/or Raksan.
52
Memoirs, 137 (chapter XXIV).
53
Memoirs, 139, 141 (chapter XXIV). Incidentally, when citing his own words to the Bosnian envoys, the author makes
himself speak of God, presenting himself as a Christian: ‘By my faith, you will have no truce … and we, God willing,
[will follow] after you on Wednesday all the way to Bosnia.’ For events, see Fine, Late Medieval Balkans, 584–5.
54
For the term kechaya, see Snežana Petrović, ‘Turkish Loanwords in the Czech Manuscript of Konstantin Mihailo-
vić’s Memoirs of a Janissary’, in Etymological Research into Czech, eds. Ilona Janyšková, Helena Karlíková and Vít
Boček (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2017), 339–49 (343), proposing ‘majordomo’. My Stanford colleague
Ali Yaycioglu prefers ‘steward’ (which I keep given its military sound); I thank him here.
55
See Jireček, Geschichte der Serben, 2: 323.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 11

1463]’, writes Konstantin, hinting at overwhelming force to which it is not shameful to

yield. ‘And I thanked the Lord God that I had thus got back among the Christians with
honour’ – the honour of having defended the position entrusted to him.56 Entrusted
indeed, and how! The Report and Chronicle indicates elsewhere that when Mehmet
gave a province to a servant or vassal, he always withheld its fortresses and placed janissary
garrisons there. The Sultan thus divided military rule, putting the key military assets – the
fortresses – in janissary hands. The conclusion is clear. Konstantin Mihailović was a
trusted servant.57 He was given control of a key military place, and he captained there
50 janissaries, a large number if one considers that according to him the standing corps
numbered 4000 souls.58 A cadastral survey shows that in 1455, the fortress guarding
the important mining town of Novo Brdo housed 50 Muslim horsemen and 10 janis-
saries.59 Thus Konstantin commanded in Zvečaj more, about one-hundredth of the
Sultan’s elite military corps.
A trusted servant, so was Konstantin ever a Muslim? He certainly disparaged apostates,
giving one example illustrating how ‘such heathenised Christians are much worse than
true-born heathens’ – a Christian monk who became an apostate out of lust for a
woman, and ‘insulted Christ’s faith’.60 Konstantin spoke of having returned ‘among the
Christians’ after the surrender of the fortress of Zvečaj. But what did this return to Chris-
tendom mean? He knew about Islam as it existed in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the
Ottoman court. He reported Muslim sermons to whet the appetite of the princely Chris-
tian audience he hoped for, and to highlight the Ottomans’ religiously-mandated expan-
sionism. A short generation earlier, George ‘of Hungary’, another captive who ended up

56
Memoirs, 141 (chapter XXXIV).
57
A mark of trust as well that Konstantin was in charge, for ‘two years’, of distributing to janissaries their dole of one
gold piece for a bow, a tunic, trousers and two shirts, Memoirs, 159 (chapter XXXIX); Soucek (232, n. 5) to this chapter,
thinks that Konstantin had to be a mere handyman given his short training; he could not have been literate in Turkish,
contradicting his remarks at 229, n. 5 (to chapter XXXIV), noting Konstantin’s command of janissaries by the end of
his career. As for literacy, by the end of the century at least, the Sultan’s pages learned their letters very swiftly, under
intensive training; see Imber, Ottoman Empire, 137. Christensen, ‘Heathen Order of Battle’, 82–3, follows Soucek,
calling Konstantin a ‘handyman’, and stating without giving arguments that Konstantin was not a janissary, even
though the source shows that he was at the centre of the Ottoman machine. According to Gilles Veinstein, ‘On the
Ottoman Janissaries (Fourteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)’, in Fighting for a Living: A Comparative History of Military
Labour, 1500–2000, ed. Erik Jan Zürcher (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 115–34 (128–9), unlike the
Cairo mamluks, the earlier janissaries received an extremely short training.
58
Janissary numbers: Memoirs, 159 (chapter XXXIX) (plus 2000 youths in training, who might be mobilised if needed:
157). According to a contemporary source (composed between 1473 and 1481), there were 5000 janissaries at
Mehmet’s accession (1451), and he doubled the number during his wars with Karaman 20 years later. See Imber,
Ottoman Empire, 269, citing Gyula Káldi-Nagy, ‘The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organisation’, Acta
Orientalia 31 (1977): 147–83 (166), based on Serif Bastav, ed. and (French) trans., Ordo portae. Description grecque
de la porte et de l’armée du sultan Mehmed II (Budapest: Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetemi Görög Filológiai
Intézet, 1947), 7; more recently Pál Fodor, ‘Ottoman Warfare, 1300–1453’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey,
vol. 1, Byzantium to Turkey 1071–1453, ed. Kate Fleet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 206–8,
based on the same sources, and in agreement. The early sixteenth-century payrolls did distinguish (as Konstantin
seems to with his youths in training) between janissaries proper and janissary recruits (placed in the acemi ocagi):
see Káldi-Nagy, ‘First Centuries’, 167. George ‘of Hungary’ (who was not a janissary) speaks of 30 to 40,000 gingitscheri,
but the elite archer troops surrounding the Sultan he evaluates as 5000 or 6000: Tractatus, ed. Klockow, 210–13 (VIII,
R9b.2–10).
59
Jovanović, ‘Novo Brdo’, 65–6.
60
Memoirs, 191 (chapter XLIII), lightly modified, and see nn. 57–60. Lust or love (for women but also for boys) was
one among many correlatives in reality and propaganda to apostasy (in the admittedly better documented early
modern era); see Eric R. Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediter-
ranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Tobias P. Graf, ‘Of Half-Lives and Double-Lives. Renegades
in the Ottoman Empire and Their Pre-Conversion Ties, ca. 1580–1610’, in Well-connected Domains: Towards an
Entangled Ottoman History, eds. Pascal Firges and others (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 131–49 (135–8).
12 P. BUC

returning to Christian Europe, had out of raw curiosity – or so he said later – learned
enough dervish lore to be consulted by devotees of the sect.61 Like George, who joined
the Dominican Order, the Serbian janissary Konstantin had to dispel suspicions of apos-
tasy, for it is likely that as a janissary, he had to convert to Islam.62 Thus to his Christian
audience, he had to present himself as a sort of spy, interested in how the enemy ‘governs’
itself,63 and not listening in out of religious conviction. Much suggests that during his
years of service to the Sultan, the janissary Konstantin had adopted Islam, at least on
the surface. An explicit plea for Nicodemism, the dissimulation of Christianity under a
veil of conversion, for the sake of self-preservation or worse, for career, would not have
pleased his audience.64 But as we have seen, Konstantin made implicitly the famous Skan-
derbeg a Nicodemite in the vignette that he devoted to him.
Konstantin may have known how men like George regarded the janissaries and those
among the renegades who had risen to positions of command in the Sultan’s war-machine:
… these reprobate and iniquitous men’s concord does not stem from some accidental and
external advantage [that they would seek] insofar as they are enslaved by this kind of
great fear to the service and the governance of that most cruel of tyrants. Rather, [it
stems] from some essential and interior reason and cause, despair of the good and obstinacy
in evil. They came to it owing to their sins as if drunk and from some devilish impulse tied
together and united. [This] by the Just Judge’s fury, whose cup of anger they drank, that they
might rush without pause and hindrance to the endpoint of their malice and full perversity,
and prepare a place for their lord the Devil and for Antichrist.65

George also informed the West that Slav renegades were so numerous that one hardly
heard, even at the Sultan’s court, any Turkish: ‘The whole court and the greater part of
the magnates is made of renegades from that nation (ydioma).’66 The most spectacular
figure among those men whom George saw predestined to the armies of Antichrist may
have been Konstantin Mihailović’s fellow citizen from Novo Brdo, the Grand Vezir
Mahmut Bassa. It is probable the paths of the two men crossed on more occasions than
listening to sermons at the mosque or the hatching of the plot against Bosnia in the
Ottoman treasury managed by Konstantin’s brother. Mahmut’s own brother, Mikhail
Angelović, was an important member of the pro-Ottoman faction at the court of the

61
George ‘of Hungary’, Tractatus, ed. Klockow, 22 (‘Einleitung’) and 408 (R34a.14, Conclusion).
62
A general rule, according to Veinstein, ‘On the Ottoman Janissaries’, 123.
63
By c.1600, spying would be in fact practised by many renegades, and as a way to regain Christian favour as well as a
passport back to the West: Graf, ‘Of Half-Lives’, 146–7.
64
In the Gospel of John, the Pharisee Nicodemus listened to Christ in secret (John 3), and helped at His funeral (John
19). Konstantin did dissimulate his Christian belief from potential persecutors and served the martyrs (the pages who
died as a result of the attempt to assassinate the Sultan).
65
George ‘of Hungary’, Tractatus, ed. Klockow, 214–16 (VIII, R9b.26–R10a.1–3). George goes on: ‘He [Antichrist] will
fill to the top the measuring-cup of their evil intention and take into himself the person of all reprobates and iniquitous
men; he will perfect fully the malice with which these people assaulted God’s Church, to the point that he will make
himself be worshipped by all as if God. Then the Lord Jesus Christ will kill him with the breath of His mouth, so that he
along with his members will feel the severity of the Punisher, they who disdained God’s patience, Who had so long
waited that they would come to penance.’ George was a Joachite; he cites Joachim of Fiore’s Commentary on Revel-
ations on the origins of Islam, Tractatus, 416–18 (Appendix). He dates the beginnings of the end of times, with refer-
ence to 2 Thess. 2, when ‘the harvest of all evil and wickedness, in signs and lying marvels, of which now we have an
abundance without count, began to be had’, from c.1280, to the beginnings of the Ottoman dynasty, Tractatus, ed.
Klockow, 156 (I, R2b.15–17),
66
George ‘of Hungary’, Tractatus, ed. Klocklow, 210–13 (VIII, R9a.23–5). Ydioma, like lingua, ‘language’, synonymous
here as often in the later Middle Ages with ‘nation’.
 JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 13

last Serbian despot, Lazar Branković.67 His trajectory mirrored in negative that of our
Konstantin. According to Aşıkpaşazade’s Tevārīh-i Āl-i ʿOsmān, the two brothers had
arranged together a truce between Serbia and the Sublime Porte. After the despot’s
death, in 1458, Mikhail entered a short-lived three-person regency. The other faction suc-
ceeded, however, and foiled the infiltration of janissaries into Smederevo.68 Mikhail was
captured. Ultimately he managed to leave his prison in Ragusa, and, still a Christian,
found the protection and patronage of Mehmet the Conqueror. This was a world of trai-
tors indeed.69 Konstantin had to pre-empt accusations that he belonged to this realm of
political and religious shape-changers.
Konstantin Mihailović was not a Philippe de Commynes.70 But like the Frenchman, he
had things to hide, and things to reveal in the service of dissimulation. The Serb sought to
accumulate credit and trust by giving information and warnings. The existence of the
Report and Chronicle in two Slavic languages, Czech and Polish, probably with a Serb ante-
cedent, now lost, refracts how the author tried both to sell this knowledge and his services
to two royal courts, Poland and Bohemia-Hungary, ruled by the two brothers Jan I
Olbracht (r. 1492–1501) and Władisław II (r. 1471–1516 in Bohemia, r. 1490–1516 in
Hungary) of the Jagiellonian dynasty, and to mobilise these two Christian kingdoms
against the Turks. Konstantin trumpeted a call to ‘their majesties the Hungarian and
Czech king and the Polish king’, two uterine brothers, in the conclusion of the
Memoir.71 That the Polish versions of the Report and Chronicle were based on the
Czech version suggests that Konstantin first approached the Czech Bohemian court
(and the first of the two brothers to obtain a royal crown, Władisław).72 The presence
even in the Czech version of ‘Polonisms’ suggests, perhaps, passage from one land to
the other.73 The text’s affected dislike for King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (d. 1490)
may have something to do with the conflicts that set Władisław in opposition to Matthias
in the 1470s, linked with his dissatisfaction at King Matthias’ lack of interest in a sustained
war against Mehmed II (to the contrary, despite presenting his Hungary as a bulwark for
Christendom, Matthias prioritised conflicts with the Habsburgs and Bohemia).74 Finally, if
there was indeed a Serbian-language manuscript, now lost, it may indicate further posi-
tioning on Konstantin’s part: the Report and Chronicle passed over a number of Serbian
compromises with the Ottomans, possibly to deflect blame away from an important
family, that of the last Serbian despot George Branković.75

67
Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror (1432–1481) and His Time, trans. R. Manheim (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1971), 153; see also 147. Laonikos Chalkokondyles, IX, v, § 24, trans. De Vigenère, 604 (erroneous); ed.
and trans. Kaldellis, 2: 300–3: ‘the Serbs approached Michael, the brother of Mahmud, who had been attending upon
the ruler of the Serbs, and chose him to be their ruler, appointed him, and entrusted him with the affairs of the city
[Smeredovo].’
68
Aşıkpaşazade, Tevārīh-i Āl-i ʿOsmān, ed. Kreutel (as n. 19), 214–21 (§ 131); Stavrides, Sultan, 93–100.
69
Structural analysis in Oliver Jens Schmitt, ‘Südosteuropa im Spätmittelalter: Akkulturierung – Integration – Inkor-
poration?’, in Akkulturation im Mittelalter, ed. Reinhard Härtel. Vorträge und Forschungen 78 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke,
2014), 81–136.
70
See, against Dufournet’s position that Commynes was a traitor, Joël Blanchard’s involved attempt at a rehabilitation,
‘Commynes n’a pas “trahi”: pour en finir avec une obsession critique’, Revue du Nord 380, no. 2 (2009): 327–60.
71
Christensen, ‘Heathen Order of Battle’, 132–4, noting also the disapproval of the anti-Hussite campaign of Corvinus;
Memoirs, 197.
72
See the discussion of historiography in Lachmann, Memoiren (1975 edn.), 46–7; (2010 edn.), 30–1.
73
Charles Zaremba, ‘Introduction philologique’, in Mémoires d’un janisssaire, ed. Charles Zaremba, 17–23 (20).
74
Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 40–6.
75
Frantz Olivié, ‘Notice introductive’, in Mémoires d’un janissaire, ed. Zaremba, 29–39 (31–9).
14 P. BUC

While Konstantin Mihailović’s world and that of many others in the Balkans and in the
wider Mediterranean was one in which, de facto, men and women came and went both
geographically and in terms of identities, with much grey in between,76 this was in norma-
tive terms unacceptable: there could be no ‘passing’ and sensitivity as well as indulgence to
human circumstances; seen through this lens, there were only apostates. Coming back to
Christendom, Konstantin was painfully aware of this normative black-and-white. And so
he had to paint in black-and-white.77 Narratively, he was keenly aware of traitors – his
Report and Chronicle abounds in them. And no wonder, for he was one of them.

Acknowledgements
My thanks to my students at the University of Vienna, with whom I have in several seminars ana-
lysed and discussed Konstantin’s Report and Chronicle. Special thanks to my colleague Oliver Jens
Schmitt for his advice (I am solely responsible for misunderstandings and omissions). Jakub Sicha-
lek of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften has verified the Stolz translations from the
Serbian into English, and here and there modified them. I gratefully acknowledge his help. Finally,
the article was finished under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Central Euro-
pean University and of Stanford University’s Department of History, which I also thank (in particu-
lar Stanford’s Ali Yaycioglu).

Notes on the contributor

Philippe Buc, after having taught at Stanford (1990‒2011), now teaches high and late medieval
history at the University of Vienna. His most recent book is Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror:
Christianity, Violence and the West (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2015). He is
now working on the comparative history of religions and warfare.

76
As underscored, among others, by Graf, ‘Half-Lives’, 148–9.
77
See Krstić, Contested Conversions, 51.