Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan Page A

Canada, I was given a booklet that explained it all. What most of us did not know was that much of what we watched with such respect was a creation of the nineteenth century. Earlier coronations had been slipshod, even embarrassing affairs. When a hugely fat George IV was crowned in 1820, his estranged queen, Caroline, hammered on the door. At Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837, the clergy stumbled through the service, and the archbishop of Canterbury had trouble with the ring, which was much too big for her finger. By the end of the century, the monarchy was more important as the symbol of a much more powerful Britain. Royal occasions became grander and were much better rehearsed. New ones were added: David Lloyd George, the radical prime minister from Wales, found it useful to have a formal ceremony within the ancient walls of Caernarfon Castle to install the later Edward VIII as Prince of Wales.
    One of the most famous of national symbols is the Battle of Kosovo, where Serbian forces were defeated by the Ottoman Turks in 1389. In Serbian nationalist lore, this was both an earthly and a spiritual defeat that contains within it, however, the promise of resurrection. For Serbian nationalists, the story is tragically clear. The Christian Serbs were defeated, through treachery, by the Muslim Ottomans. The night before the battle, Prince Lazar, the Serbian leader, had a vision in which he was promised that he could have either the kingdom of heaven or one on earth. A good Christian, he chose the former, but the implicit promise was that one day the Serbian nation would be resurrected on earth. Spiritual salvation or earthly? Lazar died on the battlefield, after he was betrayed by a Judas, a fellow Serb. His people, true to their faith, remembered the defeat and the promise and longed for a restored Serbian state for the next four hundred years.
    The only problem with the story is that not only is it much too simple but parts of it are not supported by the sketchy records from the time. Prince Lazar was not the ruler of all the Serbs but merely one among the several princes who were scrambling for power in the wreckage of the Serbian empire built by Prince Dusan. Some had already made their peace with the Ottomans and as vassals of the sultan had sent troops to fight against Lazar. It is not clear that the battle was an overwhelming defeat for the Serbs; at the time, reports in fact called it a victory. It may equally as well have been a draw because neither side resumed hostilities for a time. And an independent Serbian state lingered on for decades.
    Lazar’s widow and Orthodox monks began the process of turning the dead prince into a martyr for the Serbs, curiously at the same time as his son was fighting as a vassal for the Turks. For centuries, though, Lazar and Kosovo were symbols more of Serbsas Orthodox Christians and a people who had a common language than of an independent Serbian nation-state. The story was kept alive in the monasteries, along with much other Serbian culture, and in the great epic poems which were passed down through the generations. It was only in the nineteenth century, with the awakening of nationalism throughout Europe, that that story became so central in mobilizing Serbs to fight for independence against a declining and incompetent Ottoman Empire.
    In the first half of the nineteenth century, with history as their inspiration, the Serbs moved toward first autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and then full independence. The highly influential Serbian scholar of the early nineteenth century Vuk Karadžić standardized a modern Serbian written language and collected the epic poems. He also left a poisoned legacy by arguing that those peoples such as Croats and Bosnian Muslims who spoke virtually the same language were also Serbs. Ilija Garašanin, the statesman who did so much to shape Serbian nationalism and to build the structures for the new Serbian state, drew on history to point his fellow