Germans and Austrians take Novi Pazar

On 20 November 1915 troops of General Hermann Kövess’s Austro-Hungarian Third Army took Novi Pazar, the chief town of the Sandžak. A British chronology of the war attributes this to the Austrians, and rightly names the army that was conducting the advance here. According to the Austrian official history, however, the first to enter the town were Germans. At about 5 p.m. a rifle regiment of the German Alpine Corps, which was advancing in the vanguard, reached it. The Austro-Hungarian 10th Mountain Brigade entered Novi Pazar only the next day, 21 November.

Pursuit through the mountains

After the fall of Kragujevac and the capture of Niš by the Bulgarians, the Serbian army was retreating southwards into the mountains above the Ibar and the Kopaonik massif, towards the Field of Kosovo. Field Marshal August von Mackensen wanted to encircle and destroy it there. Kövess’s army was coming from the north, and alongside it the German Eleventh Army and the Bulgarians were advancing. The pursuit in the snow-covered mountains, on bad roads and with ever longer supply lines, was moving slowly, however. By 19 November the Central Powers’ troops had reached the line from Sjenica through Raška to the Prepolac pass.

That day Mackensen ordered the march on the Field of Kosovo to be speeded up. The German XXII Reserve Corps, which had reached Raška, was to send a detachment to Novi Pazar, about 20 kilometres south-west of Raška. Kövess directed the Austro-Hungarian 10th Mountain Brigade there for 20 November, reinforced by a German rifle regiment, and sent the rest of the Alpine Corps and the Austro-Hungarian 59th Infantry Division towards Mitrovica.

A town without defence

The column, which was moving along the valley of the Deževa river, met no enemy on the way. Novi Pazar had earlier been defended by Montenegrin units, but they had withdrawn south-west towards Rožaje to cover the roads to Berane and to Peć. According to the Austrian official history, 50 old mortars, 8 guns and a great deal of military equipment were captured in the local arsenal. During the night of 20–21 November the German riflemen drove the Serbian Užice Group from the hills east of the town, but it halted not far away, at Han Rogozna, on the road to Mitrovica. On 21 November the 10th Mountain Brigade entered the town, and the commander of the Alpine Corps also sent most of his units here.

Novi Pazar was a town with a long history. For centuries it had belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and its population was mostly Muslim. Under the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 Austria-Hungary maintained garrisons in the Sandžak, which it withdrew in 1908, during the Bosnian crisis. In the First Balkan War the Sandžak was occupied by Serbia and Montenegro, and Novi Pazar went to Serbia. Now Austro-Hungarian troops had returned to these parts as victors.

The capture of the town cut the Serbs off from one of their routes of retreat westwards, through the Sandžak to Montenegro. A few days later the Austrians and Germans also took Mitrovica and Pristina. As early as 21 November the Serbian high command issued the first orders to retreat behind the Sitnica river, and soon afterwards it decided to withdraw the army through the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic.