Ghazi Murad : He won 37 battles and was martyred in the Kosovo epic

Ghazi Murad won in 37 battles, and expanded the borders of the Ottoman Empire 5 times what they were before he took power. The greatest battles he fought was the Battle of Kosovo (Kosovo), which was the gateway for the Ottomans to Europe.

One comes to mind when mentioning the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, certain princes and sultans, for their wide fame, such as the founder Othman, Muhammad Al-Fatih, Selim I, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Abdul Hamid II.

However, many of the rulers of the Ottoman Empire had great deeds and a good noble biography, they did not take their share of this wide fame, and among these: Ghazi Murad, or Murad I, or as he was called "Murad Khudawandekar", which means the owner of power.

Murad bin Orhan bin Osman bin Artgrel, is the grandson of the founder of the state. He was born in 1326 AD. He took power after the death of his father at the age of thirty-five, and in the year following his assumption of power, he conquered Ankara again, then opened Edirne and made it the capital instead of Bursa.

In the following year, Philip opened one of the vital centers in the Balkans, in order to make the city of Constantinople surrounded by Ottoman lands. With the conquests of Murad, the Ottoman emirate became adjacent to the Serbs, the Bulgarians and Albania.

The conquests of Ghazi Murad raised the fears of European countries, so Pope Urban V mobilized the Crusader armies that attacked Adrianople in the absence of Murad, who was besieging another city, but he returned to confront the Crusader army and defeated it.

The new king of Serbia at the time formed a crusade front with the Bulgarian prince against the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottoman army defeated this Serbian-Bulgarian army, and as a result, the King of Serbia and the Prince of Bulgaria signed a treaty with Murad, under which they commit to paying an annual tribute to the Ottoman state.

Murad I entrusted his vizier Timur Tash with the formation of a cavalry corps, and the latter conquered many countries, including Sofia, the current capital of Bulgaria.

Then the Ottoman Serbs attacked the Balkans in 1387 AD, and defeated the Ottomans, who were led by Timur Tash, in the Battle of Balochnik, which tempted the Crusader armies to target the Ottoman Empire.

Murad I directed one of the great Ottoman leaders, Ali Pasha, to move to attack the Prince of Bulgaria, and conquered several Bulgarian cities, which made the Bulgarian prince flee to Nikopoli, then returned to surprise the Ottoman army by surprise, but the Ottomans were vigilant, so they defeated him and captured him.

In 1389 AD, a crusader alliance formed between the King of Serbia, Stefan Urus V, and the princes of Albania, against the Ottoman Empire. Murad I joined this alliance in Kosovo (Kosovo), and led the Ottoman army himself, making his two sons Bayezid on his right and Jacob on his left.

This battle is considered one of the major battles not only in Ottoman history, but in Islamic history as a whole, in which the Ottomans defeated the Crusader army in a crushing victory, in which the leader of the Serbs was killed.

One of the results of this great battle was the start of the Ottoman rule for 5 centuries in the Balkans, and it was the beginning of the Ottoman incursion into Serbia and from there to Europe, and Kosovo (Kosovo) remained the metropolis of Muslim Albanians for several centuries.

From then on, Qusovo provided the Ottoman Empire with brilliant leaders, including Commander Hamid Pasha Al-Arnaout, and Ahmed Bey Al-Arnaout, and it became the first line of defense for the Ottoman Empire in Europe, and then it became a center for the third Ottoman army.

This decisive battle remained before the Serbs until the modern era, and its memory extracted the grudges inherent in the European conscience towards the Ottoman Empire.

In 1989, 6 centuries after the Serbian king was killed in that battle, the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, stood spreading his poison in a crowd of racist Serbs, evoking the atmosphere and memory of this battle to sharpen them against the Bosnian Muslims.

He reminded them at the time of the killing of their historical Serbian king in the Battle of Kosovo at the hands of the Ottoman army led by Murad I, and the result of this historical invocation of the battle was the most heinous massacres of the era against Muslims in Bosnia.

In the aftermath of this decisive battle, the invader Murad inspected the battlefield, which was filled with blood on a dark night in which the crescent and stars lit the place of the incident, and some historians attributed the shape of the Ottoman flag to this scene, its red color reminds of the blood that filled the battlefield, and the crescent and stars decorated the sky of that night. .

While Murad was inspecting the square, he found one of the Serb soldiers among the wounded pretending that he wanted to convert to Islam, so he hardly approached him until the Serb urgently stabbed him with his dagger, killing him, and he was carried, may God have mercy on him, to Bursa, where he was buried at the age of sixty-five, after a long journey from Struggle and struggle.

The most prominent of the benign qualities with which Murad I was known was his religious tolerance towards non-Muslims. Although the Church declared him an enemy of Christ and ruled that he was an infidel, the Christians who lived under his rule loved him more than they loved the Pope, because he treated them with tolerance and justice, the teachings of Islam that He owed it.

The Byzantine historian Halco Nedilas testified to this and said: "He treated his flock with compassion, without regard to the differences of race and religion."

On the military level, we find that Murad I won 37 battles in Anatolia or in the Balkans, and the area of ​​the Ottoman Empire increased 5 times what it was when he took over the emirate. In about 3 decades, is his reign.

Historian Ahmed Ak Kondez states in his book "The Unknown Ottoman Empire", that Murad I surrounded himself with a number of competencies that were a major reason for his success.

He created a new position, "the Military Judge", and delegated it to the scholar Gandarli Qara Khalil, who, with Qara Rustam al-Qarmani, organized the financial institution, and developed and elaborated the details of the Janissary Institution and the "Ajami Oglanlari" institution that had been formed during the reign of his father Orhan.

He also surrounded himself with a number of prominent statesmen known for their competence, such as: Ali Pasha, Timur Tash Pasha, Lala Shaheen Pasha, Saruga Pasha, Ornos Bey, and other prominent statesmen