Late September 1436
The road out of Skopje fell away through fields shorn bare by two armies' hunger. Dawn was cold over the Vardar.
Constantine rode ahead, then turned in the saddle to take in the host: the camp breaking down behind him. Pegs came free; ropes hissed through raw hands; last night's embers were drowned until steam lifted and vanished. Wagons found their file. Pike-butts struck the ground in cadence. The drakos guns rolled forward behind oxen, slow and stubborn under the yokes. Mule teams strained and complained, teeth bared as leather tightened; the whip cracked, and sometimes meant it.
The powder wagons moved as if everyone felt their weight. Guards kept clear of the wheels, close enough to command, far enough to leave a margin. No open flame.
At night they strung a rope around them. It wasn't much, but no one crossed it without orders.
Behind him, Serbian banners lifted in the same wind as his own purple. The cross on Branković's standard looked stark in the morning, clean, hard-edged. Beside it the double-headed eagle and the blunt cross of the Ieros Skopos pulled at the air like heavier cloth.
Grgur rode on Constantine's right, close enough that their knees nearly touched when the road narrowed. He handled his horse well—no stiffness, no show. When Constantine glanced over, Grgur was already watching him.
Not warmth. Something tighter. Something measured.
Grgur's eyes kept sliding past Constantine to the Pyrveloi marching behind, the way their files closed without shouting when the pace changed.
He waited until a wagon clattered by and the road noise rose.
"Your… tagmata," he said, his Greek careful, the consonants a little too clean. "They move like they think they cannot be broken."
"They move like they've been drilled," Constantine said. Saddle leather worried his bruises. He shifted once and kept his eyes forward. "That's most of it."
Grgur edged closer and lowered his voice. "Serbia needs this. A core that doesn't break. A company of Pyrveloi, even small, if it must be small. Enough to make an enemy captain hesitate." He paused. "My father asked me to remind you."
Constantine kept his eyes on the pale ribbon of road. "As I promised your father and mine, after this campaign. Limited deliveries. Instructors. Terms."
"And if I ask now?"
"You're asking now," Constantine said. "And it's still no. I don't bind myself to vows on horseback."
Grgur stared at him for a beat too long, then looked past him again, down the road. When he spoke, it was softer, almost conversational.
"You have a daughter," Grgur said quietly. "She will grow in a world where Serbia either stands as a wall or becomes a corridor. Call it my fear. It will be yours."
Constantine thought of Zoe and pushed the thought away.
"Do not bargain with my blood," he said, voice level.
For an instant Grgur's expression cracked, then sealed.
"Fair," he said at last, eyes sliding off to the road.
A gust lifted both banners. Purple and the Serbian cross tugged against the same wind. Canvas snapped somewhere down the line, sharp as a slap.
"When this is finished," he said, "come south. Glarentza. Your sister will want you there." He paused. "And you should see your niece."
Relief flickered across Grgur's face and was mastered. "If the roads are safe."
"The war never makes roads safe," Constantine said. "We take what we can from it."
The days between Skopje and Velbazhd blurred into the host's routine—march and halt, sleep and wake. Camps were sited like geometry: latrines dug downwind and downhill; cookfires clustered under watch; pickets placed at measured distances so no one wandered out of the camp's body without being seen. Men drank in files, not swarms. Animals were brought in ordered turns. It didn't make them kinder; it kept them alive.
It also made enemies inside the camp. On the fifth evening, a man was punished for taking what wasn't his.
Constantine arrived, spoke briefly, and the camp drew inward without being told. Ten lashes were carried out—measured, without haste.
On the twelfth day, scouts returned with dust crusted on their faces and the tight energy of men who had finally seen what lay ahead.
"The Velbazhd plain," one reported. "No walls. Small town. No signal fires. Ottoman riders farther east, watching."
"Thomas is ahead," another added. "He took the town with the riders you sent and holds it."
Constantine nodded once. "Tighten the line," he ordered.
Velbazhd offered no fight. The plain opened under a thinner light. At the edge of town the fields had been stripped—stubble cut, fences torn, a few carts abandoned where they'd broken. Hisarlak hill rose nearby. The castle that once sat there was gone. The town lay open on the plain: low roofs, narrow lanes, no wall. A place that endured by being forgettable.
Roman banners already flew from the square. Men were posted at the roads out, spearpoints steady, muskets visible. Thomas had done the work without making it a chase.
He rode out to meet Constantine, helmet pushed back, sweat and dust streaking his face—pleased and irritated in equal measure.
"We took it clean," Thomas reported, dismounting. He gestured east. "A small Ottoman party showed itself beyond the fields. Scouts, maybe raiders. They wanted me to chase. I didn't. They vanished."
His mouth twisted. "They tried to pull me out of the town."
Constantine studied him a moment. "And you stayed."
Thomas lifted his chin. Pride flickered. "Yes."
"Good," Constantine said.
They rode into Velbazhd with Grgur beside him. The town smelled of another life layered over the old—cumin, lamb fat, smoke from unfamiliar hearths.
From one shuttered doorway came Turkish words, low and hurried, where women huddled out of sight.
Constantine dismounted in the square and began issuing orders.
"No looting," he said. "No revenge. Anything taken is requisitioned and recorded. Any man caught stealing will be punished publicly. Any man who harms a civilian will hang."
A few men shifted. One spat into the dust and didn't look at him. Another exhaled like he'd been waiting for permission to stop thinking.
George Sphrantzes arrived with clerks and folios, already in motion. A table went up under a tree.
"Get a register going," Constantine said. "Names first. Where they're from. Who came with the garrison and who didn't. Count the households. Mark who has sons of fighting age —anyone old enough to carry a spear, I want it noted."
George nodded and called for more tablets without looking up.
The captives were brought in, controlled, not dragged. Ottoman settlers, mostly poor families: those who had not fled in time, some found hiding in cellars, others frozen in their doorways as if waiting for their own soldiers to return and explain the world.
Constantine watched with a soldier's eye and a ruler's patience. Women with covered hair. Boys clinging to sleeves. Old men holding pride like a cane. A few men of fighting age—thin-faced, tense—were separated and placed under guard, wrists bound with rope.
One family stepped forward as George began the registration: a young woman holding a child against her hip, the child's face half-hidden in the folds of her shawl. A boy, seven or eight, stood at her skirt, silent as stone. An old grandmother came with them, spine rigid, eyes dark and unblinking. No husband. No father.
George asked their names in rough Turkish. The young woman answered at once, her voice hoarse with fear and smoke, words tumbling out too quickly.
When George asked the boy's age, the mother hesitated, then glanced to the grandmother as if permission were required to speak. The grandmother said nothing. The boy did not cry. He did not blink.
George's pen scratched on the tablet, neat and indifferent. Then he poured water into a cup and held it out.
The mother stared as if expecting a trick, then let the boy drink first. His hands trembled slightly. When he finished, she took a swallow. The grandmother waited, then drank too, chin lifted as if refusing any posture that could be read as gratitude.
Constantine let himself watch that only a moment before pulling his attention back to the larger work.
The town was "cleansed" without much blood, not through slaughter, but through uprooting.
Ottoman settlers linked to the garrison, families of sipahis, household staff, the ones whose presence anchored occupation, were removed from Velbazhd entirely. Not killed. Not enslaved. Just expelled, escorted under guard toward the south and east, away from the campaign's line. Their property was confiscated in the Emperor's name. Inventories were taken: sacks of grain counted, livestock marked, weapons listed, household goods recorded down to copper pots and wool blankets. Seals were pressed onto doors and storerooms.
It was devastation in a different language. It mirrored what the Ottomans did when they moved populations like pieces on a board, sürgün, uprooting as policy.
Roman soldiers billeted in houses according to lists, not whim. Payment was recorded where it could be. Where it could not, the debt was written down anyway, a promise made in ink rather than breath. Keys were collected. Doors were sealed. Names went into the ledger
By evening, Velbazhd was quiet. Constantine stood at the town's edge and watched the last escorted line of Ottoman families file out under guard across the plain. The grandmother from the table walked stiff-backed and did not look back. The young mother held her child tight to her chest. The boy kept pace beside them, silent, eyes down.
Thomas rode up, "They're watching us," he said. "I can feel it, brother."
Constantine's gaze stayed east. "Yes," he answered. He did not add what both of them knew: Sofia was already being prepared.
The road tightened toward Sofia.
Nights cooled. Mornings sharpened. Men woke to dampness on their cloaks and the smell of smoke. The landscape changed subtly: fewer animals in fields, fewer voices in villages, more doors shuttered.
Rumors came clinging and unwelcome: Ottoman officers ordering wells fouled before retreat; barns stripped, then burned; stores emptied to the last handful of grain. No battle, no siege—just denial.
Reports returned in clipped phrases, smoke from outer farms, fences torn down for firewood, roadside granaries already bare.
On the seventh day from Velbazhd, a local Orthodox priest approached under escort, a Bulgarian with a beard like grey straw and eyes that looked as if they had watched too many flags change.
"They'll burn it," the priest said without greeting, his voice flat as old wood. "They burn what they cannot carry. They salt what they cannot burn. And then they say it was your fault for coming."
Constantine nodded once, because the priest was not wrong. He handed the man a small purse of coin, a Greek Bible, and a slim text bearing the seal of the Ieros Skopos. By early October, Sofia's smoke was visible from the ridges before the city itself came into view, thin black threads at first, then thicker, then unmistakable columns that carried the bitter smell of scorched grain and resin.
When they finally reached a vantage over the city, the sight below did not offer the clean shapes of a fortress to take. Sofia was a crossroads town on old Roman bones, streets that followed ancient lines, fragments of antique walls that still stood in places like broken teeth. It was not a proper fortress city, not a single hard shell. It was many soft parts that could be stripped and wounded quickly.
Barns stood open and empty. Fences had been dismantled, ready to feed fires. Fields near the city looked "cleaned," as if a hand had swept across them and taken anything useful.
Smoke drifted from one outer quarter in a way that was too clean, too fast—dry timbers, not cooking. A roof collapsed inward with a faint, distant sigh. Another fire caught along a line of sheds.
A runner arrived from the forward scouts, breath tearing in his chest. "Majesty," he managed. "They're fouling wells. We saw men at the south spring, throwing sacks in, dumping something white. Salt, maybe. Or lime."
Constantine's fingers tightened on the reins until leather creaked. Salt was cheap and effective. It meant they couldn't use the wells.
He did not speak.
He looked down at Sofia, the stripped yards, smoke that did not belong to meals, and felt time narrow. His mind did what it always did when the world grew sharp: it began to count. Hours until night. Water that could still be saved. Men enough to stop a torch from becoming a city's death.
For a single heartbeat, uninvited, the scent of mint rose in his memory—Katarina's hand pressing it into his satchel, Zoe's warm milk-scented breath against his chest. It tried to soften him. He shoved the memory aside and went back to counting: hours, wells, men.
Below, Sofia was already burning.
Author's Note:
During the research, it became clear that both Velbazhd and Sofia in the 1430s lacked fortifications we often expect. Velbazhd, in particular, relied on open settlement rather than walls. Hisarlak Hill nearby had once held a castle that served Roman and later Serbian authorities for generations, but it had been abandoned by the Ottomans, who, during this period, frequently neglected or dismantled older fortifications.
The treatment of the local population reflects another historical reality. The Ottoman practice of sürgün, the forced relocation of populations, was a common administrative tool used to depopulate, punish, or reorganize newly taken areas. In this chapter, Constantine mirrors that logic, enforcing a similar administrative response, mostly out of necessity: population control as policy rather than vengeance.
By early to mid-October, Constantine reaches Sofia, where denial rather than defense shapes the Ottoman response. The burning of the city echoes what occurred historically in 1444, when Ottoman forces destroyed Sofia ahead of Hunyadi's advance. Here, that logic arrives earlier, but the pattern is the same.
From here on, hold fast! Ieros skopos!