ПОХОД КРАЉА МИЛУТИНА НА ТЕСАЛИЈУ
THE THESSALIAN CAMPAIGN OF KING MILUTIN

Summary/Abstract: The Vita of King Stefan Uroš II Milutin, preserved in three different redactions, contains intriguing notices of the king’s campaign against the “Wallachian land”, which was allegedly conquered, plundered and left in desolation. The notices are frequently omitted in the scholarly works dealing with Milutin’s anti-Byzantine campaigns of the late thirteenth century. The “Wallachian land” undoubtedly refers to Thessaly, and based on the text of the Vita, the campaign can be broadly dated between 1285 and 1289. Chronologically, it coincided with the death of the lord of Thessaly, sebastokrator John Doukas (also called John Angelos), who died before March 1289. It can be supposed that the campaign occurred at the time when Thessaly experienced internal instability, following the demise of Milutin’s former ally and father-in-law. The last years of the reign of sebastokrator John are shrouded in obscurity, and no other source is referring to the campaign. However, although the king’s Vita presumably exaggerated the success of Milutin’s armies in Thessaly, the historicity of the campaign should not be doubted. It indicates that, contrary to the prevalent scholarly opinion, Milutin’s full scale offensive against Byzantium did not stop in 1284, and that the warfare continued until the late eighties of the thirteenth century when the threat embodied in the lords of Braničevo on the northeastern borders forced the Nemanjić king to deploy his military resources to another front and probably to abandon some of his conquests to the South. This continuation of the Serbian offensive is circumstantially confirmed by a contemporary inscription in a Slavic codex, written in 1286, containing a reference to Milutin as “ruling in the Greek lands”. Although the king’s Thessalian campaign did not have a lasting legacy, it was the ominous announcement of the later expansion of his grandson Stefan Dušan, when this region was conquered and incorporated into the Nemanjić state.

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