The life of St Stephen Uroš of Serbia
Regional lords, including his own uncle and mother, began ruling their own territories independently in open defiance of him, and other noble families soon followed their example, so that by the end of his reign only a small remnant of his father's empire still answered to him directly.
Later memory gave him the name Uroš the Weak, a title aimed at his political and military failures rather than at any fault of character; those who wrote of him instead described an unusual personal modesty and a real gentleness toward others, qualities that did little to hold an empire together but were not forgotten by the Church that came after him. He was the last legitimate ruler of the Nemanjić line that had governed Serbia for two centuries, and he died in December of 1371. More than two centuries later, the Church looked back on him not as the failed ruler chroniclers had described but as a man whose humility had outlasted his politics, and canonized him as a saint.
