It could have happend. The key point was not the battle of Kosovo, but the reign of Stefan Dushan 50 years earlier.
Dushan was a man of tremendous personal force, a great soldier and conqueror, but no more than a competent administrator. He lacked the spark of genius that might have turned the Serbian empire into a real state. Also, he died young -- 48 or 49 -- so his work was unfinished. OTL the Serb empire didn't quite collapse at his death, but it went into a protracted period of confusion, from which it was only just emerging a generation later when the Ottomans arrived to clobber it.
So: tweak Dushan so that he's a bit less fierce but a much better peacetime ruler, and let him live out his threescore and ten. That takes us into the 1370s, at which point the Ottomans are showing up in force. If they face a unified, well administered Serb state nearly twice the size of OTL... well, who can say. But TTL the Serbs could be a European counterpart to Safavid Persia -- that is, a long-term wall to Ottoman expansion. If they stay strong, they could stop the Ottomans from expanding beyond Greece and Bulgaria.
If they manage it, then all eastern European history jumps the rails bigtime. The Hapsburgs never get Hungary. Romania has a chance to become a real nation in the 16th or 17th century, not the 19th. (And possibly a mixed Orthodox-Protestant one.) Greater Serbia -- which here is very roughly OTL Yugoslavia, minus Slovenia and Croatia but including pieces of Romania, Bulgaria and Albania -- isn't a /big/ empire, but it'll enter the modern era as a respectable middleweight state, roughly filling the Austria-Hungary niche but further south and east.
It's a stretch... the medieval Slavic empires tended to be rickety. But maybe not quite impossible.
Thoughts?
Doug M.
Dushan was a man of tremendous personal force, a great soldier and conqueror, but no more than a competent administrator. He lacked the spark of genius that might have turned the Serbian empire into a real state. Also, he died young -- 48 or 49 -- so his work was unfinished. OTL the Serb empire didn't quite collapse at his death, but it went into a protracted period of confusion, from which it was only just emerging a generation later when the Ottomans arrived to clobber it.
So: tweak Dushan so that he's a bit less fierce but a much better peacetime ruler, and let him live out his threescore and ten. That takes us into the 1370s, at which point the Ottomans are showing up in force. If they face a unified, well administered Serb state nearly twice the size of OTL... well, who can say. But TTL the Serbs could be a European counterpart to Safavid Persia -- that is, a long-term wall to Ottoman expansion. If they stay strong, they could stop the Ottomans from expanding beyond Greece and Bulgaria.
If they manage it, then all eastern European history jumps the rails bigtime. The Hapsburgs never get Hungary. Romania has a chance to become a real nation in the 16th or 17th century, not the 19th. (And possibly a mixed Orthodox-Protestant one.) Greater Serbia -- which here is very roughly OTL Yugoslavia, minus Slovenia and Croatia but including pieces of Romania, Bulgaria and Albania -- isn't a /big/ empire, but it'll enter the modern era as a respectable middleweight state, roughly filling the Austria-Hungary niche but further south and east.
It's a stretch... the medieval Slavic empires tended to be rickety. But maybe not quite impossible.
Thoughts?
Doug M.