(Cambridge Concise Histories) Dejan Djokić - A Concise History of Serbia-Cambridge University Press (2023)

A CO NC ISE HISTORY OF SER B I A
This accessible and engaging book covers the full span of

Serbia’s history, from the sixth-century Slav migrations up to
the present day. It traces key developments surrounding the
medieval and modern polities associated with Serbs, reveal-
ing a fascinating history of entanglements and communication
between south-eastern and wider Europe, sometimes with
global implications. This is a history of Serb states, institutions
and societies, which also gives voice to individual experiences
in an attempt to understand how the events described impacted
the people who lived through them. Although no real continu-
ity between the pre-modern and modern periods exists, Dejan
Djokić draws out several common themes, including migra-
tions, the Serbs’ relations with neighbouring empires and peo-
ples, Serbia as a society formed in the imperial borderlands and
the polycentricity of Serbia. The volume also highlights the
surprising vitality of Serb identity, and how it has survived in
different incarnations over the centuries through reinvention.
Dejan Djokić is Professor of History at Goldsmiths,

University of London. He is the author of three monographs,
(co-)editor of four books and recipient of prestigious grants
and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Coun-
cil, The British Academy, The Leverhulme Trust, Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, Columbia University in the City
of New York and the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington,
DC. He is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of
the Balkans at Goldsmiths.
CAM BRIDGE CONCISE HISTORIES
This is a series of illustrated ‘concise histories’ of selected

individual countries, intended both as university and college textbooks
and as general historical introductions for general readers, travellers, and
members of the business community.
A full list of titles in the series can be found at:

www.cambridge.org/concisehistories
A CONCISE HISTORY OF
SERBIA
DEJAN DJOKIĆ
Goldsmiths, University of London
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107028388
doi: 10.1017/9781139236140
© Dejan Djokić 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2023
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Djokić, Dejan, author.
Title: A concise history of Serbia / Dejan Djokić, Goldsmiths,
University of London.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge
University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge concise histories | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022025384 | ISBN 9781107028388 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781107630215 (paperback) | ISBN 9781139236140 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Serbia – History.
Classification: LCC DR1965 .D58 2023 | DDC 949.71–dc23/eng/20220527
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025384
isbn 978-1-107-02838-8 Hardback
isbn 978-1-107-63021-5 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material included in
this book. The publishers would be grateful for any omissions brought to their
notice for acknowledgement in future editions of the book.
For my mother
C ONTENTS
List of Figures page viii

List of Maps xi
List of Tables xii
List of Boxes xiii
Acknowledgements xiv
List of Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
1 Migration (up to c.1150) 50
2 Empire (c.1170–1459) 83
3 Borderland (1450–1800) 140
4 Revolution (1788–1858) 204
5 Independence (1860–1914) 275
6 War and Interwar (1914–1944) 332
7 Federation to Fragmentation (1945–1990) 412
8 Ruin and Recovery (after 1990) 464
Further Reading 534

Index 541
vii
FIGURES
1.1 Remnants of the medieval town of Ras,

south-western Serbia page 70
2.1 St Sava and St Simeon (Stefan Nemanja), c.1314,
King’s Church, Studenica Monastery, south-western
Serbia93
2.2 (a) The Sopoćani Monastery (built 1259–70)
and (b) The Gračanica Monastery (built 1321) 103
2.3 Alphonse Mucha, The Coronation of Serbian Tsar
Stefan Dušan as East Roman Emperor (1926) 113
3.1 The Coat of Arms of the ‘Turkish Empire’, Konrad
Grünenberg of Constance (c.1483) 147
3.2 Paja Jovanović, Migration of the Serbs (c.1896) 179
4.1 The Orašac Assembly (1804), a nineteenth-century
illustration by an unknown author 217
4.2 Dositej Obradović, lithograph by Anastas
Jovanović, 1852 236
4.3 Vuk Karadžić, lithograph by an unknown author,
c.1850237
4.4 Portrait of Prince Miloš Obrenović by Josef Brandt,
probably painted in Constantinople/Istanbul, 1835 252
4.5 Princess Persida Karadjordjević (1813–73), consort
of Prince Aleksandar. Portrait by Uroš Knežević,
1855261
4.6 Pavle Simić, Serbian National Assembly, 1 May 1848
(1848)266
5.1 Prince Mihailo Obrenović, c.1850 279
5.2 Draga Ljočić (1855–1926), Serbia’s first female
doctor296
5.3 Serbian peasants from the Belgrade district, Serbia 318
viii
List of Figures
5.4 Young girls dressed as soldiers in the Serbian army at

a Purim Party, Belgrade, early twentieth century 328
6.1 Nikola Pašić, Prime Minister of Serbia,
23 July 1914 347
6.2 Civilians fleeing the Habsburg army invasion
of Serbia, c.1914 351
6.3 A Serbian soldier being shaved in a trench by one of
his comrades at the Macedonian front, c.1916 357
6.4 Zenit, No. 17–18, September–October 1922,
cover design El Lissitzky 374
6.5 Milena Pavlović Barilli, self-portrait, 1938 375
6.6 King Aleksandar [Karadjordjević] (1888–1934)
and Queen Marie of Yugoslavia (1900–61) attend the
unveiling of a sculpture on Armistice Day in Belgrade,
created as a tribute to France by sculptor Ivan
Meštrović, 11 November 1930 385
6.7 Hitler’s birthday present, 1941 395
6.8 The Partisan leadership, Jajce, Bosnia, November
1943: Ivo Lola Ribar, Aleksandar Ranković,
Milovan Djilas, Tito, Sreten Žujović, Andrija
Hebrang, Moša Pijade and Edvard Kardelj 407
6.9 General Mihailović between two Allied officers,
Colonel Bailey and Brigadier Armstrong, eastern
Bosnia?, c.1942–43 409
7.1 (a) Coat of arms of Socialist Republic of Serbia
(1947–92). (b) Coat of arms of the Principality
of Serbia (1835–82) 423
7.2 Jovanka Broz, Tito and President Nasser of Egypt,
Belgrade, 1961 432
7.3 Film director Želimir Žilnik and actress Milja
Vujanović, the Berlin film festival, 1969 438
7.4 Post-punk band Šarlo akrobata performing
at the Student Cultural Centre, Belgrade,
November 1980 448
ix
List of Figures
7.5 Slobodan Milošević faces a crowd of cameramen

and photographers on 17 October 1988 in Belgrade
prior to the opening session of the party
plenum meeting 460
7.6 Ethnic Albanians pray in front of coffin of a young
man killed during demonstrations on 2 February
1990 in Podujevo, Kosovo 460
8.1 Anti-government protests, Belgrade, 9 March 1991 473
8.2 Women in Black, anti-war demonstrations,
Belgrade, 1992 476
8.3 Serb reservists return from the Croatian front,
December 1991 487
8.4 Croatian Serb refugees wait for a train in Bijeljina,
north-east Bosnia, August 1995 499
8.5 Citizens of Belgrade queue for free bread distributed
by the state, 6 January 1994 (the Orthodox
Christmas Eve) 503
8.6 Vojislav Koštunica and Zoran Djindjić, celebrating
election victory, Belgrade, 27 September 2000 515
8.7 President Aleksandar Vučić walks in front of a
23-metre-tall statue to Grand Župan Stefan Nemanja
unveiled in Belgrade on 27 January 2021
(St Sava Day) 526
8.8 Festival goers leave after day three of the Exit Festival
at the Petrovaradin Fortress, Novi Sad,
11 July 2021 531
x
M A PS
0.1 Serbia and its neighbours in 2022page 4

1.1 Probable borders of ‘Baptized Serbia’ and its
neighbours, c.950 71
2.1 Serbia under the Nemanjić dynasty, late twelfth
to mid-fourteenth centuries 89
3.1 Habsburg Military Border, late eighteenth century 150
3.2 Jurisdiction of the Serbian (Peć) Patriarchate,
mid-seventeenth century 174
5.1 Serbia’s territorial expansion, 1804–1913 329
6.1 The formation of Yugoslavia in 1918 361
6.2 Yugoslavia’s administrative division, 1929–41 381
6.3 Axis occupation and partition of Yugoslavia
in the Second World War 398
7.1 Administrative and ‘ethnic’ boundaries of
Yugoslavia’s republics and provinces, 1945–91 415
xi
TA BLES
4.1 Population of Serbia, 1815–1874 page 241

6.1 Population of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes by ethnicity, 1921 363
xii
B OXES
2.1 Raška or Serbia? page 85

6.1 Yugoslavia’s war deaths, 1941–45 411
xiii
AC K NOWLEDGEM EN T S
I would not have written this book without Elizabeth Friend-

Smith, my Cambridge University Press editor. Liz commissioned
the book, having persuaded me I was the person to write it, and
then patiently supported me throughout the manuscript comple-
tion, which took longer than either of us had planned. I should like
to thank four anonymous readers commissioned by Cambridge
University Press for their comments and suggestions on an early
outline and the final manuscript. Late Stevan K. Pavlowitch
encouraged me to take on the project when I doubted I was up to
it, as did Richard Clogg, whose history of Greece remains one of
the best books in the series in which this book appears. The origi-
nal research and writing would not have been possible without the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Experienced
Researchers that I held at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2015–16.
It was at the same institution where I completed the manuscript
in 2020–21. Hannes Grandits was a generous host during my both
stays at his Chair for South-East European History at Humboldt
University, home to a stimulating community of early career
scholars and of the Berlin Colloquium for South-East European
History, where I presented my research in progress. Hannes read
the final draft and made numerous helpful and reassuring com-
ments. Nada Zečević read the medieval and early modern chap-
ters, selflessly sharing her knowledge about pre-modern Balkans
and Europe. I am grateful to Veljko Vujačić, whose comments and
suggestions improved the introduction and the ‘modern’ chapters.
Last but not least, Jasna Dragović-Soso made many helpful sug-
gestions on the final chapter.
I should like to thank Lucy Riall, Tom Buchanan and Martin
Conway for inviting me to present preliminary thoughts about a
xiv
Acknowledgements
book I had yet to begin writing at, respectively, Department of

History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence
and Modern European History seminar at Oxford University. A
number of colleagues and friends have encouraged me to write and
persevere with this book, shared their knowledge and sources, and
helped me understand Serbia in broader contexts. They include,
in alphabetical order: Catherine Baker, Mile Bjelajac, Xavier
Bougarel, Marie-Janine Calic, Cathie Carmichael, Nathalie
Clayer, Dragan Cvetković, Aleksa Djilas, Emir O. Filipović,
Christian Goeschel, Vesna Goldsworthy, Dejan Jović, Pieter
M. Judson, Predrag J. Marković, Milan Nikolić, Jan Plamper,
Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Lucy Riall, late Nobuhiro Shiba,
Naoko Shimazu, Peter Siani-Davies, Danilo Šarenac, Ana Stolić,
Milan Ristović, Milica Uvalić, late Ljubinka Trgovčević and Tara
Zahra. Needless to say, I bear sole responsibility for the book’s
content, including any errors of fact or interpretation.
Apart from my home and university offices in Berlin and
London, most of the research and writing took place at the
British Library, London and Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (Berlin State
Library) (mainly the West building). I would like to thank the
helpful, in their own different ‘London’ and ‘Berlin ways’, staff
of these two incredible institutions. I am also grateful to the staff
of the Archives of Yugoslavia, Belgrade; Jacob-und-Wilhelm-
Grimm-Zentrum and Zweigbibliothek Fremdsprachliche
Philologien (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Centre University
Library and Foreign Languages and Literatures Branch Library),
both Humboldt University of Berlin; School of Slavonic and East
European Studies Library, University College London; and to
Wayne Kempton of Archives of the Episcopal Diocese of New
York. Special thanks to Goranka Matić, Serbia’s foremost pho-
tographer, who generously granted permission to use photographs
from her private collection, and also to the following persons
and institutions for their help in obtaining images reproduced in
the book: Simona Benyamini, The Oster Visual Documentation
xv
Acknowledgements
Center, ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv; Angelika

Betz and Alisa Fowler, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian
State Library), Munich; Jelena Jovanović-Simić, Museum of the
Serbian Medical Society, Belgrade; Nemanja Kalezić, National
Library of Serbia, Belgrade; Slobodan Mandić, Historical Archives
of Belgrade; Ivana Pantelić, Institute of Contemporary History,
Belgrade; Borislav Radanović, Matica srpska Gallery, Novi Sad;
Archimandrite Tihon (Rakićević), Studenica Monastery, Serbia;
and Helmut Selzer, Wien Museum, Vienna. History Department
at Goldsmiths generously funded image reproduction costs.
Jonna, Simon and Lia have been with me for almost as long as
this project. I hope they will be pleased when I present them with
a copy of the book and thus finally answer Lia’s question ‘Dejan,
why did you come home so late?!’, asked repeatedly when I was
making the final push. They have provided me with a home at the
time I did not think I would find it and have somehow remained
with me despite my being at times intolerable while working on
this manuscript (at least I would like to think the book was to
blame).
My family back in Serbia remains the foundation of everything
I do, even if they may not always realize how grateful I am to them
because I have been so absent for so long. I know that not all of
them will like the book. One reader will, I am sure, have no objec-
tions – my mother Desanka Djokić (née Obrenović), to whom I
dedicate the book. Apart from never failing to provide love and
support, she taught me, without perhaps realising it, that we all
have one mother and that she is neither the nation nor the state.
What an incredible gift, and not just for a historian. Хвала мама.
xvi
A BBREVIA TIONS
DAI Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando

Imperio, Greek text ed. by Gy. Moravcsik,
translated by R. J. H. Jenkins, Dumbarton Oaks,
Washington, DC, 1967
DokKSHS Dokumenti o postanku Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata
i Slovenaca 1914–1919, compiled by F. Šišić,
Zagreb, 1920
DokSPKS Dokumenti o spoljnoj politici kraljevine Srbije,
vol. VII-2, Belgrade, 1980
ISN Istorija srpskog naroda, 2nd edn, vols 1–6/II,
Belgrade, 1994
VIINJ Vizantijski izvori za istoriju naroda Jugoslavije, vols
1–6, Belgrade, 1955–1986
xvii
Introduction
u
Where Is Serbia?
This should be, but is not, a straightforward question. In 2022,
an answer depended on whether one considered Kosovo, which
unilaterally declared independence in 2008, a part of Serbia or not.
The Belgrade government refused to recognize the independence
of its (former) province, and in this it was joined by around 90
other countries, including China, Russia, India, Brazil and five EU
member states: Spain, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Cyprus.
A slightly higher number of countries, including the USA, UK,
Germany, France and Italy, recognized an independent Kosovo,
but the former province of Serbia remained without a seat in the
UN. Whichever view one takes, two things seem undisputable:
Serbia no longer controlled Kosovo after 1999, while Kosovo had
little control over its mainly Serb-populated north, where around
one half of the remaining Kosovo Serbs live today.
The problem of Kosovo was not the only reason why the
opening question could not be answered easily. Since 1912,
Serbia has had at least four different territorial incarnations –
not counting the interwar period, when there was no Serbian
polity within the framework of ‘first’ Yugoslavia, and the Second
World War years (1941–45), because the Territory of the
Military Commander in Serbia was a German-occupied land,
albeit with a local, collaborationist administration. It is often
said that an average East-Central European could have lived in
several countries without ever travelling anywhere, and this is
also true of the Serbs. On 30 October 2013, Politika, Serbia’s
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
A Concise History of Serbia
newspaper of record, reported that Kalina Danilović, a house-

wife from southern Serbia, died at the age of 113. Because local
birth certificates did not survive the First World War, the exact
date, and probably year, of Kalina’s birth was not known. It is
believed that she married in 1918, aged around 20 and therefore
‘quite late’; the groom was six years younger. Around the same
time, the regional media reported the death, in Belgrade, of
Slava Ivančević at the age of 117 or 119 (depending on source).
If true, Slava – whose recipe for long life allegedly included daily
shots of home-made brandy and generous consumption of men-
thol mints – would have been one of the oldest people in the
world at the time of her death.
Subsequently the accuracy of these claims has been challenged,
but in any case, a person born in Serbia in 1912, on the eve of
the Balkan Wars, when Serbia incorporated Kosovo, Macedonia
(present-day North Macedonia) and Sandžak, and still alive in
February 2008, when Kosovo declared independence, would have
been 96 years of age. Even if they never left their place of birth,
they would have still lived in eight different countries. If the year
of Slava’s birth (1894) was correctly reported, she would have lived
in nine countries, spending only the final years of her life in an
independent Serbia. She was born in Bihać, present-day Bosnia-
Herzegovina, which in the 1890s was an Ottoman province under
the Austro-Hungarian occupation; and she died in Belgrade, as
one of tens of thousands of Bosnian Serb refugees during the war
of the 1990s, when Serbia was, together with Montenegro, part of
‘rump’ Yugoslavia.
The 2006 declaration of independence, from the Serb-
Montenegrin union, by Montenegro automatically made Serbia
an independent country once again, for the first time since 1918.
Much has been said about Serb nationalism, which, for all the
confusion between Greater Serbian and Yugoslav ‘projects’
during the late 1980s and ‘90s, was able to mobilize powerful
support among the population. It was both a destructive and a
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
Introduction
self-destructive force that, unlike the nationalisms of the Serbs’

neighbours, did not necessarily seek to create an independent
Serbia. Ironically perhaps, Serbia in 2006 in some ways resembled
the Austria of 1918 – a former core of a larger, multinational state
that became independent by default because everyone else had
declared independence after a devastating war.
Even without Kosovo, Serbia remains the largest and one of
the most multi-ethnic Yugoslav successor states, with a rich and
turbulent history and geographically a strategic location as a land-
locked country in the central Balkans, or South-East Europe,
depending on one’s preference, which exercises varying degrees of
influence over Serb communities in neighbouring Bosnia, Croatia
and Montenegro. Those parts of former-Yugoslavia not in the EU
(Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia
and Serbia) and Albania have been in recent years termed jointly
the Western Balkans – perhaps because the prefix ‘Western’ makes
the Balkans sound less ‘Eastern’. However, if joining the EU means
leaving the Balkans, then adding ‘Western’ in front of the Balkans
is unnecessary since, with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania
to the EU in 2007, there is no longer Eastern Balkans. Geography
is of course rarely free of political symbolism, and this is perhaps
especially true of the Balkans. The Balkans as Europe’s Other, its
Orient in the Saidian sense, has become a discipline of its own.1
Serbia borders Bulgaria to the east, Romania to the north-east,
Hungary to the north, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the
west, Montenegro to the south-west and Albania/Kosovo and
North Macedonia to the south (see Map 0.1). As Serbia’s Balkan
neighbours have joined the EU and NATO in recent years, or
M. Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, New York, 1997, is now a classic; cf.
1
M. Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’,

Slavic Review, 54:4 (1994), 917–31; D. Bijelić and O. Savić (eds), Balkan as
Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, Cambridge, MA, 2005;
V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination,
New Haven, CT, 1998.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
SLOVENIA HUNGARY
Zagreb
CROATIA Vojvodina
Sava R. Novi Sad ROMANIA
Belgrade ube R.
Banja Luka
A Dan
BOSNIA Srebrenica
AND Sarajevo SERBIA
Kragujevac
HERZEGOVINA M
ora
B
va R.
Mostar A Novi Pazar Niš

MONTE-
NEGRO Prishtina BUL-
Podgorica KOSOVO GARIA
ini R.
Dr
ADRIATIC Skopje
SEA NORTH
Tirana
MACEDONIA
ITALY ALBANIA
A Republika Srpska GREECE

B Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Disputed
map 0.1 Serbia and its neighbours in 2022. Drawn by Joe LeMonnier,
https://mapartist.com/
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
Introduction
exist as de facto western protectorates, it may be possible to

imagine that only Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its own
Serb entity, remain in the Balkans.
According to Serbia’s official sources, the country occupies a
territory of around 88,500 square kilometres. If Kosovo’s 10,887
square kilometres is taken away, the government in Belgrade
controls roughly 77,600 square kilometres, a territory similar in
size to the Czech Republic, Scotland and Nebraska. According
to the 2011 census, Serbia’s population (not counting Kosovo)
was close to 7.2 million people, comparable to Arizona, Bulgaria
and Paraguay, and slightly below the size of the population of
Hong Kong. In 2019, that figure was estimated at just shy of
7 million according to the country’s Statistics Office. In 1991,
Serbia’s population without Kosovo was 8 million. In 2019, the
UN estimated that due to emigration the population of Serbia
(including Kosovo) will decline by almost 19 per cent between
2020 and 2050. According to another study, Serbia (without
Kosovo) has experienced an annual decrease in population of 5.4
per cent per year between 2010 and 2020, due to emigration and
low birth rate; if the trend continues, it is projected to shrink to
5.79 million people in 2050 – a decrease of almost 24 per cent
since the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991.2 With 18.5 per cent of
its population aged 65 or above in 2015, Serbia falls just below the
European average of 18.9 per cent, and below countries such as
Germany (21 per cent) and Italy, which has the oldest population
in Europe with nearly 22 per cent of over-65s.3
2
T. Judah, ‘“Too Late” to Halt Serbia’s Demographic Disaster’, Balkan Insight,
24 October 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2019/10/24/too-late-to-halt-
serbias-demographic-disaster/. Similar or even worse projections exist for
other Balkan countries, including EU member states Croatia, Bulgaria and
Romania.
3
‘Population structure and ageing’, Eurostat, June 2016, http://ec.europa.eu/
eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Population_structure_and_ageing.
These figures will likely go down once the tragic death toll of the Covid-19 is
considered.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
Kosovo’s predominantly Albanian population had fought for

decades to achieve independence from Serbia, but many ethnic
Albanians continue to emigrate, seeking better opportunities
elsewhere, even though Belgrade’s rule ended in 1999. More than
half of the pre-war Serbian population of Kosovo – estimated
at c.300,000 – and tens of thousands of Roma have left the
province since 1999. These trends, combined with declining
birth rates in Kosovo – previously the highest in Europe – means
that its population is projected to fall from c.1.8 to c.1.66
million by 2050.
The main reason for the recent depopulation of the Balkans is
therefore not ethnic cleansing, but emigration to the West, often
of young and well educated. The migrant crisis in the Balkans
exists in more than one form. The arrival of Middle Eastern and
African refugees, who seek to reach western Europe through the
‘Balkan route’, presents Serbia with an opportunity to encourage
at least some to stay and settle, for example, in its almost depopu-
lated villages. Most would want to continue for more prosperous
countries of the EU, but it is possible some might choose to stay,
despite rising anti-migrant sentiments following an initial, sur-
prisingly warm reception of migrants by Serbia.4
The capital Belgrade is Serbia’s largest city by far, with close to
2 million people if suburban areas are included. Other main cities
are Novi Sad, Niš, Kragujevac, Subotica, Leskovac, Kruševac,
Kraljevo, Zrenjanin, Pančevo, Čačak, Šabac, Novi Pazar and
Smederevo; of these, only the population of Novi Sad and Niš
exceeds 200,000 inhabitants. According to the 2011 census (which
did not include Kosovo, whose largest city Priština/Prishtina
is home to around 200,000 people), slightly over 83 per cent
4
D. Djokić, “Wait, the Serbs are now the good guys?”, openDemocracy,
15 November 2015, www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/
wait-serbs-are-now-good-guys/, originally published (in J. Plamper’s
German translation) in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27 October 2015.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
Introduction
of Serbia’s citizens declare themselves as Serbs; the majority,

nominally at least, belong to the Serbian Orthodox Church,

whose jurisdiction extends into Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,
Kosovo and Montenegro – a legacy of history, as this book shows.
Orthodoxy, and a related tradition of slava, or krsna slava, a cele-
bration of a family patron saint arguably specific to the Serbs, are
important markers of Serb identity and tradition. The popularity
of religiosity and observation of main religious holidays do not
necessarily mean that most Serbs are deeply religious or knowl-
edgeable about religion they formally profess.5 Although Serbia
is a secular state, the Orthodox church often plays an important
symbolic role in the country’s politics, and so it is not unusual
to see political leaders – both in government and in opposition –
allegedly seeking blessing from the Serbian patriarch or another
senior bishop. As will be seen, between the sixteenth and eight-
eenth centuries, Serb patriarchs were de facto ethnarchs, that is
‘national’ leaders. In other words, there is a tradition of blurred
boundaries between politics and religion. This is even more pro-
nounced in Montenegro, where Orthodox bishops doubled-up as
ruling princes between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth
centuries, while in more recent times, the Metropolitan of Cetinje
had played a major political role in the country.
The Serbian church has dioceses not just across the Balkans but
also in central and western Europe, North America, Australia and
South Africa. The Serbs are a Diaspora people, and this is another
important layer of their identity – though not to the extent that
it is the case with Armenians, Greeks and Jews. Perhaps a bet-
ter parallel may be made with the Russians. Large Serbian and
Serbian-speaking communities live in the former Yugoslav ‘near
R. Radić and M. Vukomanović, ‘Religion and Democracy in Serbia since 1989:

5
The Case of the Serbian Orthodox Church’, in S. P. Ramet (ed.), Religion and
Politics in Post-Socialist Central and Southeastern Europe: Challenges since 1989,
Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2014, 180–211.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
abroad’, and, in smaller numbers, across the globe, because of

war, revolution and state collapse.
Significant and historically important Serb communities live
in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina (1,360,000 or 31 per cent
of the country’s population; Bosnia’s Serbs mostly live in its Serb
entity Republika Srpska [Serb Republic]),6 Montenegro (178,000
or almost 29 per cent of the total population identified as ethnic
Serbs in 2011, but nearly 43 said their mother tongue was Serbian)7
and Croatia (124,000 or 3.2 per cent of total population in 2021,
down from 581,600, or 12.2 per cent, in 1991).8 There are perhaps
146,000 Serbs in Kosovo today (close to 8 per cent of the popula-
tion), down from c.300,000 in 1999, according to Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) estimates.9
Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were displaced during the
1990s wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; most initially fled
to Serbia, where some settled permanently, while many others
moved on elsewhere. Large groups of ‘Diaspora’ Serbs live in
western Europe (especially in Austria, Germany, Sweden and
Switzerland), the United States and Australia, including descend-
ants of earlier generations of political and economic (Gastarbeiter)
émigré communities. A smaller number of Serbs has emigrated to
Cyprus, Greece, East-Central Europe and Russia.
Serbia is an ethnic nation state, despite its constitutional com-
mitment to civic equality of all regardless of ethnic background.
Prior to Kosovo’s declaration of independence, ethnic Albanians
6
[Official Statistics Office, Bosnia-Herzegovina], ‘Popis 2013. u BiH’, www
.statistika.ba.
7
Office for Statistics of the Republic of Montenegro, ‘Popis stanovništva,
domaćinstava i stanova u C. Gori 2011. g.’, www.monstat.org/userfiles/file/
popis2011/saopstenje/saopstenje%281%29.pdf.
8
State Office for Statistics, Republic of Croatia, ‘Rezultati Popisa 2021’,
https://popis2021.hr/.
9
‘Kosovo: Serbs’, Minority Rights Group, March 2018, https://minorityrights
.org/minorities/serbs-3/.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
Introduction
were the largest minority, who made up between 15 and 20 per

cent of Serbia’s population. A similar number of non-Serbs lives
in the rest of Serbia (without Kosovo). The largest ethnic minor-
ity among them are Hungarians (c.250,000, down from c.338,000
in 1991), Slav Muslims (c.200,000, many of whom now declare
themselves as Bosniaks), Roma (c.150,000, up from c.91,000 in
1991), Croats (c.60,000, down from nearly 100,000 in 1991),
Slovaks (c.50,000), Montenegrins (c.38,000, down from c.118,000
in 1991) and Vlachs (c.35,000), a stateless ethnic group whose lan-
guage is similar to Romanian. Some 23,000 people declared as
Yugoslavs in 2011, down from nearly 315,000 in 1991.10 There is
also a small but culturally significant Jewish community, histori-
cally strong in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Šabac, Subotica and Zemun.
Roughly 75 per cent of 2,500 Serbian Jews are Sephardim and
the rest are mostly Ashkenazim. The majority of Serbian Jews
live in Belgrade today, joined in recent years by Israeli entrepre-
neurs and a small number of Orthodox Jews who have moved to
Serbia’s capital. Since 2019/20, students enrolled at the Faculty of
Philology, Belgrade University, have been able to learn Hebrew.
Serbia was widely praised when in 2016 its parliament adopted a
law on the restitution of Jewish property lost in the Holocaust and
during the communist government in Yugoslavia. Much of the
rest of former-Yugoslavia must catch up in this respect.11
Serbs like to describe their country as the crossroads of Europe
and this, many believe, explains their historical predicament.
10
[Official Internet presentation of the Government of the Republic of Serbia],
‘Stanovništvo, jezik, vera’ [2011] (www.srbija.gov.rs/tekst/36/stanovnistvo-
jezik-i-vera.php); cf. P. Vlahović, Srbija: Zemlja, narod, život, običaji, Belgrade,
2011.
11
R. Shnidman, ‘Israelis to teach Serbs how to say “shalom”’, The Jerusalem
Post, 22 June 2019; ‘Serbia to Extend Restitution to Holocaust Survivors
Living Abroad’, Haaretz, 5 April 2017; J. Rock, ‘The Significance of the
Sephardic Language as a Source of Cultural Identification in Sarajevo From
a Comparative Perspective’, in S. Rauschenbach (ed.), Sefardische Perspektiven,
4, (2020), 121–36, 128.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.001
They see Serbia as a meeting place between East and West,

and a country that is at once eastern and western – a metaphor
wrongly attributed to a thirteenth-century Serbian saint in the
late twentieth century (see Chapter 2). Essentially, according to
this narrative, Serbia is a defiant victim of the Great Powers’ rival-
ries and interests.
Whatever one’s ideological view may be, the country’s geog-
raphy and climate have had a major impact on its history. The
physical map of contemporary Serbia (without Kosovo) reveals
a north–south river axis, formed by the Tisa, Danube, Velika
Morava and its subsidiaries Zapadna and Južna Morava. In the
west, the river Drina forms natural part of Serbia’s border with
Bosnia-Herzegovina; the rivers Danube and Timok flow along
the eastern border with Romania and Bulgaria (Map 0.1). Sava,
Danube, Tisa and Velika Morava belong to the Black Sea basin,
are navigable and connect Serbia with Croatia, Hungary and
Romania. The Velika (Great) Morava forms the aquatic spine of
the country, before splitting into the Zapadna (West) and Južna
(South) Morava. The latter connects Serbia with the Vardar River
valley in North Macedonia, and is part of a route that links the
central Balkans with the Greek port of Salonica. The Nišava
River, in southern Serbia, is part of another aquatic route, towards
Sofia and Istanbul, in Bulgaria and Turkey, respectively. River
Ibar connects Montenegro, northern Kosovo and south-western
Serbia, where it flows into the Zapadna Morava. Kosovo’s larg-
est rivers are Sitnica/Sitnicë, which flows into the Ibar, and Lab/
Llap, while the Beli Drin/Drini i Bardhë dominates a river net-
work in the valleys of Metohija/Rrafshi i Dukagjinit. Serbia is
connected to the Adriatic Sea through Montenegro, including via
the Belgrade-Bar railway, built after the Second World War.
Fertile land in Vojvodina in the north and valleys of the rivers
Sava, Mačva and Morava represent the main agricultural regions.
The further south one goes, hills and mountains become grad-
ually higher – from Avala, near Belgrade (500 metres above sea
10
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Introduction
level) to the Balkan Dinaric Mountain chain in the south-west of

the country, where the highest peaks reach above 2,500 metres.
The Carpathian–Balkan Mountains extend from Bulgaria into
south-east Serbia, where they are known as the Stara planina
(Old Mountain).
Serbia’s climate is moderate continental, with regional differ-
entiations; the mountainous regions in the south are exposed to
sub-Alpine and even Alpine climates. The country has been tradi-
tionally rich in forests, as the name of its central region, Šumadija
(‘land of forests’) attests. Particularly widespread are oak, pine,
beech, willow and poplar trees. Roughly 55 per cent of Serbia’s
territory consists of arable land, while around one-third of the
country remains covered in forest. The percentage rose signifi-
cantly after the Second World War thanks to a state-sponsored
forestation campaign in socialist Yugoslavia. According to inde-
pendent Serbian media, illegal cutting of both state- and privately
owned forests has been one of the most widespread crimes in
post-Yugoslav Serbia. Each year, hectares of forest are lost due to
this, but the authorities appear unable to prevent the crime. In the
north-east, there is a small desert, the Deliblatska peščara.
Serbia’s rivers are rich in fish, including trout and carp, while
wolves, bears, wild boars and a type of wild cat can be found in
Serbia’s mountains. Serbian farmers typically keep domestic cat-
tle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, chicken, turkeys and geese; live-
stock export, especially a local type of pig, was a main source of
income in the nineteenth century. The historical presence of
eagles, hawks and falcons is evident in many references to the
birds of prey in the Serbian epic poetry and heraldic symbols.
The country’s national symbol today is the Byzantine-style
double-headed white eagle with a royal crown, even though

Serbia is a r epublic with no strong popular support for the resto-
ration of monarchy. At the same time, the krstaš eagle (also known
as the Eastern imperial eagle) is nearly extinct, as are several other
animal species previously common in Serbia. The country’s rivers
11
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are as polluted as is its air. Some blame the NATO use of depleted
uranium ammunition in 1999 for this sorry situation, but Serbia’s
environmental record and investment in recycling is dismal.
In 2018, the government admitted that it invested only 0.7 per
cent of its economic output in the environment (by comparison,
other countries in East-Central Europe tend to spend around
2 per cent), citing lack of funds. In January 2020 – before the
Covid-19 pandemic reached their country – Serbs went out
on streets wearing surgical masks to protest high air pollution,
responsible for 175 per 100,000 deaths in the country.
Historical Legacies
Nominally at least, Serbia has been set more or less on a
pro-western course since the fall of President Slobodan
Milošević in October 2000, but the relationship with the ‘West’
remains complicated. Like all its neighbours still not in the EU,
Serbia formally wishes to join the Union. It has been a full can-
didate for the EU membership since early 2012, but the pros-
pects of joining any time soon are bleak and popular support
for the EU has been fluctuating. NATO membership in a near
future is an even more unlikely scenario, even though Serbia
joined the NATO-led Partnership for Peace in 2006. The most
powerful military alliance in history waged one war since it was
formed in 1949 – against Serbia, in 1999, as discussed later in
the book.
The government in Belgrade maintains friendly relations with
China and Russia – with the latter it also shares Slav and Orthodox
Christian identity. Serbia and Russia were the core republics of
former socialist federations, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union,
respectively. However, the Serbian Yugoslav and Russian Soviet
experiences were fundamentally different, and not least because
unlike Serbia in the case of Yugoslavia, Russia sought independ-
ence from the Soviet Union that, unlike Yugoslavia, broke up
12
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Introduction
relatively peacefully.12 Serbia, on the other hand, sought to reaf-

firm both its own ‘sovereignty’ within the Yugoslav federation
and, initially at least, to reverse an ever greater decentralization
of the country in the late 1980s and at the beginning of the ‘90s.
Serbia’s geographic diversity and complex historical legacies
are reflected in varied cultural influences: Byzantine, Ottoman,
East-Central European and Mediterranean. The Serbs are South
Slavs, who speak the Serbian variant of the former Serbo-Croat
language, also spoken in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and
Montenegro, and widely understood in North Macedonia and
Slovenia (as well as in Bulgaria and parts of Romania bordering
Serbia). Modern Serbia, therefore, is also defined by its Yugoslav
legacy. In common with the rest of Eastern Europe, Serbia is a
post-communist society.
Together with much of former-Yugoslavia, Serbia shares the
legacies of two Yugoslav conflicts. The first occurred in the 1940s,
when the original ‘Yugoslav Wars’ took place within the frame-
work of the Second World War and brutal occupation regimes
of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Serbia and Serbs played the
central role in the tragic and violent (second) disintegration of
Yugoslavia, in the 1990s. Modern Serbia may be said to have
been, for much of its existence, a postwar society: following the
anti-Ottoman uprisings of 1804–30, after the Eastern Crisis of the
1870s, and in the aftermath of the 1912–18, 1941–45 and 1991–
95/1999 wars. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 were in some ways a
prelude of the ‘Great Balkan War’ of 1914–18, fought within the
larger framework of the First World War. Relatively speaking,
Serbia may have suffered the highest casualties of all countries
fighting in the First World War, losing hundreds of thousands
of soldiers and civilians. During the Second World War in occu-
pied Yugoslavia, around 1 million people lost their lives, roughly
V. Vujačić, Nationalism, Myth and the State in Russia and Serbia: Antecedents of
12
the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Cambridge, 2015.
13
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half of them Serbs. The 1940s war was a complex, multi-layered

conflict. One of its key features was a civil war that broke out in
western Serbia in 1941 between two ideologically opposed move-
ments, the predominantly Serb Četniks led by a group of former
army officers, and communist-led Partisans, whose multi-ethnic
leadership also recruited mainly among Serbs in the early years of
the war. Deep ideological, regional and generational divisions, as
legacies of the wars of the 1940s and ‘90s remain. Following the
collapse of Yugoslavia, right-wing and frequently anti-Yugoslav
narratives have become louder and more visible; during the regime
of Aleksandar Vučić, they have become de facto mainstream. As
a result, a strong socialist and social-democratic tradition, which
long predates Yugoslavia, not to mention the heroic resistance to
Nazism and Fascism among Serbs, has been sadly marginalized.
Serbia shares the legacy of communist rule with all its neigh-
bours and the Yugoslav legacy with five of them. Two of Serbia’s
neighbours were part of Serbia in the twentieth century: North
Macedonia and Kosovo. Montenegro – which had united with
Serbia a week before Croats, Slovenes and others joined to form
Yugoslavia on 1 December 1918 – remained in a union with
Belgrade for further 15 years after the break-up of the Yugoslav
state in 1991. Unlike Kosovo’s secession from Serbia following
the 1990s Yugoslav war, Macedonia became a separate federal
unit, and Macedonians were recognized as a constituent nation of
Yugoslavia, at the end of the Second World War. Similarly, it was
in 1945 that Montenegro became a republic within Yugoslavia
and Montenegrins were recognized as a separate (from the
Serbs) nation.
While the Serbian government, and many Serbs, still regard
Kosovo as a constituent part of their country, nearly half of
Bosnia sees itself as semi-adjacent to Serbia. A close and com-
plex relationship exists between Serbia and Montenegro; many
Montenegrins identify as Serbs, or at least believe in common
historical, linguistic and ecclesiastical ties with the Serbs. A
14
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Introduction
canonically unrecognized Montenegrin Orthodox Church was

established following the disintegration of Yugoslavia presuma-
bly to cement the identity of Montenegrins as a distinct nation.
However, the Serbian Orthodox Church remains by far the
strongest religious institution in Montenegro, though not with-
out opposition within the country.
The Orthodox Church in North Macedonia had been part of
the Serbian Orthodox Church from the early decades of the twen-
tieth century until the late 1960s, when the Yugoslav communist
government enabled the establishment of a separate church there.
Its autocephaly was not recognized by the rest of the Orthodox
world, until in May 2022 the Macedonian Orthodox Church
was finally granted autocephaly by the Serbian Patriarchate and
the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Serbian
Orthodox Church had previously unsuccessfully attempted to
broker an agreement that would have seen the reincorporation
of the Macedonian church as a highly autonomous Ohrid arch-
bishopric, whose historical importance is acknowledged within
the Serbian church.
Whatever its leaders argued, Serbia was involved in the wars in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, where local
Serbs fought to remain in a union with Belgrade, as Yugoslavia
was breaking up. One of the main stated reasons for the Bosnian
and Croatian Serbs’ refusal to leave Yugoslavia and live in the
newly independent states was their fear of becoming a minor-
ity in the countries where the Serbs were victims of systematic
mass murder, forced expulsion and conversion during the Second
World War.13 In addition, most Serbs believe that their enormous
suffering in the First World War was inbuilt into the very foun-
dations of the Yugoslav state, and so found it hard to give up on
D. Jović, ‘Fear of Becoming Minority as a Motivator of Conflict in the

13
Former Yugoslavia’, Balkanologie, 1–2 (2001), https://journals

.openedition.org/balkanologie/674.
15
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Yugoslavia; they believed in a strong state – whether unitary and

centralized or federal. During the Second World War, much of
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of northern Serbia were
included in the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi German and
Fascist Italian puppet state. It was run by the Ustašas, an extreme
anti-Serb and anti-Semitic Croatian right-wing organization,
which committed a genocide against the Serbs, Jews and Roma,
and murdered anti-Fascist Croats and Bosnian Muslims as well.
The final Yugoslav war of the 1990s was fought on the ter-
ritory of Serbia, over the status of Kosovo, initially against
independence-seeking ethnic Albanian guerrillas and then also
against NATO, which intervened militarily on behalf of Kosovo
Albanians, who were exposed to systematic violence and mur-
der by Serb forces. The North Atlantic alliance bombed Serbia
and Montenegro between late March and early June 1999, when
Belgrade finally gave in. Ironically perhaps, a peace agreement
was signed in a run-down café ‘Evropa’ (Europe) on the Kosovo–
Macedonian border.14 Not counting sporadic bombardment of
Bosnian Serb positions by NATO aircrafts in the first half of the
1990s, this was the first time NATO waged a war. Also, it was the
first time since the Second World War that German troops, as part
of the NATO force, intervened militarily, in an area where its occu-
pation regime had been particularly brutal in the 1940s. NATO’s
military and western diplomatic interventions paved the way for
Kosovo’s contested declaration of independence in February 2008.
To say, therefore, that Serbia’s relationship with its immediate
and approximate neighbours – except for Greece and Romania –
and with ‘Great Powers’ is difficult would be an understatement.
However, as this book will show, Serbs (to the extent that their
In a further twist of historical irony, Prime Minister Pašić received Austria-

14
Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 while having lunch

in hotel-restaurant ‘Evropa’, in the southern town of Niš. That was the
beginning of the First World War.
16
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Introduction
and their neighbours’ clearly distinguished ethno-religious iden-

tities existed) have also enjoyed long periods of peaceful coexist-
ence and friendly relations with Bosnians, Bulgarians, Croats and
Hungarians; even the relationship with Albanians and, prior to
the nineteenth century, Ottomans cannot be painted in simplistic
colours. Either way, a history of the Serbs and Serbia needs to
be understood in a regional context as this book attempts, while
keeping focus on Serbia.
Serbia or Serb polities had fought against and had been subju-
gated by the Byzantine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Nazi
empires. During the Cold War, the main threat to Yugoslavia
came from the Soviet Union. As this book shows, the discourses
of traditional friendships (Russia, Byzantium/Greece, France,
Britain, USA) and traditional enmities (Ottoman Turkey, Austria,
Germany, Croatia, Bulgaria, Albanians), popular in Serbia and
frequently supported by some outside commentators, are too
simplistic. Even those Serbs who describe themselves as western
or western-oriented seem insecure about their Europeanness.
Serbia’s intellectuals often approach Europe uncritically –
depending on their ideology, it is either an unquestionably pos-
itive or a negative category, a symbol of progress and modernity
or of an alien, Catholic, north-western and ultimately anti-Serb
and anti-Orthodox world. Europe/West is therefore at once an
ideal and an enemy. Regardless of any regional tensions, many
Serbs are sympathetic to Arab, African and Asian countries. This
is partly a legacy of the Titoist era, when Yugoslavia was a key
member of the Non-Aligned Movement, and partly due to oppo-
sition to the US foreign policy in Asia and the Middle East, which
presumably reminds many of the NATO military intervention
against Serbs in the 1990s.
The Serbs suffer from collective traumas (as much as these can
be quantified) due to their huge sacrifices as well as victimization
in the two World Wars. Leaving aside for the moment the ques-
tion of their role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the wars
17
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of the 1990s, Serbs have suffered enormously historically. During

the twentieth century, they were subjected to pogroms and even
periodic threats of extermination (as in the Second World War),
even as they also came to occupy dominant political positions in
Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
Serbia was the only former-Yugoslav republic against which
UN sanctions were imposed during the 1990s, and against which
NATO intervened militarily. Serbia is also the only former-
Yugoslav republic that experienced a loss of territory, when
Kosovo declared independence. The Croatian and Bosnian Serbs
also declared independence in the early 1990s, but even Serbia
did not recognize formally their statelets, which were eventually
dissolved and reintegrated (into Croatia) and reincorporated (into
Bosnia), after international intervention.
Stories of epic battles and heroic losses turned into victories
are also an integral part of the Serbian national narrative. These
include the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, the Great Migration of
1690, the anti-Ottoman wars of the nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, the heroic resistance and enormous suffering in the
First and Second World Wars, and the most recent conflicts and
international intervention against Serbia. In modern times, Serbs
have been responsible for violence against their neighbours, dur-
ing the nineteenth century, in the wars of 1912–18, in the Second
World War (when violence committed by Serbs, especially
Četniks, against other Serbs was also widespread) and during the
1990s wars. However, anti-Muslim violence of the nineteenth
century or the 1912–13 Balkan Wars is on the margins of histo-
riographic and public debates. Serbia, as a society, has a long way
to go in dealing with its role in the break-up of Yugoslavia and the
violence that ensued. At the same time, Belgrade bookstores sell
eulogies to Radovan Karadžić and General Mladić (Bosnian Serb
wartime leaders) alongside books about war crimes committed by
Serbs in the 1990s.
18
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Introduction
Culture and Society

Serbia’s history has not been just a history of conflict and war.
One of the main legacies of its turbulent past is a remarkable cul-
tural and social melting pot, while pockets of cosmopolitanism
survive throughout the country. A curious visitor to Serbia today
would recognize an eclectic mix of Central and East European,
Mediterranean and Near Eastern customs and influences – in
architecture, cuisine, social interaction, life philosophy and every-
day life. Serbia, especially its urban centres, is in many ways indis-
tinguishable from a modern western, consumerist society. This is
the legacy of the late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century
modernization and the post-communist transition. First super-
markets opened in the 1950s, and today even smaller towns have
shopping malls, while card payments are typically accepted even
in remote village stores. Privately owned boutiques selling lat-
est, usually Italian or Italian-inspired, fashion have been common
since the 1980s. Foreign journalists and visitors have long noted
that Serbia’s youth are sometimes indistinguishable in appearance
from their trendy western counterparts. Wearing a well-known
fashion label and purchasing latest mobile phones is considered
essential, even if not many Serbs can easily afford them. They are
often forced to buy cheaper copies, sometimes provided by Chinese
traders, many of whom settled in Serbia during the 1990s, taking
advantage of the friendly relations between Belgrade and Beijing.
Not many readers of this book would remember that China
threatened to go to war with NATO after the North Atlantic mil-
itary alliance bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999,
allegedly due to an error. That said, western commentators some-
times obsess over Russian and Chinese influences in Serbia. Even
Belgrade’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was reported with
a focus on Chinese, and to a lesser extent Russian medical aid to
Serbia and potential implications on the country’s foreign policy,
rather than on lives saved because of the aid.
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Contemporary Serbia is a society of sharp contrasts and con-

tradictions, not unlike other countries that have experienced
transition from one-party rule to multi-party democracy, and
from state communism to liberal-capitalist system. Poverty mixes
with prosperity, while abrasiveness and borderline aggressiveness
meet extreme hospitality. Some of the coolest and hippest people
and places coexist alongside reminders of Ottoman and Yugoslav
socialist pasts. Typically, laid-back attitude can be infuriating,
even if it often produces surprisingly efficient outcomes. In Serbia
(as throughout much of former-Yugoslavia), things frequently
function through veze (connections) and exchange of favours,
from finding a place in kindergarten and school to enrolling at a
university, getting a job, skipping a queue in hospital, all the way
to conducting business and politics. Commenting on the same
phenomenon in Greece, one historian has argued that this is a
legacy of the long Ottoman rule.15 Certainly, cultural affinities
between Serbs and other Balkan peoples, including Greeks and
Turks, exist. At the same time, many Serbs are attracted by and
identify with Italian, and more generally South European, ‘way
of life’, especially concerning fashion, food and music. In com-
mon with Croats and other South Slavs, the Serbs are as much
if not more South European as they are East European – Balkan
and Mediterranean Slavs at once, one might say.
Serbia is a highly centralized state, with almost all p
olitical and
economic power located in Belgrade. At the same time, it was
the only former-Yugoslav republic with autonomous provinces,
Kosovo in the south and Vojvodina in the north. As this book
shows, both provinces were in different ways legacies of large-
scale migrations of Orthodox Slavs (but not just them) between
the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Vojvodina’s autonomy
today is as fictional as Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo. However,
R. Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002, 4.

15
20
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Introduction
despite a high degree of centralism, key political decisions con-

cerning ‘ordinary’ people are frequently made locally. For better
or worse, town mayors and local businessmen are often the ones
who determine ‘when it’s sunny and when it’s cloudy’, as a popular
Serbian saying goes.
Reality TV programmes and tabloid press (which make their
British counterparts appear almost high culture in comparison)
are hugely popular. At the same time, excellent theatre plays are
sold out months in advance, local playwrights and writers often
reach celebrity status that their British counterparts can only
dream of, and Serbia’s film and TV series production is arguably
the strongest in former-Yugoslavia. In addition to books by local
writers, Serbian reading public has access to a wide range of inter-
national authors thanks to a remarkably vibrant publishing indus-
try. The Prosveta bookstore – once the location of a bookshop
owned by Geca Kon, a Serbian-Jewish publisher murdered by
German occupation authorities in 1941 – on the Knez Mihajlova
Street in downtown Belgrade even had a dedicated section to
Japanese literature and culture.
Most Serbian publishers receive state funding, which enables
them to survive – one of the legacies of the Yugoslav socialist era.
Things have been changing for the worse in recent years, due to
budget cuts. Nevertheless, excellent bookshops stubbornly sur-
vive on high streets dominated by clothes retailers, betting shops
and cassinos, as well as numerous cafes and restaurants. Public
libraries throughout the country regularly host poetry readings
and book launches. The Belgrade Philharmonic, opened in 1923,
is internationally renowned. Serbia is a birth country of acclaimed
classical music performers (including violinists Stefan Milenković
and Nemanja Radulović) and composers (Isidora Žebeljan, who
died in 2020, aged just 53). Belgrade International Theatre
Festival (BITEF), founded in 1967 by Mira Trailović and Jovan
Ćirilov, has maintained its excellent reputation despite decreas-
ing state funding, alongside other cultural venues such as the
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Yugoslav Drama Theatre, founded in Belgrade in 1947, and the

Serbian National Theatre, established in Novi Sad in 1861 (then
part of the Habsburg Empire). Indeed, Serbia has a rich cultural
scene; practically every town in the country has its own film, the-
atre or music festival and a literary prize. Museums and galleries
are popular, and entry prices are relatively low and sometimes
free. ‘High culture’ remains both of high quality and affordable.
These are also legacies of socialism and Yugoslavia.
A start-up tech industry has blossomed in recent years. This
is partly due to young Serbs returning home from the West to
set up companies in an environment that allows more time to
develop business (outdated laws notwithstanding) than places
such as the Silicon Valley. There is also a tradition of inter-
nationally recognized technological innovation, at socialist-era
‘Vinča’ and ‘Pupin’ institutes (the latter is named after Mihajlo
Pupin, the famous Serb-American scientist and inventor, born
in Habsburg Hungary, who taught at New York’s Columbia
University). In the early 1980s, Vojislav Antonić invented
Galaksija, a ‘Do It Yourself’ personal computer and an afforda-
ble Yugoslav answer to Commodore and Spectrum computers
that were out of reach of most people at the time. Political isola-
tion and economic restrictions of the recent decades have forced
young (and no longer so young) Serbs to learn how to fix and
sometimes build their own PCs, so as a result there exists a wide-
spread, self-taught expertise that is arguably superior to that in
the more affluent West. In late 2019, slightly over 80 per cent
of all Serbian households possessed internet connection (a seven
per cent growth in comparison to 2018). This is comparable to
neighbouring countries, and only just below the EU average of
around 90 per cent in 2020.16
The data is for Serbia without Kosovo, where an even higher percentage of
16
households have internet. ‘Godišnje istraživanje o upotrebi informaciono-

komunikacionih tehnologija, 2019’, Republički zavod za statistiku,
22
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Introduction
Serbia might be described as at once a conservative, patriar-

chal and modern society, in which atheist values meet religious
beliefs, and where many are prepared to turn to fortune tellers
and sorceresses to seek solution to their problems. Traditional
societal norms coexist, and sometimes mix, with liberal and even
semi-anarchic values. Serbia is the birthplace of ‘turbofolk’, a
kitschy brand of music that combines elements of the Yugoslav-
era ‘neo folk’ (symbolized by Belgrade-based, Bosnian-born Lepa
Brena, real name Fahreta Jahić), with techno and dance music. It
was named by Rambo Amadeus (Antonije Pušić), a richly talented
Montenegro-born musician and performer based in Belgrade,
who was mocking the genre. Turbofolk music is usually per-
formed by highly sexualized female singers, who also regularly
feature in reality shows and help sell the scandal-filled tabloid
press (a similar phenomenon in Bulgaria is known as chalga). The
veteran of the genre is Svetlana Ražnatović Ceca, the widow of
Željko Ražnatović Arkan, Serbia’s notorious gangster and para-
military leader murdered in 2000 in a Belgrade hotel lobby by a
paid assassin. The genre is associated with the extreme national-
ism of the 1990s and regional, not only Serbian, macho culture.
Paradoxically perhaps, Ceca and other Serbian singers are popular
across the Balkans, including in Croatia and Slovenia. Some tur-
bofolk performers have in the meanwhile become gay icons and,
in the case of Jelena Karleuša (the wife of footballer Duško Tošić,
who once played for Portsmouth and Queens Park Rangers in
England), advocates of LGBTQ rights.17
At the same time, an underground culture has been flourishing
despite, or perhaps because, more than three decades of political
www.stat.gov.rs/sr-latn/vesti/20190920-godisnje-istrazivanje-o-ikt/?a=27&s=;
‘Digital economy and society statistics – households and individuals’, Eurostat,
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Digital_
economy_and_society_statistics_-_households_and_individuals.
17
Eurovicious, ‘Queer as Turbofolk’, a 3-part article at www.balkanist.net,
September–October 2014.
23
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and economic crises, wars and international isolation. Yugoslav

Serbia was home to a strong post-punk and New Wave scene of the
1980s, which featured groups such as Šarlo Akrobata, Disciplina
Kičme (whose London reincarnation Disciplin a Kitschme formed
in the 1990s), Ekatarina Velika, Električni Orgazam, Idoli, Obojeni
Program and Partibrejkers. The early 1990s saw the emergence
of a new generation of grunge and indie rock groups that toured
the country collectively under the name Brzi bendovi Srbije (Fast
bands of Serbia) – an ironic commentary on President Milošević’s
promise to introduce west European-style fast trains. Members
of some of the above-mentioned 1980s bands formed a ‘super
group’ that in 1991 released an anti-war track and campaigned
for peace in Yugoslavia. Belgrade-based Bajaga & Instruktori per-
formed in Sarajevo in July 1991 (during the war in Slovenia) at
a concert for peace broadcast by Yutel, Yugoslavia’s first, short-
lived independent TV. Music by bands such as Darkwood Dub,
Kanda, Kodža & Nebojša, Oružjem Protivu Otmičara and Plejboj
provided the soundtrack for anti-Milošević protests of the 1990s.
Djordje Balašević, a singer–songwriter, poet and actor, who has
been compared to Bob Dylan and Vladimir Vysocky, became the
symbol of anti-war and anti-nationalist voices in Serbia. His death
in February 2021 from Covid-19 provoked spontaneous scenes of
public mourning and grief across former-Yugoslavia unseen since
the death of President Tito in 1980. Indeed, with some notable
exceptions, pop and rock culture provided a rare space for critical
thinking and anti-war, anti-nationalist activism and progressive
ideas, channelled through the now defunct Radio B92.18
M. Colin, This Is Serbia Calling: Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio and Belgrade’s Underground
18
Resistance, London, 2001. The B92’s once flagship political show ‘Peščanik’
(Hourglass – the title of a well-known novel by Danilo Kiš) aired for a while
as an independent radio programme, before transforming into a website
(www.pescanik.net) that publishes critical commentary on topical Serbian and
international issues.
24
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Introduction
The ‘exit’ from the Milošević era was symbolized by a music fes-
tival of the same name held annually in Novi Sad since 2000. The
Exit quickly became one of the best music festivals in Europe this
century, regularly hosting the world’s premier pop, rock and hip-
hop artists. It is simplistically thought of as a symbol of a ‘European
Serbia’, where a more traditional gathering of brass bands held
annually in Guča, western Serbia, is supposed to represent ‘tra-
ditional Serbia’, even though it regularly attracts regional and
international guests and performers. Acclaimed Serbian-Roma
trumpet player Boban Marković and his band are among those
regularly playing at Guča, when not performing at venues such
as London’s Barbican. Marković has collaborated with classically
trained violinist Félix Lajkó (Lajko Feliks), an ethnic Hungarian
from Vojvodina known for his work with ‘world music’ acts from
around the world. There are numerous other excellent trumpet
and brass bands from Serbia whose success probably owes some-
thing to the genre-defining music of Goran Bregović. Irish folk-
rock, sung in a Serbian-accented attempt at Irish pronunciation
of English, is hugely popular thanks to veterans of the genre
Orthodox Celts and the bands they inspired, such as Irish Stew
of Sindidun (the Celtic name for Belgrade dating to third century
BC). There is also a rich and diverse hip-hop scene. Among those
distinguished for their politically and socially engaged lyrics are
Bad Copy, Prti Bee Gee, Marčelo (real name Marko Šelić), Sajsi
MC (Ivana Rašić) and Smoke Mardeljano (Miloš Stojanović). A
regional variant of Reggaeton and Auto-Tune sound is hugely
popular. Kosovo-born Rasta (Stefan Djurić) is arguably the gen-
re’s biggest performer and producer, having founded the success-
ful ‘Balkaton’ label.
Belgrade’s club scene is internationally renowned. Once a strip
joint, the boat-club ‘20/44’ (the city’s geographic coordinates) is a
cult venue that attracts leading local and international DJs, often
prepared to waive their fees to play there. One of the club’s resi-
dent DJs, Slobodan Brkić (a.k.a. DJ Brka), is a London School of
25
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Economics graduate and a former advisor to late Prime Minister

Djindjić. Belgrade-born Gramophonedzie (real name Marko
Milićević) is a world-famous DJ, whose music has featured in the
top 10 singles lists around the world. The ‘New Serbian Scene’
of the recent years includes excellent indie and pop-rock acts,
including Goribor, Nežni Dalibor, Repetitor, Svi na pod!, Zemlja
gruva (featuring Konstrakta and Zoe Kida) and Kralj Čačka (real
name Nenad Marić), who is sometimes described as a Serbian
Tom Waits.
A predominantly collectivist society, Serbia is nevertheless the
birth country of some hugely creative and globally renowned
individuals. These include conceptual artist Marina Abramović
and fashion designers Zoran (Ladičorbić, a reclusive New York-
based designer praised as a genius of minimalism) and London-
based Roksanda Ilinčić (whose clients include the Duchess of
Cambridge, Keira Knightley, Michelle Obama and Melania
Trump). Abramović may be the best known but is not the only
highly accomplished international artist; others include Raša
Todosijević, another conceptual artist, painters Mića Popović,
Leonid Šejka, Ljubica Sokić, Vladimir Veličković and sculptors
Toma Rosandić and Olga Jančić. Serbia is also home to interna-
tionally celebrated naïve and marginal artists, notably those based
in and near Jagodina, central Serbia and Kovačica, a predomi-
nantly ethnic-Slovak village in Vojvodina.
Acclaimed twentieth-century writers Ivo Andrić (the only
Yugoslav to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature), Miloš Crnjanski,
Milovan Djilas, Danilo Kiš, Milorad Pavić, Vasko Popa and
Mehmed-Meša Selimović have belonged to and shaped the mod-
ern Serbian literature. The same may be said of Branko Ćopić,
Bora Ćosić, Dobrica Ćosić (they are not related), Filip David,
Oskar Davičo, Mirko Kovač, Borislav Pekić and Aleksandar
Tišma, as well as the first post–World War II generation of writ-
ers, including David Albahari, Vladislav Bajac, Svetislav Basara and
Dragan Velikić, and their literary heirs such as Srdjan Valjarević.
26
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Introduction
Meanwhile, Belgrade-born Zoran Živković is a widely translated

author of science fiction. Some of these authors came from eth-
nically non-Serb or mixed backgrounds but wrote in the Serbian
variant of the Serbo-Croat language and adopted Serbian culture
and identity that did not contradict their other identities nor iden-
tification with Yugoslavia. Although male dominated, the Serbian
literary scene has produced prominent female writers, poets and
playwrights, including Isidora Sekulić, Desanka Maksimović,
Vida Ognjenović (who has also been a leading member of the
Democratic Party), Milena Marković, Biljana Srbljanović and
Radmila Petrović – who, again, represent different generations
and literary forms. North American- and British-based writers of
Serb origin, Vesna Goldsworthy, Téa Obreht and Charles Simić,
a Pulitzer Prize–winning Serbian-American poet, are among
internationally renowned contemporary authors who belong to
different generations and literary genres. Walt Bogdanich, a cel-
ebrated investigative journalist and a three-time recipient of the
Pulitzer Prize, is another well-known Serbian-American.
In recent years, Belgrade has re-emerged as a cultural cen-
tre of former Yugoslavia. For example, Centre for Cultural
Decontamination regularly hosts events featuring participants
from across former-Yugoslavia. Belgrade is home to a regional
writers’ festival Krokodil, while prominent contemporary Bosnian,
Croatian and Slovenian writers regularly publish their books
with Serbian presses and in some cases have moved to Belgrade.
Internationally renowned scholars of Serb origin are numerous
and include economist Branko Milanović and Gordana Vunjak-
Novaković, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia
University.
Serbia and the Serbs have made an important contribution to
the world cinematography, including award-winning directors
belonging to the Yugoslav ‘Black Wave’ of the 1960s and ‘70s
(such as Dušan Makavejev, Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović
and Želimir Žilnik). The ‘Prague School’ group came into the
27
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limelight in the late 1970s and early ‘80s (Srdjan Karanović,

Goran Marković, Goran Paskaljević and Bosnian-born Emir
Kusturica). Their contemporary Slobodan Šijan directed several
cult films based on satirical plays written by Dušan Kovačević.
Srdjan Dragojević emerged in the early 1990s, and was followed
by several younger, award-winning directors, including Stefan
Arsenijević, Stevan Filipović, Maja Miloš, Oleg Novković and
Mila Turajlić. Actors such as Milena Dravić, Bekim Fehmiu,
Dragan Nikolić, Ljubiša Samardžić and Velimir-Bata Živojinović
achieved international fame during the Yugoslav era, in some
cases thanks to the hugely popular Partisan film. Živojinović
was particularly popular in China, while Gojko Mitić became a
star of East German Western movie production and was popu-
lar in the USSR as well. Mirjana Karanović and Jasna Djuričić
are leading contemporary Serbian actresses, while Croatian Serb
Rade Šerbedžija, a highly respected and popular actor in socialist
Yugoslavia, forged a successful international career after emigrat-
ing to Britain and then the USA in the 1990s. Meanwhile others,
such as London-based Branka Katić, are usually cast in smaller
roles of stereotypical East Europeans. Younger Serbian actors
Miloš Biković, Milan Marić and Milena Radulović have found
success in Russia, while Belgrade-born, Denmark-based Danica
Ćurčić is a rising star of Scandinavian cinema and TV. Hollywood
directors and actors of Serb origin include Peter Bogdanovich,
Karl Malden (i.e. Mladen Sekulovich) and more recently Soviet-
born actress and model Milla Jovovich and Canadian-American
actress and producer Kata Stanić. Well-known Australian Serbs
include transgender model Andreja Pejić and actress and singer
Holly Vallance (Vukadinović).
Serbia’s sportswomen and men, such as tennis stars Novak
Djoković and Monika Seleš (an ethnic Hungarian from Vojvodina)
and basketball player Nikola Jokić are historically among the
world’s best in the sport in which they have competed. The emer-
gence of Ana Ivanović and Jelena Janković in 2007–2008 as number
28
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Introduction
1 female tennis players in the world coincided with Djoković’s

rise and made Serbia one of the strongest tennis nations globally
for a few years. Serbia’s water polo team has in recent years won
Olympic, World and European championship gold medals and
is arguably the most dominant ever national team in any sport.
Serbia has also produced outstanding men and women national
teams in basketball, volleyball and handball. It might be argued
that the country’s success in collective sports is largely thanks to
the creativity of its hugely talented individuals. Serbian basketball
players (such as Radivoj Korać, Dragan Kićanović, Vlade Divac,
Aleksandar Djordjević, Dejan Bodiroga and Predrag Stojaković)
and coaches (Aleksandar Nikolić, Ranko Žeravica, Dušan Ivković,
Božidar Maljković, Svetislav Pešić and Željko Obradović) are
historically among Europe’s best. Borislav Stanković, a longtime
president of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA), the
world basketball governing body, was arguably one of the most
influential executives in international sport. Their success is in
many ways the legacy of the ‘Yugoslav school of basketball’,
which made Yugoslavia a sport superpower in the 1970s and
‘80s alongside the Soviet Union and the United States.19 (Gregg
Popovich, one of the greatest American basketball coaches ever,
has Serb roots, as did late Pete Maravich, considered among the
most talented basketball players ever). Similarly, Yugoslavia chal-
lenged the post–World War II dominance of Soviet chess players.
Serbian grandmasters Svetozar Gligorić, Borislav Ivkov, Milunka
Lazarević, Ljubomir Ljubojević and Alisa Marić (who served as
Serbia’s Minister of Youth and Sport in 2012/13) were among the
best in the world. Major football silverware has eluded the coun-
try at senior lever, but Serbia won the Youth World Cup in 2015
(by defeating Brazil in the final). The Yugoslav-era international
V. Perica, ‘United They Stood, Divided They Fell: Nationalism and the
19
Yugoslav School of Basketball, 1968–2000’, Nationalities Papers, 29:2 (2001),

267–91.
29
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success of Serbian football teams Red Star and Partizan Belgrade

represented the achievement of the Yugoslav football. Serbia’s
most popular sport has produced some exceptionally gifted and
successful players and coaches, including Radomir Antić, Vujadin
Boškov, Dragan Džajić, Vladimir Jugović, Miljan Miljanić,
Dragan Stojković, Dejan Stanković, Dragoslav Šekularac, Velibor
Vasović and Nemanja Vidić, to mention but a few.
Creativity, unpredictability, emotion, and so on have often
delivered results, and sometimes puzzled outside observers.
Djoković and Jokić, one of the best tennis players of all time
and one of the most uniquely talented basketball players in the
world, respectively, on the surface appear like two very differ-
ent personalities and athletes. Djoković combines gluten-free
and vegetarian/vegan diet and Oriental meditation with extreme
hard work and dedication. Jokić, on the other hand, by his own
admission enjoys the Serbian carbs and red-meat-rich diet, has a
laid-back attitude and sometimes appears to be out of shape phys-
ically. Yet, both have succeeded thanks to a combination of talent,
hard work, imagination, improvisation and inat. This apparently
typical Serbian emotion, which cannot be easily translated into
English, means doing things out of spite and stubbornness, often
repeatedly, even if such actions may be counterproductive and
self-harming. Both have been nicknamed ‘Joker’ – partly because
of their surnames, but also due to their sense of humour, which
sets them apart from usually serious and earnest public appearance
of many of their fellow countrymen. However, one cannot help
but wonder if there is something ‘Balkanist’ in the Joker moniker,
especially regarding Djoković. He remains far less popular than
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, his greatest tennis rivals from
Switzerland and Spain, respectively, despite often outperform-
ing them on court. Even western commentators have noted that
Djoković remains un(der)appreciated, and some have wondered if
this might be because he is from Serbia.
30
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Introduction
In common with other patriarchal societies in South-Eastern

Europe, Serbian women are frequently discriminated against,
both in public and at home. According to a 2016 study, 46 per
cent of women in Serbia have experienced some form of abuse
or violence, while every third woman was victim of domestic vio-
lence. These figures do not differ much from those in the EU,
where every third woman over the age of 15 has been a victim of
physical and/or sexual violence.20 Despite this, many women in
Serbia have reached the highest levels of their profession, through
combination of talent, ambition, survival strategies, sexuality and,
inevitably, veze (not necessarily in this order and not always due
to all these factors). Ethnic, religious, sexual and other minorities
are frequently discriminated, sometimes openly, although many
Serbs would say that they belong to a tolerant, non-racist nation.
Dragan Maksimović, a well-known Serbian actor, was beaten to
death in late 2000 by a group of football hooligans who assumed he
was Roma. One of the most talented young Serbian writers today
is Meti Kamberi who as a Roma has experienced racially moti-
vated discrimination and violence. On the other hand, Serbian
Roma and Muslim folk singers, such as late Šaban Bajramović and
Džej Ramadanovski, are hugely popular; the former even has a
monument in his hometown of Niš. Not to mention that Bosnian,
Croatian and Macedonian folk and pop-rock musicians remain
popular in Serbia, regularly performing in sold-out concert are-
nas in Belgrade.
Not unlike in the rest of Eastern Europe, homophobic views
are common in Serbia and are frequently publicly expressed by
conservative and right-wing politicians and religious leaders.
The 2010 pride parade in Belgrade provoked riots and violence
T. Ignjatović, ‘Numbers Speak: Violence against Women in Serbia’,

20
Heinrich Böll Stiftung/Gunda Werner Institute, 2017, www.gwi-boell.de/

en/2017/09/11/numbers-speak.
31
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committed by right-wing groups and football hooligans, result-

ing in the banning of the march in the following few years.
Although recent pride parades have been held peacefully, they
require strong police presence to guarantee the safety of the par-
ticipants. At the same time, Dragojević’s 2011 film Parada, which
offers a critical look at the Serbs’ homophobia, received not just
international acclaim (winning, for example, the Teddy award at
the 2012 Berlinale), but was also a huge hit in Serbia and across
former-Yugoslavia, where homophobic views are similarly wide-
spread. Turbofolk, which originated as a music of the nationalist,
gangster, macho Serbs, has in recent years brought the LGBTQ
community closer to the mainstream. One of the country’s most
popular pop singers and Serbia’s only Eurovision Song Contest
winner Marija Šerifović is both gay and Roma (and, one might
add, has a Muslim-sounding surname). When she was appointed
Prime Minister of Serbia in 2017, Ana Brnabić was one of the
few female leaders in the world; she is also openly gay and is
an ethnic Croat. In 2019, it was reported that Brnabić’s partner
gave birth to a baby boy. Serbia’s laws do not recognize same-
sex marriage and civil partnership, nor are gay couples allowed
to adopt. Despite all this, Brnabić is not known as an LGBTQ
rights champion.21
Serbs are sometimes perceived from outside as a nation united
in its anti-western nationalism. Many authors, both Serbian and
non-Serbian, on the other hand, point out that the society has
been traditionally divided into the ‘first’ (anti-modern, conserv-
ative, pro-Russian) and ‘second’ (modern, liberal, pro-western)
Serbia. During the 1990s, some western authors portrayed
C. Baker, ‘The Molitva Factor: Eurovision and Performing National

21
Identity in World Politics’, in A. Dubin et al. (eds), Eurovision as a Cultural

Phenomenon, London, 2023, 96–110; B. Bilić, ‘Ana je tu: Figure zazora, klasne
privilegije i premijerka Ana Brnabić’, Sociologija (Belgrade), LXII (2020),
378–96.
32
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Introduction
the Serbs as perennially associated with violence, as a nation of

metaphorical vampires, as one scholar has argued.22 In popu-

lar films and series produced in the West since the 1990s, Serbs
have joined, if not replaced, Russians as the stereotypical evil East
Europeans. Ironically perhaps, James Bond, the quintessential sav-
iour of the West in this movie genre, was likely modelled on a
Serbian World War II spy; another Yugoslav (and a Serb through
his mother’s family), may have also inspired Ian Fleming’s famous
secret agent.23
Both Serb nationalists and their staunch critics have tended to
view Serbia and Serbs as homogenized categories. In reality, there
exist visible social, political and cultural differences between the
Serbs of Serbia and Serbs of Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro,
and between the Serbs of Vojvodina and of central and south-
ern Serbia. Contemporary Serbia unites, not always easily, his-
torical traditions of ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Habsburg’ Serbs. Bosnian
and Croatian Serbs are similarly divided by the different imperial
legacies, but at a closer look, they also share important histor-
ical experiences: both were part of the society of the Habsburg
Military Border (discussed later in the book); they also share
the victimhood identity (anti-Serb Habsburg pogroms in the
First and the Ustaša genocide of the Serbs in the Second World
War). Montenegro represents another complex case, for many
Montenegrins have identified with the Serbs, while even among
those who feel as a separate nation many acknowledge common
history and origins with Serbs. Serbian history has been charac-
terized by a remarkable plurality of opinions and regional identi-
ties, as this book shows.
22
T. Longinović, Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary, Durham, NC,
2011. The origin of the ‘vampire’ phenomenon is, incidentally, associated with
the Serbs, as discussed later on in the book.
23
D. Popov, Spy/Counterspy, New York, 1974; V. Ivanović, LX: Memoirs of a
Yugoslav, London, 1977, 360–61.
33
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How Unique Is Serbian History?

It has been suggested sometimes that anti-modern, anti-western,
corrupt and aggressive groups and forces have dominated Serbia’s
history since the nineteenth century and that this explains the
country’s recent predicament.24 In other words, a direct line may
be drawn between Garašanin and Milošević/Vučić – similar to
the ‘Mazzini to Mussolini’ or the ‘Bismarck to Hitler’ theses in
the Italian and German cases, respectively. So, is there a Serbian
Sonderweg, a special Serbian path in history?25
Some key developments in the history of Serbia and the Serbs
may indeed appear unique. For example, since the mid-nineteenth
century, the Serbs have had adopted several national ideologies,
which may be broadly defined as Serbian (including a maximalist,
‘Greater’ Serbian version) and Yugoslav. However, the Croats,
and to a lesser degree the Slovenes, have also embraced or wan-
dered between a wider Yugoslav and a more particularistic type
of nationalism, which, in the Croat case, also included a ‘Greater’
Croat idea (briefly, and tragically, fulfilled during the Second
World War). Not to mention the similarly complex identities of
the Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians and Montenegrins; groups
which, incidentally, Serbs have generally regarded as part of
24
See, for example, O. Milosavljević, Činjenice i tumačenja: Dva razgovora sa
Latinkom Perović, Belgrade, 2010, and U tradiciji nacionalizma ili stereotipi
srpskih intelektualaca XX veka o ‘nama’ i ‘drugima’, Belgrade, 2002; L. Perović,
Dominantna i neželjena elita: Beleške o intelektualnoj i političkoj eliti u Srbiji
(XX–XXI vek), Belgrade, 2016; L. Perović et al. (eds), Srbija u modernizacijskim
procesima XIX i XX veka, 3: uloga elita, Belgrade, 2003; D. Stojanović, Kaldrma i
asfalt: Urbanizacija i evropeizacija Beograda 1890–1914, Belgrade, 2008.
25
V. Vujačić, Reexamining the ‘Serbian Exceptionalism’ Thesis, Berkeley, CA,
2004, https://iseees.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2004_03-vuja.pdf, is the
best work on the subject; cf. J. Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler: The
Debate about the German “Sonderweg”’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23:1
(1988), 3–16; H. Walser Smith, ‘Introduction’, in his edited Oxford Handbook
of Modern German History, Oxford, 2011, 1–28; S. Levis Sullam, Giuseppe
Mazzini and the Origins of Fascism, Basingstoke, 2015.
34
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Introduction
a wider Serb nation, an idea which also have had its adherents
among many Montenegrins, as already mentioned.
Although in some respects these developments are specific to
Serbia and Serbs, one should not rush to declare Serbia’s history
unique. Germany, Italy and Japan have dealt with their difficult
pasts (in the case of Germany especially of the Nazi and communist
eras, but increasingly in respect of its imperial past as well) with
varying degrees of success and these societies remain divided. Post-
socialist transition has revealed deep divisions in countries such as
Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. The legacies of civil wars
fought in the 1930s and ‘40s in Spain and Greece, respectively, sur-
vive. Even in the United States, where a civil war was fought in the
mid-nineteenth-century, divisions caused by it are felt to this day.
The polarization in American society over the question of racial
equality became especially pronounced during the Trump presi-
dency (2016–20). Not to mention the extent to which Brexit has
divided the United Kingdom, flared old and created new debates
about the legacy of the British Empire.
Some, perhaps many, Serbs see themselves as a heroic people
who only wage defensive and just wars. The myth of a nation
built on resistance against more powerful enemy (Ottomans in
1389 and 1804, Austria-Hungary in 1914, Nazi Germany in 1941,
the Soviet Union in 1948 and NATO in 1999) is a strong part
of the Serbs’ identity, but a similar, ‘insurrectionary nationalism’
exists elswehere, notably in Poland.26 A related discourse rests
on a belief that Serbia selflessly sacrificed its independence for
the sake of other South Slavs in 1918 and again in 1945, only to
be eventually betrayed and abandoned by them and by Western
Allies. In another related narrative, the Serbs are a Diaspora peo-
ple, forced by a Muslim enemy (Ottomans, Albanians) to leave
their spiritual home in Kosovo. Inevitable parallels with the Jews
J. Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, Princeton,

26
NJ, 2020, ch. 5.
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have been made, and not only by Serbs. When in December 2014
then Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vučić visited Israel, his
host and Israeli counterpart Benyamin Netanyahu stated that
‘[t]he friendship between the Jewish and Serbian peoples goes
back to thousands of years, to the time of the Roman Republic
[c.509–27 BC]’, to which Vučić responded that ‘everything that
Prime Minister Netanyahu have [sic] just said about our past has
been something very true and yeah, we shared in a way the same
destiny’.27 Nobody seemed to mind, or perhaps did not know, that
the Balkan Serbs do not appear in historical sources before ninth
century AD.
Orthodoxy and Ottoman heritage, and historic ties with
Russia, seemingly place Serbia outside the European mainstream.
(Meanwhile, even the most ardent ‘Cold Warriors’ would not
deny that Russian art, music and literature are ‘European’ – at
least this was true prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in
February 2022). However, as this book shows, modern Serbian
history is also part of European history and Serbian nationalism
developed under central and west European influences. Besides,
west European history represents just one aspect of Europe’s past.
Countries such as Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, today EU and
NATO member-states, share the Ottoman and Orthodox histor-
ical legacies with Serbia; in addition, Bulgaria and Romania are,
like Serbia, post-communist societies.
There are certain developments specific to Serbia’s history,
certainly within the former-Yugoslav context. For example,
27
Netanyahu also stated that a Serbian Jewish Rabi was the progenitor of
Zionism (see Chapter 3) and made a reference to Jewish and Serbian
suffering in the Second World War. ‘PM Netanyahu meets with Serbian
PM Vučić in Jerusalem’, Belgrade, Tel Aviv, 1 December 2014, https://
embassies.gov.il/beograd/NewsAndEvents/Pages/PM-Netanyahu-meets-
with-Serbian-PM-Vucic-1-December-2014.aspx. On the identification with
the Jews across Yugoslavia, see M. Živković, Serbian Dreambook: National
Imaginary in the Time of Milošević, Bloomington, IN, 2011, ch. 8.
36
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Introduction
medieval Serbia was the most powerful and enjoyed independence

for the longest time among the South Slav polities (not counting
Bulgaria). For a long period, it was part of the Byzantine ‘com-
monwealth’, but it maintained strong economic and cultural ties
with Venice and Dubrovnik, as evident in medieval architecture,
for example. Most Serbian kings were canonized by the Orthodox
Church; the tradition of holy kings and dynasties may be spe-
cific to former-Yugoslavia, but it existed elsewhere – in Hungary
and France, for instance. At the same time, medieval Serb rulers
sought recognition from both Constantinople and Rome, and
some were baptized as Catholics. Even the rich tradition of epic
poetry and oral history is not a solely Serb but rather a Balkan
phenomenon.
This book explores key developments such as large-scale migra-
tions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that made the
Serbs a nation of migrants. At the same time, it should be borne in
mind that the ‘migrations of the Serbs’ usually involved, in addi-
tion to Orthodox Slavs who identified or were identified as Serb,
ethnically and even religiously different groups of peoples, includ-
ing Albanians, Bulgarians and Vlachs. Between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries, a polycentric, multi- layered pre-modern
Serb identity emerged, fostered by the Orthodox church and oral
tradition. Similar patterns may be observed elsewhere, for exam-
ple, in the case of Bulgarians, Greeks and Romanians.
The nineteenth-century tradition of anti-Ottoman resistance,
which anticipated the much better-known Greek revolution, was
one of the reasons why Serbia, alone among the future component
parts of Yugoslavia, except for tiny Montenegro, enjoyed political
independence in the nineteenth century. At the same time, dem-
ocratic institutions, developed on the French and Belgian models,
set Serbia apart from the rest of the South Slav political space,
however limited and problematic nineteenth-century Serbia’s
democracy had been. The domination of the People’s Radical
Party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has led
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some authors to conclude that Serbia had already then become

a one-party state; but such authors seemingly ignore political
conflicts between the Radicals, Liberals and Progressives, and
between the Radicals, the monarchy and the military, not to
mention a rather remarkable freedom of press in Serbia at the
time. During the interwar Yugoslav period, there existed a greater
political plurality among Serbs than any other Yugoslav group.
The Serbs, it might be further argued, also offered the strongest
and most sustained democratic opposition to King Aleksandar’s
dictatorship, which at the same time relied on the Serb political
and military support.
As previously mentioned, the Serbs suffered enormous casual-
ties in the two World Wars. Without considering these traumas,
one cannot fully understand the modern Serb nationalism. For
this reason, it is not easy to draw a direct line between the early
twentieth century and contemporary Serb nationalism, as has
been done in some centenary-driven histories of the First World
War. Early twentieth-century Serbia experienced both economic
and political sanctions (as discussed later on), and wars against
its neighbours over contested territories it claimed – on equally
dubious historical and ethnic grounds as its neighbours. Although
the contexts were entirely different, and separated by more than
mere passage of time, it is indeed tempting to suggest that these
events anticipated Serbia’s predicament of the late twentieth cen-
tury. In the early 1990s, Serbia came under international sanctions
because of its role in the war in Bosnia; at the end of the decade,
NATO intervened militarily against Belgrade over its treatment
of Kosovo Albanians. A century earlier, Serbia had also become
involved in Bosnia. Following the assassination in Sarajevo of the
heir to the Habsburg throne on 28 June 1914 by a Young Bosnian
student, Austria-Hungary decided to finally eliminate the threat
it believed the Serbian and South Slav nationalisms posed to it.
However, even the most radical Serbian nationalist of a century
ago was in favour of political unification with other South Slavs;
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Introduction
by contrast, modern Serbian nationalism is characterized by its

rejection of Yugoslavia [literally: the land of South Slavs] and
Yugoslavism.
The Serbs’ geographic dispersion, not entirely reversed by
the twentieth century wars, throughout former Yugoslavia is
another legacy of history and another key component of the
modern Serbian identity. After the Second World War, when
Yugoslavia reemerged as a communist-led federation, Serbia was
the only Yugoslav republic that was federalized as well, while a
large number of Serbs lived in other Yugoslav republics. Alone
among the federal republics, Serbia included two autonomous
provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina). It might be argued that there
was a strong case for creating autonomous provinces elsewhere,
specifically in Croatia and Macedonia, and perhaps in Bosnia and
Herzegovina as well.
With the secession of Kosovo, Serbia is also the only former
Yugoslav republic that has disintegrated following the break-up of
Yugoslavia. During the 1990s wars, Bosnia and Croatia temporarily
disintegrated as well, with the secession of Serb entities in these two
republics, but eventually re-integrated (albeit partially in the case of
Bosnia, whose Serb entity enjoys a wide autonomy). All this was
achieved and may have been only possible with outside support.
Therefore, some historical developments are specific to Serbia,
but it is too simplistic to speak of a Serbian Sonderweg, a single
path and inevitable outcomes in the history of Serbia. The exist-
ing generalizations about Serbia are not necessarily based on any
real understanding of the country’s complex history and ignore an
incredibly heterogenous society. For example, during the 1990s,
Belgrade was both the centre of the most destructive nationalism
in former-Yugoslavia and arguably the most cosmopolitan city in
the region. Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian music
were regularly aired on radio and TV channels, including those
owned by the state. A number of Sarajevo’s most talented artists
such as Muslim-Serb film director Emir Kusturica, Croat-Serb
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musician Goran Bregović and Yugoslavia’s biggest pop star

Zdravko Čolić, a Bosnian Serb, moved to or spent significant peri-
ods of time in the Serbian capital after the war in Bosnia broke
out in Spring 1992. They have been criticized, some more than
others, for abandoning their own city, which for three and a half
years was exposed to sustained bombardment from Bosnian Serb
forces but remain popular regionally and internationally. Despite
tensions, Serbia’s sizeable Muslim Slav community continues to
live in the Sandžak region (in Raška, the nucleus of the medieval
Serbian state), while further north, Vojvodina is home to signifi-
cant Roman Catholic Hungarian, Croat and Slovak communities.
Even after Kosovo’s secession in 2008, Serbia remains one
of the most multi-ethnic states in the Balkans. The tradition of
religious coexistence in the Balkans is usually, and rightly, asso-
ciated with Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina more generally.
Less well known is a similar tradition in Serbia. For example, the
Holy Archangel Orthodox Church and the seat of the Serbian
Orthodox patriarchate in Belgrade are in the same street as the
Jewish community centre, and just a few hundred meters away
from the Synagogue and nearby the Belgrade Mosque. The
thirteenth-century Mileševa monastery in south-western Serbia
is within a walking distance from a sixteenth-century Ottoman
Mosque that holds one of the oldest copies of the Quran in the
Balkans.
There is no typical Serbian food, there is no specific Serbian
look, and there is no uniquely Serbian modern architecture –
which makes Serbia a rather typical European country. Yet, in
common with the rest of the Balkans, a rich historical legacy sur-
vives, despite the wars and destruction that are usually associated
with the region. A visitor to Serbia would be able to see Orthodox
monasteries, Roman Catholic cathedrals, Ottoman-era mosques
and Ashkenazim and Sephardim synagogues. They would be able
to enjoy the Hungarian secessionist architecture in Subotica, a
mix of Central European architecture (built in the late nineteenth
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Introduction
century to ‘Europeanize’ the city by replacing Ottoman-era build-

ings) and socialist-era brutalism in Belgrade, and the somewhat
chaotic charm of Niš and Pirot or the Oriental feel of Novi Pazar.
No Serbian meal begins without meze, a set of starters/tapas
style dishes that typically include feta-like cheese, kajmak (clot-
ted cheese spread), ajvar (a dip made up of roasted peppers, and,
in some variations, aubergine), pršuta (prosciutto) and proja (corn
bread), lepinja or pogača (local versions of flat bread and focaccia,
respectively). Boiled or fried eggs, cheese, kajmak, pršuta or slanina
(bacon) are traditionally eaten for breakfast, as are kačamak (maize
porridge) and popara (bread porridge). Fresh and dried fruit is
another essential part of the regional diet. In recent years, Serbia
has become one of the world’s greatest producers and exporters of
raspberry, with 80–100,000 tonnes exported annually. Šljivovica,
loza, dunjevača and viljemovka (plum-, grape-, quince-, apple
brandy, often home-made and collectively known as rakija) are
drunk as both aperitif and digestif – sometimes during breakfast
time, but more commonly later in the day or evening. There is a
long tradition of wine making, revived in recent years, especially
in eastern and central Serbia and in Vojvodina. Local breweries
were first opened in the nineteenth century, by Bohemian beer
makers. Beer goes well with Serbian meat-rich diet. Probably the
most popular dish is ćevapčići (lit. little kebabs), grilled minced
meat sausage-like food similar to Turkish kebabs; a burger ver-
sion is called pljeskavica. Other types of grilled meat, usually pork,
beef and chicken, are also popular, as is pečenje – roast pork, lamb
and veal. Chicken, turkey and duck are traditionally eaten as
well. Popular dishes also include musaka (Serbia’s version of the
better-known Greek dish) and sarma (rice and m inced-meat-filled
cabbage leaves). Meat and meat-based dishes have not always
been consumed as regularly as today, because they used to be
unaffordable for most people. Rather like in the case of Latin
American countries, the Serb traditional diet has consisted of
protein-rich beans and corn. The former may be said to have been
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Serbia’s national food, offered in a variety of ways, most com-

monly as prebranac (baked beans) and pasulj (a thick bean soup),
both of which come in a vegetarian version or served with bacon
or sausage. The ‘Serbian bean soup’ is a popular dish across
former-Yugoslavia and in Austria and Germany, countries with
large Serbian and former-Yugoslav émigré communities. Other
traditional food includes gibanica (cheese-filled pastry) and burek
(similar to the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern varieties), usu-
ally accompanied by jogurt (a slightly thicker type of Turkish and
Middle Eastern ayran). These and similar dishes may be found
throughout the Balkans and are part of the region’s Ottoman and
in some cases Byzantine-Greek and Venetian-Dalmatian legacy
and influences.
However, there is also a strong Central European influence
on Serbians’ diet. Widely eaten pork or veal šnicle are sometimes
served rolled, breaded and filled with kajmak; this type of schnit-
zel is named, for reasons not entirely clear, after Karadjordje,
the leader of the 1804 Uprising. Other common dishes include
Hungarian-style gulaš (goulash) and paprikaš (paprikash). For a
country rich in rivers, fish is not as central as red meat and poultry
to the Serbs’ diet, but fish soup and pohovana riba (fried white fish
in batter) are popular and typically eaten on Orthodox fast days.
Serbia is home to excellent kafanas (traditional restaurants,
some of which serve sophisticated, local version of nouvelle cuisine),
which often have live music bands. There is a strong café culture.
Serbs of all ages love to spend hours in Central European–looking
cafes drinking Italian coffee or turska kafa. Unlike Bosnians and
Greeks, many Serbs continue to call the Turkish coffee by its
original name, though in recent years there has been a trend of
using a neutral name such as ‘brewed’ coffee – probably the final
stage of de-Ottomanization of Serbia that started in the nine-
teenth century, as discussed later in the book. Italian restaurants
and fast-food kiosks selling (sometimes excellent) pizza and pasta
may be found throughout the country, while Chinese/Asian fast
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Introduction
food has also become popular. A recent phenomenon is a greater

choice for vegetarians and vegans in Serbia’s restaurants, though
meat-based offering continues to dominate.
The historic hotel ‘Moskva’ in Belgrade, where our imaginary
visitor to Serbia might have stayed, symbolizes the country’s rich
and complex past particularly well. Its Central European appearance
today in fact owes much to the St Petersburg architecture (despite
its name). Among other delicacies, the hotel café sells the Moskva
šnit (Schnitte), an Austrian-Hungarian-style cake often consumed
by Belgraders after servings of ćevapčići or sarma in one of the city’s
many kafanas. The hotel is located in the central Belgrade square
Terazije (a word of Ottoman Turkish origin) and is reached via the
Balkanska Street when approached from the main bus and – until
recently – train stations. This run-down uphill street p reserves an
Oriental feel, due to the presence of the city’s last surviving crafts-
men. It includes an impromptu flea market where local Roma and
Middle Eastern migrants sell miscellaneous items that somehow,
improbably, seem to find their buyers. Gavrilo Princip and other
Young Bosnians lived in this neighbourhood before they made their
last journey back home, several weeks before the 1914 Sarajevo
assassination. A monument to Princip – unveiled on 28 June 2015 –
stands in this part of the city. The Terazije Square also leads to
the pedestrianized Knez Mihailova Street, whose early twentieth-
century European architecture and numerous cafes bring Parisian
and Viennese flavours to the city. This fashionable street serves as
the Belgrade’s promenade and connects the Terazije Square with
the Ottoman-era Kalemegdan park and fortress.
When Is Serbia?
There can be no continuity of nation, state and even territory
between medieval polities associated with Serbs and the modern
Serbian state. For most of the timeframe this book covers, no
country called Serbia existed. This is a common problem facing
43
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a historian writing a ‘national’ history. Authors of synthetic his-

tories of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and Romania, for
example, face similar challenges. As do historians of Italy and
Germany, two major European countries that were created in the
nineteenth century, and which have long, complex and often con-
troversial histories.
My position is presentist by default, but at the same time I try to
not read history backwards. I have written a national history in an
era in which historians have rightly challenged the national frame-
work and sought to study the past in transnational and global con-
texts, or to focus on local, micro and personal histories. Writing
this book, I have become even more convinced that this is the
only right approach to studying the past. History of Serbia and of
the Serbs cannot be understood without understanding broader
regional and European contexts. At the same time, writing a crit-
ical national history remains important, and not least because the
history of Serbia is, in my view, frequently misunderstood and
misinterpreted, due to presentist simplifications or ignorance.
Moreover, nation states arguably continue to offer the dominant
form of political organization in the modern world. Their monop-
oly over territorial rule was reasserted and grew stronger during
the ‘migrant crisis’ of 2015 and especially the Covid-19 pandemic,
paradoxically as a result of two very global crises.
It is sometimes said that each generation writes its own histo-
ries. If so, mine was conceived, researched and written during the
1914–18 centenary commemorations, the anxiety caused by the
‘migrant crisis’ and finally the Covid-19 pandemic. The devel-
opments of the recent years have shaped my thinking about the
past, both consciously and unconsciously, making this book dif-
ferent from previous histories of Serbia. The book stands out in
three other respects. First, it is the most complete single-volume
history of Serbia, with due consideration given to medieval and
early modern periods – most similar books tend to start around
1800, with the important exception of Sima M. Ćirković’s history
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Introduction
of the Serbs, which however focuses on pre-modern develop-

ments. Second, I place Serbia in wider regional and European
context. Finally, unlike most other similar works, I have tried to
move beyond the history of high politics and diplomatic relations,
providing the reader a sense of how some of the events described
impacted individuals, both the elites and the ‘ordinary’ people. All
this, I believe, makes this book unique among the existing histories
of Serbia in any language.
My perspective has been also influenced by the wars of the
1990s, though perhaps less so than in the case of my eminent pre-
decessors Ćirković, Stevan K. Pavlowitch and Holm Sundhaussen,
whose histories of Serbia appeared during the first decade of the
century. My book builds on their work, together with earlier rel-
evant studies, from Leopold Ranke’s pioneering history of the
‘Serbian revolution’, Slobodan Jovanović’s still unmatched work
on nineteenth-century Serbia, Andrej Mitrović’s studies on early
twentieth-century history, through Traian Stoianovich’s histoire
totale and Michael B. Petrovich’s classic two-volume textbook on
Serbia between 1804 and 1918, to a monumental, multi-volume
History of the Serbian People, written (in Serbian) in the 1980s by
crème-de la crème of Serbia’s historiography.28
The reader is presented with my own interpretation of the his-
tory of Serbia and Serbs. This is not the definitive account of the
Serbian history – no such thing is possible anyway – but it covers
a full span of Serbia’s known history, from the sixth century Slav
migrations to the present day. The reader should approach the
book as a critical synthesis, a mix of analysis and narrative, rather
than an encyclopaedia or a chronologically presented list of facts.
Similarly, images included in the book are meant to illustrate, not
cover all key events and personalities associated with the Serb his-
tory. I hope that the reader will be able to learn something new,
Full references are provided in footnotes that follow and in the Further
28
Reading.
45
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wish to know more and rethink what they had known about Serbia,
even when they may not agree with my analysis, focus and direc-
tion. Equally, I have written a book that should be easily accessible
even to readers with no prior knowledge of Serbian history.
The book traces key developments surrounding medieval and
modern polities associated with the Serbs. It is a history of states,
institutions and societies that Serbs have helped build and in which
they have lived, almost always together with others. While research-
ing and writing the book, I did not consciously seek to unearth com-
mon themes and threads that would hold the narrative together.
However, several of these may be identified, including migrations;
Serbia’s relations with neighbouring empires and peoples; Serbia
as a society formed in borderlands and peripheries of larger territo-
rial entities (Byzantine, Ottoman and Habsburg empires, the Iron
Curtain, the EU); the polycentricity of Serbia (i.e. more than one
Serb centre has existed through history); and a surprising vitality of
Serb identity, which in different incarnations through centuries has
shown an ability to survive through reinvention.
Whenever appropriate, analysis informs narrative and new
interpretations challenging conventional wisdoms are offered.
The modern period is arguably more relevant for understanding
Serbia’s current predicament and we have far more sources about
it than about medieval and early modern history. As a historian of
the modern era by training, my focus should not be surprising, but
the book is much less modern-centric than I had initially envis-
aged it to be. While researching and writing – numerous versions
of each chapter – I kept being ‘pushed’ back to more distant pasts,
to find answers and explanations for later events. In the end I gave
up, persuaded that a history of Serbia, however concise, should
not be merely a history of the modern period.
Studying medieval and early modern eras has been challenging
and rewarding in equal measure, but it has also been necessary.
States associated with Serbs, or at least Serb rulers, existed through
the Middle Ages, while Serbs and Serbianized or Serb-identifying
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Introduction
populations played an important role in the Early Modern his-

tory of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, as one of the
peoples living in the Habsburg–Ottoman–Venetian borderlands.
Much of our understanding of Serbia’s distant past is steeped in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century romantic interpretations of
pre-modern history. By studying the earlier history, I am not sug-
gesting an uninterrupted continuity between the medieval and
modern Serbias; on the contrary, doing so has I hope enabled me
to challenge more convincingly the ‘continuity thesis’ and in the
process interrogate and rethink the national framework.
To try to understand why Serbia is where it is today, it became
necessary to start at the ‘beginning’, or at least ‘the beginning’
about which speculation is possible from what survives of the
sources. This allows us to neatly begin our journey with the
migration of the Serbs to the Balkans (from an unknown loca-
tion in East-Central or North-Eastern Europe), which probably
occurred in the seventh century as part of wider Slav movements,
and to round it up with the current migrant crises – one, better
known, concerning Middle Eastern, Asian and African refugees
passing through Serbia en route to western Europe; another one
caused by a large number of Serbs emigrating to more promising
west European and north American destinations, which was only
temporarily halted by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The origin, migration and formation of the earliest polities
associated with the Serbs in the ninth and tenth centuries inform
much of Chapter 1. The following chapter then looks at the rise
and fall of the Serb kingdom of Raška within and against the
Byzantine imperial framework starting in the late twelfth century,
when Grand Župan Nemanja and his sons laid the foundations
of a powerful regional dynasty and a state with its own politi-
cal and religious institutions.29 Medieval Serb rulers first sought to
The rulers of Raška were known, between the mid-twelfth and early
29
thirteenth centuries, as grand župans – the overall leaders among župans,
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‘enter’ the Byzantine empire and then, in the fourteenth century, to

replace it. The fall of the short-lived Serb-Greek empire of Stefan
Dušan (king 1335–46, emperor 1346–55) had begun even before the
Ottoman conquest of the Balkans gained pace in the late fourteenth
century. The Lazarević-Branković despotate, as the most impor-
tant successor state of Dušan’s empire, lasted for 70 years after the
Ottoman victory against a Serb-led coalition at Kosovo in 1389.
Post-Kosovo Serbia even prospered politically, culturally and eco-
nomically for a while, despite being squeezed between the Ottomans
from the south, Hungary from the north and Bosnia from the west.
Smederevo, Serbia’s last medieval capital, was finally conquered by
the Ottomans in 1459, six years after the fall of Constantinople.
Keeping with the ‘empire’ theme, Chapter 3 discusses the
Serb society under the Ottomans, and large-scale Serb migra-
tions into Hungary and the Habsburg empire as well as towards
Venetian-held Dalmatia, between the sixteenth and late eight-
eenth centuries. During this period, two ‘Serbias’ may be said
to have emerged along the Ottoman–Habsburg imperial border,
one centred around the Velika Morava valley south of Belgrade,
and another north of the Danube, in the lower Pannonian basin
of then southern Hungary. Chapters 4 and 5 trace the emergence
of the modern Serbian state and nation during the long nine-
teenth century. Serbia was formed almost by accident, following
an uprising in the Belgrade pashalik (a popular name for the san-
jak of Smederevo), which began as a Porte-supported rebellion
of Christian peasants and merchants against the Janissary mis-
rule. The Great Powers’ rivalry, and Serbia’s aspirations towards
and links with large Serb and other South Slav communities in its
who governed over smaller territories called župas, first mentioned in

Emperor Constantine’s De Administrando Imperio. This word of uncertain
origin survives as a toponym and as a surname (e.g. Županič, Župančič,
Župan, Župić) across former-Yugoslavia. Župa has also been used to describe
administrative and ecclesiastical territorial units in Bulgaria, former-
Yugoslavia, the Czech and Slovak lands and Poland.
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Introduction
neighbourhood, eventually led to the recognition of an independ-

ent principality in 1878 (kingdom in 1882). This event marked the
end of the Ottoman rule, but subsequent wars with the Ottoman
(1912) and Austro-Hungarian (1914–18) empires would have
profound consequences well beyond the region. Chapter 6 looks
at Serbia in the First World War, the formation, and short life,
of the interwar Yugoslav kingdom, and the Second World War.
Serbia and Serbs emerged from the war, in which they formed
two rival resistance movements, experienced collaboration, civil
war and genocide to became one of six Yugoslav federal republics
in 1945, as discussed in Chapter 7. The new socialist Yugoslavia
defined itself in opposition to the Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia
of the interwar period. Yet, the ‘Yugoslav Serbia’, and Serbs, as
the largest and most regionally dispersed of the Yugoslav nations,
represented the core of Tito’s socialist federation. At the same
time, Serbia was the only Yugoslav republic that itself was feder-
alized, with the establishment of the provinces of Vojvodina and
Kosovo. The final Yugoslav crisis began as a constitutional crisis,
as Serbia’s leadership attempted to revise the terms of Serbia’s
participation in the Yugoslav federation. The last chapter traces
the violent break-up of Yugoslavia over the ‘Serbian Question’,
and Serbia’s tribulations during the ‘dark’ 1990s, when Serbs trag-
ically sought to ‘right the wrongs’ of the past, through the wars in
Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. The chapter concludes by looking
at the painfully slow transition of the post-Milošević years, and a
return to populism, in line with similar developments elsewhere
in the world, during the past decade, after a decade-long demo-
cratic reform. At the time of finishing the book, Serbia, like the
rest of the world, was dealing with the extraordinary challenge
posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. As the book was going to print,
the war in Ukraine broke out. The future history of Serbia, while
unpredictable, will be inevitably shaped by these experiences and
the world that emerges out of them.
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1
Migration (up to c.1150)
u
Prehistory
The lower Danubian plains and the central Balkan region, south of
the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers, including the valleys
of the Velika Morava, Drina and Timok, and stretching all the way
south to the Ibar and Lim Rivers – an area roughly corresponding
to the location of modern Serbia – have been populated since the
dawn of human civilization. Between 35,000 BC and 25,000 BC,
it had been home to human settlements, which combined charac-
teristics of traditional central European societies with new cultures
originating in the steppes of southern Russia. Indeed, the oldest
human remains in Europe, dating to c.40,000 BC, have been found
in Bulgaria and Romania, close to their borders with Serbia.1
Climate changes following the last Ice Age facilitated the
emergence around 6700 BC of an advanced culture at Lepenski
Vir, near the Danube Djerdap gorge, on the present-day Serbia–
Romania border.2 Its inhabitants were fishermen and hunters
who kept domesticated animals and cultivated land. They were
also capable of producing sophisticated art, including distinc-
tive sandstone anthropomorphic figurines. Towards the end of
the Stone Age (c.4800–4400 BC), the population of the central
Balkans increased, as evidenced by several new settlements in the
1
ISN, I, 5; W. E. Banks, ‘Puzzling Out the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic
Transition’, Nature, Ecology & Evolution, 4 (2020), 775–76.
2
D. Borić, Lepenski Vir: Settlement of the Danube Fishermen, Belgrade, 2015;
ISN, I, 10–14.
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Morava valley. One reason for this was the arrival of new settlers,
but little is known about them or about the encounters between
the old and new populations.
Around this time, the Neolithic Vinča culture (c.5700–4500
BC) flourished. This was an advanced agricultural society, which
pioneered copper metallurgy, practised trade and produced
highly sophisticated artefacts. Mysterious Vinčan symbols have
intrigued scholars and the public alike, but they were not a
proto-orthography, as is sometimes suggested.3 Rich evidence of
this civilization, which probably collapsed due to a combination
of economic decline caused by over-exploitation of land and raids
by other tribes, has been discovered in modern Serbia and the
neighbouring countries. During the Copper and Bronze Ages, the
area continued to be home to human settlements and to attract
migrants from elsewhere.4 Traces of ancient Greek civilization
suggest that contacts between the central and southern parts
of the Balkan peninsula existed. In the fourth century BC, the
empire of Alexander the Great extended to southern regions of
present-day Serbia.
When the Romans began their conquest of the Balkans in the
second century BC, they encountered, among others, the Triballi,
Dardani, Illyri (Illyrians) and Scordisci, a Celtic tribe that lived in
the vicinity of modern Belgrade. Administrative division of the
Roman Balkans changed several times, but much of what is Serbia
today was part of Moesia and Moesia Superior between the first
century AD and the late third century AD. Further administra-
tive reorganization during the reign of Emperor Diocletian (AD
284–305) created Moesia Prima, which roughly corresponded to
modern central Serbia. Pannonia included present-day Vojvodina
(northern Serbia), Dalmatia bordered Moesia Prima in the west,
3
A. Palavestra, ‘Izmišljanje tradicije: ‘vinčansko pismo’, Etnoantropološki
problemi (Belgrade), 5:2 (2010), 239–58.
4
ISN, I, 15–30.
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Dacia and Thrace in the north-east and east, respectively, while

Macedonia laid in the south. Much of what in the twentieth cen-
tury became Yugoslavia and Albania was part of the Illyricum
prefecture created as part of Diocletian’s reforms. Main centres
of Roman life on the territory of modern Serbia, and important
archaeological sites today, include Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica),
Viminacium (near Kostolac), UNESCO-listed Felix Romuliana
(Gamzigrad), Singidunum (Belgrade), Horeum Margi (Ćuprija),
Naissus (Niš) and Remesiana (Bela Palanka).
Two Moesian-born emperors and rivals, Constantine I (b.
Naissus, AD 272, r. AD 306–337) and Licinius (b. AD 263, Felix
Romuliana?, r. AD 308–324), jointly issued an edict near Milan
in AD 313 that ended the prosecution of Christians. In AD 330,
Constantine moved the empire’s capital to Constantinople, a
city he built on the site of Byzantium, an ancient Greek settle-
ment on the Bosphorus where he had defeated Licinius six years
previously. The move to the new capital completed the shift of
political and economic power within the empire from west to
east, which had already begun under Diocletian. The formal
division came in AD 395, the final year of the reign of Emperor
Theodosius I (AD 379–395), during which Christianity became
the empire’s official religion.
While Constantinople prospered as a political, economic
and military centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, the power
of the Western Roman Empire declined. By early fifth cen-
tury, the population of Constantinople had outgrown that of
Rome, increasing to over 500,000 inhabitants by the end of the
century. At this time, the Western Roman Empire succumbed
to invasions of Germanic tribes, who adopted the culture and
religion of the conquered. Meanwhile, Hellenic culture and
Eastern Christianity gave the old Roman imperial framework
in the east a new life, transforming it into the polity known in
modern times as the Byzantine Empire, or Byzantium. By the
time the (Eastern) emperor Justinian I (AD 527–565) conquered
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Rome in AD 536, this once grand city had become a shadow

of its former self.5
In 1054, six and a half centuries after the political division of the
empire, the Christian church formally split into the Roman Catholic
and (Greek) Orthodox branches, with Rome and Constantinople
as its rival centres, respectively. The sacking of Constantinople by
the Fourth Crusade in 1204 temporarily installed ‘Latin’ rule in
Byzantium, which lasted until 1261. The capture of Constantinople
in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks brought to an end the Eastern
Roman Empire – or perhaps transformed it once again, only even
more fundamentally than when it transitioned from a Roman to a
‘Greek’ state in the seventh century. The first fall of Constantinople
facilitated the rise of medieval Serbia in the early thirteenth century,
while the downfall of Byzantium in the fifteenth century coincided
with the end of Serbia’s medieval statehood.
Indeed, these developments, sketched here very broadly, have
had a profound impact on the history of Serbia and the Serbs. The
dividing line between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires
ran across the Balkan peninsula, through the territory that Serb,
Croat and other Slav tribes settled in the sixth and seventh cen-
turies. Originally political, the partition in time gained religious,
social and cultural dimensions. These have long outlived the
Roman Empire and have contributed decisively to the shaping of
identities of, and divisions among, the Southern Slavs, and among
the Serbs, who today live on both sides of Theodosius’ old border.
Slavs and Avars

Very little is known of the earliest history of the Serbs except
that their arrival in the Balkans, and on the historical scene, was
5
G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, transl. from German by
J. Hussey, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1968, 27–28, 45; B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Old and New
Rome Compared: The Rise of Constantinople’, in L. Grig and G. Kelly (eds),
Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 2012, 53–80, 54.
53
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almost certainly closely connected with Slav and Avar migrations

to east-central and south-eastern Europe in the sixth and sev-
enth centuries. Protected by the Carpathian Mountains from
the curiosity of classical scholars and with no written language,
and therefore no documents, of their own, the early Slavs – their
society, identity and religious beliefs – are shrouded in mystery,
as are the circumstances surrounding their migration. Slavs
began to raid Byzantium’s northern frontier during the reign
of Emperor Justin I (AD 518–527). Their incursions intensified
during the reign of his successor, Justinian, gradually turning into
permanent settlements in the second half of the sixth century. At
the time the empire was exposed to invasion by central Asian
nomads, most probably of Turkic origin, it became involved in
a conflict between the Germanic Gepids and Lombards, while
in the south it had to deal with a threat posed by the Persians.
During Justinian’s reign, Byzantium suffered a devastating
plague epidemic, which further weakened its defences. All these
factors helped the Slav penetration, probably from more than
one direction, of the empire’s fortified frontier along and south
of the lower Danube.6
Crucial for the success of the Slav migrations may have been
the emergence of the Avars around this time. This semi-nomadic
tribe, which may have usurped the name of an enemy that forced
them out of their central or east Asian homeland, appeared in
central Europe in the second half of the sixth century, initially as
a Byzantine ally. The Avars defeated the Germanic tribes, forc-
ing the Lombards to move to modern Italy (where they would
in turn defeat Byzantine colonies there and establish a powerful
6
F. Dvornik, The Slavs: Their Early History and Civilization, Boston, 1956,
ch. 1; B. Ferjančić, Vizantija i Južni Sloveni, Belgrade, 1966, 13–15; VIINJ, I;
J. V. A, Fine Jr, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth
to the Late Twelfth Century, Ann Arbor, MI, 1991 (first publ. 1983), ch. 2;
ISN, I, 109–24; D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe,
500–1453, London, 1971, ch. 2.
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kingdom) and subjugated the Turkic and Slavonic tribes whom

they encountered. By the late sixth century, they had established
a powerful tribal confederation in central Europe. During the
two and a half centuries of its existence, the Avar khaganate was a
major European power that rivalled the Byzantine and Frankish
Empires. Indeed, with Slav and Persian help, the Avars nearly
captured Constantinople in 626.7
The relationship between the Avars and Slavs was complex.
The former probably subjugated the latter, yet at times they seem
to have been allies. In the late sixth century, the Slavs, possibly
together with the Avars (Byzantine sources did not always distin-
guish between them), penetrated deep into the Balkan peninsula.
They captured Singidunum, Viminacium and other fortifications
of Roman Moesia and besieged Salonica. In the 580s, the Slavs
held much of northern Greece and reached as far south as the
Peloponnese. The earliest sources describe the Slavs as tall, red
haired and relatively peaceful farmers, skilled at navigating riv-
ers, using boats they made themselves. However, they were also,
or eventually became through encounters with the Avars and
Byzantium, tough and mobile warriors who carried with them
light arms and equipment.8
After the mid-sixth century, Slav incursions into the Balkans
ceased to be driven purely by looting and pillaging. While the Avars
tended to return to their central European base following military
campaigns south of the Danube, the Slavs increasingly remained
behind, colonizing the Balkan interior that was largely depopu-
lated after the collapse of the imperial frontier on the Danube.
It was likely as part, or in the aftermath, of these migrations and
7
W. Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822, transl. from
German by W. Sayers, Ithaca, NY, 2018.
8
VIINJ, I, 29–30 (for Procopius’ description of the Slavs); Ferjančić, 18–19;
S. M. Ćirković, The Serbs, transl. from Serbian by V. Tošić, Oxford, 2004, 11;
Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 5.
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military expeditions that Serbs and Croats appeared in the Balkans,

in the first half of the seventh century.9 This is an educated guess
because no surviving contemporary sources about Slav and Avar
migrations mention the Serbs and Croats.
Byzantium may not have ‘made’ the Slavs in an effort to
make sense of the numerous, previously unknown tribes that
appeared on its Danube frontier, as one historian has suggested,
but the Slav–Byzantine encounters undoubtedly had had a pro-
found impact on both sides.10 In the Balkans, distant ances-
tors of modern Serbs (as well as Bulgarians, Macedonians and
Montenegrins) would come under the direct political, cultural
and religious influence of Constantinople and would form part
of the ‘Byzantine commonwealth’. On the other hand, distant
ancestors of modern Croats and Slovenians, who settled to the
west of the border that divided the Roman Empire in 395, ulti-
mately came under the influence of the ‘west’: politically this
meant the Franks, Venice, Austria and Hungary, and ecclesi-
astically it meant Rome. Modern Bosnia and Herzegovina lay
somewhere in the middle of this fault line, but it is important
to keep in mind that borders between ‘east’ and ‘west’ remained
fluid through the Middle Ages (and really into modern times).
Medieval Serb polities included both Eastern Orthodox (in
the hinterland) and Roman Catholic dioceses (on the coast of
Montenegro and south Dalmatia), while some Serb rulers were
baptized as Catholics. In Bosnia and Hum (later Herzegovina),
a local, possibly heretic Christian church co-existed with Roman
Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy between the thirteenth and
fifteenth centuries, while medieval Croatia had been exposed to
Byzantine political and cultural influences as well.
9
ISN, I, 109–10.
10
F. Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube
Region, c.500–700, Cambridge, 2007, and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages
(500–1300), 2 vols, Leiden, 2019, I, ch. 5.
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The exact location of the Slavs’ pre-Balkan homeland remains

a matter of debate. Some scholars have suggested that the area
between the Polish Vistula/Wisła River and the Pripet/Pinsk
Marshes in southern Belarus and north-west Ukraine was the
likely Slav Urheimat, while others have argued that it extended
into north-eastern parts of modern Germany.11 A comprehensive
study of human genetics points at the middle basin of the Dniester/
Dnieper River, in modern Ukraine and Belarus, as a region with
the highest concentration of a ‘Slav gene’.12 Byzantium referred
to Slav settlements that sprang up on the territory it now con-
trolled only nominally (with the exception of fortified garrisons)
as Sclavinias (Sklaviniai). The exact number of these settlements
is not known, nor do we know what, if any, cultural, linguistic and
proto-ethnic differences existed between them.13 Sclavinias were
established near rivers, in nearby forests and close to main roads,
probably in areas abandoned by local population that had fled the
invading foreign tribes. (This pattern was partly repeated when
the Ottomans swept the Balkans in the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries, forcing Orthodox Slavs, Vlachs and Albanians
to flee into mountains or to migrate north and west, as discussed
later in the book.) The Slav tribes eventually mixed, both among
themselves and with non-Slavs, as historians, archaeologists and
linguists have long suspected and as more recent studies of human
genetics seem to confirm.14
11
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 25–27; Ferjančić, Vizantija i Južni Sloveni,
6; Dvornik, ch. 1; cf. Curta, The Making of the Slavs.
12
K. Rębała et al., ‘Y-STR Variation among Slavs: Evidence for the Slavic
Homeland in the Middle Dnieper Basin’, Journal of Human Genetics, 52:5 (2007),
406–14.
13
Ćirković, The Serbs, xviii, 10–12, and Rabotnici, vojnici, duhovnici: Društva
sredjevekovnog Balkana, compiled and ed. by V. Djokić, Belgrade, 1997, 171–84;
cf. N. Budak (ed.), Etnogeneza Hrvata, Zagreb, 1996.
14
D. Marjanović et al., ‘The Peopling of Modern Bosnia-Herzegovina:
Y-chromosome Haplogroups in the Three Main Ethnic Groups’, Annals
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South Slav words for the people of the empire, the Greek-
speaking ‘Romans’ (Grci, from Latin Graeci) and for imperial and
royal titles (car, from Caesar; kralj, from Carolus), point at an ini-
tial interaction with Latin-speaking ‘Romans’ of the east Adriatic
towns. Roman coins dating to this time have been found in the
Balkan hinterland, which suggests that the early contacts, probably
established through trade, were not limited to the coastal areas.
The Slavs would have encountered ancestors of Vlachs, semi-
nomadic shepherds possibly of Dacian origin, whose language was
heavily influenced by Latin and Greek, depending on their geo-
graphic location. Slav migrants also reached the remote moun-
tains of modern Albania, where the local population was possibly
of Illyrian origin and had largely remained, unlike the Vlachs, out-
side direct external influences. Even before the Slav migrations,
groups and individuals with ethnically mixed or ambiguous identi-
ties were formed. The movement and mixing of peoples continued
and polyethnic identities certainly existed following the arrival of
the Slavs.15
Ancient Slavs cultivated land, kept domesticated animals
and knew how to preserve and store food. Their pre-Christian
beliefs are little known, except that, in common with the
Indo-European tradition, they worshiped gods of thunder,

lighting, heaven, the underworld, fire and rivers.16 Names of
some Slav deities are preserved in toponyms (Triglav, the larg-
est mountain in Slovenia; Veles, a town in North Macedonia,
of Human Genetics, 69:6 (2005), 757–63; C. Carmichael, A Concise History of

Bosnia, Cambridge, 2015, 3–4.
15
T. Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe, Armonk, NY,
1994, 131–33; cf. K. Kaser, Hirten, Kämpfer, Stammeshelden: Ursprünge und
Gegenwart des balkanischen Patriarchats, Vienna, 1992.
16
V. Čajkanović, Mit i religija u Srba, Belgrade, ed. by V. Djurić, Belgrade,
1973, and Stara srpska religija i mitologija, ed. by V. Djurić, Belgrade, 1994;
H. Lovmjanjski [Łowmiański], Religija Slovena, transl. from Polish by B.
Rajčić, Belgrade, 1996.
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Volos in Greece and Velenje in Slovenia) and personal names

(Vesna, Vid, Perun – all three are Serb personal names today).
Dabog, the Slav god of the underworld, was worshiped by
the Serbs, who also believed in nymph-like creatures, vile
(s. vila), not dissimilar to the Norse Valkyrie. One of the key
characters in Serbian folk tradition is Vila Ravijojla, a ‘blood sis-
ter’ and protector of Marko Kraljević, a Dionisius-like hero of
Balkan folk legends (based on the fifteenth-century Serbian King
Marko – see Chapter 2). Like other Indo-European peoples,
the Slavs believed in the existence of demonic creatures. In Serb
tradition, these include veštice (witches), vukodlaci (werewolves),
drekavci (lit. ‘screechers’, similar to the Scandinavian Myling) and,
most infamously, vampiri (vampires). The word vampire may be
of uncertain origin etymologically, but the phenomenon is asso-
ciated with the Serbs, and more broadly the Balkans, due to the
popularity of Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel Dracula (1897).
In 1725, the Viennese press had reported of a case of vampirism
in Serbia (as the Austrian-occupied Belgrade province was called
at the time), causing something of a sensation across Europe.17
By the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Slavs had become
one of the dominant groups in south-eastern Europe, together
with the ‘Romans’ (Greeks and Greek-speaking peoples of the
empire), Avars and Bulgarians – another central Asian people who
had migrated to the eastern and central Balkans in the late sev-
enth century. These tectonic changes led to further mixing and
unmixing of populations, to assimilation and forced population
movements. An example of the latter was the exodus in 762 of
a large number of Slavs from the Bulgarian–Byzantine border-
lands to northern Anatolia. Contemporary sources talk of over
200,000 Slav refugees, which, if correct, means that large parts
17
J. Nowosadtko, ‘Der “Vampyrus Serviensis” und sein Habitat: Impressionen
von der österreichischen Militärgrenze’, Arbeitskreis Militär und Gesellschaft in
der Frühen Neuzeit, 8:2 (2004), 151–67.
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of south-eastern Europe were effectively depopulated. At the

same time, this forced migration increased an already significant
Slav presence in Asia Minor, where Byzantine emperors had pre-
viously settled Slav migrants.18 Following a catastrophic defeat
by the Franks in the early ninth century, the Avar confederation
broke up for good. The Bulgarian polity survived, but, after a
period of conflict between Bulgars and Slavs, its rulers eventually
adopted the language and culture of their Slav subjects.
The lack of a strong central authority – traditionally seen
as a weakness by historians – or a leader such as the Avar khan
Bayan, the Frankish king Clovis or the Bulgarian khan Krum,
may have been in fact beneficial for the Slavs. They established
sustainable agrarian society, arguably militarily weaker
a self-
than that of the Avars and Bulgarians, but more durable in the
long term. Slav settlements attracted lower, non-military classes
among Avars, Bulgarians and other non-Slavs who mixed with
and adopted the identity of the Slavs.19 By the late ninth century,
the Slavs (or their leaders at any rate), including Serbs, accepted
Christianity, from both Constantinople and Rome, depending on
their geographical location. This was a complex process that went
hand in hand with the development of the Old Church Slavonic
language and the spread of literacy.
Origin of the Serbs

Several decades earlier, the Serbs appeared in the historical record
for the first time. According to the Frankish Annals, in 822,
Duke Liutewid (Ljudevit in the modern spelling) of Pannonian
Slavs – probably Croats, but not named as such in the text –
sought refuge among neighbouring Serbs after his stronghold
18
Ćirković, The Serbs, 14; Ostrogorsky, 168.
19
P. J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton,
NJ, 2002, ch. 5.
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Siscia (Sisak in modern Croatia) came under attack by the Franks.

Ljudevit’s host was one of several unnamed ‘dukes’ of the Serbs,
‘a people that is said to hold a large part of Dalmatia’. This was
a reference to the ancient Roman province of Dalmatia, which
extended deep into the western Balkan interior, from the eastern
Adriatic coast to the valleys of the Ibar and Sava Rivers. Can we
take this as a clue about the extent of the Serbs’ political rule in
the first half of the ninth century? Or did Ljudevit seek refuge in a
small Serb outpost in present-day south-eastern Croatia, as some
historians have speculated?20 According to the Annals, Ljudevit
‘treacherously murdered’ his Serb host, only to be himself assas-
sinated by a rival Slav/Croat leader the following year.21 The ear-
liest account of the Serbs in the Balkans is therefore also the first
known record of the relations between the ancestors of Serbs and
Croats. Other medieval sources similarly point at a close interac-
tion between Serb and Croat tribes.22
The origin of Serbs, the location of their pre-Balkan home-
land and when and under what circumstances they migrated to
the Balkans are matters of much speculation due to the lack of
sources.23 Even the meaning of the word ‘Serb’ is unknown.
Some scholars believe that it is non-Slav in origin (just like the
20
T. Živković, ‘The Origins of the Royal Frankish Annalist’s Information
about the Serbs in Dalmatia’, Spomenica akademika Sime Ćirkovića,
Belgrade, 2011, 381–98; cf. N. Klaić, Povijest Hrvata u ranom srednjem vijeku,
Zagreb, 1971, 211; R. Novaković, Gde se nalazila Srbija od VII do XII veka,
Belgrade, 1981.
21
The quotes from the Annals: Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and
Nithard’s Histories [late 8th-early 9th centuries], transl. by
B. W. Scholz and B. Rogers, Ann Arbor, MI, 1972, 111, 113.
22
DAI, 123–60; Mas’ūdi, From the Meadows of Gold, transl. by P. Linde and C.
Stone, London, 2007, 15–16; ‘The Russian Primary Chronicle’, transl. and
intro. by S. H. Cross, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 12
(1930), 77–320, 138.
23
T. Živković, De conversione Croatorum et Serborum: A Lost Source, Belgrade,
2012, 47.
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word ‘Croat’). One theory is that name ‘Serb’ is derived from a

Caucasian word ‘Ser’ or ‘Sur’, which means ‘man’ (Ser-bi/Sur-bi
meaning ‘people’); another theory is that its Indo-European root
(ser-, serv-) means to ‘guard’ or ‘protect’ (land or a herd of domes-
ticated animals).24 There are suggestions that original Serbs and
Croats were of Iranian–Sarmatian origin but were later Slavicized,
while other historians have maintained their Slav origin. Either
way, the Serbs (and Croats) had been Slavs prior to their settle-
ment in the Balkans or became Slavicized at some point relatively
soon thereafter.25
It is plausible, but cannot be proven, that there is a link between
the Balkan Serbs and Serboi, a tribe which had lived between the
Caucasus and the Volga River and which is mentioned in the works
of Pliny the Elder (first century AD) and in Ptolemy’s Geography
(second century AD). The Serboi lived near, and may have been
part of, Soubeni, or Slavs, who occupied a vague area north of the
Black Sea, in ancient Sarmatia. Contemporary Greek-language
sources also refer to Choroatos in the lower Don valley, in the
proximity of the Serboi; this was either a people, a person or a
place name, possibly connected to Balkan Croats, who first appear
in historical sources as Croats in the late ninth century.26
Although contemporary accounts about Slav migrations do not
mention Serbs and Croats, it is generally assumed that the two
24
Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 124–25; N. Županič, ‘Značenje nekih starih
geografskih i etničkih imena na balkanskom poluostrvu’, Etnolog (Ljubljana),
5–6 (1933), 98–112, 103–104.
25
The Iranian–Sarmatian origin of Croats and Serbs: Dvornik, 26–28; Fine,
The Early Medieval Balkans, 56–57; Serbs as Slavs by the time of their
Balkan migration: Ćirković, The Serbs, xviii, 10–12, and Srbi u srednjem veku,
Belgrade, 1995, 12; Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 60. The Slav
origin thesis was developed by nineteenth-century philologists and linguists,
such as eminent Croatian scholar Vatroslav Jagić (1838–1923). Fine (56) also
allows for this possibility.
26
Ćirković, The Serbs, ch. 1; Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 56; Stoianovich,
Balkan Worlds, 125.
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peoples settled in south-east Europe as part of these, or related,

population movements.27 The most detailed and the earliest
surviving account about the arrival of the Serbs and Croats in
the Balkans and their subsequent history is a tenth-century text
ascribed to Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913–59).
De Administrando Imperio (On governing the empire) was what
today might have been called a policy guide, which the emperor
wrote for his heir. Constantine used written documents available
to him and he likely also had knowledge of the Slavs’ own his-
torical accounts, preserved in oral tradition. Written some three
centuries after the Slavs’ arrival in the Balkans, by emperor of an
empire that sought to reassert control over the region, the text
must be approached with extreme caution. Historians have long
analysed and contextualized Constantine’s work, wondered about
sources on which it drew and questioned its reliability. At the same
time, they have not been able to write about the period without
relying on it.28 With these caveats in mind, it is worth looking at
Constantine’s account of the origin of Serbs, their migration to
and their early history in the Balkans.
According to Constantine, Croats and, shortly after them,
Serbs migrated to south-eastern Europe on invitation by Emperor
Heraclius (AD 610–640).29 Heraclius’ reign, incidentally, marked
the beginning of the empire’s Hellenic turn, politically and cul-
turally, so if Constantine was correct, the Serbs and Croats set-
tled at the periphery of the Eastern Roman Empire at the time
it was transitioning into the Hellenized Byzantium.30 Heraclius
27
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, ch. 2.
28
VIINJ, II; Živković, De conversione.
29
DAI, on the Serbs: 153–60; on the Zahumljani, Travunjani, Konavljani,
Pagani (all of whom Constantine describes as Serbs) and Dukljani (whose
origin is unspecified): 160–65. For Croats see 147–53. A separate chapter is
dedicated to (Roman) Dalmatia, which also discusses Croats, Serbs and other
Slavs, 123–47.
30
Ostrogorsky, 106–107.
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was recruiting allies against the invading Avars, possibly during

the 626 siege of Constantinople, and it is in this context that his
invitation to the Croats and Serbs may be understood. However, it
is just as probable that Serbs and Croats came uninvited, as part of
an Avar–Slav invasion. Writing at the time when the empire had
de facto lost control of the Balkan interior to Bulgarians and Slavs,
Constantine might have projected tenth century political ambi-
tions on the seventh century events he was describing.
In all likelihood, he was familiar with the Serbs’ myth of ori-
gin, or at least with what the Serbs or those who had contacts
with them believed was their earliest known history. According
to it, Balkan Serbs ‘descended from unbaptized Serbs, also called
“White”’, who lived in the neighbourhood of ‘White Croatia’
(the Croats’ pre-Balkan homeland) and the Frankish state. After
an unnamed Serb archon (ruler) bequeathed the land to his two
sons, one of them led part of the people on a long journey south,
while the other brother remained in ‘White Serbia’ with the rest
of the tribe. Initially, Heraclius granted the Serb migrants land ‘in
the province of Thessaloniki’. At some later point, they decided
to return home, but upon crossing the Danube changed their
mind once again. This time they settled in the western Balkans, in
‘what is now Serbia and Pagania and the so-called country of the
Zachlumi and Terbounia and the country of the Kanalites’, that is
the lands which ‘had been made desolate by the Avars’.31
The location of ‘White Serbia’, whose existence (just like that
of ‘White Croatia’) seems to be confirmed in other sources,32 can
only be guessed. According to Constantine, the Serbs called their
pre-Balkan home Boïki (Bojki, Bojka), which, scholars have spec-
ulated, could have been located in Bohemia, in the modern Czech
Republic, or in present-day Saxony, in Germany, where to this
31
DAI, 154–55; cf. Ćirković, Srbi u srednjem veku, 13, 15; ISN, I, 141–45.
32
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 56–58.
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day a people called Serbs live.33 The connection, if any existed,

between the ancestors of the Balkan Serbs (Srbi) and of the Serbs
(Serby/Serbja) of Lusatia (Łužica/Łužyca, Lausitz) in Saxony,
where they are known as Sorben (Sorbs), is indeed potentially
intriguing. The Lusatian Serbs first appear in historical records
during a conflict with the Avars c. AD 631. Under the leader-
ship of Dervan, they then joined a vast, mainly Slav confederation
that stretched across the modern Czech Republic, Slovakia, parts
of Austria and Slovenia, under the leadership of a Frankish mer-
chant Samo (d. 658). Samo’s ‘empire’ emerged in the 620s out of a
rebellion against the Avars, which, if it had not been instigated by
Heraclius’ diplomats, certainly suited the Byzantine emperor.34
Could the Lusatian Serbs be the descendants of those Serbs
who in Constantine’s account remained north, in ‘White Serbia’?
Some historians have speculated, not implausibly, that Dervan
was that brother who stayed behind in the Serbs’ pre-Balkan
homeland. According to this hypothesis, Byzantium established
contact with the Serbs (and with the Croats) via the Franks,
whose king Dagobert I (c.629–634) had exchanged embassies
with Heraclius in 629/30. Following the migration to the Balkans
of part of the tribe at some point between the late 620s and early
630s, the remaining Serbs joined Samo’s confederation.35 The
33
Ćirković, The Serbs, xvii, Srbi u srednjem veku, 12; V. Ćorović, Istorija
srpskog naroda, Belgrade, 2013, 56; Dvornik, 27; Obolensky, The Byzantine
Commonwealth, 59; VIINJ, II, 46–47; Županič, 102–103.
34
Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 59–60; G. Stone, Slav Outposts in
Central European History: The Wends, Sorbs and Kashubs, London, 2016, 6.
35
T. Živković (Južni Sloveni pod Vizantijskom vlašću, 2nd edn, Belgrade,
2007, 198–99), builds on an earlier suggestion by R. H. J. Jenkins, a British
Byzantologist, and translator of De Administrando Imperio, that Dervan might
have been one of the two Serb brothers mentioned by Emperor Constantine.
Obolensky (The Byzantine Commonwealth, 59) indirectly makes the same
point. This theory, and more generally Constantine’s account of the
migration of the Serbs and Croats, is rejected by Curta (Eastern Europe in the
Middle Ages, I, 70).
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Balkan and Lusatian Serbs thus may descend from a single tribe,
but it is similarly possible that more than one tribe shared the
Serb name. In any case, the latter, who today number just around
60,000 people, are a surviving reminder of a larger Slav pres-
ence in northern Europe in the Middle Ages. This tiny Slavonic
nation is linguistically and culturally closest to the neighbouring
Czechs and Poles, and its members belong to the Roman Catholic
and Lutheran churches. They refer to their better known, more
numerous and predominantly Eastern Orthodox Balkan cousins
and namesakes as ‘southern Serbs’.36
In its main features, the Serbs’ myth of origin resembles the
myth of origin of other peoples, including the Croats. Even if
some of it was based on actual events, differences would have
likely already occurred between the two groups of Serbs by the
time the migration of the southern branch was complete or
soon afterwards. The migrants would have lost (through death
and desertion) some old and gained new members (mercenaries,
slaves, brides), who would have adopted the identity of the dom-
inant group. Following their settlement in the Balkans, the Serbs
mixed with other Slav and non-Slav peoples who lived in their
vicinity; sometimes they took leadership of neighbouring groups;
in other cases, they were assimilated by others.
The Formation of the First Serb/South

Slav Polities
The process of political consolidation of a previously fragmented
space eventually took place, as Sclavinias gradually disappeared
through merger or conquest by more powerful groups such as the
Serbs and Croats. This is most likely how the first Serb or Serb-led
36
For the Lusatian Serbs see J. Brankačk and F. Mětšk, Geschichte der Sorben:
Von den Anfängen bis 1789 (vol. 1 of a multi-volume series edited by J. Šołta),
Bautzen, 1977; Dvornik, ch. 11; Stone, Slav Outposts.
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polities and tribal confederations were formed. Nominally part of

Byzantium, they exercised a large degree of self-rule. Names of
the old Slav tribes were mostly forgotten by the eleventh cen-
tury. In some cases, Slav and Slavicized tribes took their name
from a geographic location or an ancient place name in the area
where they settled, so ‘memory’ of some Sclavinias survives in
toponyms. In other cases, old names were preserved in titles of
medieval Serb rulers.37
Like other medieval Europeans, the Serbs were likely brought
together by the notion of common origin, although group mem-
bership was not acquired solely through birth. A ‘core’ people,
in this case Serb, would have preserved, shared and projected its
identity onto surrounding groups and individuals. Slavs assimi-
lated their Bulgarian conquerors, Avars incorporated Slavs, who
may have been later re-assimilated by Slavs or by Slavicized
Bulgarians and so on. Similar examples could be found through-
out Europe. For example, the previously mentioned Lombards
incorporated Gepids, Alamans, Saxons, Goths, Romans and
even some Bulgarians. The modern French are named after the
Germanic Franks, and so on.38
Multiple identities existed also, so one could be both an Avar and
a Slav, a Bulgarian and a Serb. Proto-ethnic boundaries, so far as
they mattered, were not and could not be static, especially at times
of frequent migrations. It is therefore safe to assume that early Serbs
37
Ćirković, Srbi u srednjem veku, 30–31. For example, the title of Stefan Vladislav
(1234–43) was ‘King of all the Rascian land and Duklja, Dalmatia, Travunija
and Zahumlje’. The Serbian Orthodox Church today includes a bishopric
of Zahumlje-Herzegovina and the Littoral, while the full title of Serbian
Metropolitan Amfilohije (1991–2020) was Archbishop of Cetinje, Metropolitan
of Montenegro and the Littoral, of Zeta, Brda (the Highlands) and Skenderija,
and the Exarch of the Holy Throne of Peć. A senior cleric within the
Metropolitanate holds an honorary title of Bishop of Dioclea (i.e. Duklja).
38
P. J. Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early Middle
Ages’, Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien, 113 (1983),
15–26, 20.
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possessed a complex, fluid and ‘polyethnic’ identity. Group bound-

aries were more permeable and peoples inside them less homoge-
nous than usually thought. Pre-modern nations emerged, evolved
and sometimes disappeared. Not unlike modern nations, medieval
group identities, including those of Serbs and other South Slavs,
were constructs of situations and contexts.39 In any case, between
their assumed migration to the Balkans and the time Emperor
Constantine wrote his text, the Serbs would have undergone a signif-
icant transformation, or ethnogenesis, a hard-to-explain phenome-
non, perhaps because it is rarely observable by contemporaries. For
that reason, any talk about an ancient Serb – and, similarly, Slav –
homeland is purely an academic matter.
According to Emperor Constantine, direct descendants of the
archon40 who brought the Serbs to the Balkans continued to rule
the Serb (and possibly neighbouring) tribes until the tenth century.
The first one of them known by name was Višeslav (or perhaps
Vojislav), whose reign historians have dated to around AD 780. A
combination of military power and diplomatic skill of early Serb
leaders, the support they allegedly enjoyed in Constantinople,
which in the ninth century sought allies against the Bulgarians
and Arabs, facilitated the emergence of a Serb or a Serb-led con-
federation under Vlastimir (c.831–850).41 Constantine called this
polity ‘Baptized Serbia’, presumably to distinguish it from then
still unbaptized Serbs of ‘White Serbia’.42
39
Geary, ‘Ethnic Identity’ and The Myth of Nations, passim; W. Pohl,
‘Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies’, in L. K. Little and
B. H. Rosenwein (eds), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, Oxford,
1998, 13–24, 16–17.
40
VIINJ, II, 50n. Greek-language sources used archon and Latin-language
sources dux when referring to the early Serb and other South Slav rulers, but
we do not know the Slav equivalents from this time.
41
DAI, 153–54; Ćirković, The Serbs, 14–15.
42
Northwestern Slavs (collectively known as Wends), long resisted attempts
by Germanic kings and missionaries to convert them to Christianity, partly
because it would have amounted to their subjugation by the Germans.
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De Administrando Imperio includes an account of a battle

between Vlastimir’s sons and heirs Mutimir, Stroimir and Gojnik
and Bulgarian Khan Boris, which took place in 853 or 854.43 After
the Serbs prevailed, they released prominent Bulgarian prison-
ers, including Boris’ son Vladimir. In a gift-exchanging cere-
mony that followed, the Serbs presented their erstwhile enemy
with two slaves, two falcons, two hunting dogs and eighty furs.
This spectacle, if not the battle itself, took place ‘at the frontier
at Rasi’. Whether this referred to the fortified town of Ras or to
the surrounding area, it seems that in the mid-ninth century, the
political centre of the later Serb principality of Raška (Rascia) was
situated on the Bulgarian–Serb frontier (Figure 1.1). Therefore,
much of what is modern central Serbia was part of the Bulgarian
polity at the time.
This, then, was the easternmost border of ninth-century Serbia
(Map 1.1). Its northern frontier is not known, but it likely did
not cross the river Sava. It extended from the valleys of the Ibar
and Lim westwards across the river Drina, into present-day
Lusatian Serbs were finally conquered in 963 and the majority were
Germanized thereafter. However, Boso of St Emmeram (968–70), the first
bishop of Merseburg (a town in modern Germany near Halle an der Saale,
in Lusatia) was a Slav speaker, like his immediate successors. A. P. Vlasto,
The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, Cambridge, 1970, 142–54. These
north-western Slav or Slav-speaking ‘apostles’ may have therefore performed
a similar role as Cyril and Methodius (see below).
43
DAI, 155; VIINJ, II, 51n. No other record of the battle survives. A ninth
century golden seal featuring an Orthodox-style cross and inscription, in
Greek and Old Slavonic, ‘God, protect Stroimir’, was purchased in 2006
by the Serbian government at an auction in Germany. The stamp, now
displayed at Belgrade’s Historical Museum, is believed to have belonged to
Stroimir, the ninth-century co-ruler of the Serbs. Munich’s Gorny & Mosch
auction house acquired the seal from a private collector in Germany, but no
further details were provided. Reportedly it sold for €20,000 – a modest price
for what the Serbian media somewhat sensationally presented as a proof of
Serbia’s statehood in the ninth century. T. Živković, ‘The Golden Seal of
Stroimir’, Istorijski časopis (Belgrade), LV, 2007, 23–29.
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figure 1.1 Remnants of the medieval town of Ras, south-western

Serbia, an area where, or in whose proximity, the first Serb polity in the
Balkans formed in the late eighth or early ninth century (Michael Runkel/
robertharding/Getty Images)
Bosnia, until it reached Croat and Croat-controlled lands in

modern Dalmatia and western Herzegovina. (As already seen, the
Frankish Annals suggest a similar territorial extent of early medi-
eval ‘Serbia’.) At this time, Bosnia was probably a župa situated
in the Bosna River valley, and smaller in territory than the mod-
ern state of that name. After the collapse of Časlav’s state in the
second half of the tenth century, discussed in the following text,
the history of Bosnia would develop separately from the history
of the Serb polities that formed to its east. Not much is known
about the Bosnian history during this period. Parts of modern
Bosnia were included in the eleventh century Croat kingdom;
by the late twelfth century, if not earlier, Bosnian Slavs created
a separate territorial organization of their own, despite a period
of Hungarian rule, about which little is known as well. Hum
(Herzegovina) would remain part of the Serbian state until the
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HOLY
ROMAN Dr HUNGARY
EMPIRE av
a R.
Sisak
Sava R .
Sirmium
CROATIA
Zadar Belgrade
SERBIA Danube R.
Split
Mo
rav
IJA
AD
PA GA N
a R.
IA Dubrovnik Ras Sofia
LJE
R
TI
C ZAHUM VUNIJA BLACK
SE TRA BULGARIAN EMPIRE SEA
A DUKLJA Var
da Adrianople
THEME OF Constantinople
Durazzo
rR
DYRRACHION E
EMPIR
.
ITALY NE
I
N T Salonica
ZA
BY
AEGEAN
SEA
Athens
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Probable borders of ‘Baptized Serbia’and its neighbours, c. 950
map 1.1 Probable borders of ‘Baptized Serbia’ and its neighbours,

c.950. Drawn by Joe LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/ based on a map
originally published in Sima M. Ćirković, The Serbs, Oxford: Blackwell/
Wiley, 2004, p. 13
second half of the fourteenth century, when it was taken over by

Bosnia, but retained its own regional identity (see Chapter 2).44
As mentioned earlier, according to Emperor Constantine, fol-
lowing their arrival in the Balkans, the Serbs also settled in the
44
S. M. Ćirković, Istorija srednjevekovne bosanske države, Belgrade, 1964, 39–40,
350n, ch. 4.
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lands known as ‘Pagania [Narenta], and in the so-called country

of Zachlumi [Zahumlje], Terbounites [Travunia or Travunija]
and the country of the Kanalites [Konavljani]’. Constantine
claimed that his contemporary Mihailo of Zahumlje origi-
nated from the Litziki (Lędzianie in modern Polish) tribe, who
at that time were still pagan and lived near the Wisła River in
southern Poland. Did Mihailo descend from a different Slav
tribe than his people, whom Constantine described as ‘Serbs
from the time of that prince who claimed the protection of
Emperor Heraclius’? Bordering these polities was ‘the country
of Diocletians’ (named after an abandoned Roman settlement
Dioclea/Duklja), the identity of whose population is not speci-
fied by the Byzantine emperor.45 This omission would in modern
times cause much polemic and controversy concerning the origin
of the Montenegrins. It is almost certain that Duklja, just like
the surrounding territories, was settled by Slavs following their
migrations and that they mixed with non-Slavs, like elsewhere in
the Balkans. An eleventh- and twelfth-century polity called Zeta,
which grew out of a župa of the same name, emerged roughly in
the area where Constantine’s tenth century Duklja had been situ-
ated. Zeta would be associated with the Serbs and with the South
Slavs more generally, and sometimes even with the neighbour-
ing Croats, by contemporaries and by later historians. However,
Zeta’s distinct (from Serb settlements in the hinterland) status
within the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Serbian state would
be preserved.46 Whatever the identity of these medieval South
45
DAI, 161–65.
46
For various interpretations (and sometimes speculations) about the identity
of the population of Duklja/Zeta and the other South Slav polities in the
early Middle Ages see N. Budak, ‘Identities in Early Medieval Dalmatia’,
in I. H. Garipzanov et al. (eds), Franks, Northmen and Slavs: Identities and
State Formation in Early Medieval Europe, Turnhout, 2008, 223–41; S. M.
Ćirković, Živeti sa istorijom, compiled & ed. by V. Djokić, Belgrade, 2020,
298–302; VIINJ, II, 63n; Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 202–203; Istorija
72
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Slav tribes and polities may have been, modern concepts of

nationhood should not be projected back to a pre-modern era.
The earliest Serb and South Slav settlements were formed in river
valleys, suitable for agriculture and water transport. Nearby hills
and mountains offered additional source of food and shelter in the
event of enemy attack. Specifically, Constantine’s ‘Baptized Serbia’
was formed in the valleys of Ibar and Lim Rivers, Pagania was sit-
uated between the rivers Cetina and Neretva, Zahumlje between
the Neretva and the hinterland of Dubrovnik/Ragusa, Travunija
between Zahumlje and Boka Kotorska and Konavle, and Duklja in
the valleys of the rivers Zeta and Morača.47 There existed through
the Middle Ages varying degrees of political, economic and cultural
links between these lands. The balance of power shifted from one
territory to another, until in the late twelfth century Raška assumed
the leading role and kept it for some two and a half centuries. The
popular view of two medieval Serb states, Zeta and Raška, as prede-
cessors of modern Montenegro and Serbia, respectively, is a nine-
teenth century construct meant to serve the idea of a union of the
two principalities as they were emerging out of the Ottoman rule.
A power struggle among Vlastimir’s sons apparently followed
the victory over the Bulgarians. Mutimir eventually prevailed,
but after his death around 890, his nephew Petar, the first
known Serb with a Christian name, emerged as the new Serb
ruler. Petar had previously lived in exile among the Croats,
who provided him shelter from a political conflict back home.48
Crne Gore, Titograd [Podgorica], 3 vols, 1967, I, 292; Klaić, Povijest Hrvata;
and Novaković, Gde se nalazila Srbija. For contemporary Byzantine sources
see Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057, transl. by J. Wortley,
intro. by Jean-Claude Cheynet and B. Fusin, notes by Cheynet, Cambridge,
2010, and Anna Komnene, The Alexiad, transl. by E. R. A. Sewter, ed.
P. Frankopan, London, 2009.
47
Similarly, the earliest Croat or Croat-led settlements formed in the valleys of
rivers Cetina, Drava and Sava.
48
Ćirković, The Serbs, 15; cf. DAI, 156–57.
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The Serbs’ western neighbours were on the ascendancy around

this time, having successfully resisted both Byzantium and the
Franks. Under Tomislav (c.910–928), about whom very little is
known from contemporary sources, the Croats repelled attacks
by the Bulgarians and the Hungarians. Dimitrije Zvonimir
(1075–1089) received a royal crown from Pope Gregory VII
(who also crowned Mihailo of Duklja, as the ‘King of Slavs’ – see
the following text). Croatia extended over a large territory that
stretched from Slavonia in the north to Dalmatia in the south,
including parts of Bosnia.49 The Croat state ceased to exist as
an independent polity in the late eleventh century, when it came
under the Hungarian rule, formalized as a union of two crowns in
1102. The Croats’ association with Hungary, and from the first
half of the sixteenth century Austria, would last until 1918, when
together with Serbs and Slovenians (descendants of those Slavs
who lived to the northwest of Croats), they formed Yugoslavia –
the Land of the South Slavs.
Spread of Christianity
Emperor Constantine’s claim that the Slavs had adopted
Christianity following their migration only later to return to
pagan beliefs seems unlikely. For at least two centuries after their
migration, most Slavs and Slavicized peoples remained pagan. A
mid-tenth-century Arab chronicle, referring to events of the pre-
vious century, described ‘a Slavic people called Serbs, who were
much feared’ and with ‘no particular religious affiliation’, who
allegedly burned themselves alive upon the death of their chief-
tain and ‘immolate his horses’, customs which resembled ‘those of
49
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, ch. 8, and When Ethnicity Did Not Matter
in the Balkans: A Study of Identity in Pre-Nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and
Slavonia in Medieval and Early-Modern Periods, Ann Arbor, MI, 2006, chps 1
& 2; Goldstein, Croatia, 18–19; Klaić, Povijest Hrvata, chps 6 & 7.
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the Indians’.50 Circumstances surrounding the conversion of the

Serbs to Christianity are not known, but it is possible to recon-
struct the context in which it happened. Having defeated the Arabs
in 863, Byzantine Emperor Michael III (842–867), known as the
Drunkard, turned his attention to the Slavs. Three years earlier,
the Russians had reached the walls of Constantinople, while (by
now mostly Slavicized) Bulgarians controlled large parts of the
Balkans.51 Christian missionaries from Constantinople and Rome
had been competing to convert the predominantly Slav popula-
tion of eastern and south-eastern Europe but without any signifi-
cant success until that point. Both sides understood that through
Christianity they would be able to strengthen their influence
among the Slavs and, in the case of Byzantium, hopefully regain
control of the Balkans. Byzantine strategy of keeping South Slav
rulers in check, by giving them imperial administrative titles and
allowing them to collect tribute from eastern Adriatic towns pre-
viously paid to the emperor, was effective up to a degree only.
At the same time, Slav leaders understood the importance
of adopting Christianity, the religion of the ‘civilized world’.
Bulgarian rulers moreover hoped that the Christian church would
unite a society where divisions between the Bulgars and the Slavs
had still existed.52 Keen to avoid interference from Byzantium,
the Bulgarians sought to ‘import’ Christianity from the geograph-
ically distant Franks. For the same reason, Rastislav of Moravia, a
polity squeezed between the Franks and the Bulgarians and out-
side the Byzantine sphere of influence, asked Constantinople to
send missionaries to his realm. Byzantium responded by dispatch-
ing brothers Cyril and Methodius, missionaries from Salonica flu-
ent in a local Slav vernacular, which at the time would have been
comprehensible to other Slavs.53
50
Mas’ūdī, 16. 51 Ostrogorsky, 227–28.
52
R. J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2005, 12–14.
53
Ostrogorsky, 229; cf. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 83–101.
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Byzantium realized that to finally convert the Slavs, it had to

make the New Testament and Christian liturgies understanda-
ble to them. To that effect, Cyril and Methodius designed the
first Slav alphabet based on Greek letters. This was Glagolitic;
later it was ‘updated’ to Cyrillic, whose modern versions are used
today by most Orthodox Slavs, including the Serbs. The conver-
sion of the Slavs to Christianity, therefore, was closely linked with
the spread of literacy. The Old Church Slavonic, as the written
Slav language became known, was based on the language spoken
by the Slavs living in Greek Macedonia, which was linguistically
close to the language spoken by Serbs and other South Slavs. By
the second half of the twelfth century, a (non-standardized) Serb
redaction of the Old Slavonic emerged.54
Despite their initial reluctance to accept Christianity from
Constantinople, Bulgarians were eventually left with no choice. In
864, Khan Boris – the same Bulgarian ruler whose army had been
defeated by the Serbs ten years previously – became Christian and
added ‘Michael’ to his name, in honour of the Byzantine emperor
of the same name. Several years later, possibly in the early years
of the reign of Emperor Michael’s successor Basil I (867–86), the
Serb leaders followed suit. Vlastimir was possibly born a pagan,
but his grandson Petar, born between 870 and 874, was given a
54
In 2021, Czech archaeologists published what they believe is evidence of the
earliest writing system among the Slavs: an inscription, in ancient Germanic
runes, on a cattle bone dating c. AD 600. This would suggest that some Slavs
at least had used an alphabet well before the invention of the Glagolitic – a
claim first made by a ninth-century Bulgarian monk, but previously rejected
by scholars. It could also shed further light on early German–Slav encounters
and possibly also on the pattern of Slav migrations. (Macháchek et al., ‘Runes
from Lány (Czech Republic): The Oldest Inscription among the Slavs’,
Journal of Archaeological Science, 127, March 2021). Either way, Glagolitic
remained in use in some parts of Croatia until the early modern era and
remains an important symbol of Croat identity today, despite the Croats’
preference for Latin and general rejection of Byzantine legacy and of Cyrillic
as a ‘Serbian’ alphabet.
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Christian name.55 It is not known to what extent, and how fast,

the new religion spread beyond the elites. Many ‘ordinary’ peo-
ple probably remained pagan or combined pre-Christian and
Christian beliefs and customs for a while, at least privately.56
Byzantium competed with Rome over the baptism of the Slavs
in the coastal regions of the Eastern Adriatic and in Croatia,
but ultimately Roman Christianity took a hold there. After the
schism between Rome and Constantinople was completed in
1054, the line of division between Roman Catholicism and Greek
Orthodoxy ran across territories populated by the South Slavs.
Croats became Roman Catholic, while the Serbs of the hinterland
eventually adopted Orthodoxy as their main religion, but Roman
Catholic presence remained strong in the towns of Duklja and
Zahumlje. The situation in Bosnia was even more complex: in
addition to the Catholics and Orthodox, there was also a native
church that kept many early Christian features and used Slavonic
liturgy. It was also tolerant of and possibly adopted a Manichean
Christian heresy, rejected by both the Orthodox and the Catholic
churches (see Chapter 2).
Cyril and Methodius, the ‘apostles of the Slavs’, are celebrated
today as saints by both the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic
church. Their home city of Salonica had once been home to large
Ottoman-era Jewish and Muslim communities, almost erased
during the first half of the twentieth century. It is generally less
known that in the early Middle Ages, the city and the s urrounding
area had a significant Slavophone community (which survives
to this day, albeit as a small, officially unrecognized group in
present-day Greece).57 Because of the work of Cyril and Methodius
55
VIINJ, II, 49–50n.
56
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 141–42; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs, 207–26.
57
A. Karakasidou, ‘Cultural Illegitimacy in Greece: The Slavo-Macedonian
“Non-Minority”’, in R. Clogg (ed.), Minorities in Greece: Aspects of a Plural
Society, London, 2002, 122–64; M. Mazower, Salonica, the City of Ghosts:
Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950, London, 2004.
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and their disciples, Salonica, or Solun as the Slavs call it, occupies
a special place in the history of the Serbs, and other Slavs.
The Decline of ‘Baptized Serbia’ and the Rise

of Duklja/Zeta
Taking advantage of a leadership crisis in Byzantium, where fol-
lowing the death of Emperor Leo VI in 912 an internally divided
regency ruled in the name of minor Emperor Constantine VII –
the future author of De Administrando Imperio – Simeon of
Bulgaria (893–927) vastly expanded his realm, which included
the ‘Serb lands’, and stretched all the way south to Greece. In
August 913, Simeon’s army reached the walls of Constantinople.
To his surprise, the Bulgarian leader was invited in by the impe-
rial regency. In an unprecedented ceremony, Patriarch Nicholas
crowned him ‘Emperor of Bulgarians’ – though not of ‘Romans’,
that is as a co-ruler with Constantine VII, which must have been
Simeon’s ultimate aim.58
Simeon’s death in 927 enabled Časlav – the grandson of Stroimir
and half Bulgarian through his mother’s side – to re-establish the
Serb polity, with the help of Byzantium. This would be a short-lived
success, as it turned out. Časlav’s defeat and death at the hands of
Magyars (Hungarians) in 960 marked the end of ‘Baptized Serbia’.59
A central Asian people who had recently settled the Pannonian
plains to the north of the South Slavs, in the last major population
movement of the Migration Period, the Magyars cut off, together
with Germanic Austrians and Latin Romanians, the Southern from
the Western and Eastern Slavs. In 1102, Croatia and soon thereaf-
ter Bosnia came under the control of the Hungarian Árpád dynasty.
58
Ostrogorsky, 262–63.
59
Ćirković, The Serbs, 18–19; Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 159–60;
P. Stephenson, Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier: A Political Study of the Northern
Balkans, 900–1204, Cambridge, 2000.
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For nearly a century after Časlav’s death, there is little informa-

tion in the surviving sources about the Serbs of the Balkan interior,
but ‘memory’ of the old Serb polity was preserved in the Byzantine
administrative system created under Emperor Basil II (976–1025).
A strategos Serbias governed the theme (province) of Serbia from his
seat in Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica, northern Serbia).60
Further south, Mihailo, the ruler of Zahumlje mentioned in
De Administrando Imperio, extended his rule over Travunija and
Duklja. He maintained religious links with Rome and friendly rela-
tions with Byzantium and other neighbours. During a Bulgarian–
Croatian war of 926, Zahumlje remained neutral.61
In the second half of the tenth century, Duklja came out of
the shadows previously cast by Mihailo’s Zahumlje and Časlav’s
Serbia. Under Jovan Vladimir, who enjoyed good relations with
Emperor Basil II, Duklja expanded into Zahumlje, Travunija and
the lands in the hinterland previously held by Časlav. It initially
kept good relations with Byzantium’s main Balkan rivals, the
Bulgarians. Things changed in 997, when Samuilo of Bulgaria
(976–1014) conquered this South Slav polity and imprisoned
its ruler. In control of a large territory in present-day Bulgaria,
North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, Samuilo pro-
claimed himself tsar (emperor) the same year.62 According to a
medieval chronicle of uncertain credibility, Samuilo’s daughter
Kosara married Jovan Vladimir. He was reinstated as a Bulgarian
60
Ćirković, The Serbs, 19, 21–22; Ostrogorsky, 132–35.
61
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 154–55.
62
In Yugoslav and Macedonian historiography, Samuilo is considered a
Macedonian tsar and his state a Macedonian empire, in spite of Samuilo
and despite contemporary sources. This is not the place to discuss the
Bulgarian–Macedonian historical controversies, which in 2022 threatened to
harm North Macedonia’s already distant prospects of joining the EU, due
to Bulgaria’s demands that the former Yugoslav republic acknowledges its
Bulgarian roots. For Samuilo’s state, see Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans,
ch. 6, and Stephenson, 58–77.
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vassal and ruled Duklja until 1016, when Samuilo’s successor

imprisoned and publicly beheaded him outside a monastery in
Prespa (present-day North Macedonia). A cult of Jovan Vladimir
as a martyr and saint, whose relics allegedly performed miracles,
developed soon afterwards, anticipating a trend of saintly Serb
rulers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.63
Bulgaria’s supremacy in the Balkans came to an end in 1014
when Samuilo’s army was handed a crushing defeat by Byzantium.
Having de facto lost much of the Balkans to the invading Slavs
in the sixth and seventh centuries, having barely resisted the Avar
and Bulgarian threat and the emergence of the South Slav polities
in the ninth and tenth centuries, Byzantium had under Basil II
re-established control of the Balkan peninsula – albeit for a rela-
tively short period of time, as it turned out. Following Basil’s death
in 1025, his vast empire, which stretched from the eastern Adriatic
to the northern Caucasus, faced serious challenges. Internally, a
conflict over the succession followed the death of the emperor.
Turkic Pechenegs raided the Balkans, penetrating, and possibly set-
tling in, the previously virtually inaccessible Albanian mountains.
Rebellions broke out in Duklja and Bulgaria against a tax increase
and, in the case of the latter, appointment of a non-Slav archbishop
of Ohrid. In 1042, Vojislav of Duklja defeated the imperial army at
Dyrrachium (Durazzo, Durrës in modern Albania).64
In the ensuing period, Duklja extended, or reimposed, control
over the neighbouring South Slav lands, including the territory
once ruled by Časlav. The political centre of Vojislav’s state was
63
Ćirković, The Serbs, 20; Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 193–94; Ist. C. Gore,
I, 382. Jovan Vladimir’s relics are kept in a monastery in Albania, whose
Orthodox believers venerate him today. Similarly, the Serbian Orthodox
Church commemorates St Jovan Vladimir on 22 May (the date of his death)
and considers him the first Serbian saint. The medieval Dukljan ruler is also
the patron saint of the Montenegrin port town of Bar.
64
Ostrogorsky, 323–26; Ist. C. Gore, I, 385–87. Skylitzes’ Synopsis (384–90),
offers a contemporary Byzantine account of these events.
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in Ston, near Konavle and Ragusa (Dubrovnik). An emerging

power, Duklja fought for supremacy in the region with Byzantium
and Bulgaria. In the early 1070s, it supported a rebellion against
the Byzantine Empire that had broken out in Skopje (the cap-
ital of modern North Macedonia) but failed to take over the
uprising. This may have prompted Vojislav’s successor Mihailo
to seek allies in the West. In 1077, the pope’s emissary crowned
Mihailo the ‘King of Slavs’, who then married off his son and heir
Konstantin Bodin to a Norman princess. The Normans had at
the beginning of the decade conquered Byzantine stronghold of
Bari in southern Italy, just across the Adriatic from Duklja. At
this time, Duklja’s political centre had moved further south along
the eastern Adriatic coast, to Bar (Antivari) and the area around
the lake and town of Skadar (Shkodra/Scutari), on the modern
Albanian–Montenegrin border. From around this time, Duklja
would be increasingly referred to as Zeta and Zahumlje as Hum.
After he had succeeded his father, Konstantin Bodin secured
from the pope, in the second half of the 1080s, the ‘upgrade’ of
the Bar bishopric into archbishopric. This was a further example
of the decline of Byzantium’s influence, at the expense of Rome
in this case, and a blow to Dubrovnik, whose archbishop had
hitherto exercised jurisdiction over the bishops of Bar.65 Closer
links with Rome did not necessarily mean an absolute loyalty to
the Catholic cause among the Southern Slavs. In 1095, Count
Raymond de Toulouse’s crusading army came under repeated
attacks by Dalmatian Slavs, their passage not being made any
smoother by the fact that they were able to communicate with
‘Latin’ population of eastern Adriatic towns. Exhausted and with
supplies running low, they were received by ‘the king of the
Slavonians [Konstantin Bodin] at Scutari [Shkodra, in modern
Albania]’. There ‘[t]he Count swore friendship with him and gave
him a large tribute, so that the army might buy or seek necessaries
65
Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans, 211–16; Ist. C. Gore, I, 397; Ostrogorsky, 346.
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in security.’ In turned out, however, that no food was available

and, in any case, Bodin’s men attacked the Crusaders. Raymond’s
army was forced to retreat towards the presumed safety of the
imperial frontier at Dyrrachium.66 An internal conflict combined
with a recovery of Byzantium led to the erosion of Zeta’s power
by the early twelfth century. This would eventually pave way for
the emergence of Raška.
66
R. d’Aguiliers, Historia francorum qui ceperint Jerusalem, https://sourcebooks
.fordham.edu/source/raymond-cde.asp; cf. J. Harris, Byzantium and the
Crusades, 2nd edn, London, 2013, 65–66.
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2
Empire (c.1170–1459)
u
Raška
Things did not look promising for the future founder of the
Serbs’ longest-lasting dynasty when in 1172 Grand Župan
Nemanja of Raška (c.1166–96) was defeated by a Byzantine army
of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (1143–80). Manuel, who had
led successful campaigns in the Balkans earlier on in his reign,
had gathered a large army against ‘[that] satrap of the Serbs, [an]
inordinately insolent [and] mischievous fellow who deemed med-
dlesomeness to be shrewdness’, as Byzantine sources described
Nemanja, whose men had frequently raided imperial garri-
sons. The Serbs suffered a heavy defeat at an unknown location
in Raška and their leader was captured alive.1 Half-naked and
humiliated, Nemanja fell on his knees in front of the emperor’s
feet and begged for mercy. Manuel spared his life but took him
to Constantinople as a slave and a war trophy. Nemanja’s humili-
ation and Manuel’s triumphant return to the imperial capital was
depicted in mosaics displayed in imperial palaces and at least one
church in Constantinople. These, no longer surviving, images
were created soon after the events they depicted and served as
a powerful propaganda tool, reminding the emperor’s erstwhile
and potential enemies of his might. A contemporary Byzantine
1
D. Obolensky, ‘Sava of Serbia’, Six Byzantine Portraits, Oxford, 1988, 115–16;
cf. J. Kinnamos, Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenos, transl. by C. M. Brand,
book VI, New York, 1976, 215. I have used Obolensky’s translation of
the original source in Greek, which differs slightly in style from Brand’s
translation.
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source describes the moment when the enslaved Serb leader was
shown one of the mosaics:
He [Nemanja] surveys with his eyes those decorations that represent

your [Manuel’s] feats, cunningly wrought for the sake of remembrance
by the hands of painters – those that concerned himself as well as
the other [paintings]. Here [he was] represented arousing his people
to rebellion, elsewhere as a man-at-arms or a horseman, elsewhere
placing his hand upon his sword, repeatedly ranging his army in the
open, planting ambuscades, being defeated by your forces, filling the
hard trodden plain with his fugitives, and finally being enslaved. See-
ing these paintings, he agrees with everything and approves of the
visual feast. In one respect only does he chide the painter, namely that
the latter has not called him a slave in all the scenes of triumph, that
the appellation ‘slave’ has not been coupled with the name Neeman
[Nemanja].2
The victory over the Serbs in 1172 was part of Manuel’s success-
ful campaign to restore and consolidate the imperial power in
south-eastern Europe. Around the same time, Byzantium had also
waged successful campaigns against the Arabs, Seljuk Turks and
Venice, while in Hungary a pro-Byzantine King Béla III (1172–
96) came to the throne. The reader will recall that Hungary had
previously taken control of Croatia-Slavonia and Bosnia, while
Bulgaria had ceased to be a threat following its catastrophic defeat
by Emperor Basil II. Through his military and diplomatic vic-
tories, Manuel effectively extended the empire’s influence, albeit
indirectly, into the rest of the Balkans and parts of central Europe.
This would be a short-lived success. In 1204, Constantinople
would be captured by the crusaders – an event which facilitated
the rise of Raška, as it would turn out.
2
Eustathius of Thessalonica, ‘Speech addressed to Emperor Manuel I’,
reproduced in C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312–1453: Sources
and Documents, Toronto, 1972, 225.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Situated in present-day south-western Serbia (near mod-

ern Novi Pazar) and north-eastern Montenegro, between the
valleys of the Ibar and Lim Rivers, the territory of Raška was
either the nucleus of or situated in the proximity of the original
long-term Serb settlement in the Balkans. A Serb polity called
Raška (Rascia in its Latin form) appears in the surviving sources
only in the twelfth century; its name originally probably meant
‘the province of Ras’, that is the territory in the vicinity of the
previously mentioned fortified town of the same name. This
region had been incorporated into Zeta (Duklja) in the elev-
enth century but enjoyed a degree of self-rule similar to that
of Hum (Zahumlje), which had also come under Zeta’s control.
Around 1083, Vukan (whose title is not known) governed Raška
as Konstantin Bodin’s vassal.3
Box 2.1 Raška or Serbia?

Historians tend to use Raška/Rascia and Serbia synonymously, but it
should be noted that Nemanjić rulers typically called their realm the
‘Serb lands’ rather than ‘Serbia’. They also distinguished between the
hinterland, that is Raška, and the ‘Littoral’ or ‘Maritime lands’, that is
Zeta, Hum and the coast of Montenegro and south Dalmatia. In Latin
language sources, and on some coins printed by the Nemanjić kings,
the Serb rulers are ‘Rex Rasciae’ or ‘Rex Serviae’. Different titles
are used after the proclamation of the Serb–Greek Empire by Ste-
fan Dušan (Nemanjić) in the mid-fourteenth century, as discussed in
the following text. Latin-language sources usually referred to Serbia
3
ISN, I, 197–210; J. V. A Fine Jr, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey
from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest, Ann Arbor, MI, 1994,
ch. 1; J. Kalić, ‘Naziv Raška u starijoj srpskoj istoriji (IX–XII vek)’, Zbornik
Filozofskog fakulteta (Belgrade), XIV–1 (1979), 79–91; D. Obolensky, The
Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453, London, 1971, 219–21.
Vukan’s title: S. M. Ćirković, Srbi u srednjem veku, Belgrade, 1995, 49; cf. S.
Novaković, ‘Vizantijski činovi i titule u srpskim zemljama XI–XV veka’, Glas
SKA (Belgrade), LXXVIII (1908), 178–279.
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as ‘Rascia’ (sometimes spelled ‘Rassia’ or ‘Rassa’) or as ‘Servia’, and

sometimes as ‘Sclavonia’ (the land of the Slavs). On the other hand,
Byzantine sources typically used the name Serbia (Σερβία) for the
Serb polity, but rarely Raška. Contemporary Serbian sources written
in Greek tended to follow this tradition.4
The rule of Vukan’s nephew and successor Grand Župan Uroš

I (c.1112–45) coincided with the decline of Zeta and the expan-
sion of Hungary into the western Balkans. The nature of the
Hungarian–Serb relations during this period is not known except
that close contacts existed. Around 1130, Jelena, daughter of Uroš
I, married the son and heir of King István II (1116–31) in what was
the first dynastic marriage between the Hungarian and Serbian
ruling families. The name of the Serb ruler appears to have been
derived from the combination of Hungarian ‘Úr’, meaning ‘lord’,
and a Slav suffix ‘oš’, which suggests that close links between the
rulers of Raška and Hungary had been established already during
Vukan’s rule.5
In the late 1140s, armies of the Second Crusade (1145–49)
and Byzantium clashed with the Hungarians and Serbs. In 1150,
Emperor Manuel defeated Grand Župan Uroš II (c.1145–62)
and forcibly resettled some of the population of Ras to modern
Bulgaria and other parts of the empire. Uroš II remained in power
as a Byzantine vassal, but his rule was challenged by his brother
Desa. Desa eventually prevailed, possibly with the help from
Hungary, but was then deposed in 1165 by Byzantium. Emperor
4
M. Dinić, Srpske zemlje u srednjem veku, compiled by S. M. Ćirković, Belgrade,
1978, 33–43; S. Dušanić-Marjanović, Vladarska ideologija Nemanjića, Belgrade,
1997, 42–59; S. Dimitrijević, Srednjovekovni srpski novac, Belgrade, 199; K. Jiriček,
Istorija Srba, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1952, I, ch. 1; Kalić, ‘Naziv Raška’.
5
Jiriček, Istorija Srba, I, 138; J. Kalić, ‘Grand Župan Uroš II of Rascia’, Balcanica
(Belgrade), XLVII (2016), 75–96; T. Živković, ‘Jedna hipoteza o poreklu
velikog župana Uroša I’, Istorijski časopis (Belgrade), LII (2005), 9–22.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Manuel enslaved the defeated Serbian ruler and publicly humili-

ated him in Constantinople6 – just like he would do to Nemanja
several years later.
It was after this event that Nemanja first appeared in sources,
as one of the younger brothers of Grand Župan Tihomir. The
background of Raška’s new ruling family is unknown. They may
have been originally from Hum and could have been related to
the previous rulers of Raška and Zeta. Nemanja was born in Zeta
around 1113 and baptized according to Roman Catholic rites,
after his father had fled there, probably from Raška. At some point
between 1166 and 1168, Nemanja defeated Tihomir to become
Raška’s grand župan, apparently to the emperor’s displeasure.
Nemanja may have been an ally of Venice at this time; his ‘capital’
Ras was rebuilt in the image of ‘western’ fortified towns of that
era.7 In the following decades, Raška under Nemanja, who would
be eventually released from captivity by Byzantium, became the
most dominant South Slav polity in this part of the Balkans. The
balance of political power thus once again shifted from the lands
close to or on the Adriatic coast to those in the hinterland.
Following Emperor Manuel’s death in 1180, Bulgarians,
Hungarians and Serbs turned against Byzantium once again.
During the following decade, the ruling family of Raška signif-
icantly expanded their territory. Nemanja took control over
Zeta, ‘the fallen land of his grandfathers’; previously ruled by
his cousin, this former kingdom was given to Nemanja’s eldest
son Vukan. To the west of Zeta lay Hum, which was ruled by
Nemanja’s elder brother Miroslav – best known today for gos-
pels he commissioned in the 1180s, which represent one of the
oldest surviving documents written in the Serbian recension of
the Old Church Slavonic. (To the north of Hum was Bosnia,
6
F. Curta, Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages (500–1300), 2 vols, Leiden,
2019, II, 656–58.
7
Ibid, 659; cf. M. Popović, Tvrdjava Ras, Belgrade, 1999.
87
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ruled independently from the Serbs by Ban Kulin, Miroslav’s

brother-in-law). The Serb polity also included the town of Kotor/
Cattaro, and stretched further into south Dalmatia, all the way to
Dubrovnik/Ragusa. The Serbs besieged Dubrovnik and may have
temporarily captured it in 1185; the conflict ended the follow-
ing year, possibly after a Norman intervention, following which
the city-state paid a tribute to Nemanja and was granted trade
concessions in the Serb lands. Nemanja’s realm at this time also
included the hinterland of the lake of Skadar/Scutari, the area
around Prizren and Kosovo Polje and Skopje. Raška extended
its territory to the north as well, into the Zapadna Morava val-
ley (present-day western Serbia), ruled by Nemanja’s brother
Stracimir. Thus, in the late twelfth century, the grand župan and
members of his immediate family controlled a large territory that
included present-day south-western Serbia, Montenegro, eastern
Herzegovina, south Dalmatia and parts of Albania, Kosovo and
North Macedonia (Map 2.1).8 Much of modern central, eastern
and northern Serbia was at this time part of Byzantium, Bulgaria
and Hungary.
A successful Bulgarian–Vlach revolt resulted in the restoration
of the Bulgarian Empire in Târnovo in 1185. Byzantium’s con-
trol of the region was thus reduced to fortified towns and garri-
sons scattered across the Balkans. When the army of Frederick
Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor (1155–90) and one of
the leaders of the Third Crusade (1189–92), passed through the
region on their way to the Holy Land in summer 1189, it encoun-
tered a frosty reception from Byzantine representatives. (The
English and French armies of King Richard the Lionheart and
8
Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, 7–9; ISN, I, 258–59; Sveti Sava [St Sava],
Žitije Svetoga Simeona Nemanje, in Sveti Sava: Sabrana dela, ed. and compiled
by Lj. J. Georgieska, Belgrade, 2003, 163–87.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Sava R.
Belgrade
IA
M ora v a
M A ˘C
VA
SN Danube R .
O Užice
R.
B
Niš
HUM Ras
RA Š K A
ZET Pec´
Dubrovnik (Ragusa) A
Kotor
Skopje
AD ar
V
da
AL
RI rR
AT
BA
Ohrid Prilep
.
I
NIA
IA
O NSalonica
C
D
I TA LY
SE
A CE
A
EP M
I TH
ESS
RU
A LY
AEGEAN SEA
S
1196 (at the abdication of Stefan Nemanja)

1355 (at the death of Stefan Dušan)
map 2.1 Serbia under the Nemanjić dynasty, late twelfth to

mid-fourteenth centuries. Drawn by Joe LeMonnier, https://mapartist
.com/, based on a map originally published in Michael B. Petrovich,
A History of Modern Serbia, 1804–1918, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976, 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 4
89
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King Philip Augustus, respectively, travelled by sea). By contrast,

the Serbs offered a friendly welcome, sensing an opportunity to
further weaken Byzantium.9
Indeed, Nemanja’s reemergence following the humiliation
and enslavement by Emperor Manuel seemed complete when
in July 1189 he received Frederick Barbarossa in Niš (modern
south Serbia). The Holy Roman Emperor had ‘wisely sought
the friendship of the rebel chieftains’ in the Balkans, Steven
Runciman tells us in his classic work on the subject,10 but the
interest was mutual. Nemanja, who had several months earlier
established contact with Barbarossa, received the emperor and his
suite with greatest honours and a concrete offer: the Serbs would
provide 20,000 soldiers and acknowledge the supremacy of the
Holy Roman Empire in exchange for its recognition of Raška’s
current and future territorial gains at the expense of Byzantium.
Marriage between a son of Nemanja’s elder brother Miroslav and
a daughter of a prominent member of Barbarossa’s court was also
discussed. Ultimately, however, the Holy Roman Emperor was
keen to reconcile with Byzantium. His death the following year
put an end to these plans in any case.11
Nemanja’s ambitions suffered an even greater blow in 1190
when a large army of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II (Angelos, 1185–
95, 1203–04) defeated the Serbs at an unknown location near the
Morava River. Byzantium recovered the strategically important
strongholds of Niš, Skopje and Prizren, but allowed the Serbs to
keep the rest of their territory. This event is traditionally con-
sidered by historians as the beginning of Serbia’s medieval inde-
pendence. Unlike later battles, such as the one at Kosovo in 1389,
9
J. Harris, Byzantium and the Crusades, 2nd edn, London, 2013, 142–43;
10
A History of the Crusades, London, 1971, 3 vols, III, 12–13; cf. Harris,
Byzantium and the Crusades, ch. 8.
11
ISN, I, 256–58; S. M. Ćirković, The Serbs, transl. from Serbian by V. Tošić,
Oxford, 2004, 32.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
the 1190 Morava battle represented a political victory despite a

military defeat. Isaac’s description of ‘Serbia’ as ‘the subject to
the empire since ancient times’, represented a political statement
rather than reality on the ground. Nemanja remained in power,
while Byzantium de facto treated Raška as a separate polity and an
ally, even if it may have formally considered it a vassal territory.
To cement a newly found piece, a marriage was arranged between
Isaac’s niece Eudokia and Nemanja’s second son Stefan.12
The Kingdom and the Church

The change of emperor in Constantinople in 1195 had a direct
impact on Raška. After Isaac was violently deposed by his brother
Alexios III Angelos (1195–1203), Nemanja abdicated in favour of
Stefan (grand župan 1196–1217, king 1217–28), the son-in-law
of the new Byzantine emperor. Nemanja’s eldest son Vukan, who
as such should have succeeded the throne, was given Zeta, Hum
and the coastal land in south Dalmatia, effectively as a consolation
price. In some cases, future heirs to the Serbian throne would rule
Zeta as ‘junior kings’, in recognition of Zeta’s old royal status.
The first dynastic marriage between the Byzantine and Serb
ruling houses gave Raška a status arguably higher than whatever
form of independence from Constantinople it may had achieved
in 1190. Stefan (Nemanjić) received the title of sebastocrator (‘ven-
erable ruler’) – at the time one of the highest Byzantine titles
after basileus (emperor) and usually reserved for members of the
imperial family. Byzantine emperors had previously, between the
tenth and twelfth centuries, regarded South Slav rulers as their
12
A. Simpson, ‘Byzantium’s Retreating Balkan Frontiers during the Reign of the
Angeloi (1185–1203)’, in V. Stanković (ed.), The Balkans and the Byzantine World
Before and After the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and 1453, Lanham, MD,
2016, 3–22; V. Stanković, ‘Rethinking the position of Serbia within Byzantine
Oikoumene in the Thirteenth Century’, in ibid, 91–102; ISN, I, 259–60.
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subordinates and local ‘patricians’ at best. However, in the late

twelfth century, the ruling house of Raška was accepted into the
imperial family, an acknowledgement that the Serb polity was an
important and independent factor in regional affairs.13
Zeta and Hum included Roman Catholic bishoprics, while
Raška was under the jurisdiction of the Orthodox bishop of Ohrid
(modern North Macedonia). Upon moving to Raška from Zeta,
where he was born, Nemanja allegedly ‘received the second bap-
tism from bishops and archpriests in the middle of the Serb land’,
according to his son and biographer, King Stefan. The likelihood
of the second baptism was small, although Nemanja would fully
embrace Orthodox Christianity in his adult life, while donating
generously to both the Catholic and the Orthodox churches. The
dynasty he founded would become one of the greatest patrons of
the Orthodox church in Eastern Europe. This played an impor-
tant role in constructing the image of the Nemanjićs as a ‘holy
dynasty’, analogous with Byzantine and Hungarian traditions, but
with some specific Serbian features. In any case, Stefan Nemanjić
did not regard his father’s alleged dual baptism as something
unusual or problematic, but instead thought the presence of
Roman Catholic priests at Nemanja’s christening was a ‘fortu-
nate thing’.14 Orthodoxy and Catholicism coexisted in medieval
Serbia, which in the thirteenth century may have been a de facto
dual Orthodox–Catholic polity. Lines of division between the two
branches of Christianity had not yet fully formed anyhow and,
despite their later rivalry, the idea of a union of the two churches
lived on through the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern
Period – admittedly more in the west than in the east.
13
S. M. Ćirković, ‘Srbija i carstvo’, Glas SANU, Odeljenje istorijskih nauka
(Belgrade), 10 (1998), 143–53, 146; VIINJ, II, 76–78.
14
Stefan Prvovenčani [King Stefan the First Crowned], ‘Žitije svetoga
Simeona’, in Stefan Prvovenčani, Domentijan, Teodosije, edited by
Lj. J. Georgievska, Novi Sad, 2012, 41–67, 42.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
figure 2.1 St Sava and St Simeon (Stefan Nemanja), c.1314, King’s

Church, Studenica Monastery, south-western Serbia (Studenica
Monastery Archives)
Following his abdication, Nemanja withdrew to an Orthodox

monastery at Studenica (to the north of Raška’s capital Ras, in mod-
ern south-western Serbia), which he had founded six years previ-
ously. Like other Orthodox churches and monasteries built in Serbia
during this era, the Studenica bears a ‘Latin’ imprint of its Dalmatian
and Venetian architects, providing a powerful visual testament of the
Orthodox–Catholic coexistence in medieval Serbia (see Figure 2.2).
With a marble church of Virgin Mary at its centre, the monastery
represents the foundational piece of the future cult of the Nemanjić
dynasty. It is one of the most important Serb religious sites and has
been listed since 1986 as a UNESCO world heritage site.15
Nemanja (now known as monk Simeon) and his wife Grand
Županess Ana, who joined a female convent, followed in the steps
15
Dušanić-Marjanović, Vladarska ideologija, and Sveti kralj: Kult Stefana
Dečanskog, Belgrade, 2007; J. Erdeljan, ‘Studenica: An Identity in Marble’,
Zograf (Belgrade), 35 (2011), 93–100.
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of their youngest son Rastko, arguably one of the most remarka-

ble personalities in medieval Eastern Europe.16 Born in or around
1174, Rastko was not content with life as the ruler of Hum that
his uncle Miroslav vacated for him, temporarily, as it turned
out. Of rebellious nature, unsurprisingly perhaps for a teenager,
Rastko fled to Mt Athos around 1191, apparently after a fateful
encounter with a Russian Athonite monk.17 The father and the
son eventually reconciled and in 1198 they rebuilt an abandoned
monastery of Chilandari (Hilandar in its Serbianized form) on Mt
Athos, with a permission from Constantinople. Initially a small
brotherhood consisting of 10–15 monks, Hilandar represented
the Serb addition to Byzantine, Bulgarian, Russian, Georgian and
southern Italian monastic communities at the Holy Mountain. An
example of continuity between the Middle Ages and the modern
era, the monastery is today home to some 50 monks and a library
of over 20,000 titles, including rare Old Slavonic and Greek texts.
Rastko later adopted Sava as his monastic name, after
St Sabbas the Sanctified, a fifth-century Cappadocian–Syrian
monk. He would be canonized by the Orthodox church after his
death. He is best known as the founder of the Serbian Orthodox
church (see the following text), but Sava is also considered the
first original author in Old Church Slavonic in Serbia and on
Mt Athos, as well as the first known traveller from the Balkans
to the Middle East. He made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land
16
Obolensky, ‘Sava of Serbia’; cf. F. Curta, ‘Angel on Earth and Heavenly
Man: St. Sava of Serbia’, in D. Ostrowski and C. Raffensperger (eds),
Portraits of Medieval Eastern Europe, 900–1400, London, 2018, 91–99.
No critical biography of St Sava exists in Serbian.
17
Monk Domentijan, Sava’s pupil and biographer/hagiographer, claims that
Rastko was seventeen when he chose monastic life – this was, incidentally,
the minimum age required to become a monk. Domentijan, Žitije Svetog
Save, in Sveti Sava, Sabrani spisi, compiled and ed. by D. Bogdanović,
Belgrade, 1986, 9, 438n; cf. R. Novaković, ‘Povodom podataka o Rastkovom
boravku u Zahumlju’, 31–32.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
(in 1229 and 1234), spending some time at the Holy Laura of St
Sabbas, his patron saint, near Jerusalem. Finally, Sava’s political
skills may have contributed to the end of a dynastic conflict in
Serbia, fought at the beginning of the thirteenth century by his
brothers Vukan and Stefan.
The acquisition of Zeta in the late twelfth century encouraged
Raška’s rulers to think of themselves as inheritors of the royal
crown that Mihailo had received from the pope in 1077. Indeed,
Vukan may had begun to style himself as a king while his father
was still alive. He increasingly behaved as an independent ruler
and pursued direct contacts with the Holy See and Catholic
Hungary – unsurprisingly for an ambitious prince whose subjects
included a significant Roman Catholic population. Vukan com-
peted with Dubrovnik over the control of the Catholic dioceses in
Zeta and Bosnia, and with his brother Stefan over the supremacy
in the Serb lands. In summer 1199, just months after Nemanja’s
death, Vukan secured the reinstatement of the Bar archbishopric
by Pope Innocent III. To further weaken Dubrovnik, which also
claimed ecclesiastical jurisdiction in neighbouring Bosnia, where
his Hungarian allies sought to re-establish control, Vukan wrote
to the pope to accuse Bosnia’s Ban Kulin of protecting heretics.
Meanwhile, Stefan too sought to establish closer links with
the pope. After his separation from Eudokia in 1200 or 1201,
Byzantium’s influence in Raška weakened. The divorce caused a
scandal, with both sides accusing each other of infidelity. After a
particularly bitter row, Stefan ordered that his wife be stripped
of all clothes and thrown out of their residence. Eudokia made
her way to Constantinople with Vukan’s help, a development that
may have contributed to the growing rift between the brothers.
After the Orthodox church granted the divorce, Stefan was free
to marry Anna Dandolo, granddaughter of Enrico Dandolo, the
Doge of Venice; future Serbian King Stefan Uroš I was born in
this marriage. Eudokia too remarried, twice. One of her future
husbands was Alexios V Doukas, briefly the Byzantine emperor
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in 1204, just months before the empire was occupied and par-
titioned by the Fourth Crusade, led by, among others, Enrico
Dandolo.18 Ironically, an early thirteenth century charter issued
by the Serbian Žiča monastery includes Stefan’s order that any
man who expelled his wife would be required to take her back or
face excommunication from the church and other form of punish-
ment as seen fit by the wife’s family. Exceptions were made if the
wife was caught in infidelity.19
Simultaneously with strengthening links with the Catholic
‘west’ through his new marriage, Stefan established regional alli-
ances in Bosnia and Bulgaria to counter Vukan’s connections
with the Roman Catholic Church and with Hungary. A conflict
between supporters of the two brothers, which had a regional
dimension, broke out around 1201. It brought anarchy and pov-
erty to Serbia; reportedly, people fled the country due to violence
and hunger. It also led to foreign intervention. With Hungary’s
military support, Vukan defeated his brother in 1202. Clearly
regarding Vukan as his vassal, Hungarian King Imre (1196–1204),
who was himself engaged in a conflict with his brother, began to
style himself King of Serbia (Rex Serviae).20 This was exactly a
century after Hungary had incorporated Croatia after a ‘merger’
of the two crowns. Since Hungarian kings also claimed the crown
of Bosnia, Imre may be considered a proto-Yugoslav king of sorts.
Byzantium, meanwhile, faced a renewed threat from the
Crusaders and had to deal with a rebellion in southern Macedonia
and Thessaly. The armies of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04) cap-
tured Constantinople in April 1204. They burnt and pillaged the
city, and temporarily brought down the Eastern Roman Empire.
This in turn enabled Bulgaria to play a more prominent role in
18
Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 239–40.
19
E. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700, Ithaca,
NY, 1990, 171.
20
ISN, I, 268–69.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
regional affairs, at the expense of Hungary and the ‘Latin’ empire

in Constantinople, whose army Bulgarians defeated in 1205. It is
not known why Stefan was able to ultimately prevail over Vukan,
but the support he enjoyed in Bulgaria may help explain the out-
come of the Serb dynastic conflict.
Family politics may have also contributed to the end of the
Serb ‘civil war’. Sava acted as a peacemaker, leaving his broth-
ers little choice but to cease hostilities to attend a reburial of
Nemanja’s relics at Studenica that took place either in 1206
or in 1207. According to a legend promoted by the Orthodox
church, during the ceremony, Nemanja’s relics released ‘holy oil’
(myrrh), a divine intervention that brought about the reconcilia-
tion between the brothers.21 Sava’s diplomatic skills offer a more
plausible explanation for the end of the dynastic war, which saw
Stefan retain the throne, and Vukan, who had in the meanwhile
become a Catholic, return to his more modest position as the
ruler of Zeta. This was the first known example among Serbs of
a reburial of an eminent individual whose original resting place
was abroad; several other medieval – including Sava and Prince
Lazar (see the following text) – and modern personalities would
have their relics transferred to different resting places.22 Firmly in
power, Stefan fulfilled his old ambition when in 1217 he received
a royal crown from Pope Honorius III (1216–27). To his peo-
ple, he became known as Prvovenčani (the First Crowned). That
the Serb ruler sought the royal recognition from Rome and not
the ‘Latin’ empire in Constantinople suggests that the latter was
never able to exert domination over the Balkans following the
defeat by Bulgaria.23
In the meanwhile, three Byzantine states ‘in exile’ were estab-
lished in Epirus, Nicea and Trebizond. A complex political game,
21
ISN, I, 270–71; Ćirković, The Serbs, 35.
22
See K. Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, New York, 1999.
23
Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 240.
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in which the Bulgarians, Russians and Serbs recognized the patri-

archs of Nicea (1204–61) as legitimate ‘leaders’ of the Orthodox
Christianity – which also implied their acknowledgement of the
political rulers of Nicea as inheritors of Byzantinium – led to the
recognition of autocephaly of the Orthodox church in Raška in
1219. The same year Sava, whose considerable political skills
played a major role in these developments, was consecrated by
exiled Patriarch Manuel I and Emperor Theodore I Laskaris as
the first Serbian archbishop.24 Thus, just over a decade following
the dynastic war, Serbia became a kingdom with its own church
and with international support both in Rome and in the exiled
Byzantium. That Raška’s first king and the first head and founder
of its church were brothers made the relationship between the
state and the church especially close. Sava institutionalized this
secular–ecclesiastical partnership in a legal codex in which he com-
bined Byzantine/Roman law with old Slav custom laws. St Sava’s
Nomokanon served as both the church and the state law in medie-
val Raška, until it was superseded by Stefan Dušan’s Code in the
mid-fourteenth century, as discussed in the following text.25
Despite the political links with Rome, Serbia would continue
to gravitate towards Orthodoxy in the decades that followed.
Foundations of a dynasty that had begun with Nemanja’s emer-
gence just a few decades previously were firmly laid. Sava played
a major part in promoting the cult of his father – known as
St Simeon Mirotočivi (the Myrrh-flowing) – as the patron saint
of the Nemanjić dynasty. Most Nemanjić rulers would become
saints, a tradition specific to the Balkans but which, as already
mentioned, existed elsewhere in medieval Europe – for exam-
ple in Bohemia, Hungary, Russia and France. Rather than being
24
Ibid, 240–41; ISN, I, 317; B. Ferjančić and Lj. Maksimović, ‘Sava Nemanjić
and Serbia between Epiros and Nicaea’, Balcanica (Belgrade), XLV (2014),
37–54.
25
ISN, I, 322–24.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
formally canonized, it seems more likely that the Nemanjićs

became saints through emergence of their cults, promoted by the
church and hagiographies written by their successors and follow-
ers. Two such hagiographies, written in the Serbian recension of
the Old Slavonic by Sava and his brother Stefan, represent the
beginning of medieval Serbian literature.26
It has been often said that Serbia has through its history been a
meeting place between East and West, at once eastern and west-
ern, largely because of the events of the early thirteenth century.
The authorship of this metaphor has been even falsely ascribed
to St Sava in the twentieth century. Medieval Serbs considered
their country to be in the west – not out of some desire to escape
the east (which to them had positive connotations anyway), but
simply because they lived to the west of Constantinople, thought
of as the centre of the civilized world.27
The marriage of King Stefan’s eldest son Radoslav to Anna,
daughter of Theodore Angelos of Epirus, secured good relations
with at the time the most powerful Byzantine ruler in the wake
of 1204. After Theodore took over Salonica and proclaimed
himself emperor in 1224, Stefan Radoslav (1228–c.1234)
became co-ruler of Raška with his ailing father. All Nemanjić,
and several post-Nemanjić, rulers added Stefan (Stefanos, ‘the
crowned one’ in Greek) to their name. Bulgaria’s victory over
Theodore in 1230 increased internal pressure on Radoslav from
a rival party led by his younger brother Vladislav (1234–43).
The son-in-law of the Bulgarian tsar, Vladislav prevailed thanks
to Bulgaria’s support. A correlation between dynastic marriage
and foreign policy was another recurring theme of the medieval
Serbian history – like elsewhere in Europe at the time. Ageing
26
D. Kalezić, ‘Sveti Sava kao književnik’, in Sveti Sava: Spomenica povodom
osamstogodišnjice rodjenja, 1175–1975, Belgrade, 1977, 255–87.
27
S.M. Ćirković, ‘Sveti Sava izmedju istoka i zapada’ in Ćirković (ed.), Sveti
Sava u srpskoj istoriji i tradiciji, Belgrade, 1998, 27–37.
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Sava approved Vladislav’s succession and withdrew into monas-

tic life, having previously chosen his own successor. Making his
way back from the second pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Sava
visited Bulgaria, but fell ill and died there in January 1236. The
following year, his remains were transferred to Serbia, or possi-
bly smuggled out of Bulgaria by Vladislav, and reburied at the
Mileševa monastery.28
A Mongol invasion temporarily swept away Hungary and
brought much damage to parts of Serbia in the early 1240s. It
also coincided with the emergence of a complex web of rival-
ries and alliances that led to another dynastic conflict. There
followed interference into Serbia’s domestic affairs by Bulgaria,
Hungary and rival ‘Greek’ states of Nicea and Epirus. As a result,
Stefan Vladislav was replaced by his younger brother Stefan Uroš
I (1243–76). (All Nemanjić rulers would henceforth be given
names ‘Stefan’ and ‘Uroš’ – a symbolic reminder of Byzantine
and Hungarian influences in medieval Serbia.)
Stefan Uroš I began his long reign by installing his hench-
men as provincial governors, often at the expense of family
members who had sided with the deposed king. He also put
his younger brother – the fourth and youngest son of Stefan
the First Crowned – in charge of the Church, as Archbishop
Sava II (1263–71). This was possibly an attempt to build on
the symbiosis between the state and the church that marked
his father’s reign. King Uroš was half Venetian, and his mar-
riage to Helen, who was of French origin, further strength-
ened the ‘western’ influence at the Serbian court. Within two
generations, the old ruling house of Raška had transformed
due to dynastic marriages into a truly international, multi-
ethnic family with relations to Byzantine, Bulgarian, Hungarian,
Venetian and French ruling houses and noble families.
28
D. Popović, ‘Mošti Svetog Save’, in ibid, 251–66.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
As Byzantine Empire was restored in 1261, Stefan Uroš I clashed

with Dubrovnik and had to deal with an unrest in Hum. During
the 1260s Serbia established closer relations with Hungary, to
the extent that it may have been its vassal at some point during
this period. When Uroš married off his son Dragutin to Katalin,
daughter of Hungary’s King István V (1270–72), the heir to the
Serbian throne became a ‘junior king’ of Hungary. Dragutin
received land from his father-in-law in Mačva, Braničevo (both
present-day Serbia) and north-western Bosnia. This enhanced his
prestige among local magnates and boosted his personal ambition.
Supported by Hungarians and Cumans (a nomadic Turkic people
related to the Pechenegs, who appeared in Hungary following the
Mongol invasion), and joined by his mother, Queen Helen, and
younger brother Milutin, Dragutin deposed and exiled Uroš in
1276. A guilt-ridden King Stefan Dragutin (1276–82) interpreted
a serious horse-riding incident in 1282 as a divine punishment for
deposing his father. This led him to abdicate in favour of Milutin,
though he kept the territory he had received from his father-in-law.
Late thirteenth-century Serbia was a de facto confederation
of three realms. Hungarians referred to Dragutin’s realm as the
‘Kingdom as Serbia’ and to the land controlled by new King
Stefan Milutin (1282–1321) as ‘Rascia’ (though in Byzantine
sources it was ‘Servia’); meanwhile, the Queen Mother ruled in
Zeta and the coastal regions. This, however, did not mean that
all three members of the Serb triumvirate were equally ambi-
tious and powerful. Milutin waged successful military campaigns
against Byzantine emperors Michael VIII (1259/61–1282) and
Andronikos II (1282–1328) of the House of Palailogos, extending
his kingdom into modern North Macedonia and parts of Albania.
He also successfully repelled Hungarian, Bulgarian and Mongol
attacks from the north and east. After the death of the Queen
Mother in 1314 and of Dragutin two years later, Milutin brought
under his control the ‘Serb lands’, becoming one of the most
powerful rulers in south-eastern Europe.
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Serbia’s Byzantine Turn?

It is usually suggested that during Milutin’s long reign, the
Nemanjić state completed its ‘Byzantine turn’.29 Serbia’s mili-
tary expansion into Macedonia was followed by the adoption of
Byzantine court rituals and fresco paintings. Milutin’s endow-
ment, the Gračanica monastery (Figure 2.2), is seen as a symbol
of Serbia’s moving away from the old Rascian church architec-
ture towards Byzantine-style churches, but it was in fact more of
an exception than a rule.30 Milutin may have increasingly looked
towards Byzantium, but he kept contacts with the papacy, while
at the same time seeking to usurp Byzantium when not making
alliances with it.31 Indeed, foreign policy of the Nemanjić rulers
rarely followed a single path.
Roman Catholic archbishoprics in Serbia’s coastal regions, spe-
cifically Bar and Kotor, both in modern Montenegro, remained
important centres of Catholicism in the fourteenth century (and
would remain so during the Ottoman period).32 Their jurisdiction
extended over Serbian Catholics living in the old Raškan hinterland,
who were mainly of Albanian and Dalmatian origin. Meanwhile,
merchants from Dubrovnik and Kotor ensured that trade with
Venice, including export of silver and gold, continued to flourish
regardless of any political and ideological changes in late thirteenth-
and fourteenth-century Serbia.33
29
V. Stanković, Kralj Milutin (1282–1321), Belgrade, 2012, 6–7.
30
S. Ćurčić, Gračanica: King Milutin’s Church and Its Place in Late Byzantine
Architecture, University Park, PA, 1979; cf. B. Pantelić, The Architecture
of Dečani and the Role of Archbishop Danilo II, Wiesbaden, 2002, and ‘The
Last Byzantines: Perceptions of Identity, Culture, and Heritage in Serbia’,
Nationalities Papers, 44:3 (2016), 430–55, 442.
31
M. Al. Purković, Avinjonske pape i Srpske zemlje, 1305–1378, Požarevac, 1934.
32
A. Molnár, Confessionalization on the Frontier: The Balkan Catholics between
Roman Reform and Ottoman Reality, Rome, 2019.
33
S. M. Ćirković, et al., Staro srpsko rudarstvo, Novi Sad, 2002; Ćirković, ‘The
Production of Gold, Silver and Copper in the Central Parts of the Balkans
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
(a)
(b)
figure 2.2 (a) The Sopoćani Monastery (built by King Stefan Uroš
I in 1259–70) (imageBROKER/Michael Runkel/Getty Images) and
(b) the Gračanica Monastery (built by King Milutin in 1321), both
UNESCO World Heritage Sites (Chris McGrath/Getty Images). The
monasteries are representative, respectively, of the ‘Raška school’,
distinguished by domed churches with rectangular foundations and
Gothic features, and the ‘Serbian–Byzantine’ style architecture,
characterized by churches built with square foundation and multiple
domes adjoining the main dome.
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Milutin’s five marriages marked his reign perhaps as much as

his military campaigns. On paper, church marriage in medieval
Serbia was regulated by a relatively strict set of canons, but like in
Byzantium, these were not necessarily always adhered to. As already
seen, marriage could be, and was, broken by those in position of
power. Even ‘ordinary people’, it seems, often lived ‘in sin’, and the
pre-Christian tradition of ‘stealing’ one’s future bride from her fam-
ily survived into the modern era.34 The Nemanjić kings, like their
counterparts across Europe, married young, and they sometimes
married multiple times, often with underage female members of
foreign dynasties (there were also examples where older brides were
engaged to underage male princes). The wives of King Milutin give
a good indication of Serbia’s foreign policy in the late thirteenth
and early fourteenth centuries. Byzantine, Hungarian and Bulgarian
princesses, respectively, succeeded his first wife, who was probably
of Serb descent and who gave birth to his eventual successor, Stefan
Uroš III Dečanski (1322–31).
When in late 1298 Milutin’s army made advances towards
Salonica, a Byzantine envoy arrived with a peace offer: cessation
of hostilities, exchange of hostages and prisoners, and, for good
measure, a Byzantine princess as wife to Milutin. Despite an influ-
ential war party close to the Serbian court, which saw looting and
pillaging as a profitable exercise, advocating the continuation of
the military campaign, Milutin accepted the proposal.35 After
Emperor Andronikos’ sister Eudokia, the widow of a late emperor
of Trebizond, refused to marry the Serbian king, Andronikos
offered Milutin his favourite daughter Simonis (Simonida in
Serbian tradition), who was just five years old. Milutin was 46 at
the time, six years senior to his father-in-law. The child bride was
from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century’, in H. Kellenbenz (ed.),

Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion, Stuttgart, 1981, 41–69; Purković,
Avinjonske pape, 4.
34
Jiriček, Istorija Srba, II, 11–12.
35
M. Laskaris, Vizantiske princeze u srednjevekovnoj Srbiji, Belgrade, 1928, 61.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
practically exchanged together with prisoners in no man’s land, ‘in

the middle of the Vardar River’, in Spring 1299; to make the spec-
tacle even more surreal, Milutin handed over his fourth wife Ana,
daughter of former Bulgarian Tsar Georgi Terter I (1279–92),
together with Byzantine hostages, to symbolically mark the break
with Bulgaria. This was followed by a lavish ceremony hosted by
the emperor at Salonica, which lasted several days. The Serbian
king and his suite were showered with expensive gifts. As the
emperor’s son-in-law, Milutin was entitled by Byzantine customs
to call Andronikus ‘lord and father’ (‘gospodin i roditelj’), an honour
and opportunity the Serbian king seized upon.36
Andronikos’ wish to neutralize the threat from the north and
Milutin’s ambition to become a member of the imperial family
contributed to the Byzantine–Serb alliance. Legal loopholes were
found to overcome obstacles posed by the king’s previous marriages
and the age of his latest bride during discussions that involved the
patriarch of Constantinople. It was agreed that the marriage would
not be consumed until Simonida turned 12, which at the time was
considered maturity.37
While the Serbs threatened the Byzantine Empire from the north,
a new rival had appeared in the south. During and in the aftermath
of the Byzantines’ efforts to wrestle Constantinople back from the
‘Latin’ rule several decades previously, Turkish tribes descending
from the House of Osman appeared in western Anatolia. By the
late thirteenth century, the Ottoman Turks, as they became known,
established a permanent presence on restored Byzantium’s southern
frontier. In 1302, they laid siege to Nicea, the former Byzantine
36
I have used a Serbian translation of contemporary Byzantine accounts of
these events. VIINJ, VI, Belgrade, 1986; the prisoners exchange and the
wedding celebration: 55–56, 168–71.
37
It is suspected that Milutin did not fulfil the obligation concerning the
consummation of marriage, which could explain why Simonida was unable to
bear children.
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capital.38 Ten years later, Andronikus was forced to seek help from
Milutin as Ottoman raids intensified.39
The possibility of one of Simonida’s brothers succeeding the
Serbian throne never went beyond discussion stage (partly because,
it seems, the Byzantine princes did not want to live in Serbia) but
contributed to another dynastic conflict. Milutin defeated his eldest
son and rival Stefan, blinded and expelled him, together with his wife
Teodora (daughter of Bulgarian Tsar Smilets, 1292–98) and two
children, Dušan and Dušica. They lived in exile in Constantinople
between 1314 and 1321, under the emperor’s protection. Dušan,
the future Serbian king and emperor, therefore learned Byzantine
customs and way of life during his childhood.
The exiled members of the royal family were allowed to return
shortly before Milutin’s death in 1321, after it had emerged that
Stefan had been able to see after all. This alleged ‘miracle’ secured him
enough support to defeat local pretenders to the throne. Crowned
Stefan Uroš III, ‘in Christ God pious King of the Serb Lands and
the Littoral’ the following year, he hired a Roman Catholic priest
from Kotor to build a memorial to his reign – one of the most sig-
nificant Serbian Orthodox monasteries, situated near Dečani (mod-
ern Kosovo). Stefan Dečanski (as he became known) married for the
second time in the mid-1320s, aged around 40. Maria Palaiologina,
his 12-year-old bride, was the niece of John Palaiologos, the gover-
nor of Salonica. A victory over Bulgaria at Kyustendil in 1330 further
strengthened Serbia’s position as both Byzantium’s key ally and rival
in the Balkans. After Queen Maria bore children, questions over suc-
cession were raised once again. From his base in Zeta, Dušan rebelled
against his father in early 1331. Dubrovnik’s attempts to mediate
in the Serb dynastic conflict failed; aided by local magnates, Dušan
ultimately prevailed and seized the throne in August. The following
38
H. İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, transl. by
N. Itzkowitz and C. Imber, London, 2013, ch. 1.
39
VIINJ, VI, 184–88.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
month, he was crowned in one of the Nemanjićs’ royal residences,

near modern Uroševac/Ferizaj, in Kosovo. In addition to the high
clergy, which conducted the coronation, members of the Sabor, a
sort of a state council in medieval Serbia made up of local magnates,
attended the coronation. The deposed king died in prison later that
year, under suspicious circumstances.
Dušan suppressed internal revolts in Zeta and northern
Albania, where local magnates demanded greater reward for
supporting him during the dynastic conflict. He temporarily
lost territory in Dalmatia (Pelješac and Ston) to Dubrovnik and
parts of Hum to Bosnia but managed to recover these later. Like
his father and grandfather, Dušan married into the Bulgarian
ruling house (his bride Jelena was sister of Tsar Ivan Alexander
of Bulgaria, 1331–71), ensuring the eastern neighbour’s alli-
ance. The Serbian king defeated Hungarians in the north to
reclaim parts of Mačva, once held by Dragutin. The weakening
of Byzantium, due primarily to a dynastic conflict between the
houses of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos, following the sud-
den death of Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos (1328–41) in
June 1341, facilitated Serbia’s expansion deep into the Byzantine
territory in the southern Balkans. During this period, foreign
mercenaries, including Byzantine and Bosnian knights, joined
Dušan’s army.40
With Hungarians defeated, Bulgaria no longer a threat, and
Byzantium on retreat, Dušan’s ambitions grew. He discussed mar-
riage between his five-year-old son and heir Uroš with a sister of
Emperor John V Palaiologos (1341–76; 1379–90/91) and began to
style himself čestnik Grkom. This hard-to-translate term meant that
Dušan now considered himself a member of the Byzantine imperial
inner circle. As already seen, ever since the early thirteenth century,
the Nemanjić kings had understood the importance of joining the
imperial family and thus ‘entering the empire’. Just over a century
40
ISN, I, 512–23.
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and a half after Manuel I had humiliated Nemanja, one of Nemanja’s

direct descendants threatened to usurp the imperial throne.
Serbia’s territorial expansion in the thirteenth and the first half
of fourteenth centuries was financed by a burgeoning economy.
Rich minefields were exploited thanks to imported Saxon mining
expertise, while the ports of Bar and Kotor facilitated trade with
Venice and Dubrovnik. Meanwhile, economic exchange with
Byzantium, Bulgaria and Hungary also grew. After the 1204 fall of
Constantinople, Serbia’s rulers began to mint coins. This brought
them prestige and earned them a place in Dante Alighieri’s hell
as plagiarists and forgers – alongside the kings of Norway and
Portugal – due to the resemblance between the Serbian dinari
and Venetian grossi. Byzantium had previously enjoyed a monop-
oly in the region on the coin minting, and even the Bulgarian
Empire did not have its own currency. Foreign currencies con-
tinued to circulate in medieval Serbia, but the dinar retained a
stable exchange rate from the early thirteenth century through
to the mid-fourteenth century: 1 gold coin (ducat) was typically
exchanged for 24 dinars.41
The Serb–Greek Empire

It was the Easter Day 1346, but the ceremony taking place in
Skopje (Skoplje in Serbian), an ancient Roman town and capital
of the tenth-century Bulgarian Empire (and of present-day North
Macedonia), was more about birth than resurrection. Briefly
held by Nemanja in the late twelfth century and conquered by
Milutin a century later, Skopje was chosen by Dušan as his new
capital. (Previously, his main seat was in Prizren, modern-day
Kosovo; as was the case with other European medieval dynas-
ties, the Nemanjićs had more than one residence). Skopje was
almost certainly seen as a temporary capital until the ultimate
41
Ćirković, The Serbs, 56–57.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
prize – Constantinople, the Emperor’s City – could be secured.

Dušan was crowned ‘Tsar (Emperor) Stefan of the Serbs and
Greeks’ by Joanikije (archbishop 1338–46; patriarch 1346–54),
the new Patriarch of Serbs and Greeks, in the presence of the
Bulgarian Patriarch, the Archbishop of Ohrid, and a high dele-
gation of Athonite monks.42 The new Serb patriarchate would
be based in Peć (Peja in modern Kosovo), although some early
patriarchs may have resided elsewhere.
From Byzantium’s point of view, there could have been only
one original imperial designation (basileus ton Romaion – Emperor
of the Romans). Constantinople had traditionally rejected exter-
nal claimants to the Roman imperial title, including Charlemagne
and Bulgarian tsars. After initially appearing to ignore the Skopje
coronation, the patriarch in Constantinople placed an anathema
on the self-proclaimed emperor and refused to recognize the Serb
patriarchate. Members of the Serbian clergy spoke against Dušan’s
imperial ambition after his death, which suggests that one of the few
Nemanjićs not to have been canonized may not have enjoyed unan-
imous support inside the Serbian church. However, even before
the Skopje coronation, Dušan had been seen by many as the most
important regional ruler and an emperor-in-waiting. After he had
taken over Serres in Autumn 1345, Athonite monks began to men-
tion the Serbian king in their services second only to the Byzantine
emperor. Around this time, Dušan informed the Venetian doge that
he was now the ruler of ‘almost whole of the Roman Empire’ and
signed a monastery charter as ‘King of Serbia and Romania [Roman
Empire]’. In January, he let Venice and Dubrovnik know of his deci-
sion to proclaim himself emperor, having previously secured sup-
port from Serb magnates and elders. The maritime states officially
welcomed the news and sent emissaries to Dušan’s coronation.
42
Joanikije’s background is little known, but it appears that he had been
a high official at Dušan’s court before he was appointed archbishop.
M. Al. Purković, Srpski patrijarsi srednjega veka, Düsseldorf, 1976, 55.
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In a Latin transcription of a correspondence between Dušan

and the Venetian doge two years later, the Serb ruler is described
as ‘Stefanus dei gratia grecorum Imperator’. The omission
of the ‘Serbs’, but a reference, elsewhere in the text, to the
‘Romanorum’, in a correct Byzantine form, suggests that the
Venetians at this point effectively regarded Dušan as a Byzantine
emperor.43 Following his succession in 1331, Dušan had signed
off royal charters as ‘Stefan, by the grace of God king of all Serb
land and the littoral’ (Stefan, po milosti Božjoj kralj vse srbske zemlje
i primorske). As already stated, all Nemanjić rulers bore the name
‘Stefan’, from Greek ‘Stefanos’ (the crowned one), but the title
structure invoked ‘Latin’, that is western, tradition (i.e. ‘by the
grace of God’, from dei gratia, followed by territory as the basic
principle of the title). This was another important example of a
dual ‘Greek–Latin’ tradition in medieval Serbia that clearly sur-
vived well into the fourteenth century. It was only after 1346 that
Dušan and his heir Uroš adopted a universalist, Byzantine titu-
lar style (‘Emperor of Serbs and Greeks’). In some documents,
however, Dušan was signed as ‘Emperor and Autocrator of Serbia
and Romania [Roman Empire]’, which represented a hybrid
Byzantine–western titular style.
Aged 38, Dušan was at the height of his powers, and his
sight was set firmly on Constantinople, the city of his child-
hood. His confidence may have been boosted by the longevity
of the Nemanjić dynasty. In 1346, the ruling house of Serbia
had been at the throne for nearly 200 years, while Byzantium,
Bulgaria and Hungary had all experienced a change of dynasty
43
‘Emperor Stefan Dušan writes to Doge Andrea Dandulo agreeing to extend
the treaty between Venice and the King’s maritime city of Kotor for another
three years’, date before 1 April 1348. Serbian Medieval Documents in the State
Archives of Venice, 1348-04-01 taq_Stefan_Dusan, in: http://monasterium.net:
8181/mom/SerbMedDocsInVenice/1348-04-01_taq_Stefan_Dusan/
charter.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
in recent times. Dušan was the first Serb to assume the imperial
title – something that would have been unthinkable at the time
of Nemanja and his immediate successors. The early Nemanjić
kings, in common with other neighbouring rulers, had believed
the God chose emperor from among the ‘Romans’ only.
The end of the civil war in Byzantium and the coronation of
Dušan’s ally-turned-enemy John VI Kantakouzenos (1347–54)
as co-emperor following the marriage of his daughter to John V
Palaiologos meant the Serbian tsar had another powerful adver-
sary in Constantinople. During the civil war, John Kantakouzenos
had recruited Ottoman Turkish support; he now sought their help
against the Serbs. At the same time, in 1351, Dušan established
contact with Ottoman ruler Orhan. The potential Serb–Ottoman
alliance was however prevented by Byzantines, who assassinated
Orhan’s envoy on his way to meet the Serbs.44
After taking over Epirus and Thessaly in the late 1340s, Stefan
Dušan’s empire extended as far as Salonica (Map 2.1). The Serb
advance was facilitated by an anti-Byzantine rebellion in Thrace
led by Vojvoda (Duke) Momčilo (Momchil in Bulgarian), a brig-
and and a mercenary of Bulgarian origin who had once been
Dušan’s ally. He then switched allegiance and was given the title
of sebastocrator by Emperor John Kantakouzenos, albeit at a
time when Byzantine rulers were issuing titles much more readily
than it had been the case previously. In charge of a small army
of 300 cavalry and 500 footmen consisting of Bulgarians, Serbs
and Vlachs, in 1344, Momčilo proclaimed his own state in Xanthi
(modern north-eastern Greece). He was eventually defeated and
executed by Byzantines, but became a legendary hero of Balkan
folk tales, together with his Pegasus-like horse Jabučilo, compara-
ble to previously mentioned Kraljević Marko and his horse Šarac.
44
ISN, I, 550–52; S. Novaković, Srbi i Turci XIV i XV veka, Belgrade, 1893,
72–96; Ostrogorsky, 499–552.
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Medieval Society
The rapid expansion under Dušan meant that several legal sys-
tems co-existed in Serbia in the mid-fourteenth century. In an
aim to create a single system, albeit in line with the Byzantine
law, Dušan issued his own legal code in 1349 (reissued in 1354).
The ‘Law of Pious Emperor Stefan’, in Serbian tradition known
as Dušanov zakonik, combined traditional and contemporary
Byzantine law (specifically the so-called Justinian’s Code and
Blastares’ Sintagma), with elements of the Serbs’ own laws, in par-
ticular St Sava’s Nomokanon. It includes an account of the reign
of the ‘Grand Emperor Stefan’, whose coronation represented
an act of divine grace – an obvious allusion to Roman/Byzantine
emperors, beginning with Constantine the Great. The Zakonik is
considered one of the most important medieval documents pro-
duced by the South Slavs, and it also gives a valuable insight into
Serbia’s society at the time.45
Apart from signalling his ambition to rule from Constantinople,
Dušan’s imperial title indicated another layer of duality in medieval
Serbia, in addition to the previously mentioned Orthodox–Catholic
one. No longer predominantly Slav for some time now, the Nemanjić
realm included a significant Greek and Greek-speaking population
in its southern regions, as well as Albanians and Vlachs. In other
words, as far as ethnicity mattered at the time, fourteenth-century
Serbia was a multi-ethnic polity that included both Slav and non-Slav
populations, and whose ruling house was truly cosmopolitan. It was
also a polity where central power was delegated to local lords who
recognized, and sometimes challenged, the overall authority of the
king/emperor. Their ethnic background is not always known, but
they all became ‘Serbian’ in the nineteenth century, when Romantic
writers discovered Serbian Middle Ages.
45
Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, 314–17; ISN, I, 557–65; cf. Zakonik cara
Stefana Dušana (1349 i 1354), ed. and transl. into modern Serbian N.
Radojčić, Belgrade, 1960.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
figure 2.3 Alphonse Mucha, The Coronation of Serbian Tsar Stefan Dušan
as East Roman Emperor (1926) (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty
Images). One of twenty paintings belonging to Mucha’s ‘Slav Epic’, which
depicts major events in Slav history. Note that Mucha ‘promoted’ Dušan to
a Byzantine (East Roman) emperor, an error made perhaps due to artistic
license, which Dušan would have likely approved.
Upon the proclamation of the empire, Dušan’s son Uroš (b. 1336,
emperor 1355–71) became king, de facto in charge of the ‘Serb
lands’, while the new emperor focused mainly on the ‘Greek lands’.
There were also autonomous feudal fiefdoms, typical of European
medieval states. The Serbian tsar, whose court now fully resembled
that of an Eastern Roman emperor, granted Byzantine-style titles to
magnates ruling in the ‘Greek lands’ of the state. He made his half-
brother Simeon Uroš (1326–70), the eldest son of Stefan Dečanski
and Maria Palaiologina, a despot and gave him territory in Epirus,
while close allies Despot Dejan and Branko Mladenović were pro-
claimed sebastocrators and given land in Velbužd/Kystendil and
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Ohrid, respectively. One of the last Byzantine empresses came from

Sebastocrator Dejan’s dynasty (the Dejanović Dragaš family), while
Branko Mladenović’s descendants, the Brankovićs, would rule over
the fifteenth-century Serbian despotate, a successor state to Dušan’s
empire (see the following text). By contrast, magnates based in the
‘Serb lands’ of the empire usually kept the old Slav titles such as knez
and župan.46
Contemporary sources, among them Dušan’s Code, paint the
Serbian Empire as a complex, heterogeneous society that con-
sisted of different social, religious and ethnic groups. At the top of
the social pyramid was the royal and imperial family, followed by
nobility (vlastela), clergy and professional soldiers. Professionals
such as bakers, butchers, builders and tax collectors (sometimes
recruited from among the priests) formed another social group
known as ‘public workers’ (sokalniks). Next in the hierarchy were
free peasants (sebri). Svobodniks (free men) were former serfs denied
hereditary rights and thus membership of the sebri. Serfs, or unfree
peasants, and persons of low birth (kmeti, meropsi) were at the bot-
tom of the social hierarchy. Less visible were underground indi-
viduals and groups such as pagan shamans and magicians (often of
Vlach origin) and members of the Bogomil heresy.47 A dualist reli-
gious movement which had originated in tenth-century Bulgaria,
the Bogomils had initially attracted significant following among
the peasantry because they opposed tax payments and military
service. Like their fellow dualists in northern Italy (Patarins) and
southern France (Cathars or Albigensians), with whom they had
contacts, the Bogomils were suppressed throughout the Balkans,
including Serbia. Only in Bosnia was a Christian heresy, which
46
Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, 309–14; ISN, I, 531–33, 537.
47
T. Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe, Armonk, NY, 1994,
152–53; Ćirković, Srbi u Srednjem veku, 135–62; Fine, The Late Medieval
Balkans, 314–19; cf. Zakonik, 89–144. For social divisions in earlier Serb/
South Slav polities, see S. M. Ćirković, ‘Počeci socijalne hijerarhije u Srba’,
Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju (Belgrade), 1:3 (1994), 223–35.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
came from the ‘west’ via Dalmatia, tolerated and may have even
been part of the official, Bosnian church.48
Several ethnic groups belonging to the recognized Christian
churches co-existed in medieval Serbia as Dušan’s Code attests:
Serbs, Greeks (‘Romans’), Vlachs, Albanians, Saxons (miners
from Saxony and their descendants) and ‘Latins’ (a vague term,
which referred to Roman Catholic communities, mainly traders
and merchants from Dalmatia).49 No distinction in status was
made between Serbs and Greeks. However, Dušan’s preference
for ‘Greek’ legal customs and culture, as well as a focus on the
‘Greek’ lands of his realm, revealed the Serbian ruler’s ambition
to replace Byzantium with his Greek–Serb Empire.50
Ethnic and social belonging was determined by birth and kin-
ship, but it was not necessarily fixed, and it could have been changed
because of marriage, adoption or initiation. Prohibitions of mar-
riage between members of different estates (e.g. between Vlachs
and sebri) found in medieval sources suggest that these occurred and
that societal borders were permeable.51 This was true of the Balkans
generally, not just medieval Serbia. An early fifteenth-century
church chronicle describes a certain Vonko, the conqueror of
Arta (a town in Epirus, modern north-western Greece) in 1400, as
Servalvanitovoulgarovlachos, a Serbo–Albanian–Bulgarian Vlach.52
48
Dž. Dautović, ‘Crkva bosanska: Moderni historijski tokovi, rasprave i
kontroverze’, Historijska traganja (Sarajevo), 15 (2015), 127–60; Y. Stoyanov,
The Hidden Tradition in Europe: The Secret History of Medieval Christian
Heresy, London, 1994; cf. S. M. Ćirković, Rabotnici, vojnici, duhovnici: Društva
sredjevekovnog Balkana, compiled and ed. by V. Djokić, Belgrade, 1997, 214–39.
49
Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 153.
50
G. C. Soulis, The Serbs and Byzantium during the Reign of Tsar Stephen Dušan
(1331–1355) and His Successors, Washington, DC, 1984, 81.
51
N. Isailović, ‘Legislation concerning the Vlachs of the Balkans before and
after the Ottoman conquest’, in S. Aslantaş and S. Rudić, et al. (eds), State
and Society in the Balkans before and after [the] Establishment of Ottoman Rule,
Belgrade, 2017, 25–40, 30–31.
52
Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 132.
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Further mixing, between Serbs/Slavs, Vlachs and Albanians, and

conversion from Christianity to Islam occurred following the
Ottoman conquest of Serbia in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies. Large population movements, mostly of Christians, fleeing
into Hungary and Austria would become a central feature of Serb
history in the late Middle and Early Modern Ages. The arrival of
Jews from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century made
the Balkans even more heterogeneous.
Serbian medieval society was patriarchal and conservative, but
some laws, influenced by the Roman/Byzantine legal tradition,
were surprisingly liberal. For example, while child adoption was
allowed, couples with daughters were forbidden from adopting
male children, to protect the daughters’ inheritance rights.53
Heterosexual church marriage was protected and divorce dis-
couraged.54 However, as already seen, exceptions were regularly
made when it came to Serbia’s rulers and, presumably, other
powerful individuals; moreover, among ‘ordinary’ people, for-
mal marriage may not have been so widespread in the Middle
Ages. Infidelity was considered a serious sin, even greater in cases
where a married woman had an affair with an unmarried man
than the other way around.55
History of sexuality has not received sufficient attention among
scholars of medieval Serbia. Dušan’s Code forbids ‘bride steal-
ing’, a custom which survived into the modern era. A magnate
guilty of this act was to have both arms and his nose cut off; a
lower-class man engaged in stealing a bride from an upper-class
family was to be hanged.56 Men who committed rape were given
an opportunity to marry the victim if her family agreed; that way
the woman would be compensated for losing her virginity and
the church would approve such marriage despite the premari-
tal consummation, and the perpetrator would be spared severe
53
Levin, 199; Jiriček, Istorija Srba, II, ch. 1.
54
Zakonik, 90. 55 Ibid, 105. 56 Ibid, 104.
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punishment. Where victim of rape was a married woman, the

perpetrator would have to compensate the victim’s husband.57
Medieval Serb laws prohibited ‘unnatural sex’, including
incest, which was defined broadly and included sexual relation-
ship between a monk and a nun, regarded as brother and sister in
Christ. Sodomy and homosexuality were forbidden, but laws were
relatively relaxed, especially when compared to Roman Catholic
societies of the same era. Dušan’s Code (in common with sim-
ilar Russian legal documents) fails to list homosexuality among
punishable sins. Certain forms of same-sex relationships that did
not include penetration were considered less sinful. Anal sex was
a sin comparable to infidelity among heterosexuals and to bes-
tiality. But masturbation between members of the same sex was
a less serious sin: a typical punishment, according to a Dečani
monastery document, would have been a ban on communion for
up to two years. When it came to penetrative sex between men,
according to another church source, the ‘passive’ partner was
considered a greater sinner than the ‘active’ one. Kissing another
man was punishable with 40 days of fasting and praying, a penalty
comparable with that issued to men and women caught kissing
each other outside marriage. Lesbian sex, on the other hand, was
not considered an especially great sin. The Orthodox church, it
would appear, was more concerned with men behaving in a fem-
inine way. Cross-dressing was forbidden among clergy, as it was
associated with pagan customs. By comparison, the predomi-
nantly Roman Catholic Dubrovnik introduced death penalty for
sodomy in 1474. This was a response to the fear of the spread of
homosexuality by the Ottomans, allegedly infamous for engaging
in the practice. This stereotype would survive into the modern
era, including in nineteenth-century Serbia.58
57
Levin, 298–99.
58
Ibid, ch. 4; S. Bojanin, ‘Homoseksualnost u srednjevekovnoj Srbiji’, in J.
Blagojević and O. Dimitrijević (eds), Medju nama: Neispričane priče gej i
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Bestiality was considered another serious sin. According to a

Dečani monastery document, a sexual act with a mammal carried
a heavier fine than that with a bird – most probably because com-
pensation to owners of mammals was higher. Serbian priests, in
accordance with the Orthodox tradition, were allowed to marry,
but even among the men of fate marriage apparently did not
automatically mean an end to sinful acts. One medieval Serbian
source describes the case of a priest who, convinced that a large
number of birds flying above his church was a sign from above,
confessed to his flock that he had abused a domestic animal. The
guilt-ridden priest explained that his wife had been refusing sex
allegedly because the church recommended abstinence from

desire. According to this account, the birds then attacked the
priest’s wife and killed her – not exactly a subtle message who was
to be blamed for the husband’s deviant behaviour.59
The Last Emperor and New Pretenders

The empire of Stefan Dušan, who came to be known as ‘the
Mighty’, lasted barely two and a half decades. It began to frag-
ment soon after the emperor’s untimely death in 1355, with the
emergence of several ‘successor leaders’ (vlastela, or velikaši in the
popular tradition).60 A year after Dušan’s death, his half-brother
Simeon Uroš Palaiologos proclaimed himself ‘Emperor of the
Serbs and Greeks’; in reality, he ruled over a much smaller terri-
tory in Epirus and Thessaly. Emperor Stefan Uroš, known in the
Serbian tradition as ‘the Weak’, was unable to prevent his uncle’s
lezbejskih života, Belgrade, 2014, 22–39; V. Jovanović, ‘Homoseksualnost

i srpsko društvo u 19. veku’, in ibid, 40–59; B. Krekić, Dubrovnik: A
Mediterranean Urban Society, 1300–1600, Aldershot, 1997, 337–45.
59
Levin, 222.
60
Ćirković, Srbi u Srednjem veku, 163–66; R. Mihaljčić, Kraj srpskog carstva,
Belgrade, 1975; M. Šuica, Nemirno doba srpskog srednjeg veka: Vlastela srpskih
oblasnih gospodara, Belgrade, 2000.
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secession, nor to do much about the increasing fragmentation of

the state due to the rise of competing magnates. These included
Župan Vukašin Mrnjavčević (c. 1320–71) of Prilep (modern North
Macedonia) and his brother Uglješa (not known-1371). In 1365,
Uroš granted Vukašin a royal and Uglješa a despot’s title and land
in Serres (modern Greece). To what extent the young emperor
was pressurized into making these concessions and to what degree
the alliance with the powerful Mrnjavčević brothers suited him is
not known. Some sort of a joint rule between Emperor Uroš, the
Empress Mother, King Vukašin and Despot Uglješa was estab-
lished across the crumbling empire. Vukašin probably planned to
usurp the Nemanjić dynasty. After he was crowned king, he pro-
claimed his son and heir Marko a ‘junior king’ and corresponded
with Dubrovnik directly, sometimes without any reference to
Uroš.61 Not much is known about the role played around this time
by Sebastocrator Dejan, once Dušan’s powerful ally, whose grand-
daughter Jelena Dejanović Dragaš married Manuel II Palaiologos
(1391–1425) and gave birth to the last two Byzantine emperors.62
Old ‘Serb lands’ of the Nemanjić realm similarly fragmented
into several loosely connected and mutually competing feudal fief-
doms, ruled by magnates who coined their own money and had little
regard for the emperor’s authority. These included Sebastocrator
Branko’s son, Vuk Branković (c. 1345–97), who ruled over mod-
ern Kosovo, parts of Montenegro and North Macedonia; Djuradj
I Balšić, the ruler of Zeta (r. 1362–78), in modern Montenegro;
Župan Nikola Altomanović (c. 1348–76), whose lands were in
western Serbia and eastern Herzegovina; and Prince (Knez) Lazar
61
The legendary Kraljević (Junior King) Marko of Serbian and Balkan folk
tales is based on this Marko.
62
Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, 363–64; ISN, I, 574, 583–84, 587–88.
Vukašin is the inspiration for ‘King Vukasan’, the main character of ‘Day
of the Doomed King’ (1965), a science fiction story by Brian Aldiss, a
celebrated British author of the genre.
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(c. 1329–89), who from his stronghold Kruševac ruled over an area
that roughly corresponds to modern central Serbia.
In September 1371, Vukašin and Uglješa were killed in a battle
against Ottoman Turks at the Marica River (which flows through
modern Bulgaria and Greece). Vukašin’s heir Marko became
an Ottoman vassal, and in any case his small kingdom centred
around Prilep could not have hoped to hold together a rapidly
disintegrating Serbian Empire. The sense of a political vacuum
was further exacerbated by the death of heirless Emperor Uroš
later that year. The Nemanjić imperial crown, as already men-
tioned, was claimed by Dušan’s half-brother, about whose rule
little is known except that it never extended beyond his local base
in northern Greece. With Uroš’s death, the Serbian Empire, and
indeed the Nemanjić dynasty, formally came to an end. One of
the most remarkable and long-lasting regional dynasties of their
time thus went quietly and unceremoniously. Despite apocalyp-
tic connotations associated with the end of empires and powerful
dynasties, they sometimes simply disappear, or transform into
another state. In the case of Serbia, several realms claimed the
Nemanjić legacy, most notably the fifteenth-century Serbian des-
potate, about which more will be explained in the following text.
The Nemanjićs were skilled rulers, able to negotiate a bal-
ancing act between competing foreign powers, in particular
Byzantium, Bulgaria and Hungary. Domestically, the close, at
times literally familial, relationship between the crown and the
church ensured the survival of the dynasty (if not of all its rul-
ers, many of whom had been murdered or violently deposed)
and a powerful ideological tool of the rulers’ cults promoted by
the church. They also understood the importance of economy
for maintaining political power. The exploitation of mines and
trade with Venice and Dubrovnik funded the Serbs’ medieval
rulers and their frequent military campaigns. Dynastic marriages
provided another important route to securing regional alliances
and improving Serbia’s international position. The Nemanjićs
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
appear to have had a sense of their place in the history of the

Serbs, though it is unclear how much they knew about the
earlier centuries.
Nearly the same passage of time separated them and those
Serbs who migrated to the Balkans in the seventh century as it
separates our society in the early twenty-first century from the
era of Nemanja and St Sava. It was with the rise of Raška in the
late twelfth century that Serb medieval history can be followed
through more or less verifiable sources (although the existing
historiography still contains gaps and unsatisfactory answers – at
least to questions this author posed while researching this book).
Medieval Serbia was in many ways a typical European medieval
state, but with its own features: the cult of the Holy Nemanjić
dynasty, and especially of St Sava; a hybrid Romanesque–Greek
architecture; and a local variant of the Old Slavonic language
in which a nascent Serbian literature was written. This medi-
eval ‘civilization’ is long gone, but its legacy may be traced in
present-day Serbia and parts of former-Yugoslavia, includ-
ing Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and North
Macedonia. It is just one among several, sometimes overlapping,
layers of the past – including Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg and
Yugoslav legacies – that have shaped Serbia’s history.
Regional leaders who sought to fill the power vacuum created by

the end of the Nemanjić dynasty and the fragmentation of the
Serbian Empire included Ban Tvrtko, the ruler of neighbouring
Bosnia (1353–91). A great grandson of King Dragutin (Nemanjić)
through his mother’s side, Tvrtko’s claims on the vacant Nemanjić
throne had been prompted above all by military conquest. In
the early 1370s, he established strategic alliances with two pow-
erful Serbian magnates, Prince Lazar and Vuk Branković. Lazar
and Tvrtko, supported by Hungary, defeated in 1373 Nikola
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Altomanović and together with Branković and Djuradj I Balšić par-

titioned the Altomanović fiefdom. Tvrtko’s state now incorporated
parts of the former Nemanjić kingdom, in Hum and south-western
Raška, including, significantly, the monastery of Mileševa, St Sava’s
resting place.
Territorial, symbolic and family ties to the Serbian ‘sacred
dynasty’ boosted Tvrtko’s ambition. He either ordered the cre-
ation of or modified an earlier genealogical tree of the Nemanjić
family, showing his place in it.63 A self-proclaimed successor of
the Nemanjić dynasty who sought to ‘revive’ the old kingdom and
the ‘sacred dynasty’ by transferring its political centre to Bosnia,
Tvrtko likely saw an opportunity to further emancipate his realm
from the control of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Bosnian
ban clearly did not regard King Marko nor any of late Emperor
Dušan’s relatives as worthy of the Serbian royal title, so in 1377,
he was crowned the King of Serbs and Bosnia. The location of the
coronation and the denomination of priests who conducted the
ceremony are not known but have been a matter of controversy
due to the highly politized modern debates about the origins of
Bosnia and Bosnians, so tragically manifested during the war of
the 1990s. In a Nemanjić-style charter, written in Cyrillic, Tvrtko
informed Dubrovnik in 1378 that he
went to the Serbian land wishing and wanting to restore the throne of
my fathers. And having gone there, I was crowned with the God-granted
wreath to the kingship of my forefathers, so that I should be Stefan,
faithful in Jesus Christ and God-appointed King of the Serbs and Bosnia
and the Littoral and the Western Regions.64
63
E. O. Filipović, ‘The Most Noble and Royal House of Kotromanić:
Constructing Dynastic Identity in Medieval Bosnia’, Südost Forschungen,
78:1 (2019), 1–38; M. Vasiljević, ‘Nastanak srpskih rodoslova i letopisa kao
posledica političkih i društvenih promena, Inicijal: Časopis za srednjovekovne
studije (Belgrade), 3 (2015), 95–117.
64
Cited in S. M. Ćirković, ‘The Double Wreath: A Contribution to the
History of Kingship in Bosnia’, Balcanica, XLV (2014), 107–43, 120; cf.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Historians have speculated, not unreasonably, that the coronation

took place at the Mileševa monastery located in the ‘Serbian land’
that Tvrtko had recently conquered.65 There are also plausible
alternative arguments that the ceremony took place elsewhere and
that the clergy involved may have belonged to the local Bosnian
church.66 Either way, religious and identity boundaries were far
more permeable in the Middle Ages than they are today and in
any case modern projections on Tvrtko’s identity are problematic
and ahistoric.
We know from surviving sources that the new king styled
himself Stefan Tvrtko, in the Nemanjić tradition retained by
the subsequent Bosnian kings, who too would be crowned as
the kings of ‘Serbs and Bosnia’. Dubrovnik and Venice for-
mally acknowledged Tvrtko as Rex Rascie, and the former even
paid him a tributary traditionally reserved for Serb rulers. The
exploitation of rich silver mines in Srebrenica, previously (and
subsequently, in the fifteenth century) belonging to Serbia, con-
tributed to Bosnia’s prosperity at this time. However, Tvrtko
never exercised control over the core lands of the former
Nemanjić realm. This is perhaps the reason why Serb magnates
such as Lazar and Vuk Branković, who had their own politi-
cal ambitions to fill the power vacuum created by the end of
the Nemanjić dynasty, did not seem to mind the Bosnian ruler’s
Serbian pretensions.
After Bosnia further expanded its territory in the south-west,
Tvrtko added Croatia and Dalmatia to his title in summer 1390,
less than a year before his sudden death at the age of 52. Some
E. O. Filipović, Bosansko kraljevstvo: Historija srednjevjekovne bosanske države,

Sarajevo, 2017, and ‘The Most Noble’, 18–19.
65
Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, 393.
66
D. Lovrenović, ‘Proglašenje Bosne kraljevstvom 1377. (Pokušaj
revalorizacije)’, Forum Bosnae (Sarajevo), 3–4 (1999), 228–87; M. Brandt,
S. M. Ćirković, S. Džaja and D. Lovrenović, Šest stoljeća od smrti bosanskog
kralja Tvrtka I, Odjek (Sarajevo), Oct 1991, 7–9.
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early twentieth-century authors regarded him as a de facto

proto-Yugoslav king, because he was the first South Slav ruler
who brought together the central regions of future Yugoslavia
and because his royal title ‘united’ Serbs, Croats and Bosnia.67
The 1990s Sarajevo government adopted Tvrtko’s fleur-de-lis for
its coat-of-arms, in hope that the medieval Bosnian king would be
acceptable to Bosnian Serbs and Croats as much as to the coun-
try’s Muslims (Bosniaks). Another reason for adopting the medie-
val symbols may have been to point out a long history of Bosnia’s
statehood at a time when many of its citizens, as well as neigh-
bouring Serbia and Croatia, disputed it. Although Serbs tend to
believe that Tvrtko was a Serb, while Croats might typically claim
he was in fact a Croat, only Muslims/Bosniaks accepted the new
state symbols associated with medieval Christian Bosnia (these
symbols have been since abandoned). In a further irony, as a sym-
bol of the House of Anjou, whose members were the Hungarian
kings in the fourteenth century, the fleur-de-lis was a reminder of
medieval Bosnia’s vassal status vis-à-vis Hungary.
Tvrtko was not alone in seeking legitimacy in the old Nemanjić
state among the magnates based in what is today Bosnia-
Herzegovina. From around 1449, the head of the powerful
Vukčić-Kosača family began to style himself Vojvoda of St Sava
(later Herceg, from German Herzog, which like Vojvoda translates
as Duke in this context). Following Tvrtko’s death, the Vukčić-
Kosačas assumed greater power in Hum – the region where, as
we have seen, Sava Nemanjić had once ruled and near his rest-
ing place at the Mileševa monastery. The choice of title by the
Vukčić-Kosača duke testified of the continued significance of the
cult of St Sava and perhaps of the Nemanjić dynasty more gener-
ally. In a letter to King Alfonso V of Aragon (1416–58, from 1442
also Alfonso I of Naples), the duke sought the royal approval of
his possessions, including the Mileševa monastery, which, he was
67
V. Ćorović, Istorija Jugoslavije, Belgrade, 1933, 209–10.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
keen to emphasize, contained the relics of ‘a saint capable of great

miracles’.68 That he referred to an Orthodox saint and monastery
in a letter to a Roman Catholic king did not seem to have con-
cerned Vukčić-Kosača. During his life, he was a Roman Catholic
and a member of the Bosnian church; he spelled his name as Stefan
(Serbian spelling) and Stjepan (and sometimes Stipan – Bosnian
and Croatian spellings), possibly depending on circumstances.
Indeed, Vukčić-Kosačas were regional magnates whose mem-
bers belonged to more than one branch of Christianity and who
eventually converted to Islam. Their family history, while by no
means unique in this respect, encapsulates well the region’s com-
plex history and the absurdity of modern nationalist claims on
medieval personalities and polities. The family founder Vuk was
one of Stefan Dušan’s key military commanders; his son, Vojvoda
Vlatko fought at the Battle of Kosovo alongside Prince Lazar
(see the following section). Other ancestors were linked with
Dalmatian Croats. Herceg Stefan/Stjepan collaborated and clashed
with rival South Slav magnates, with Bosnian kings, Serbian des-
pots and with Dubrovnik and Venice; by contrast, his relationship
with the Ottomans seems to have been mostly good. Hum subse-
quently became known as Herzegovina after him.
The Battle of Kosovo, 1389

The most important Serb ruler to emerge in the post-
Nemanjić era was Lazar Hrebeljanović. Remembered in popular
tradition as ‘Tsar’ (Emperor), in reality Lazar chose to keep his
68
S. M. Ćirković, Stefan Vukčić-Kosača i njegovo doba, Belgrade, 1964, 106–108;
Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, 578–79. The involvement of the kings of
Aragon and Naples in Balkan and Central European politics is complex and
does not concern us here, except that King Ladislaus of Naples (1377–1414),
who unsuccessfully attempted to claim the throne of Hungary during a
dynastic conflict there in which Tvrtko and Lazar became involved, granted
the title of ‘Herzog’ to one of the Duke’s predecessors.
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more modest title of Knez (Prince). Nevertheless, he too added the

Nemanjić ‘Stefan’ to his name and in the tradition of the old dynasty
styled himself ‘Autocrator (Samodržac) of the Serb lands’. Unlike
Tvrtko, Lazar was not a Nemanjić by blood, but he was related to
the ‘sacred dynasty’ through marriage. Princess Milica, Lazar’s wife,
was a direct descendant of Vukan, Nemanja’s original heir.
As a generous patron of the Orthodox church, Lazar enjoyed the
support of and exercised influence among its clergy. He appears
to have played a key role in securing the recognition of the Peć
Patriarchate by Constantinople and in the appointment of his ally
Spiridon I (1380–89) as the new Serb Patriarch. Lazar likely saw
himself as the true heir of the old dynasty, which is also evident in
Nemanjić-style charters he issued in the 1380s. He further strength-
ened his position by allying himself with powerful regional rulers
such as Tvrtko and marrying off his daughters to local magnates
such as Vuk Branković and Djuradj II Balšić of Zeta (r. 1385–1403).
Lazar was the progenitor of the Lazarević line of princes and des-
pots who ruled over Serbia between 1389 and 1427, when mem-
bers of the Branković family succeed them. But it was Lazar’s death
at Kosovo in 1389, and the legend that developed afterwards, that
make him one of the most significant figures of Serbia’s Middle
Ages, alongside Nemanja, St Sava and Stefan Dušan.
Few sources about the Kosovo battle exist, but it is possible to
broadly reconstruct the context in which it took place and some
key facts. Following the victory against King Vukašin at Marica in
1371, Ottoman raids into the Serb territories continued, but not
without resistance. Lazar’s army defeated an Ottoman expedition
near Paraćin in 1381. Five years later, the Ottomans sacked the
Gračanica monastery, setting its large library on fire, but were
unable to penetrate deeper into Lazar’s state. They were then
defeated at Bileća in 1388 by Vojvoda Vlatko Vuković, who was, as
we have seen, an ally of both Tvrtko and Lazar. Around the same
time, Lazar and Tvrtko became involved in a dynastic conflict in
Hungary as supporters of King Sigismund (1387–1437).
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Meanwhile, Sultan Murad I (1362–89), together with his sons

Bayezid and Yakub, assembled a large army that likely included
troops recruited in southern parts of Stefan Dušan’s former
empire. A Christian alliance led by Lazar included Vuk Branković
and King Tvrtko. Lazar’s other son-in-law, Djuradj II Balšić was
on friendly terms with the Ottomans at the time and thus it is
unlikely his troops took part in the Kosovo battle. Tvrtko did
not participate personally either but sent Vlatko Vuković and his
men instead. The two armies clashed at Kosovo Polje, the Field
of Black Birds (Fushë Kosovë in modern Kosovo), on 28 June
1389. Both Lazar and Murad were killed in battle and both sides
suffered heavy casualties. Initially, a Christian victory had been
reported in contemporary sources, fuelled by Tvrtko’s dispatches
to Dubrovnik and Italian cities later that summer in which he
claimed he had defeated the Ottomans. The most likely outcome
was an Ottoman victory, certainly in the long run. Rather than
going on to occupy Lazar’s state, the Ottomans withdrew from
the battlefield to settle a power struggle between the late sultan’s
sons, in which Bayezid came out victorious, and to deal with a
revolt in Anatolia. It is possible that this contributed to the belief
that Lazar’s Christian coalition had won. With the defeat of the
most powerful of Serbian princes, and Byzantium and Bulgaria
also on a backfoot, the Ottoman domination of south-eastern
Europe seemed inevitable. In the event, it had to be put on hold,
and not only due to the Ottoman internal affairs.69
69
S. M. Ćirković, ‘Stare i nove kontroverze o knezu Lazaru i Srbiji uoči
Kosovske bitke’, Zbornik Matice srpske za istoriju (Novi Sad), 1990, 7–17;
T. A. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389, Boulder, CO, 1990; Fine, The
Late Medieval Balkans, 406–13; ISN, II, 42–44; W. S. Vucinich and T. A.
Emmert (eds), Kosovo: Legacy of Medieval Battle, Minneapolis, MN, 1991. It is
unlikely, as is sometimes suggested, that Lazar commanded a broad coalition
that, in addition to his and Vuk Branković’s armies and reinforcements from
Bosnia, included Albanians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians, Germans and
Vlachs. R. Radić, Klio se stidi, Belgrade, 2016, 45–51.
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The Despotate
When the army of new Sultan Bayezid I (1389–1403) returned
to the Balkans several years later, it encountered strong resist-
ance in Hum and Wallachia. Ottoman Christian vassals now
included troops provided by late Prince Lazar’s son and heir
Stefan (Lazarević, prince 1389–1402, despot 1402–27), who may
have been only 12 in 1389, and his mother, and de facto co-ruler,
Princess Milica. As part of a new relationship between Serbia and
the Ottoman state, Lazar and Milica’s daughter Olivera, aged
around 17, was married off to Bayezid in 1390. Remembered in
the Serbian tradition as Lazar’s tragic widow, Milica was a capa-
ble leader in her own right. Despite the personal tragedy, she
displayed courage, wisdom and political skill needed in the chal-
lenging period that followed the Kosovo battle. Eventually, Milica
withdrew into a monastery, leaving the country to her son.
Prince Stefan was among Ottoman vassals who fought at
the 1395 Battle of Rovine (present-day Romania) against the
Wallachians. Others included Konstantin Dejanović Dragaš and
King Marko. Whether or not Marko prayed for the Christian
victory even if it meant his own death, as claimed in a contem-
porary source, both he and Dragaš were killed in the battle.70
Not all Serb magnates fought and died as Ottoman vassals. Vuk
Branković, who survived the Kosovo battle, and who continued to
rule over his realm that included Kosovo, joined a large Christian
coalition led by Hungary, which now represented the ‘bulwark
of Christianity’ and included Wallachian, Venetian, Bulgarian,
Croatian, French and English troops. The Christian coalition
was defeated by the Ottomans at Nicopolis, Bulgaria, in 1396.
Branković died as an Ottoman prisoner the following year, but is
70
Konstantin Filozof, Žitije despota Stefana Lazarevića. Stare srpske biografije XV
i XVII veka, 11, edited and adopted into modern Serbian by L. Mirković,
Belgrade, 1936, 67.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
ironically portrayed in the Serbian folklore as a Judas-like figure

who betrayed Lazar at Kosovo. The ‘treason’ discourse proba-
bly predates the Kosovo battle and may have something to do
with Vuk’s alleged refusal to fully embrace Lazar’s overlordship
among the Serbs, and his subsequent rivalry with Princess Milica.
According to a legend, which emerged soon after 1389, Lazar
opted for a Jesus-style sacrifice and a heavenly kingdom, instead
of accepting Ottoman vassalage for his earthly realm, offered to
him by St Elijah on the eve of the battle.71
In further irony, Stefan Lazarević contributed to the Ottoman
victory at Nicopolis as the sultan’s vassal, while his uncle’s death
opened the door for the takeover of the Branković lands. Stefan
kept a balancing act between the Ottomans, Hungarians and
Byzantines, and dealt with internal opposition led by his younger
brother Vuk Lazarević. In 1402, he fought bravely at the Battle
of Ankara but was unable to prevent the Ottoman defeat at the
hands of Tamerlan’s Mongol army. Nevertheless, the Serbian
prince received a hero’s welcome in Constantinople and a des-
pot’s title from Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1391–1425); at
the time, this was the highest Byzantine title after emperor. The
Serb ruler now styled himself ‘by God’s mercy, Lord of all Serbs,
Despot Stefan’72 – a hybrid western–Byzantine title, in the old
Nemanjić tradition.
Known as Stefan the Tall, he was a physically imposing and
good-looking man, with striking blue eyes. His bravery and eru-
dition earned him respect and even friendship with the Ottoman
sultan, the Hungarian king and the Byzantine emperor. The
Genovese governor of the island of Lesbos, in modern Greece,
71
Emmert, Serbian Golgotha; M. Šuica, Vuk Branković: Slavni i velmožni
gospodin, Belgrade, 2014; cf. I. Čolović, Smrt na Kosovu polju: Istorija Kosovskog
mita, Belgrade, 2016.
72
‘Povelja manastiru Mileševi’, reproduced in Despot Stefan Lazarević,
Književni radovi, ed. and compiled by Dj. Trifunović, Belgrade, 1979,
164–65.
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apparently offered him a choice of his daughters. One of them,

Helen, caught Stefan’s eye, but it appears the marriage did not
last long, and it certainly produced no heir. The despot was a man
of culture who loved to read and write, though he was apparently
not a great fan of music. He translated Greek texts into Serbian,
while his ‘Letter to love’, a powerful poem that laments the con-
flict with his brother Vuk, is considered a classic of medieval
Serbian literature. Stefan was also a shrewd politician who under-
stood how to employ art in the service of politics. He founded the
Resava monastery (also known as Manasija), located in p resent-day
central Serbia. The monastery architecture and frescoes were
meant to provide a symbolic link between the Nemanjić and
the Lazarević realms. Manasija also housed a large library and the
influential ‘Resava school’ of transcribing, translating and illumi-
nating manuscripts, which contributed to the development of the
medieval Serbian language and literature.73 A key member of the
despot’s entourage was Konstantin the Philosopher, a Bulgarian
refugee who wrote Despot Stefan’s biography.
Following in the tradition of earlier Serb rulers, Stefan
Lazarević donated generously to churches and monasteries. He
also encouraged the cult of his father, whom the Serbian Orthodox
church began to promote as a saint soon after the Kosovo battle.
Thus, he styled himself in some documents as ‘Stefan, son of
Holy Prince Lazar’.74 At the same time, he was a member of a
knight order founded by Hungarian King Sigismund, the future
Holy Roman Emperor (1433–37). Contemporary German-
language sources referred to him as ‘Duke of Serbia, also called
Despot’ (‘herßog auß Servien, gennant despot’) and ‘Despot of the
73
B. Cvetković, ‘Portret despota Stefana u Resavi: istoriografija i ikonografija’,
Srednji vek u srpskoj nauci, istoriji, književnosti i umetnosti, XI, Despotovac,
2019, 179–211; M. Pantić (ed.), Resavska škola i despot Stefan Lazarević,
Despotovac, 1994.
74
Despot Stefan Lazarević, Književni radovi, 135.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Rascians’ (‘Despot zu Ratzen’), in further evidence that Serbia and

Raška continued to be used synonymously.75 Some contempo-
raries believed that Stefan either attended or sent a delegation to
the Council of Constance (1414–18), which discussed the schism
within the ‘western’ church (the conflict between Rome and
Avignon and Jan Hus’ reforms), though this seems unlikely.76
Despite being Ottoman and Hungarians vassals, Stefan
Lazarević and his nephew and successor Djuradj Branković (the
son of Vuk Branković and Mara Lazarević) extended and con-
solidated Serbia’s borders following the late fourteenth-century
debacles at Marica and Kosovo. At its greatest extent, the Serbian
despotate included Lazar’s original lands in modern central and
south-western Serbia, Balšić’s realm in Zeta and Vuk Branković’s
land in Kosovo, as well as Belgrade (which Stefan made his cap-
ital), Mačva and eastern Bosnia, including the important silver
mine in Srebrenica. The Serbian despots also owned land in
southern Hungary gifted by Hungarian kings, and which would
become a place of refuge for Serb nobility and clergy following
the Ottoman conquest in the late 1450s. The despotate main-
tained close relations with Dubrovnik, an important economic
partner that provided a direct link to the Italian city states. In
terms of political and economic significance and its territo-
rial extent, the Lazarević-Branković despotate matched the
thirteenth-century Nemanjić kingdom. For the first time since
the disintegration of Stefan Dušan’s empire, Serbia was a unified
polity. Without the Ottoman conquest of the western Balkans, it
is possible that Serbia’s statehood would have continued beyond
the fifteenth century.
75
Reisen des Johannes Schiltberger aus München in Europa, Asia und Afrika von
1394 bis 1427, Munich, 1859, 53.
76
ISN, II, 95; cf. M. Al. Purković, Knez i despot Stefan Lazarević, Belgrade,
1978, 143–47.
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Shortly before his death in 1427, Despot Stefan interfered in

a struggle for the Ottoman throne, but backed a losing party.
The consequence was a temporary invasion of Serbia by the
army of new Sultan Murad II (1421–44, 1446–51). Hungary was
another key power and ally, whose influence under Sigismund had
extended into Bohemia and the German lands. The rapidly shrink-
ing Byzantine Empire also remained a factor in regional affairs. In
1414, marriage was arranged between Stefan’s nephew and heir,
37-year-old Djuradj Branković (c.1377–1456) and 14-year old
Irene Kantakouzene – the ‘Damned Jerina’ of the Serbian folk-
lore. Djuradj succeeded his heirless uncle in 1427, but in exchange
for Hungary’s recognition of him as the ruler of Serbia he had to
hand over Belgrade to the Hungarians. Djuradj built a new capital
city on the Danube, Smederevo. With its large library contain-
ing titles in Greek, Latin and Old Slavonic, Smederevo was also
Serbia’s cultural centre. Today, it is a city in central Serbia and one
of the largest surviving medieval fortresses in Europe.
In order to secure Serbia’s southern borders, Djuradj arranged
in 1428 the engagement between his elder daughter Mara and
Murad II. The marriage took place only in 1436, due to Mara’s
young age (she was 12 at the time; see Chapter 3). Djuradj also
married off his younger daughter Katarina to Count Ulrich von
Cilli (Ulrik Celjski), a Central European magnate whose base
was in modern Slovenia, another political marriage designed
to strengthen Serbia’s standing in the ‘west’. In 1429, Djuradj
Branković received the despot’s title from Emperor John VIII
Palaiologos (1425–48). Raised in Byzantine-Hellenic culture,
Despot Djuradj was the last significant medieval Serb ruler. He
welcomed Balkan Christian refugees, sometimes intervening
personally to secure release from Ottoman captivity of eminent
Byzantine citizens, including members of Irene’s Kantakouzenos
family and scholars and artists. At the same time, Djuradj was a
pragmatic politician who kept links with Roman Catholic states
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
and seemed somewhat ambivalent on the question of the church

union – though not quite as ambivalent as John VIII Palaiologos,
who supported the union at the Council of Florence in 1439.77
Economy in Late Medieval Serbia

The disintegration of Stefan Dušan’s empire, which had begun
soon after the emperor’s death and therefore before the Ottoman
conquest, inevitably brought economic uncertainty. By this time
but a loose confederation of sometimes mutually competing
mini-states, Serbia was hardly an attractive market in the late
fourteenth century. Merchants from Dubrovnik complained in
1371 (the year of the Serbs’ defeat at Marica) that because of the
crisis ‘in Raška due to rifts among the barons, we cannot, and we
dare not trade there to the extent that we traded in the past.’
The vast majority of Serbia’s exports went via Dubrovnik to
Italian city states, mostly Venice, but also as far south as Sicily. By
contrast, only a small percentage of exports went to Byzantium and
Hungary. Serbia benefited from the Venetian–Genoese Wars of
the second half of the fourteenth century, which caused the price
of silver to rise significantly. Nearly a ton of silver was exported
to Venice every year between 1426 and 1432 through the Kabužić
(Caboga) brothers of Dubrovnik. Serbia also exported over half
a ton of silver mixed with gold during the same period. Novo
Brdo (present-day Kosovo) was Serbia’s main mining centre, fol-
lowed by Srebrenica (modern Bosnia). According to Bertrandon
de la Broquière, a Burgundian knight who passed through Serbia
in 1433, Novo Brdo yielded for Despot Djuradj 200,000 ducats
annually. Franciscan John of Capistrano wrote to the pope in
1455 that the new master of Novo Brdo, Sultan Mehmed II the
77
N. Zečević, ‘Prvi brak despota Leonarda III Toko’, ZRVI (Belgrade), XLIII
(2006), 155–73; cf. ISN, II, 247.
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Conqueror (1444–46, 1451–81), received an annual income of

120,000 ducats from the mines alone. This was still a significant
figure, but it suggests, in line with other sources, a decline in the
exploitation of Serbian mines under the Ottomans.
While the despots enriched themselves through the exploita-
tion of mines, their subjects whose livelihoods depended on min-
ing were forced to seek loans during ‘barren’ periods, until new
mineral deposits were reached, causing something of a debt crisis
in fifteenth-century Serbia. Miho Lukarević, a wealthy merchant
from Dubrovnik, kept a list of 1,200 individuals from Novo Brdo
and the surrounding area whom he loaned money between 1432
and 1438. The despot carried out a monetary reform in 1435 to
address the issue, devaluing the state currency to approximately
35–40 dinars for 1 Venetian ducat (the previous exchange rate
was 24:1).78
Despite a challenging economic environment, domestic trade
increased in the first half of the fifteenth century, judging by
several towns and settlements that acquired the status of a mar-
ketplace (trg). Such market towns included Zaslon (present-day
Šabac, western Serbia), Zvornik and Srebrenica (both in mod-
ern eastern Bosnia), which hosted annual fairs, a tradition bor-
rowed from Byzantium. Textile industry, including production
of woolen cloth and silk, was developed under the influence from
Dalmatia and Italy.
During the 70 years between the Battle of Kosovo and the
Ottoman capture of Smederevo in 1459, medieval Serbia man-
aged to survive and even prosper despite a difficult predicament.
As the main successor to the Nemanjić kingdom and empire ide-
ologically, culturally and spiritually, the Lazarević–Branković
78
Ćirković, ‘The Production of Gold’, 42–43 and The Serbs, 52–53, 93, 95.
John of Capistrano fought against Ottomans at Belgrade in summer 1456 as
a member of János Hunyadi’s army (see the following text). He died the same
year of plague and was later canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
despotate became something of a regional political, economic

and cultural centre. Serbia was able to ‘reinvent’ itself in the
aftermath of the defeat at Kosovo in part due to ‘fresh blood’ pro-
vided by refugees from Bulgaria and Byzantium who were fleeing
the Ottomans. Rather than an aspiring and territorially almost
constantly expanding regional power of the Nemanjić era, the
Serbia of the despots shifted between Ottoman and Hungarian
vassalage (sometimes it was perhaps symultaneously an Ottoman
and a Hungarian vassal state), managing to preserve a level of
self-rule and influence regional affairs. Within decades, Serbia
transformed from an aggressive and expanding, if short-lived,
Serb–Greek Empire to one of the last enclaves of the Byzantine-
Slav civilization in the first half of the fifteenth century.
The Fall of Smederevo

Squeezed between the Ottomans and the Hungarians, as well as the
Bosnians who sought to retake Srebrenica, the despotate’s predic-
ament was becoming increasingly difficult by the late 1430s. The
Ottomans captured Smederevo – temporarily, as it turned out –
in August 1439, after a six-week-long siege. Despot Djuradj and
his family had previously fled to Hungary, but the city’s defend-
ers put up a fight, surrendering only after they had run out of
food. After the 1444 Peace of Szeged Serbia was restored, albeit
as Hungary’s vassal state. Soon after, János Hunyadi (c.1406–56),
a Transylvanian noble of Hungarian or Vlach origin – who as
Sibinjanin Janko is a hero of the South Slav epic poetry – raised a
large army that included Serbian troops. However, the Christian
coalition was defeated by the Ottomans at Varna (Bulgaria) in
November 1444 and again at Kosovo four years later. The (sec-
ond) Ottoman victory at Kosovo forced Hunyadi, in the mean-
while proclaimed the Regent of Hungary, and his ally Skanderbeg
(born Gjergj Kastrioti into a mixed Albanian–Slav family with
origins in present-day Kosovo), to abandon the battle. Despot
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Djuradj, who had recognized Hunyadi’s rival Ladislaus as the

King of Hungary, was formally neutral but may have informed his
son-in-law, Sultan Murad II, about Hunyadi’s movements. With
Hunyadi defeated and on the run, the Serbs captured him, but
agreed to release him in exchange for financial compensation for
damage caused by the Hungarian troops in Serbia.79
It is possible that the two Kosovo battles ‘merged’ in popular
memory; if so, could the myth of the ‘Branković treason’, asso-
ciated with Djuradj’s father Vuk, have something to do with the
despot’s betrayal of Hunyadi?80 In any case, Djuradj Branković
is portrayed in the romantic historiography as a positive, if ulti-
mately tragic figure, associated with last meaningful attempts to
resist the Ottomans and preserve the Byzantine-Orthodox tradi-
tion of medieval Serbia.
After taking Constantinople on 29 May 1453, Mehmed the
Conqueror set out to complete the conquest of the Balkans. His
1456 Serbian campaign was largely successful, but Smederevo and
Belgrade repelled the Ottoman attacks. The news was welcomed
across Christian Europe, and there was a short-lived hope that
Byzantium might be restored under Thomas Palaiologos, brother
of the last emperor, Constantine XI (the grandson of Serbian mag-
nate Konstantin Dejanović Dragaš). A plague epidemic claimed
Hunyadi’s life in August that year, leaving Djuradj without a key
ally (the two men had in the meanwhile made up). Sensing the
inevitable, the despot transferred all his movable assets to a family
estate in southern Hungary (Bečej, present-day northern Serbia),
before his death in December 1456, at the age of 80. Members
of the Branković, Lazarević and Balšić families also sought ref-
uge further south, in the Venetian-held eastern Adriatic and in
79
ISN, II, 263–65; J. Held, Hunyadi: Legend and Reality, New York, 1985; O. J.
Schmitt, Skanderbeg: Der neue Alexander auf dem Balkan, Regensburg, 2009.
80
N. Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, London, 1998, 61–62.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
Dubrovnik. There they were granted citizenship and in some

cases property and other privileges befitting their status.81
Following the untimely death in January 1458 of Djuradj’s son
Lazar, the son-in-law of Thomas Palaiologos, Smederevo was left
leaderless and divided among pro-Ottoman and pro-Hungarian
factions. The city’s military commander Mihailo Andjelović
sided with the former, perhaps not surprisingly considering that
Ottoman commander Mahmud Pasha, a Muslim convert, was his
brother (see the following text and Chapter 3). Facing the choice
of Ottoman or Hungarian rule, many Serbs seem to have preferred
the former. The Ottomans were known for being relatively toler-
ant of other religions, while an alliance with Hungary might have
led to the church union with Rome and the full absorption of the
Serb realm into Hungary. Late Lazar Branković’s daughter Marija
was hurriedly married off to Stefan, son and heir of Bosnia’s King
Tomaš.82 The Bosnian prince and heir to Tvrtko’s old throne was
dully proclaimed despot of Serbia in late March 1459.83
Not surprisingly perhaps, this did little to prevent the
Ottoman capture of Smederevo on 20 June, which marked the
end of medieval Serbia. At the time of frequent political changes
81
In addition to the South Slavs, Venice provided shelter also to Albanian,
Greek and Vlach magnates fleeing the Ottoman conquest. N. Zečević, ‘Sub
umbra protectione et fauore nostro: Urban inclusion in the Eastern Adriatic
through Venetian concessions of citizenship, nobility and salvus conductus
(14th–15th c.)’, in F. Sabate (ed.), Ciutats mediterrànies: l’espai i el territory,
Barcelona, 2020, 171–80.
82
In the Nemanjić tradition introduced in Bosnia by Tvrtko, all Bosnian kings
were named Stefan. In some South Slav sources, their name was given a
different spelling (Stjepan, Stipan or Štefan – this is not unlike different
English spellings of this same name, Stephen/Steven); in Latin-language
sources, they were usually called ‘Stephan’. For the sake of consistency and
in order to avoid confusing the reader too much – but certainly not because
of what would be an anachronistic attempt to Serbianize medieval rulers of
Bosnia and Herzegovina – I have decided to stick with ‘Stefan’.
83
Filipović, Bosansko kraljevstvo, 218; cf. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans,
568–76.
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and border shifts, and despite an atmosphere of gloom and doom

that followed the fall of Constantinople, surviving Smederevo
inhabitants possibly did not anticipate the Ottoman rule to last
very long. Rumours circulated for a while that exiled Serb aris-
tocracy and their Hungarian hosts plotted to restore the despo-
tate.84 In the event, Ottoman rule over medieval Serbia lasted
between three and a half and nearly five centuries, depending
on the region, with short periods of Habsburg occupation in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when ‘Serbia’ would be
formally restored, as discussed in Chapter 3.
Defenders of Smederevo surrendered after guarantees had
been given by the Ottomans that the despot and despotess would
be allowed to leave unharmed for Bosnia. Seeking to secure help
before the impending Ottoman invasion, King Tomaš had pre-
viously reaffirmed his belonging to the Roman Catholic church
(although formally a Catholic, he may had belonged also to a her-
etic type of Bosnian Christianity). Following Tomaš’s death in
1461, his son and heir Stefan (Tomašević) came to the throne.
The last king of Bosnia and technically the despot-in-exile of
Orthodox Serbia received a royal crown from Pope Pius II’s envoy.
At a ceremony in Jajce, his last residence, Stefan was crowned ‘by
grace of God, King of Serbs, Bosnia, Littoral, Hum, Dalmatia,
Croats, etc.’85 (Jajce was the place where nearly 500 years later, in
1943, foundations of Tito’s federal Yugoslavia would be laid, as
discussed later in the book).
Bosnia was finally conquered by the Ottomans in 1463 (not
counting eastern Bosnia that had come under the Ottoman con-
trol with the fall of Serbia). The unfortunate King and Despot
Stefan Tomašević was killed, having had the dubious privilege of
being the last ruler of both medieval Bosnia and Serbia – almost
84
S. M. Ćirković, ‘Smederevska tvrdjava na početku turske vlasti’, in
M. Spremić (ed.), Pad Srpske despotovine 1459. godine, Belgrade, 2011, 287–90.
85
Filipović, Bosansko kraljevstvo, 229.
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Empire (c.1170–1459)
certainly not the way in which his ancestor Tvrtko had imagined
the union of the two crowns.86 Queen Marija avoided capture
and death by fleeing to Dubrovnik. In another irony of his-
tory, the Ottoman army was led by Mahmud Pasha Andjelović,
the Serbian-born Muslim convert and conqueror of Serbia and
Bosnia, whose brother Mihailo had served as the last military
commander of Smederevo.
Hum, increasingly referred to as Herzegovina, was taken
by the Ottomans two decades later. The mountains of Zeta
(in modern Montenegro) held on for a little longer under the
Crnojević family, until in the late fifteenth century the Ottomans
conquered – though never fully incorporated – this remote and
largely inaccessible territory. The coastal regions of the former
Serbian realm had come under the control of Venice. A few kilo-
metres up north, the maritime Republic of Dubrovnik remained
independent, often taking advantage of a rivalry between Venice
and the Ottoman state, until it was abolished by Napoleon in
1808. Four years earlier, a peasant uprising had broken out in
the Ottoman sanjak of Smederevo (better, if erroneously, known
as the Belgrade pashalik), and within a few years the Serb ‘rev-
olutionaries’ would end the centuries-long Ottoman rule in the
province. Romantic and liberal-nationalist ideas of that era helped
intellectuals and revolutionaries, Serb and non-Serb alike, and
neighbouring empires to imagine this area as a restored Serbia. In
reality, more than mere passage of time separated the emerging
nineteenth-century Serbian state and the medieval realms associ-
ated with the Serbs.
86
The line of succession of Bosnian kings after Tvrtko is not always
straightforward, except that they all likely belonged to the Kotromanić
family – whose origins, incidentally, are similarly obscure. Filipović, ‘The
Most Noble’.
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3
Borderland (1450–1800)
u
The Ottoman Conquest

The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries was a prolonged and complex affair achieved
through a combination of warfare and diplomacy. The political
fragmentation and symbolic weakening of Byzantium and other
large Balkan Christian states, notably Stefan Dušan’s empire,
caused by the rise of local feudal landowners, facilitated the
Ottoman expansion. Mutually divided and hostile regional rul-
ers sometimes sought Ottoman support and would plead alle-
giance to the sultan in exchange for help against local rivals. By
the mid-fourteenth century, the Ottomans had established a per-
manent presence in the Balkans, though not yet the firm control
that would be in place a century later. Ottoman victories against
Byzantium at Gallipoli and Adrianople in the 1360s enabled them
to move on the Serb magnates in Macedonia, whom, as we have
seen, they defeated at the Marica River in 1371. After success-
ful campaigns in Anatolia and the Balkans (at Kosovo) in the late
1380s, achieved with the help of Christian allies, the Ottoman
Empire, established by Murad I in 1362, extended its control in
the Balkans through a network of vassal principalities.1
Initially, vassalage could be secured in exchange for a yearly
tribute, which with time increased, sometimes drastically; for
1
D. Howard, A History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge, 2017, ch. 1; H.
İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, transl. by N.
Itzkowitz and C. Imber, London, 2013, chs 1–2; G. Ostrogorsky, History of the
Byzantine State, transl. from German by J. Hussey, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1968, ch. 8.
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example, Dubrovnik’s annual tribute to the Ottomans rose in

1471 from 3,000 to 8,000 ducats.2 In addition to payment, vassals
were expected to provide troops and give public oath of allegiance
to the sultan, but being an Ottoman vassal was still far preferable
for Balkan magnates to militarily defeat, subjugation and death
or exile. As the Ottoman power grew, vassals, whose loyalty was
often questionable in any case, became dispensable. The capture
of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror was part of
a wider Balkan campaign during his second reign, which removed
local intermediaries and imposed direct Ottoman rule. The
Ottoman expansion was also facilitated by a lack of unity in the
wider Christian world. Avignon-based Popes Innocent VI (1352–
62) and Gregory XI (1370–78) failed to organize anti-Ottoman
crusades. Rome (where Gregory XI moved towards the end of
his papacy) conditioned any support for Byzantium by the latter’s
acknowledgement of the supremacy of the western church. It was
within this broader context that we should understand the fall of
medieval Serbia in 1459.
The political fragmentation of Balkan Christian states was con-
trasted by strong, central power exercised by Ottoman sultans,
who also possessed superior armies. In the eyes of Balkan peoples,
Ottoman Turks inspired a mix of fear and admiration. Christian
converts in the service of the sultans could not fail to notice
excellent military organization and tactics of their new rulers.3 A
better regulated and more favourable Ottoman tax regime must
have also appeared attractive to the Serbian and other south-east
European peasantry, previously often left to the mercy of their
Christian landowners.
No territory called ‘Serbia’ formally existed within the
Ottoman Empire. This should not be interpreted as an attempt
2
I. Božić, Dubrovnik i Turska u XIV i XV veku, Belgrade, 1952, 189.
3
Konstantin Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary, ed. by S. Soucek, transl. by
B. Stolz, Princeton, NJ, 2011, 93–95.
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by the conqueror to eradicate the identity of the conquered.

Medieval Serbs rarely called their country ‘Serbia’ in any case, as
we have seen. The former Serb state included several administra-
tive districts (sanjaks, elayets, vilayets, pashaliks). The Ottomans
initially referred to these lands after the names of former Serbian
magnates (e.g. ‘the Branković land’, after Serbia’s last ruling fam-
ily). Central and northern parts of the former Serbian despotate,
including modern eastern Bosnia (Srebrenica and Zvornik), came
under a single sanjak administered from Smederevo, Serbia’s
last capital. After the Ottomans captured Belgrade from the
Hungarians in 1521, the Smederevo pasha moved there, and the
province, which in addition to Belgrade now included the Mačva
region, became known colloquially as the Belgrade pashalik.
Mačva was then added around 1530 to a recently formed san-
jak of Zvornik, which at the time existed separately from the
Bosnian sanjak. As the Ottoman Empire expanded into central
Europe, borders of its internal provinces changed. At the end of
the sixteenth century, after the capture of Bihać (modern western
Bosnia), a Bosnian elayet was formed, which for a time stretched
from modern Croatia to Kosovo. This was a purely administrative
region whose establishment did not necessarily imply a continuity
with the pre-Ottoman Christian polity of the same name.4
The Ottoman Empire was organized also according to the sys-
tem of millets, non- and cross-territorial communities based on con-
fessionalism. The Eastern Orthodox belonged to the Rum (Roman)
millet, but the existence of distinct Orthodox Albanian, Bulgarian,
Greek, Serb and Vlach communities within the millet was recog-
nized. There were also separate Armenian and Jewish (consisting
of different branches of Judaism) millets. Although the Ottoman
Muslim community is often seen as a millet on its own, the Muslims
4
H. Šabanović, Bosanski pašaluk, Sarajevo, 1959; E. Miljković-Bojanić,
Smederevski sandžak, 1476–1560, Belgrade, 2004; cf. N. Malcolm, Bosnia:
A Short History, London, 1994, ch. 4.
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were organized according to different structures, which included

askeri (the military) and reaya (tax-paying flock).5 The Ottoman
state ensured that Muslims remained privileged members of the
society, while non-Muslims were subjected to discriminatory laws
and tax regime, so one should not romanticize the millet system. At
the same time, it compared favourably to the way many Christian
empires dealt with subject ethno-religious groups.6
Decades that followed the fall of Smederevo in 1459 were charac-
terized by frequent conflicts between the Ottomans and Christian
coalitions led by Hungary, the only regional power apart from
Venice that appeared capable of resisting the Ottoman expansion.
Northern parts of the former Serbian despotate and southern flanks
of the Hungarian kingdom (which included north-eastern Bosnia)
often changed hands until in 1521 the Ottomans, since recently
ruled by Suleiman I the Magnificent (1520–66), captured Belgrade,
a major fortified city on the confluence of the Danube and Sava
Rivers. The modern capital of Serbia (and in the twentieth century
of Yugoslavia) had been under Serbian control for relatively short
periods of time, during the reigns of King Dragutin and Despot
Stefan, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, respectively.
Most of the remaining Serb nobility, joined by surviving sol-
diers and some civilians, fled to the north of Belgrade, in southern
Hungary, where Serb despots had previously acquired land. This
geographically undefined territory in the lower Danube, with a
visible, possibly majority in some regions, Serb population became
known as Rácság (Hungarian for ‘Serbhood’). Other Serbs and
Orthodox populations that sometimes identified with Serbs found
refuge in Venetian-held coastal towns of the Eastern Adriatic.
Meanwhile, some ancestors of modern Serbs joined the
Ottoman army, while others were forcibly resettled, often as far
5
K. Barkey and G. Gavrilis, ‘The Ottoman Millet System: Non-Territorial
Autonomy and Its Contemporary Legacy’, Ethnopolitics, 15:1 (2016), 24–42.
6
D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, New Haven, CT, 2001, 151.
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south as Asia Minor. Istanbul’s Belgradkapı (Belgrade Gate) and

the Belgrad Ormanı (Belgrade Forest) are reminders of these
forced population movements, which did not stop with the con-
quests of Suleiman the Magnificent. A group of Gallipoli Serbs,
settled there in the late seventeenth century by the Ottomans,
either from central Serbia or, perhaps more likely, ‘Rácság’,
‘returned’ to southern parts of Serbia and Yugoslavia during the
Greek–Turkish population exchanges of the early twentieth cen-
tury. Less than a century later, their descendants mostly identi-
fied as (Yugoslav) Macedonians, possibly as a result of socialist
Yugoslavia’s nationality policy, discussed later in the book.7
After the fall of Belgrade, the Ottomans claimed another deci-
sive victory, at Mohács (present-day southern Hungary) in 1526.
Most of the Hungarian and Croat nobility, including King Lajos
II (1516–26), perished in the battle. Those who survived accepted
the authority of the Habsburg monarchy, but southern, central
and eastern regions of the Hungarian kingdom (including large
parts of medieval Croatia) would be under the direct or indirect
(through local vassals) Ottoman control over the following cen-
tury and a half. The Ottoman legacy in Europe therefore spreads
beyond Balkan Muslim and Orthodox Christian communities,
onto the Serbs’ Catholic neighbours, the Croats and Hungarians.
In Hungarian and Croatian tradition, Mohács occupies a place
not dissimilar to that of Kosovo in the case of Serbs.
The Ottoman expansion meant that once again most Serbs
lived in a single empire. The Peć Patriarchate, never formally
abolished, had technically ceased to exist and its jurisdiction
had been passed on to the Ohrid archbishopric following the
Ottoman conquest of what was left of the Serbian empire. As dis-
cussed later, the patriarchate was re-established in 1557, during
the viziership of Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (third vizier from 1555,
7
R. Tričković, ‘Galipoljski Srbi i Jagodina’, Istorijski časopis (Belgrade), 29–30
(1982–83), 129–42.
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grand vizier 1565–79), who as a young Janissary took part in the

Battle of Mohács and the 1529 siege of Vienna.
There was a strong South Slav presence among Ottoman offi-
cials and soldiers in Hungary. For example, the old Hungarian
capital Székesfehérvár became under Ottoman administration
known as Istolni Belgrad, from a South Slav translation of the
city’s original name (The Capital White City). Apart from a hand-
ful of Albanians, Hungarians, Vlachs, Roma and Tatars, most
Ottoman soldiers (both Muslim and Christian) and administra-
tors stationed in the city came from Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina
and Bulgaria, and therefore spoke mutually intelligible South
Slav vernaculars. Balkan men of fighting age were recruited as
martolosi, soldiers tasked with defending Ottoman border towns.
Their number was significant. In Ezstergom, Hungary’s former
capital captured by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1543, more than
one-third of the city’s 3,000-strong garrison were South Slav
speakers. They received regular salary and, in some cases, a timar
(tax-generating land). This created a small number of Orthodox
Christian landowners in Ottoman-held Hungary.8
‘Serbia’ in Western Imagination

Ironically perhaps, the Ottoman expansion into central Europe
brought ‘Serbia’, or rather ‘memories’ of it, closer to western
attention. Initially, ‘Serbia’ and ‘Rascia’ had been preserved in the
titles of exiled despots in Hungary. They then entered the imag-
ination of foreign travellers, diplomats and artists such as Hans
Holbein the Younger, a sixteenth-century German painter, whose
8
D. J. Popović, Srbi u Vojvodini, 3 vols, Novi Sad, 1957, I, 207–209;
Marc’Antonio Pigafetta, Itinerario da Vienna a Constantinopoli, Padua, 2008
(orig. published in London, 1585), 99; M. Vasić, Martolosi u jugoslovenskim
zemljama pod turskom vlašću, Sarajevo, 1967.
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The Ambassadors depicts a globe with Serbia on it.9 When in early

sixteenth century Venetian Marc’Antonio Pigafetta travelled from
Belgrade to Niš, across present-day central Serbia, he referred
to the area as ‘Rascia’, whose towns were populated by a mixed
Muslim–Christian population.10 Reporting a century later on
the war between the Ottomans and the army of Bethlen Gábor,
the Prince of Transylvania (1613–29) and briefly in 1620–21 the
King-elect of Hungary, London’s Weekly News listed ‘Rascia’ and
‘Servia’ among the lands held by the ‘Turkes’.11 Indeed, in the
late seventeenth century, western Europe followed closely news
from the ‘Vienna War’, celebrating Christian victories against the
Ottomans. When in September 1688 the ‘imperial army’ took
Belgrade, ‘the Capital City of Servia, considerable for its largeness,
and situation on a Hill, near the Danube and Save, which renders
it very strong, and convenient for Trade’, the Te Deum (a fourth-
century Latin Christian hymn) was sung in the Regensburg cathe-
dral (modern Germany). This was done ‘with the Solemnity usual
on the like occasions’, according to an official British report.12
Learned Europeans of this era tended to use archaic names
for geographic regions, but travel accounts provide some evi-
dence of pre-modern identification as Serbs among the local
population. Hans Dernschwam (1494–1568/69), a sixteenth-
century Bohemian traveller through what is today central Serbia
described the ‘Wendish’ (Slav) population he encountered as
‘Serby’ or ‘Ratzen’ (Rascians), and referred to the territory south
of Belgrade as ‘Seruia’.13 When Evliya Çelebi (1611–82), a cele-
brated Ottoman traveller, passed through the same area a century
9
St. K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History behind the Name, London, 2002, 14n.
10
Pigafeta, Itinerario, ch. 3.
11
Weekly News (First series), no. 33, 26 May 1623.
12
The London Gazette, issue 2387, 1–4 October 1688.
13
Hans Dernschwams Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien
(1553/55), nach der Urschrift in Fugger-Archiv Herausgegeben und Erläutert,
von Franz Babinger, Berlin and Munich, 1986, 5–10.
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figure 3.1 The Coat of Arms of the ‘Turkish Empire’, Konrad

Grünenberg of Constance, Das Wappenbuch Conrads von Grünenberg (The
Armorial of Conrad von Grünenberg, Knight and Citizen of Constanz)
(c.1483). Bavarian State Library, Munich/BSB-Hss Cgm 145, p. 72. The
figure combines the arms of C onstantinople, the House of Palaiologos, the
‘Greek Empire’ (Byzantium) and the ‘Serbian Empire’ (the wild boar’s head
at the bottom of the image). Next to the coat of arms of Serbia is that of
Byzantium, consisting of a cross and four Greek letters ‘B’, in m odern times
adopted as the ‘Serbian cross’ with four Cyrillic letters ‘S’.
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later, he credited, sometimes wrongly, medieval Serb kings and

despots as founders of towns and settlements he visited. His infor-
mation most likely came from the local population.14 Foreign vis-
itors regularly commented on Belgrade’s strategic location and
its importance for European–Asian trade and commerce. Some
offer early examples of stereotypical, ‘Orientalist’ views. Thus,
for example, a seventeenth-century British traveller wrote that
‘[…] Servia being a fruitful and pleasant Country consisting of
Plains, Woods, and Hills, which might afford good Metals, not
without stout Men, good Horses, Wines and Rivers, if it were
in the Christians [sic] hands of the temper of those in the west-
ern part of Europe, it might make a very flourishing Country.’15
Writing a century and a half later, even a writer as sympathetic
to the Ottomans as English traveller Julia Pardoe observed how
Ottoman troops garrisoned at the Belgrade fortress were few in
number and looked ill-equipped to defend the city. ‘The position
of this extensive fortress is most imposing; seated as it is upon
the banks of two noble rivers. Its appearance is very formidable,
and had it been bestowed upon a European power, it must have
proved a dangerous present; but its noble outworks and stately
walls are crumbling to decay, and in its present state it is scarcely
more than a colossal feature in the landscape.’16
Military Border
Following their defeat at Vienna in 1683, the Ottomans were
pushed back all the way to the lower Danube. By the end of the
14
E. Čelebi [Çelebı], Putopis: Odlomci o jugoslavenskim zemljama, transl., ed. and
compiled by H. Šabanović, Sarajevo, 1967, 59–70.
15
E. Brown, A Brief Account of Some Travels in Hungaria, Servia, Bulgaria,
Macedonia, Thessaly, Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Friuli, etc,
London, 1673, 40. Italics in original.
16
The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836, London,
1838, 3 vols, III, 302, 307.
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century, a more or less stable Habsburg–Ottoman border was

established on the Danube, with Belgrade as the northernmost
Ottoman outpost. During the previous two centuries, tens of
thousands of Orthodox Christians – Serbs, Vlachs, Albanians,
Greeks and Bulgarians – migrated into the lower Danubian plains,
partly depopulated due to the Austrian/Hungarian–Ottoman
wars. After Vienna granted ‘privileges’ to Serb settlers in 1538,
the Austrian Military Border (which extended into the territo-
ries of Habsburg Hungary) was formally established in 1580.
Apart from the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and the Venetians also
recruited the local populations into their armies; the Serbs, there-
fore, became guardians of three imperial powers: the Habsburg
and Ottoman states and Venice.
A long strip of territory, starting in the Croatian–Slovenian
linguistic frontier, continuing through north-western Bosnia
and Croatia, and stretching into southern Hungary and the
Romanian Banat, the Military Border was populated by Christian
peasant-soldiers and their families (both Orthodox and Catholics,
from Bosnia, Dalmatia and Serbia). It acted as a buffer zone
between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires and was perceived
by many as a ‘Bulwark of Christianity’ (Map 3.1). In reality, fre-
quent trans-border contacts existed, between Serbs on both sides
of the frontier, between Christians and Muslims, and between
Catholic and Orthodox Christians inside the Military Border.17
In the early seventeenth century, the Military Border was home
to around 60,000 Orthodox Christians, of whom at least 20,000
were soldiers. From 1727, the peasant-soldiers became owners
of the land they farmed, which provided them with livelihood
during peace time; at time of war, they received salary and were
allowed a share of the booty. This sometimes created tensions
17
ISN, III-1, 467; G. E. Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1749,
Chicago, 1960, and The Military Border in Croatia, 1750–1888: A Study of an
Imperial Institution, Chicago, 1966.
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HABSBURG EMPIR E
Mu
R.
ra
Ljubljana Sav Varaždin HUNGARY
aR
Zagreb D ra
va R BANAT
.
Trieste Karlovac .
Rijeka Sisak
SLAVONIA Novi Sad Petrovaradin
CROATIA Sremski Karlovci
Slavonski Danube R.
V
D rin a R
Banja Brod Belgrade
Karlobag Luka
E
BOSNIA SERBIA
N
I Sarajevo Kragujevac
.
C
Mo
E
rav
Niš
a R.
Sofia
ADRIATIC OT TOMAN EMPIRE
SEA VENICE
Skopje
Var
da
Tirana
rR
.
Habsburg military border

International boundaries, 1792
map 3.1 Habsburg Military Border, late eighteenth century. Drawn

by Joe LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/, based on a map originally
published in John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a
Country, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 28
between local Roman Catholic feudal landowners and Orthodox

free peasants.
Despite these dramatic events and seemingly constant warfare
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in some ways, not
much changed on the ground following the Ottoman conquest.
The Serbs remained a frontier people living between a large Euro-
Asian empire and Roman Catholic states of central Europe and,
in the south, the Adriatic, where Venice had established control.
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They continued to live in an imperial borderland fought over by

rulers (Ottoman Sultans and Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors)
who claimed, for different reasons, to be successors of Roman rul-
ers. The memory of pre-Ottoman Serbia survived, in church ser-
mons, in oral accounts of the local population and in records left
by foreign travellers. Gradually, contours of a Habsburg ‘Serbia’
appeared north of the Danube and Sava. The Serbs became
a migrant people, fleeing frequent wars brought about by the
Ottoman expansion and the resistance offered by the states and
peoples of central Europe. Together with the refugees, memories
and symbols of old Serbia shifted further north and west.18
The Orthodox church de facto inherited the legacy of the medi-
eval Serb state. It kept and maintained old churches and monaster-
ies founded by members of the Nemanjić, Lazarević and Branković
families and other regional magnates; it built new places of worship
(sometimes replicas of the old ones) in southern Hungary, which
housed relics of medieval Serb saints brought there by refugees.
Remote mountains of Montenegro, scattered monastic commu-
nities of the former Nemanjić state and the Hilandar monastery
on Mt Athos were the other places where the ‘historical memory’
of the old Serbian kings, emperors and despots, of St Sava, of the
Kosovo battle, and of mythical heroes such as Kraljević Marko, sur-
vived. The memories of medieval Serbia were preserved, imagined
and re-imagined as they passed on from generation to generation.
Ottomans brought with them a different culture, religion and
a new civilization. Yet break with the past is rarely instant and
complete. For instance, the institution of knez and knežine – local,
village autonomies, survived the disappearance of the Christian
states and the establishment of the Ottoman rule. Initially,
the knezes did not need to convert to Islam to do well under
the new regime. One of the most prosperous local leaders in the
18
S. M. Ćirković, The Serbs, transl. from Serbian by V. Tošić, Oxford, 2004,
xxi–xxiv; Pavlowitch, Serbia, ch. 1.
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late fifteenth-century Smederevo sanjak was an Orthodox Vlach,

whose timar consisted of eight villages and an annual income of
over 10,000 akçe (Ottoman silver coins, minted, among other
places, in former Serbian mines of Novo Brdo, Rudnik and
Plana).19 Knezes were sometimes responsible for tax collection
and in return enjoyed certain privileges. The number of these
local leaders was not insignificant, although it differed from
region to region. In 1479, twenty years after the fall of the des-
potate, Christians outnumbered Muslims (85 to 64) among the
sipahis (owners of timars) of the Smederevo sanjak and it appears
not much changed over the next half a century.20
The knezes represented a de facto small aristocracy; indeed, some
were members of the surviving, pre-Ottoman nobility.21 According
to Ottoman documents dated 1485, two Christian landowners in
the Peć nahija (an administrative region in the Ottoman Empire)
may have been related to Ivan Crnojević, a fifteenth-century ruler
of Zeta. According to the same sources, there were at the time 12
Christian timars in this nahija and three Christian timars in the
neighbouring Skadar/Shkodra nahija.22 In the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries, there were 27 Christian sipahis out of
170 timars in ‘Vuk’s vilayet’ (an area roughly corresponding with
modern Kosovo, named by the Ottomans after Vuk Branković).
At the same time, there were 50 Christian sipahis in Bosnia, out
of around 190. Christians living in towns frequently retained
19
S. M. Ćirković, ‘The Production of Gold, Silver and Copper in the Central
Parts of the Balkans from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century’, in
H. Kellenbenz (ed.), Precious Metals in the Age of Expansion, Stuttgart, 1981,
41–69; Ş. Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge,
2000, 34, 37.
20
ISN, III-1, 70–74; E. Miljković, ‘The Christian sipahis in the Serbian lands
in the second half of the 15th century’, Beogradski istorijski glasnik, I (2010),
103–19.
21
ISN, III-1, 72–73.
22
B. Djurdjev, Postanak i razvitak Brdskih, Crnogorskih i Hercegovačkih plemena,
Titograd [Podgorica], 1984, 60–62.
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their previous occupation. In Novo Brdo, for example, only

one light arms manufacturer was a non-Christian around this
time. Eventually, the Christian landowning nobility disappeared
through conversion to Islam and emigration. Some, like members
of a powerful Bakić family, fled to southern Hungary (they pro-
vided the last Serbian despot-in-exile).
Ottoman ‘Serbia’ was a complex border society in which soci-
etal roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Sipahis, regard-
less of their religion, were obliged to provide troops for the pasha
when required. Previously mentioned martolosi were Christian
soldiers tasked with securing the empire’s borders and fortifica-
tions; vojnuci were responsible for horse grooming, atmandžije
and dogandžije looked after hawks and falcons, respectively, used
for messenger service. There were also those in charge of food
production and supply, while infantry and river navy (azapi)
sometimes included Christians. In addition to regular army, the
Ottomans made use of mercenaries, who were often deployed
against hajduks (brigands). Delije, first introduced in Serbia by
Bosnian-born Bali-beg Jahjapašić in the early sixteenth century,
were a light cavalry and bodyguards for Ottoman officials, known
for their bravery allegedly bordering with m adness (deli means
‘mad’ in Ottoman Turkish).23
Meanwhile, towns and urban settlements in Ottoman ‘Serbia’
became (or remained) multicultural, attracting Slav and non-Slav
traders and merchants, including Greeks, Tsintsars (Hellenised
23
ISN, III-1, 75–76. From around 1990, the most fanatical Red Star
Belgrade football fans started calling themselves Delije. Many were Serbian
nationalists, while some would join paramilitary groups engaged in erasing
Muslim and Ottoman heritage in former Yugoslavia, but the irony was
apparently lost on them. Similarly, fans of Partizan Belgrade – whose
members were jailed for vandalizing Belgrade’s Bajrakli mosque in 2004
(as a retaliation for Albanian nationalists’ attacks on Serb churches and
monasteries in Kosovo) – include a group called Janjičari (Janissaries),
infamous for its links with organized crime.
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Vlachs), and, following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal

in the late fifteenth century, Sephardim Jews. Although tradition-
ally a loyal Ottoman millet, some Jews joined the Serb/Christian
migrations north. Many chose to settle in Zemun (Semlin), a town
just north of Belgrade that was home to an important Ashkenazy
Jewish community.24
Conversion to Islam
Why, under what circumstances and how many Serbs and other
Balkan Christians converted to Islam is hard to establish, but key
developments are known. Conversions did not occur at the same
time or due to a single factor. Sometimes they were forced, at
other times voluntary. Particularly controversial was the Ottoman
practice of devşirme, whereby Christian boys were taken from
their families, converted to Islam and trained as members of elite
Janissary units. Having their children taken away was undoubtedly
a tragic experience for those affected. It represents something of a
collective trauma and a key negative narrative about the Ottoman
rule in the Balkans. Among the Serbs, the practice is known to
this day as the danak u krvi (blood tax). It seems, however, that not
all children were taken forcibly, nor from a cradle, as is popularly
believed. Parents would sometimes accept that Janissary service
offered better prospects for their sons, and probably also for the
whole family. Numerous Ottoman pashas and grand viziers were
Albanian, Greek and South Slav converts, recruited originally
through the devşirme.
24
Paternal ancestors of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, born in 1860
in Pest (modern Budapest) lived in Zemun. Herzl’s father and grandfather
were taught by Yehuda Alkalai, Zemun’s Sephardim rabi, who is considered
a precursor to Zionism. The 2005 postmodern novel Pijavice (Leeches) by
David Albahari, a Canadian-based Serbian-Jewish writer born in Peć, Kosovo,
explores the history of Zemun Jews.
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When as part of his ‘Serbian campaign’ Sultan Mehmed the

Conqueror laid siege to Novo Brdo in late April 1455, he faced
a stiff resistance from defenders of Serbia’s most important
mining centre. The town surrendered on 1 June, after a 40-day
siege and sustained bombardment. Prominent citizens were
lined up and executed (by decapitation) on the spot; others were
enslaved, while boys were recruited for the Janissary corps, alleg-
edly on the sultan’s personal order. Only miners, whose labour
and expertise were necessary for the continued exploitation of
the mines, were spared. Janissary recruits included Konstantin
Mihailović and his two brothers. It is possible that Konstantin,
as a boy-soldier, had already fought alongside Ottomans, in the
siege of Constantinople no less, as a member of Despot Djuradj’s
vassal army. Following his capture, Konstantin converted to Islam
and probably became a Janissary. He was one of many local con-
verts who fought loyally, and bravely, for the sultan. So long as
they converted to Islam, even former slaves could reach high mil-
itary ranks if their conduct on battlefield merited it. Aware, like
others must have been, that Ottoman service was meritocratic
and offered greater opportunities for promotion than service in
Serbian or other Christian armies, it is not difficult to understand
why Konstantin accepted the new predicament and apparently
did not attempt to dessert. It was only after he was captured by
Hungarians that he denounced Islam and re-adopted his Christian
Serb identity. In his later years, he wrote a memoir that became a
popular read in Renaissance Europe.
The Ottoman Empire encouraged the Islamization of the
population living in southern parts of the former Serbian state
after the Christians of the northern parts joined the enemy dur-
ing frequent wars against the Hungarians and Austrians. They
believed, not unreasonably, that the conversion would ensure
loyalty of local population. Consequently, during the early dec-
ades of Ottoman rule, a large number of Christians from Raška
and Hum (Herzegovina) converted to Islam, in the old heartland
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of the Nemanjić state and in the area around the Mileševa mon-
astery, the resting place of St Sava.25 The Ottomans’ success
rested on their ability to integrate the peoples of the empire, not
necessarily only through conversion. Converting non-Muslims
to Islam and adding them to and mixing with the Turkish and
other Muslim peoples would, the Ottomans hoped, strengthen
the empire and facilitate its expansion. Konstantin Mihailović
compared the Ottoman state to a sea – a dense and salty water
that required periodical addition of fresh water (a metaphor for
Christian converts) in order to spread. The belief that the empire
could only survive through inclusion, not exclusion, of Muslims
and non-Muslims alike, may help explain why the Ottomans were
able to maintain their vast state for so long.26 The inclusivity and
tolerance had its limits though. Non-Muslims remained discrim-
inated, both formally and in practice. Although Christians were
admitted into the army, they could only reach the highest posi-
tions if they converted; similarly, Muslim women were treated
preferentially in sultans’ harems than non-Muslim women.
Christians and Jews lived in segregated urban quarters and were
only allowed to wear dark-coloured (black, brown or navy blue)
clothes in public.
The conversion was often a pragmatic choice made by non-
Muslim subjects of the sultan. Many Serb livestock traders and
other merchants doing business with coastal towns in Montenegro
and Dalmatia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were
recent converts. It was similar with craftsmen in Serbian towns,
some of whom converted to Islam during the early decades of the
Ottoman rule and continued to practice their trade as before. For
them, one can assume, life did not fundamentally change after
the collapse of the Serbian state and the establishment of the
25
ISN, III-1, 38.
26
T. Krstić, Contested Conversion to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the
Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Stanford, CA, 2011, 51–52.
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Ottoman rule. Sometimes converting to Islam was done en masse,

in villages where the local knez became a Muslim and others sim-
ply followed.27 In such cases, one can assume that the example
of others, peer pressure and fear of becoming a minority, must
have been an important factor behind decisions to abandon the
Christian faith – sometimes perhaps only formally.
Balkan Muslim converts have been traditionally perceived as
traitors, or, in the case the devşirme, as victims. However, they were
not merely passive agents, and many had had a profound impact
on the political and cultural life of the empire. Among them was
previously mentioned Grand Vizier Sokollu (Sokolović) Mehmed
Pasha. Born around 1505, he had been aged between 16 and 18
when he became a Janissary. The Ottomans were especially inter-
ested in boys and young men from eminent Christian families. The
Sokolovićs were one such family. They had already given at least
two Ottoman pashas, brothers Deli Husrev (c.1495–1544) and Lala
Kara Mustafa (c.1500–80). Young Mehmed, whose birth name was
Bajo, had been studying at the thirteenth-century Mileševa mon-
astery (founded by King Vladislav Nemanjić and the resting place
of St Sava, as previously mentioned), possibly to become a monk
like one of his uncles. As such, he was an outstanding candidate for
devşirme. The Ottomans regarded educated Christian boys highly
for their leadership qualities. Moreover, converting a monk, or a
potential monk, added an additional sense of satisfaction for a pros-
elytizing Muslim. Whether Bajo’s family, and families of other boys
and children taken into the devşirme, accepted their son’s fate, per-
haps aware of the likely benefits for the rest of the family, or tried to
resist it is not known and remains a matter of some controversy.28
27
ISN, III-1, 38.
28
Krstić, 68–72; R. Samardžić, Mehmed Sokolović, Belgrade, 1993, 15–22.
Mehmed Pasha and a bridge he built on the river Drina near Višegrad, on
the Bosnian–Serbian border, are central characters of Ivo Andrić’s classic
novel The Bridge on the River Drina, 1945.
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The South Slav presence at the Porte was such that in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, Serbian (or rather a South Slav
vernacular) was one of the empire’s diplomatic languages, for exam-
ple, used in communication with Dubrovnik.29 When Pigafetta vis-
ited Buda (modern Budapest) in the sixteenth century, he claimed
that he could speak ‘Croatian’ with the pasha and his soldiers, and
that it was similar in Constantinople.30 Ottomans of Bosnian and
Serbian origins may not have called the language ‘Croatian’, but
they and the South Slavs from Croatia and Montenegro spoke a
mutually intelligible language.
Mahmud Pasha Andjelović (Mahmūd Pāşa Angel-zāde), whom
the reader will recall was the conqueror of Serbia and Bosnia, was
another prominent Balkan convert. One of the most celebrated
Ottoman military commanders of his time, he was born in Novo
Brdo or Kruševac around 1420 to a Serb mother and a Greek ref-
ugee father – no less than son of the last Angeloi ruler of Thessaly
who had emigrated to Serbia in the late fourteenth century.31
Mahmud Pasha’s elder brother Mihailo Andjelović commanded
the Smederevo garrison in the late 1450s. Kidnapped by the
Ottomans as a child, while fleeing from Novo Brdo to Smederevo
with his mother (who converted to Islam together with her young
son), Mahmud became a Janissary and a pasha who distinguished
himself during the siege of Constantinople and of the Serbian
town of Ostrovica (believed to be Konstantin Mihailović’s home
town). Made grand vizier in late 1454 or early 1455, Mahmud
Pasha led the Ottoman expedition in Serbia. He then moved
on to Bosnia, where he defeated, for the second time, unfortu-
nate King Stefan (Tomašević). Ottomans are often portrayed
29
O. Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, Belgrade, 2007, 78.
30
Pigafetta, Itinerario, 37.
31
T. Stavrides, The Sultan of Vezirs: The Life and Times of the Ottoman Grand
Vezir Mahmud Pasha Angelović (1453–1474), Leiden, 2001, 73–100; H.
Šabanović, Književnost Muslimana Bosne i Hercegovine na orijentalnim jezicima,
Sarajevo, 1973, 39–43.
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in traditional historiography as an Asian, alien people, but such

narratives ignore that at one level the Ottoman–Serbian and
Ottoman–Bosnian wars of the mid-fifteenth century were fratri-
cidal wars, in some cases quite literally.
A patron of arts and culture and a noted poet and writer
celebrated for his style, Mahmud Pasha was not just a skillful
soldier and politician. He published under a pen name ‘Adni
(of Eden). Indeed, Serb and other South Slav converts to Islam
made an important contribution to Ottoman culture and schol-
arship but remain notable by their absence from histories of
Serbia and the Balkans. Hüseyin bin Sefer, also known as Tuği
Çelebi (died sometime during the reign of Murad IV, 1623–40)
was a Belgrade-born son of Christian converts. As a Janissary,
he took part in Ottoman campaigns in Anatolia and Persia, but
is best remembered for his historical work on the tragic reign
of young Sultan Osman II (1618–22), murdered by rebelious
Janissaries. The same subject attracted another Ottoman his-
torian of South Slav background, Ibrahim Peçevi (1574–1650),
a descendant of provincial commanders of Bosnia. Born in
Pecs, Hungary, Peçevi was raised as an orphan by his maternal
uncle Ferhad Pasha (of the Sokolović/Sokollu family that gave
Mehmed Pasha). Following his retirement from the Ottoman
army, Peçevi settled in Budapest where he spent the last years of
his life writing history books.32
Ibrahim ibn Iskandar was another prominent Ottoman of
South Slav origin. Born in Bosnia and educated in Istanbul, he
spent much of his adult life in Belgrade, in the second half of
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Munīrī Belgrādi
(Ibrahim’s pen name), was a cleric, teacher and judge who wrote
important works on geography, history, religion and poetry
(sadly, no poems by him survive). By the time of his death around
32
G. Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play,
Berkeley, CA, 2003, 45–46.
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1617, towards the end of the reign of Sultan Ahmed I (1603–17),

he had become known around the empire as a distinguished man
of letters. His fellow Belgraders remembered him long after his
death. When Evliya Çelebi visited Belgrade in 1660, he witnessed
people paying respects to Munīrī Belgrādi’s tomb.33 There were
other examples of prominent men of letters among Serbian and
Balkan converts. For example, Užice, a town in western Serbia,
was home to at least two important seventeenth-century Ottoman
poets, Tābıt (Sabit Užičanin) and Ğārī Çalabi Užičawī (Džari
Čelebi Užičanin).34
Not much is known about the early encounters between the

Ottomans and the local population, but they may not have been as
traumatic for the latter as usually assumed. The Ottoman expan-
sion into the region and seemingly radical ruptures with the past
that it caused tend to overshadow the misrule by Christian lords
in the decades preceding the arrival of Ottoman Turks. Indeed,
initially at least, ethnic Turks appear to have left a positive impres-
sion on Balkan Christians. Popular tradition remembers them as
noble, brave and ascetic people (although not so self-disciplined
when it came to smoking and drinking coffee), and as elegantly
dressed men who carried sparkling clean light weapons. Turkish
houses typically had beautiful and tidy gardens, often with an arti-
ficial spring. The ‘bad guys’ of the popular Serbian and South Slav
tradition tend to be local converts to Islam and ‘Arabs’ – it appears
that the Christians distinguished between ethnic Turks and other
Muslims from Asia.
33
Čelebi, Putopis, 91; Šabanović, Književnost Muslimana, 193–201; M. Popović,
Poznice, Belgrade, 1999, 7–29.
34
Šabanović, Književnost Muslimana, 331–33.
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The Ottoman relative tolerance of the Orthodox church was

in contrast with pressures on Balkan migrants in Hungary and
Venice to accept the supremacy of Rome and the Catholic dogma.
South Slav epic poetry includes examples of sultans respecting
and even financing Christian churches and monasteries. Even a
poorest Muslim could rise high within the hierarchy (whether
through meritocracy or corruption is beside the point); as an old
Serbian saying states: ‘Svako Ture može vezir biti’ (Every Turk
[i.e. Muslim] can become a vizier). Similarly, oral poetry pro-
vides examples of Christian/Serbian women marrying Muslims,
but without an obligation to convert. Muslim husbands respected
their Christian wives’ tradition, in some cases making donations
to the Orthodox church.35 However, the religious tolerance had
its limits, and Muslim women were forbidden from marrying
non-Muslims.
Such tolerance of another religion came from the Qur’an, but at
the time when Ottoman rule in the Balkans was still being estab-
lished marrying into local aristocracy also carried obvious political
advantages. Although married to Sultan Murad II, Despot Djuradj’s
daughter Mara remained an Orthodox Christian. So did, it appears,
her sister Katarina who, the reader will recall, married Count Ulrich
von Cilli, a Roman Catholic noble from present-day Slovenia. After
the sultan’s death in 1451, Mara left the Ottoman court, choos-
ing to live in Serres (modern Greece), on a land given to her by
the new sultan, Mara’s stepson Mehmed the Conqueror. Despite
being approached by twice-widowed Emperor Constantine XI
(Palaiologos), himself Serb through his mother’s side, Mara, aged
just 33, opted to live as a single woman. Her sister Katarina moved
in with her after the death of her husband in Belgrade in 1456.
In a history dominated by strong male personalities, the exam-
ple of the Branković sisters offers a refreshing contrast. They
played an important part in the regional affairs – first as brides in
35
D. J. Popović, O Hajducima, Belgrade, 1930, I, 18–20, 31.
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political marriages and then, after they were widowed, as inde-

pendent political actors. For example, their diplomatic skills
and contacts were required by both sides during the Ottoman–
Venetian war of 1463–79. Mara also mediated between the Porte
and Ragusa (Dubrovnik), and helped her brothers claim their
inheritance in gold, kept in Ragusan safes. The former sultana
was indeed a woman of considerable wealth and influence. In
1459, the year Smederevo fell to the Ottomans, she purchased
a monastery near Salonica. Self-styled Lady Empress Mara
(gospodja carica Mara), she was addressed by the ever-courteous
Ragusans as Imperatrice Mare.36
Society and Economy

Town population in Ottoman ‘Serbia’ was mixed, with Muslim,
Christian and Jewish quarters. Belgrade and Smederevo remained
key fortresses close to the border with Hungary/Austria. In some
cases, old, fortified towns lost in significance. Other medieval
political and economic centres, such as Prizren (present-day
Kosovo), retained their previous importance and even prospered.
Once Stefan Dušan’s capital, Prizren was a thriving economic
regional centre that in the late sixteenth century had ten Christian
and eight Muslim mahalas (quarters) and a small community of
Sephardic Jews, who sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire fol-
lowing their expulsion from Spain and Portugal in the late fif-
teenth century. Local craftsmen mostly carried on business as
usual. Christians would have included Serbs, Albanians and a small
number of Roman Catholics from Dalmatia, while the Muslim
population consisted of Albanian, Turkish and Serb speakers.
36
M. St. Popović, Mara Branković: Žena izmedju hrišćanskog i islamskog
kulturnog kruga u 15. veku, Novi Sad, 2014 (first published in German, 2010).
Known in the Ottoman tradition as Mara Despina Hatun, Mara Branković
is played by a popular Turkish actress Tuba Büyüküstün in the Netflix series
Rise of Empires: Ottoman (2020).
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A more visible Sephardic Jewish presence in the Smederevo

sanjak is recorded only from the mid-sixteenth century, but it
quickly gained a foothold there, especially in trading centres
and in mining regions of eastern Serbia.37 From early sixteenth
century, Roma begin to appear in Ottoman censuses in the ter-
ritory of what used to be Serbia. They often worked as black-
smiths and as a semi-nomadic group belonged to a separate tax
and administrative system, not tied to a specific territory. This
was similar but not identical to a millet, because Roma were
both Christian and Muslim. While Roma were discriminated
against, their status in the Ottoman Empire nevertheless com-
pared favourably to the treatment of Roma in central and west
European states.38
Goods were transported by road (old Via Militaris and Via
Ignatia) or by boat – the Danube, Sava and Morava Rivers were all
navigated. The exploitation of mines continued, albeit at a slower
pace than in medieval Serbia. Surviving trade regulations offer an
insight into the everyday life. Anyone wishing to sell goods at the
Kruševac market, in Prince Lazar’s old capital, had to pay both
entry and exit fees, set depending on quantity of goods for sale
and identity of merchants. Christians were required to pay slightly
more than Muslims, although traders from Dubrovnik continued
37
S. Katić, ‘Uloga Jevreja u otvaranju i razvoju rudnika Kučajna i Majdanpek
u drugoj polovini XVI veka’, Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, 8:1–2 (2001),
7–17, 9–10. There is some evidence of Jewish presence in tenth century
Belgrade (when the Bulgarians and Byzantines wrestled for the control of
the city fortress), while fourteenth-century Serbia expanded into previously
Byzantine-held territory that included Romaniote (Greek) Jews, who
would later merge with the Sephardim. M. S Mirč, ‘Jevreji na Balkanskom
poluostrvu i u staroj srpskoj državi do dolaska Turaka’, Jevrejski almanah
(Belgrade), 1957/58, 49–58.
38
Z. Bárány, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality and
Ethnopolitics, Cambridge, 2002; E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, Gypsies in
the Ottoman Empire, Hatfield, 2001; O. Zirojević, ‘Cigani u Srbiji od dolaska
Turaka do kraja XVI veka’, Jugoslovenski istorijski časopis (Belgrade), 1–2
(1976), 67–78.
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to enjoy a privileged status they had secured in medieval Serbia.39

With the expansion of the Ottoman state under Suleiman the
Magnificent in the Middle East, the Serbs lived in a vast empire
that stretched from Baghdad to Belgrade and Budapest. Serb and
other Orthodox Balkan merchants, as well as their Ragusan Roman
Catholic counterparts, benefitted from new trade routes that con-
nected the Middle East with western Europe. Often dressed in
Muslim attire, they took their trade as far as Lyon, France’s finan-
cial centre in the sixteenth century.40
Mid-seventeenth-century Belgrade, the seat of the Smederevo
sanjak, was a prosperous, cosmopolitan city on the confluence
of the Danube and Sava Rivers. According to Çelebi, it could be
reached after ‘12 days on foot from Salonica’. Belgrade’s Muslims
were ‘local converts to Islam’, and the city’s population included
Serbs, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Roma. A major commercial
centre, between 5,000 and 6,000 loads of goods each year arrived in
Belgrade from Anatolia, Ottoman Syria, Egypt and Lebanon; the
goods were distributed further into European parts of the empire
or exported across Europe, including Hungary, Venice, Bohemia,
Poland and Sweden.
Belgrade’s landscape was dominated by mosques; there were
probably between 70 and 80 of them, but only one remains today.
Çelebi also found nine Greek, Armenian, Serbian, Bulgarian and
Jewish places of worship, and eight Muslim medrese (schools).
Belgrade was known for its beautiful gardens, including the one
that once belonged to late Munīrī Belgrādi. The city was home
to numerous traders, merchants and craftsmen, and Muslim,
Christian and Jewish alike. It seems that Belgraders, whose good
health (evident apparently in their ‘rose cheeks’) and widely
famous good looks (especially of ‘Latin [?] and Serbian women’),
39
Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 71–75.
40
T. Stoianovich, ‘The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant’, Journal of
Economic History, 20:2 (1960), 234–313, 238.
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coexisted in relative harmony. Their everyday communica-

tion was eased by the city’s lingua franca – not Turkish, Arabic
or Greek, but a South Slav vernacular. According to the famed
Ottoman traveller, the city’s Muslims spoke ‘Serbian, Bulgarian
and Bosniak’, while ‘the Belgrade reaya and eminent citizens
(bereaya) were all Serbian’. Çelebi noted that Serbian language
was similar to, but recognizable from, the languages spoken in
the neighbouring Bosnian and Bulgarian elayets, and that Serbs
were ‘an old Christian people’ with their own history.41 Ottoman
Turkish nevertheless was the language of administration, while
Arabic was used during the Muslim prayer. In trade, Greek would
have been used as well. Such multilingualism was neither new – it
had existed in the region since Roman times – nor specific for this
part of the empire.
If towns had mixed, though predominantly Muslim population,
countryside was mainly populated by Christian Slavs and Vlachs.
Distant descendants of Saxon miners who had settled in medieval
Serbia had been assimilated by local Christian populations by this
time. Much of the interior of the Belgrade pashalik was covered
in forest and this more sparsely populated area was probably pre-
dominantly Orthodox and Slav, that is ethnically and religiously
less mixed than territory further south. Šumadija, the land of for-
ests, would be the birthplace of modern Serbia in the nineteenth
century.
The period following the establishment of the Ottoman rule in
the Balkans witnessed increased social mixing between Orthodox
Slavs and Vlachs. Distinctions between Slav farmers and Vlach
shepherds may have begun to blur already in the late Nemanjić era.
The Vlachs sometimes adopted South Slav languages, names and
identities, while Orthodox Slavs often became ‘socially Vlach’ –
that is semi-nomadic shepherds, having abandoned their previous
41
Čelebi, Putopis, 83–94; H. Šabanović, ‘Urbani razvitak Beograda od 1521. do
1688’, Godišnjak grada Beograda, 17 (1970), 5–41.
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lifestyle of land-cultivating farmers due to the disruption caused by

the Ottoman conquest. Meanwhile, some Vlachs served as Ottoman
tax collectors or caravan guards. Many Orthodox Christian Slavs
and Vlachs fled to Dalmatia or the Croatian Military Border in the
late sixteenth century. In Hungary, Orthodox parishes often con-
sisted of mixed Serb, Vlach, Romanian and Greek communities.42
Prior to Ottoman–Austrian wars of the eighteenth century,
which left Ottoman ‘Serbia’ largely depopulated, foreign trav-
ellers noted that land around Niš and in Kosovo was better
cultivated than that in northern parts of the former despotate,
which, as mentioned, was mainly covered in forest. Using prim-
itive, medieval tools, Christian farmers mainly cultivated wheat,
oat, barley, spelt, rice, onion and cabbage. Today essential to
the Serbian diet, beans, corn, pepper and tomato were intro-
duced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while potato
became a staple food only in the nineteenth century. Peasants
made most out of chestnut, walnut, cherry, apple, pear and plum
trees. Plums (šljive) were distilled to make a strong brandy-
like drink šljivovica, Serbia’s national drink today (but also com-
mon throughout the Balkans). Vineyards were to be found in the
valleys of the Morava and Timok Rivers and in Metohija, where
monastic communities produced, and sold, their own alcoholic
beverages. Pigs, sheep and goats were kept for meat and, in the
case of the latter two, wool. A special tax was paid on domestic
animals, including cows and horses. Hunting and fishing were
widespread, for domestic and commercial use: markets sold fresh,
42
Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 152; Popović, O Hajducima, 9–10; O. Katsiardi-
Hering, ‘Southeastern European Migrant Groups between the Ottoman and
the Habsburg Empires: Multilateral Social and Cultural Transfers from the
Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in H. Heppner and E. Posch
(eds), Encounters in Europe’s Southeast: The Habsburg Empire and the Orthodox
World in the 18th and 19th centuries, Bochum, 2012, 135–62; L. Wolff, Venice
and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, Stanford,
CA, 2002.
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dried and smoked meat and fish (especially popular were carp,
catfish and sturgeon). Honey and honey-based liqueur, medovača,
were also widely produced. Visitors to the Kruševac market in
the early 1530s could expect to buy a wide selection of products,
ranging from wheat, oat, rice, butter, milk, cheese, honey, salt, oil,
olives, eggs, vegetables and fruit, to fish, meat, wine, to clothes
and firewood and livestock. The Ottomans introduced coffee and
tobacco to the Balkans. By the early seventeenth century, coffee
houses – kahve-hane (predecessors of popular Serb kafane, which
today typically serve food and alcohol) – became widespread
throughout the region. In support of a decree by Sultan Ahmed I,
ordering the closure of coffee houses, so that people would have
more time to prey, Munīrī Belgrādi wrote against the use of cof-
fee, wine, opium and tobacco.43
Villages were home to a patriarchal Christian society, increas-
ingly isolated from more cosmopolitan urban areas. Agrarian,
self-sustainable communities that produced their own clothes and
food formed. The clothes were made from rough, usually woollen
cloth, and included men’s trousers with skinny lower leg, known as
čakšire (from Turkish çakşır); men’s headgear consisted of šubare,
hats made of lamb or sheep wool and Ottoman-style fezes; šajkače,
soft wool military-style caps that are regarded as a national sym-
bol of Serbia today were introduced in the nineteenth century.
Women wore long skirts and white cotton shirts embroidered
with woollen, coloured patterns; headscarves on women signi-
fied marriage, while unmarried women tended to display hair,
which was usually plaid. Women’s jewellery was made of cop-
per and glass of different colours, less frequently silver. Both men
and women wore opanci, laceless leather moccasins that typically
43
A. Fotić, ‘The Introduction of Coffee and Tobacco to the Mid-Western
Balkans’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 64:1 (2011),
89–100, 90–91; E. Boyar and K. Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul,
Cambridge, 2010, 190.
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had horn-like toe endings. Christians and Jews were not allowed
to wear silk, fur and turbans, although foreign travellers noted
examples of rule-breaking, possibly in acts of defiance.44
Tightly knit communities and extended families formed the
core of the peasant society. Kinship was extremely important,
as was kumstvo (sworn kinship) and pobratimstvo (sworn brother-
hood). Another important concept was gostoprimstvo, or hospital-
ity. Mostly illiterate, the Serbian reaya45 kept a rich oral tradition.
Fairy tales and fables were told from generation to generation,
as were legends about medieval kings and events, both real and
fictional. Historical figures such as Kraljević Marko were given
supernatural powers, resembling ancient Greek heroes. In other
cases, mythical, Bible-inspired qualities were attributed to medi-
eval rulers, most notably in the form of Jesus-like Prince Lazar
and Vuk Branković, whose alleged treason at Kosovo was an
obvious reference to Judas. Miloš Obilić, the alleged assassin of
Sultan Murad I at Kosovo about whom no historical record exists,
was another popular folk hero with powers like those of Achilles.
Obilić was especially popular in Montenegro, and among some
Albanian tribes. The cult of St Sava spread beyond Christian
communities, or possibly survived in the tradition of formerly
Christian converts to Islam. Not all epic poetry was about Kosovo
and about fighting the Ottomans. ‘Banović Strahinja’ is a beau-
tiful poem about love, loyalty and sacrifice. It tells the story of a
Serb nobleman who forgives his wife’s infidelity with a Turkish
man – seen as both a personal and a betrayal of the whole nation –
despite pressure from her family and the society to punish her.
Muslims from Bosnia, Sandžak and the Albanian regions also pos-
sessed their own epic tradition, which shared many features with
44
45
A. Fotić, ‘Tracing the Origin of a New Meaning of the Term Re’āyā in the
Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Balkans’, Balcanica, XLVIII (2017), 55–66.
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the tradition of Orthodox Slavs from Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia

and Herzegovina and the surrounding lands.
Brigands and Rebels

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travellers observed that ban-
ditry was widespread in present-day central Serbia, around Via
Militaris, which the Slavs called the ‘Carigradski drum’, or the
Road to the Tsar’s City (Constantinople). The Ottomans were
forced to hire local ‘barefoot Rascian boys carrying clubs’ to help
defend the caravans from frequent robbery attempts.46 In reality
robbers and murderers, sometimes feared and hated because they
brought danger to the locals and took their food, the hajduks are
remembered in popular tradition as the Balkan version of Robin
Hood, as defenders of the poor and exploited against the rich and
more powerful foreign oppressors. They became national heroes
in retrospective imagination, but most probably were local actors,
who sometimes operated across the region, on different sides of
the imperial borderlands.47
Further north, in modern Vojvodina, ‘Tsar’ Jovan Nenad, cel-
ebrated in modern times as a Serbian national hero whose tall
statue stands in the centre of Subotica, was an outlaw of uncer-
tain origin. His numerous, multi-ethnic following of Serb,
Hungarian, Vlach and Bulgarian poor, homeless and desperate
hailed him as a messiah and saviour. Variously referred to as the
‘Black Man’, ‘Niger’, ‘Der schwarze Mann’ (due to his dark com-
plexion, enhanced by a visible ‘black’ scar or birth mark) and ‘Tsar
Jovan (Ivan)’, he appeared around the time of Hungary’s defeat
at Mohàcs in 1526. Claiming to be a descendant of Byzantine
emperors or of Serbian despots (depending on source or perhaps
46
Popović, O Hajducima, 106–107; R. Tričković, Beogradski pašaluk, 1687–1739,
Belgrade, 2013, 125–54.
47
See E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, London, 2017 (first publ. 1959).
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occasion), he commanded a large army of between 10,000 and

14,000 soldiers and cavalry. This enabled him to play a major
role during a power struggle in Hungary between Ferdinand, the
Habsburg King of Hungary from 1526, and John (János) Zápolya,
the Count of Transylvania who claimed the Hungarian throne.
Taking advantage of the conflict between Ferdinand and Zápolya,
Jovan Nenad established a short-lived ‘empire’ in Subotica/
Szabatka and the surrounding area in modern Vojvodina. He set
up a quasi-court and had a personal guard of around 600 men.
Although at that time a Croatian noble held the Serbian despot’s
title, it was the mysterious Jovan Nenad whom Hungarian Serbs
regarded as their ‘tsar’. ‘A robber, named Niger, of the Rascian
family was corrupted by Ferdinand’, as were ‘Despotus Rasciae’
and two other local magnates, reported an envoy of English
King Henry VIII in July 1527.’48 Jovan Nenad was assassinated
by Zápolya’s supporters in summer 1527, after deciding to join
Ferdinand’s camp. Remnants of his defeated and leaderless army
quickly dispersed, many choosing to flee across the border to the
Ottoman Empire.49
Starina Novak was another sixteenth-century rebel and a leg-
endary hajduk of the Balkan folklore (which may have mixed
him with an earlier hajduk Novak from Bosnia).50 Born in east-
ern Serbia either in 1520 or in 1530, Novak had been a Muslim
convert in his youth, before establishing himself as a leader of
Christian brigands. In the 1590s, Starina Novak fought alongside
Wallachian voivod Michael the Brave against the Ottomans. He
was captured by the Ottomans in 1601, who tortured and burnt
him alive. An Orthodox priest shared his destiny, and it was with
48
Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, arranged
and catalogued by J. S. Brewer, London, 1872, IV-II, doc. 3239, 1473.
49
ISN, III-1, 142–44; D. J. Popović, Vojvodina, Novi Sad, 1939, I, 189–201, and
Srbi u Vojvodini, I, 133–50.
50
ISN, III-1, 263–69; R. Samardžić (ed.), Starina Novak i njegovo doba, Belgrade,
1988.
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him that Novak allegedly spoke Serbian during his last moments.
Modern nationalist discourses describe Novak as a national hero
who fought against ‘Turkish’ and, in the case of Romanians,
Hungarian ‘oppression’. In reality, he was a transnational brig-
and, able to speak several Balkan languages. His small, ‘multi-
national’ army included Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Vlachs.
Depending on circumstances, Novak’s men fought both against
and for the Ottomans and the Hungarians.
Restoration of the Peć Patriarchate

Unlike the state, the Serbian church survived the Ottoman con-
quest, although not without significant human and material dam-
age and loss of property. In the territory of the Smederevo sanjak,
the church was left alone and enjoyed a de facto autocephalous
status.51 However, further south, in old Raška and what is today
Kosovo (a territory that was divided into several sanjaks), things
looked very different. When Prizren fell in 1455, the monastery of
the Holy Archangels, founded in the early 1340s by Stefan Dušan,
was pillaged and looted, including the grave of the late emperor.
Some churches and monasteries were turned into mosques, while
the Dečani monastery lost almost all its 180 hectares of land. The
Peć Patriarchate effectively came to an end around 1463, fol-
lowing the death of Patriarch Arsenije II. The jurisdiction of its
southern eparchies passed over to the Ohrid archbishopric.
Prior to the Ottomans’ arrival, there had been around 1,300
monasteries, churches and other buildings owned by the Serbian
church in Kosovo and Metohija alone; early sixteenth-century
Ottoman sources list only around 50 Orthodox places of wor-
ship in the same area.52 Yet, the church also enjoyed certain
51
B. Djurdjev, Uloga crkve u starijoj istoriji srpskog naroda, Sarajevo, 1964,
111–12; Miljković-Bojanić, Smederevski sandžak, 273.
52
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privileges under the Ottomans and its status gradually improved.

The Orthodox clergy was sometimes allowed to collect tax from
the Christian reaya, including among Roman Catholics in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, which contributed to Orthodox–Catholic ten-
sions there.53 The eparchies in the remote mountains of mod-
ern Montenegro continued to function mostly independently.
In the early 1490s, the first printing house in south-eastern
Europe was founded at the Cetinje monastery, just several dec-
ades after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.
Montenegrin clergy helped preserve memory of the medieval
Serbian state and church. Indeed, the church played a central part
in the political life of the tiny clan-based society that between
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries functioned as a theocracy,
under Orthodox prince-bishops (vladikas).
The Peć Patriarchate was restored in 1557 mostly thanks to
Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. Since 1551, the Beylerbey (governor-
general) of Rūm-ėli (land of the Romans) – the Ottoman name
for the Balkans – the future grand vizier remained attached to his
native region, even though his parents and siblings had also con-
verted to Islam and joined him in Constantinople. Unsurprisingly,
Mehmed Pasha’s identity was complex, though, to be sure, he was
not a crypto-Serb patriot. He communicated in his mother tongue
with representatives of Dubrovnik, the Adriatic city state close to
the Pasha’s native Herzegovina. His roots may have also eased his
contacts with the Serbs of southern Hungary, which proved help-
ful during the Ottoman military campaigns there. At the time,
two key political personalities in the struggle for the Hungarian
throne, which continued after Zápolya’s death in 1540, were fel-
low South Slavs: Peter Petrovics, a Hungarian landowner of Serb
origin and Queen Isabella’s ally and relative, and Bishop Juraj
Utješenović, a Croat-Venetian cleric and statesman who acted as
53
Ibid, 83–84, 140.
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regent in the name of minor John (János) II Sigismund, Zápolya’s

successor. A sense of a shared language and regional identity must
have eased their own communication and their dealings with
Mehmed Pasha. In some ways, the complex Austrian–Hungarian–
Ottoman relationship during this period was a South Slav affair.
The pasha obviously saw benefits in allowing the Serbs – one of
the largest Orthodox communities in the empire and good soldiers
the Ottomans needed for their European campaigns – to run their
own church affairs. He had kept or re-established contacts with
the Mileševa monks and consulted them regarding the restoration
of the Peć Patriarchate. The new Patriarch Makarije (1557–71)
was Mehmed’s close relative. Makarije’s two immediate successors
were also chosen from the same family.54 Therefore, it might be
said that the restoration of the Peć Patriarchate in mid-sixteenth
century was a family affair. (It is not known whether these devel-
opments had anything to do with the fact that the then Ottoman
grand vizier Damat Rüstem Pasha (1555–61) was another South
Slav convert – probably of Dalmatian Croat origin – who sup-
ported the re-establishment of the Serbian church.) Keeping
key political and religious institutions within the same family
was reminiscent of, but coincidental to, early thirteenth-century
Serbia, when the state and ecclesiastical leaders came, as we have
seen, from within the Nemanjić family. Mileševa, St Sava’s resting
place, and a place where future Mehmed Pasha received his first
education, provided further symbolic links between the two eras.
Serb patriarchs retained spiritual jurisdiction and regulated
family law over their large congregation. Due to the Ottoman
expansion and Orthodox population movements, the Peć
Patriarchate extended over a territory larger than ever before,
or since, including parts of Hungary, Dalmatia, Croatia, Bosnia,
Herzegovina, Bulgaria and Albania (Map 3.2). Peć was obliged
54
ISN, III-2, 41–53; Samardžić, Mehmed Sokolović, 121–34.
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IA Novi Pazar Bela Crkva

Tvrdoš
R
TI Nikšic´ Novo Brdo

C
SE PEĆ Vranje
A Kotor Cetinje Prizren
Kiustendil
Skopje
Patriarchate of Pec´ e
Tetovo hat
Ottoman Empire ar c
Patri of ple
no
Seats of Dioceses Archbishopric of Ohrid a n ti
C o n st
map 3.2 Jurisdiction of the Serbian (Peć) Patriarchate, mid-seventeenth

century. Drawn by Joe LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/, based on a map
originally published in Michael B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia,
1804–1918, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 11
to pay a considerable tax to the sultan – 100,000 akçe in the late

sixteenth century. An economic crisis that hit the empire around
the same time forced the Serbian church to sell some land and
property to fulfil its duties. However, the Patriarchate was able to
fund the renovation and rebuilding of old churches and monas-
teries. The ‘Serb–Turkish idyllic’, as one historian described half
a century of influence of ‘Islamized Serbs’ at the Porte, came to an
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end when the last Sokolović grand vizier was succeeded by Sinan
Pasha (1580–96), who was of Albanian origin.55
The Serbs and European Wars, Sixteenth

to Seventeenth Centuries
When in 1593 the Austrian–Ottoman ‘Long War’ broke out,
Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) called on the Romanian prin-
cipalities, Poland and Russia to join an anti-Ottoman Christian
coalition. A peasant rebellion broke out in southern Hungary, in
areas with significant Serb population. The insurgents captured
several towns, including Vršac/Versec. In neighbouring Ottoman
Bulgaria, Starina Novak’s hajduks pillaged Sofia.
The Serbian church supported the rebellions and, in some
cases, provided leadership.56 It had preserved the cult of
St Sava and encouraged rumours, at the time when Messianic
beliefs were widespread in Europe, about Sava’s resurrection
to lead the liberation of Balkan Christians. Reportedly, the
belief in miraculous, healing powers of St Sava’s relics was not
uncommon among Balkan Muslims either. In response, Sinan
Pasha ordered in 1594 or 1595 the removal of the relics from
the Mileševa to a hill near Belgrade where they were burnt.
(Today this is an affluent Belgrade neighbourhood dominated
by a monumental Temple of St Sava.) It was probably partly in
response to these events that the Serb Orthodox population in
the neighbouring Habsburg Empire was granted in 1597 the
so-called ‘Vlach privileges’ by Ferdinand II of Austria (1590–
1637, Holly Roman Emperor, 1619–37). Ultimately, however,
nothing came out of the pope’s calls for another crusade nor did
a Balkan-wide uprising materialize. The war officially ended in
55
D. Roksandić, Srbi u Hrvatskoj, Zagreb, 1990, 23.
56
ISN, III-2, 69.
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1606 with a peace agreement in Zsitvatörök (Žitavská Tôňa in

modern Slovakia).57
The peace in central Europe would not last long however, as
the Thirty Years’ War broke out in 1618.58 Initially a religious
conflict within the Holy Roman Empire, between supporters of
a staunchly Catholic Ferdinand II and his Protestant opponents,
it eventually transformed into a global war. The combatants
involved Britain, Denmark, France, Hungary, northern Italy, the
Low Countries, Poland, Russia, Spain and Sweden, as battles were
fought across Europe, in Africa, the West Indies and the Indian
and Pacific oceans. The war claimed perhaps more than twelve
million lives – a greater relative loss of population in Europe than
in either of the World Wars of the twentieth century – before
finally ending in a series of peace treaties signed in Westphalia in
1648. During this time, Europe came to know, and fear, Emperor
Ferdinand’s Croat light cavalry. Similar in some ways to hussars,
only more brutal and impetuous, the Croat regiments included
Orthodox Serbs from the Military Border.59 In a war character-
ized by violence and a high number of casualties, the ‘Croats’
arguably stood out, although Cossacks and Swedes were similarly
feared. Daniel Friese, who as a 12-year boy survived the destruc-
tion of the German Protestant city of Magdeburg in 1631, later
recalled that an enemy soldier who took pity on his family warned
his father: ‘if you want to get out with your children leave imme-
diately, for the Croats will be here in an hour and you and your
children will scarcely survive.’60 Ultimately the Croat regiments’
57
ISN, III-1, 247–54; Roksandić, Srbi, 23; Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću,
114–19.
58
P. H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years’ War,
London, 2009; M. Rady, The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power,
London, 2020, ch. 13.
59
E. Bauer, Hrvati u Tridesetogodišnjem ratu, Zagreb, 1941, 19, 28–29.
60
H. Medick and P. Selwyn, ‘Historical Event and Contemporary Experience:
The Capture and Destruction of Magdeburg in 1631’, History Workshop
Journal, 52 (2001), 23–48, 40.
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best known legacy belongs to the world of fashion – the French

cravate was named after a piece of red cloth the ‘Croats’ typically
wore around neck.61
The Thirty Years’ War was entering its later stages when in early
1642 Francesco de Leonardis, a Catholic missionary from Dalmatia
who served as Archbishop of Bar (Antivari), secured an audience
with Serbian Patriarch Pajsije (1614–47). The Ottoman Empire
stayed out of the war, but a separate battle for the souls of Orthodox
‘Schismatics’ continued on its territory. Leonardis had previously
secured support among the high Orthodox clergy in Montenegro
for the church union but failed to get the same commitment from
the patriarch. Pajsije nevertheless maintained contacts with Rome,
and with Moscow and Constantinople, seeking financial and
political support, to prevent the rumoured reincorporation of the
Patriarchate of Peć into the Ohrid archbishopric. Leonardis was
impressed with the Kosovo-born patriarch, who was elected by his
archbishops and acted independently from Constantinople. The
patriarch resided in ‘a very large monastery [in Peć], together with
around 60 monks and as many novices’. The walls of the patriar-
chal church were painted with frescoes of medieval Serbian kings,
despots and the church founder St Sava. Relics of Serbian saints,
prominently displayed in coffins made of cypress wood and deco-
rated with ivory, offered a reminder of the past glories.62
The Serb patriarchs increasingly assumed the role of quasi-
national leaders, sometimes even adopting secular titles such as
the ‘Lord of the Serbs’ (gospodin Srbljem), while the territory under
their jurisdiction was referred to as the ‘Serb Land’ in Ottoman
sources.63 The Serbian church was de facto a political and cultural
61
Pavlowitch, Serbia, 18.
62
ISN, III-2, 73–85; Molnár, Confessionalization on the Frontier, ch. 8; J.
Radonić, Rimska kurija i južnoslovenske zemlje od XVI do XIX veka, Belgrade,
1950, 145–85; Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 143–44.
63
Tričković, Beogradski pašaluk, 41–42.
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institution that preserved, if not actually invented, the Serb his-

torical tradition. For example, Pajsije wrote hagiographies of
King Stefan the First Crowned and Emperor Uroš, contributing
to their cults as Orthodox saints; this may have been partly in
response to the burning of St Sava’s relics. The territorial juris-
diction of the Serbian church under the Ottomans meant that
‘memory’ of the Nemanjić kings and emperors, of Prince Lazar
and the Kosovo battle, and of the Lazarević–Branković despotate,
reached well beyond the borders of the medieval Serbian state.
Pajsije’s successor Gavrilo maintained simultaneous contacts
with Rome and Moscow, causing divisions among the Serb
clergy. Following a visit to Russia in 1653, the patriarch was
falsely accused by bishops opposed to him of allegedly advocating
Russian intervention against the sultan. Gavrilo and one of his
allies among the bishops were executed by Ottoman authorities,
while the Metropolitan of Montenegro went into hiding fear-
ing for his life. In 1655, Serb bishops elected Patriarch Maksim,
an Ottoman loyalist who broke off all contacts with Rome and
Moscow. The pro-Ottoman line was initially maintained by
Maksim’s successor Arsenije III (1674–90/1706), Montenegro-
born and allegedly a descendant of Zeta’s old ruling house of
Crnojević (the surname he spelled Čarnojević). However, things
would soon change dramatically.
The Great Migration

Traditionally ‘remembered’ among Serbs as a central ‘national’
event, the Velika Seoba (Great Migration – Figure 3.2) is better
understood not as a single mass exodus but as a number of pop-
ulation movements – of Balkan Christians, generally north of
the Danube and Sava Rivers, and Muslims – which took place
in the backdrop of the Vienna War (1683–99). The war, fought
between the Ottomans on one hand and the Habsburg monar-
chy, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Venice and Russia
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figure 3.2 Paja Jovanović, Migration of the Serbs (c.1896).

(Wikipedia). A descendent of Serb refugees in Hungary, Pavle-Paja Jovanović
(sometimes spelled Paul Ioannowitch or Ioannowits, 1859–1957), is regarded
as the greatest Serb romantic painter. His Migration of the Serbs is one of the
most recognizable artworks in Serbian history, responsible for the popular
perception of a single, mass exodus led by Patriarch Arsenije. In addition
to paintings on Serbian historical themes, Jovanović produced a series of
Orientalist paintings following his late nineteenth-century travels in the
Balkans and the Near East. It is generally less known that his oeuvre includes
portraits of Emperor Franz Josef and communist leaders Stalin and Tito.64
on the other, had a profound impact on the Serbian history. The

Ottoman state was at its peak, stretching deep into Europe, close
to Kiev in the east and Vienna in the west. This meant that rather
than at an imperial periphery, the Serbs at this time lived in cen-
tral parts of ‘Turkey-in-Europe’. The Ottoman defeat at Vienna
in September 1683, after a two-month siege of the city failed,
represented a turning point, because it halted and then reversed
the Ottoman expansion in Europe.
64
P. Petrović, Paja Jovanović. Sistemski katalog dela/Catalogue raisonné, Belgrade,
2012.
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When the war broke out, Patriarch Arsenije was on a pilgrim-

age to the Holy Land. En route he visited the grave of Despot
Uglješa, who, the reader will recall, was killed at Marica in 1371,
in a decisive battle that paved the way for the Ottoman expansion
into Europe. It is not known, however, if the patriarch was invested
at this stage in the collapse of the Ottoman state. Three years
later, Grand Vizier Süleyman Pasha (Murvetović, Montenegro-
born, like Arsenije, and called Sarı in Ottoman Turkish because
of his blond hair) invited the patriarch to Adrianople (Edirne).
He asked the patriarch to help prevent an anti-Ottoman upris-
ing of Orthodox Christians, pointing out that the outcome of the
war would equally affect the Ottoman state and the ‘Serb Land’
within it.65
Over the next several years, Christian armies pushed the enemy
all the way south to Macedonia. They were helped by internal
Ottoman divisions and renegades such as Yeğen Osman Pasha
of the newly formed Belgrade pashalik (which included the
Smederevo sanjak and what was left of the sanjak of Srem). A pre-
cursor of late eighteenth-century rebel Janissaries, Yeğen Osman
turned against the sultan, as his men abandoned the defence of
Belgrade and instead pillaged and burnt Smederevo, eventually
abandoning it to the enemy. The former capital of the Serbian
despotate thus surrendered without resistance on 13 August 1688,
nearly 230 years after it was captured by the Ottoman army led
by a Serb convert, Mahmud Pasha Andjelović. There was some-
thing symbolic in the fact that the Habsburg army that entered
Smederevo was led by Captain Nestorović Deak. Like most of his
troops, he was a descendant of Serb refugees in Hungary.66
The following year, a Siena-born Habsburg general Piccolomini
led a successful offensive into Kosovo. Perhaps up to 20,000
Serb and Albanian volunteers joined his troops, which originally
65 66
Tričković, Beogradski pašaluk, 42–43, 50–51. Ibid, 32.
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numbered between 6,000 and 7,000 men. Upon entering Prizren,

Stefan Dušan’s old capital, Piccolomini and his men were
accompanied by Pjetër Bogdani (c.1630–89), the Roman Catholic
archbishop of Skopje and ‘administrator of the whole Kingdom
of Serbia’. Bogdani, who was born into a local Albanian family,
claimed to descend from a fourteenth-century magnate Bogdan,
who received land from ‘Emperor Stefan of the Nemanja family’.
It is unlikely that Patriarch Arsenije was in Peć to witness the
entry of the victorious Christian army there three centuries after
the (first) Kosovo battle. He had previously fled to Montenegro,
from where he issued calls on Balkan Christians to join the anti-
Ottoman campaign. Albanian Catholic leaders made similar pleas,
and there were hopes (unfounded, it turned out) that a Balkan-
wide anti-Ottoman uprising would break out.67
During the fighting, Orthodox churches and monasteries were
looted and damaged, including the Peć Patriarchate and the
Gračanica monastery. The violence did not affect Christians only.
With the withdrawal of Ottoman troops, many local Muslims fled
to Bosnia, as the victorious army killed civilians and burned and
pillaged mosques and Muslim shops and houses. The wheel of
fortune would soon turn again. An outbreak of plague decimated
Piccolomini’s army and claimed the general’s life (and Bogdani’s).
In early 1690, Ottoman troops, reinforced with Tatars, won a
decisive battle near Kačanik/Kaçanik (an area in modern Kosovo
associated with Albanian resistance to twentieth-century Serb
and Yugoslav rule). Engaged in another conflict, against France,
Austria was unable to send reinforcements, so remnants of its
Balkan expedition retreated in panic. Local Christian population
was left at the mercy of returning Ottomans seeking revenge.
67
Ibid, 68–69; cf. ISN III–1, 491–529; Malcolm, Kosovo, 141; O. J. Schmitt,
‘Ottoman Albania and Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs, Sixteenth to Eighteenth
Centuries’, in J. R. Lampe and U. Brunnbauer (eds), The Routledge Handbook
of Balkan and Southeast European History, London, 2020, ch. 1.
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Patriarch Arsenije issued an appeal for help to the tsar, but no aid
arrived, as Russia too was fighting on two fronts, due to a border
dispute with China in the Far East.
Ottoman reprisals were harsh. Contemporary sources, includ-
ing an Italian account, describe brutal violence against the Serbs
of Kosovo by Tatars and Bosnian Muslims.68 Men, women and
children were randomly killed or taken to slavery, while by now
mostly deserted Christian villages were set on fire. Monasteries
and churches were looted and damaged; monks and priests who
did not manage to flee were executed. The poor and the well-
off alike joined columns of refugees, making their way towards
Habsburg-held Belgrade. Their numbers swelled as they
approached the city. People carried what they could and what
they had. Sometimes it was just a few personal belongings, and in
other cases more. In addition to a considerable amount of money,
Stevan Todorović, a soap maker from Požarevac (modern eastern
Serbia), took his entire soap-making equipment and a small plum
brandy distillery, another source of income. He was hoping to
settle in Belgrade but was soon forced to abandon all his belong-
ings and flee north, ending up as a penniless refugee in Buda.69
Lifeless bodies, victims of disease and hunger, lay across
‘Serbia’. There were reports of starved people eating dead ani-
mals and even dead human bodies. Refugees fled in groups and
sometimes whole villages were uprooted. There was panic and
fear and whatever hope these unfortunate people had, had been
placed in reaching the safety of Hungary. Belgrade’s population
swelled by tens of thousands of refugees. City streets were full of
desperate and homeless, living skeletons whose faces turned dark
due to hunger, according to eyewitness reports. Whether the
patriarch personally led the exodus, as maintained in the Serbian
68
S. Bizzozero, La sagra lega contro la potenza ottomana: successi delle armi
imperiali, polacche, venete e moscovit, Milan, 1690–1700, cited in Zirojević,
Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 164–65.
69
ISN III-1, 530–35.
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tradition, or not, is a moot point. The church, from the patriarch

and the high clergy down to local priests, provided leadership,
both real and symbolic, to a desperate people on the move –
even when the refugees were not Serbs or even Orthodox.70
The reprisals went on for around three months, stopping only in
March 1690 on the orders from Constantinople. Concerned that
there would be no one left to farm the land, the Porte declared
a universal amnesty, demanding in exchange only declarations of
loyalty to the sultan. Some of those who had not yet crossed the
Danube and the Sava decided to stay, but most refugees never
returned. Among those who remained or returned were elderly,
unable or unwilling to start a new life in a foreign country and
preferring to die at home.
In response to the arrival of a large number of mainly
Orthodox Christians from the neighbouring empire, in August
1690, Leopold I of Austria (Holly Roman Emperor, 1658–1705)
issued ‘Privileges to the Illyrian [in this context Orthodox
Serb] nation’. The migrants were guaranteed freedom of reli-
gion, the use of the Old Style (Julian) calendar and autonomy
for the Serbian church, including its right to appoint bish-
ops and other clergy. The patriarch’s request that the refugees
should settle in a geographically compact area and be allowed
to elect secular leadership was rejected. In the sense that their
autonomy therefore was not territorial, but mainly ethno-
confessional, the position of the Serb Orthodox community in
the Habsburg monarchy resembled that of their millet in the
Ottoman Empire. Initially, the newly arrived refugees were for-
bidden from moving to towns and cities. They sometimes built
their rural settlements and lived in underground houses (zemu-
nice). Large religious gatherings were allowed but required special
permission and could only be held in the presence of authorities.71
70
Ibid; cf. Malcolm, Kosovo, 158–59.
71
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By early Autumn 1690, Belgrade was practically deserted, most

of its inhabitants and refugees having fled to southern Hungary.
(Belgrade Muslims had fled previously and were yet to return.)
Last people were evacuated by boats across Danube on 6 October
1690, two days before Belgrade once again came under the
Ottoman control. Columns of refugees, some on horses and cat-
tle carts, many others on foot, moved slowly into the unknown.
A large refugee column that was making way towards central
Hungary via Slavonian towns of Vukovar, and Osijek (both in
modern Croatia) included monks from the fourteenth-century
Ravanica monastery near Ćuprija (present-day Serbia). Forced to
flee on foot, the monks carried with them ‘relics of holy among
Tsars, Serbian Prince Lazar’, the founder of the monastery. A
Ravanica monk Stefan later recalled the ‘pillaging and displace-
ment (raseljavanje) of the Christian people and all Serbian land’.
After 40 days of walking, the monks reached ‘some place above
Buda called Sent-Andreja’ (Szentendre in Hungarian). In Buda,
they had seen Patriarch Arsenije, together with ‘a few bish-
ops, many monks, and many people from all Serb lands, males
and females.’ Another eyewitness, abbot Ćirilo of Hopovo, a
sixteenth-century monastery built at Fruška Gora by descendants
of the Branković despots, wrote that ‘all Serb land fled towards
Buda’. He compared the fate of the Serbs to that of the Jews: ‘Just
like Moses, who led the Israelites across the Red Sea carrying with
him the bones of Joseph, Patriarch Arsenije was now leading the
Serb people across the Danube, together with relics of saints.’72
In search of safety, the refugees went to areas they hoped
would remain unaffected by fighting, settling in some cases as
far as Szentendre and Veszprém (Sent Andreja and Vesprem in
Serbian, respectively), towns situated north-west of Budapest,
and Komárno (Komoran), in modern Slovakia. Danger, however,
72
ISN, III-1, 534; Tričković, Beogradski pašaluk, 41–78.
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did not come just from the Ottomans bent on revenge. Smiljana
Miloševa, a young girl at the time of the migration, recalled how
Christian hajduks raided a refugee column that included her fam-
ily.73 Hiding nearby, she watched the brigands strip her parents
of all clothes in search of money and valuables. When one of the
robbers spotted her, he demanded to know if she had any money
hidden and started beating her, but she was saved by another man
who told the attacker that hitting young women brought bad
luck. Patriarch Arsenije may have used a figure of speech when he
wrote in 1690 to the imperial authorities about the sorry state of
his people, fleeing ‘naked and barefoot’ from the Ottoman terror.
Smiljana’s story shows that sometimes this was literally the case,
even if Ottoman soldiers were not the only culprits.
An approximate number of refugees who fled Ottoman ‘Serbia’
around this time is difficult to establish. Similarly, it is not known
how many people lost their lives, either in combat or due to hunger
and disease, but this figure was certainly high. Nor is establishing
the identity and place of origin of the refugees straightforward.
People had been on the move prior to and regardless of the main
exodus of 1690 due to the fighting and banditry. The Orthodox
Slavs of Serbia, Montenegro, Herzegovina and Bosnia were joined
by Vlachs, Albanians and Bulgarians in their migration towards
the perceived safety of Hungary.
In November 1690, Patriarch Arsenije informed the authorities
that he had reached Buda together with more than 30,000 men,
women and children. Shortly before his death in 1706, Arsenije
wrote to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I (1705–11) stating that
over 40,000 people had fled with him. Some contemporary reports
suggested that around 40,000 refugees passed through Belgrade
alone on their way to Hungary. Other sources talked of ‘37,000
families’ who found themselves as refugees, while a Dutch report
from 1696 claimed that the ‘Patriarch of the Rascian nation’
73
Popović, Srbi u Vojvodini, I, 317–18.
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placed ‘30,000 soldiers’ at the disposal of the Habsburg mon-

arch.74 Historians have not been able to reach a consensus. One
authority on the subject concluded that in total between 60,000
and 70,000 refugees – from Kosovo, Sandžak, Montenegro and
central Serbia – may have crossed into the Austrian empire

around this time, in several mass movements of people.75 It seems
safe to say that at least 30,000 people fled across Danube and Sava
in 1690 alone.76
Whatever the real figure, the Orthodox population of the for-
mer Serbian realm had been significantly reduced by the late sev-
enteenth century. The regions of Kosovo and Metohija seemed
particularly affected. Near Priština, around 360 villages were
burnt and destroyed during the latest conflict, while in Prizren
only 5 Christian households remained after 1690.77 Out of approx-
imately 200 villages recorded prior to 1690 in this area, two-
thirds no longer existed (or had a different name) a century later.
Those who abandoned their homes for good were replaced by
newcomers moving from the mountains of Albania, Montenegro
and Herzegovina. However, not everyone had left, while some
returned after a temporary exile, taking advantage of the Ottoman
amnesty and unable to settle in the new environment.
With the depopulation of much of the central Balkans, the soci-
ety established in the wake of the Ottoman conquest was effec-
tively destroyed. With Buda lost to the Habsburgs, the Ottomans
created a new pashalik with Belgrade as its seat. A militarized
frontier province designed to protect the empire from the north,
the Belgrade pashalik included the sanjaks of Smederevo and
what was left of the sanjak of Srem, while its pasha had military
jurisdiction over the neighbouring sanjaks of Niš and Kruševac.
74
Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 171.
75
Popović, Srbi u Vojvodini, I, 318–20.
76
ISN, III-1, 535–36; Pavlowitch, Serbia, 20; Tričković, Beogradski pašaluk, 77n.
77
ISN, III-1, 531; Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 167–69.
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In the following decade, the pashalik will be exposed to frequent

raids by Christian hajduks based in southern Hungary; their
exploits would be sometimes attributed to medieval Serb heroes
in the popular tradition.78
Amidst preparations for a military campaign against the
Habsburgs in 1691 – where he would be killed in the battle of
Slankamen (present-day Serbia) – Grand Vizier Fazıl Mustafa
Köprülü Pasha, who was an ethnic Albanian, installed Bishop
Kallinikos (Kalinik in Serbian, 1691–1710), a Phanariot Greek,
as the new Patriarch of Peć. For a while, there existed two rival
Serbian churches. Arsenije initially set up his patriarchate-in-exile
at the sixteenth-century Krušedol monastery, the endowment of
Despot Djuradj Branković’s descendants. An important symbolic
link with the old despotate was thus established. Eventually, the
patriarch moved to Sremski Karlovci, which became the religious
and cultural centre of the Habsburg Serbs. Numerous Serb mon-
asteries were built at the nearby Fruška Gora Mountain, some-
times known as the ‘Serbian Mt Athos’. The Hilandar monastery
and the Cetinje Metropolitanate, whose bishops styled themselves
‘Exarchs of the Peć Patriarchate’, were the other church centres
that functioned as ‘keepers of memory’ of medieval Serbia.
Kallinikos unsuccessfully reached out to Arsenije, among other
reasons to reclaim medieval icons, saintly relics and other valuables
the retreating clerics took with them. A number of bishops con-
tinued to recognize Arsenije as the sole legitimate patriarch. One
of them, Danilo I Petrović Njegoš (1697–1735) of Montenegro,
kept links with the Russian Orthodox Church and travelled to
Sremski Karlovci rather than Peć to be officially installed as
Metropolitan. A self-proclaimed ‘Vojvoda of the Serbian land’,79
78
79
‘Danil vladika cetinjski Njegoš, vojevodič srpskoj zemlji’ was how he
described himself in a note written following the purchase of a gospel
he would donate to the Peć Patriarchate. ‘Jedan zapis vladike Danila’,
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Danilo displayed political ambition as well. He established a the-

ocratic dynasty of prince-bishops who ruled over Montenegro
until the mid-nineteenth century. Danilo is one of the principal
characters of the Montenegrin epic poem Mountain wreath, writ-
ten by his nineteenth-century successor, Petar II Petrović Njegoš
(1830–51), the last of the prince-bishops. The poem, dedicated
to Karadjordje Petrović, leader of the First Serbian Uprising
against the Ottomans (see Chapter 4), tells a fictional story of
the mass killing of Montenegrin Muslim converts. It recalls the
spirit of Prince Lazar, Miloš Obilić and the Kosovo battle, but
also of fifteenth-century Albanian hero Skanderbeg. The poem,
not surprisingly, gained additional meanings during the Yugoslav
wars of the 1990s, when local Muslim communities were exposed
to ethnic cleansing and s ystematic mass murder (as discussed in
Chapter 8).80
Following Arsenije’s death in 1706, Kallinikos remained the sole,
though not undisputed, Serb patriarch. Metropolitan Danilo’s
successor Vasilije claimed for himself the title of ‘exarch of the
Serbian [patriarchal] throne’,81 thus keeping the Nemanjić legacy
in Montenegro, if mainly symbolically. Shortly before his death
in 1710, Kallinikos acknowledged the Metropolitan of Sremski
Karlovci as the ‘exarch of the Serb patriarchate’, an important step
12 March 1732, Zbornik dokumenata iz istorije Crne Gore (1685–1782),

compiled by J. M. Milović, Cetinje, 1956, 104. Ivo Banac (The National
Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Ithaca, NY, 1984, 272)
believed Danilo’s ambition was to politically unite all Serb lands. See ibid,
274–76, for the Serb tradition in early modern Montenegro.
80
A. B. Wachtel, ‘How to Use a Classic: Petar Petrović Njegoš in the Twentieth
Century’, in J. R. Lampe and M. Mazower (eds), Ideologies and National
Identities: The Case of Twentieth Century Southeastern Europe, Budapest, 2006,
131–53.
81
Vasilije’s full title was ‘The Metropolitan of Montenegro, Skenderija and
Littoral and Exarch of the Serbian [Patriarchal] Throne’. See his letters to a
Venetian governor (provedadore) of 10 and 13 July 1755, Zb. dok. ist. C. Gore,
243–44.
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towards reconciling the church.82 After a former Metropolitan of

Skopje spent just a year on the patriarchal throne, a Serb from
Raška was chosen as the next patriarch. Mojsije Rajović (1712–26)
styled himself ‘Patriarch of all Serb and Bulgarian [lands] and all
Illyria’. He inherited an indebted institution, which forced him to
seek financial help from the Habsburg Serbs.83
The Austrian–Ottoman war continued for nearly a decade fol-
lowing the ‘Great Migration’. Prince Eugen of Savoy’s army that
halted the Ottoman advance at Zenta (Senta in modern Serbia) in
1697 included a 10,000-strong Serb militia. They launched a suc-
cessful counteroffensive, pushing the enemy back to Bosnia where
they temporarily occupied Sarajevo, bringing much destruction
to the city and its inhabitants. Under terms of the 1699 Treaty of
Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci), which ended the 15-year-long con-
flict, the Habsburgs kept Hungary and Croatia, while the Ottoman
state regained Serbia, Banat and Bosnia. New population move-
ments followed, this time of Muslims fleeing Croatia and Hungary
mainly to Bosnia. But it was the Christian and much smaller Jewish
population of the Belgrade pashalik that suffered most, as it was
reduced by the early eighteenth century to approximately one-
eight of its pre-war size. Using Ottoman sources, historian Radmila
Tričković estimated that before the war up to 144,000 ‘male heads’,
or 36,000 tax-paying households, lived in the pashalik. By 1704, that
figure was reduced to approximately 18,000 Christian and Jewish
tax-paying ‘male heads’. If correct, this would mean that the number
of deaths caused by war, hunger and disease was extremely high,
and the total number of refugees, including those who left prior and
after the ‘Great Migration’ of 1690, was indeed considerable.84
82
The Serbian Orthodox Church today recognizes Kallinikos as patriarch
from 1691, apparently accepting the decision made by Constantinople in
the aftermath of the Great Migration. ‘Serbian Archbishops and Patriarchs’,
http://arhiva.spc.rs/eng/church.html.
83
84
Ibid, 185.
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On the eve of the war, a Serb from the Arad County (in mod-
ern Romania) claimed to be a descendant of the Branković des-
pots. He called on Orthodox Christians to join the anti-Ottoman
campaign and pledged to restore the Serbian despotate. He
was well-educated and multilingual and came from an eminent
Transylvanian Serb family. Conveniently, his name was Djordje
Branković.85 Moreover, Sava II, Orthodox Metropolitan of
Transylvania, was his elder brother. Sensing an opportunity to
mobilize the Serbs for the war against the Ottomans, Leopold I
acknowledged Branković as a descendant of the Serbian despots
but gave him a more modest title of a count and stopped short
of promising the restoration of Serbia. Count Branković raised a
small army, which joined other militias mobilized by Habsburg
Serb leaders answering the emperor’s call to mobilization.
Following Austria’s defeat, Leopold no longer needed
Branković, whose contacts with Russia and with a prince of
Transylvania whom the emperor mistrusted were used as an
excuse to arrest him. While in prison (where he would die in 1711),
the unfortunate would-be despot wrote a 2,000-page chronicle
of Serbian and Balkan history. Not surprisingly, the main aim of
the book, which was published in five volumes, was to prove its
author’s relation to the Branković line of despots. A romanticized
account of Serbia’s past, it was widely read among literate Serbs
and thus probably contributed to creating the ‘knowledge’ of
medieval Serbia. Djordje Branković also wrote a short history of
South Slavs in Romanian.86
85
Djordje (George) was the modernized spelling of Djuradj, the name of the
fifteenth-century despot belonging to the Branković dynasty.
86
Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 173–78; cf. J. Radonić, Grof Djordje
Branković i njegovo vreme, Belgrade, 1911; Djordje Branković, Hronika
Slovena Ilirika, Gonje Mezije i Donje Mezije, transl. from Romanian by S.
Bugarski, intro. by J. Redjep, Novi Sad, 1994.
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During his imprisonment, Djordje was elected ‘despot’ in 1691

by an assembly of prominent Habsburg Serbs who believed the
privileges granted to them by Leopold I the previous year enti-
tled them to choosing a political leader of their own. This may
have been the only case of an elected imprisoned despot, but the
Renaissance tradition of elected monarchs existed in early mod-
ern east-central Europe (most famously in the Polish–Lithuanian
Commonwealth). The imperial authorities refused to recognize
Djordje as despot; instead, they appointed a Habsburg Serb
officer as a Vice-Vojvoda of the Serbs. This would be the ‘legal’
basis for the proclamation of Vojvodstvo Srbija, Duchy of Serbia,
or Vojvodina, by a revolutionary assembly of the Hungarian Serbs
in 1848, as discussed in Chapter 4.87
Habsburg Serb Society

How did the local population north of the Danube and Sava
view Serb and other Balkan refugees? Not surprisingly, with
much prejudice and stereotyping, as in the case probably of all
migrations throughout history. An official Hungarian report
of 1699 described the newcomers as semi-nomadic, ‘wild, for-
est people’, skilled with weapons but not used to hard work.
Both men and women were prone to drinking and arguing.
‘This schismatic people’, the report went on, ‘has a king-like
leader they call patriarch, but whom we refer to as the Serbian
(Rascian) archbishop’. His people follow him everywhere, ‘like
bees follow their honeybee’. A more sympathetic account is
found in Cardinal Imre Csáky’s 1718 letter to Emperor Charles
87
Ćirković, The Serbs, 144, and ‘Vom Land des Despoten zum Land des
Vojvoden’, in Živeti sa istorijom, 273–86. Vice-Vojvoda Jovan Monasterlija
(1691–1706) was born in the 1860s in modern Slovakia, where his family,
which may have been of Serb-Vlach origin, had emigrated from the Ottoman
Balkans.
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VI (1711–40). The cardinal correctly concluded that the Serbs’

apparent semi-nomadic habits were formed due to a history of
forced migrations. This was also the main reason why the Serb
migrants were unable to completely trust their environment and
why they often lived in shelters and dugouts. Serb peasants led
modest lives, many were poor, but should not be looked down
upon. An intelligent and, in their own way, educated people, they
professed utmost loyalty to their ‘church-king’ and his bishops;
although they were religious Orthodox people, the Serbs had
shown great tolerance towards the Roman Catholics, cardinal
Csáky concluded in his letter.88
Once they were permanently settled in the Habsburg monar-
chy and restrictions on their movement were lifted, many Serbs
moved in search of better opportunities. Despite the prejudices
they encountered, descendants of Orthodox refugees eventually
became an integral part of urban settings in southern Hungary
and in Croatia-Slavonia. They found themselves living alongside
Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Greeks, Tsintsars, Croats, Romanians
and Slovaks, among others. They usually spoke several languages,
and some became wealthy and well-educated, while many forged
successful military careers in the imperial army. At the same time,
another society in which Serbs and those who identified with
Serbs, formed in the Military Border, where different rules and
values applied. The Habsburg Serbs’ identity – as with any group
identity – was not homogeneous and it evolved, gaining new lay-
ers in the Habsburg imperial context. The Habsburg monarchy
allowed the Serbs (and other ethno-religious groups) to foster
their separate tradition. Towns with significant Serb population
included Újvidék/Novi Sad, Pancsova/Pančevo and Becskerek/
Bečkerek (since 1945 Zrenjanin) – all in modern Serbia – as well as
Karlstadt/Karlovac, Eszék/Osijek and Vukovár/Vukovar (Croatia)
and Temesvár/Timișoara/Temišvar (Romania). The rise of the
88
Popović, Srbi u Vojvodini, II, 28–30.
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Habsburg Serb middle class would be arguably as important for

the emergence of the modern Serbian state and nation in the
nineteenth century as the 1804 peasant rebellion in the Belgrade
province.
As a trans-imperial people, the Serbs established a group iden-
tity (or perhaps identities) that transcended state borders before
they became a modern nation in the nineteenth century. Their
migrations meant that Serbs were divided by the border between
the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, which they frequently
crossed, both legally and illegally. The migrations also led to even
greater contacts with non-Serbs, including Roman Catholic and
Muslim populations of Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, who spoke the same, or very similar language as
the Serbs. It was in this borderland between two very different
empires that both the Serbian nation and the ideology of the
South Slav unity (Yugoslavism) would be born in the nineteenth
century, as discussed later on.89
Habsburg Serbs were affected by, and sometimes became
involved in the Austrian–Hungarian rivalry. Eager to preserve
privileges granted by Leopold I, they would side with Vienna dur-
ing the Rákóczi uprising against the Habsburg rule in Hungary
(1703–11). However, when another anti-Habsburg rebellion
broke out in 1735, Orthodox peasants joined their Hungarian
counterparts. Vienna quickly defeated the rebels with the help
of troops from the Military Border, many of whom were Serbs.
Serb frontiersmen and women were on the move again follow-
ing the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), a European
conflict over the issue of succession of Maria Theresa (1745–65).
Several thousand Orthodox officers and soldiers, together with
their families, were settled by Empress Elizabeth (1741–62) in
89
D. Rusinow, ‘The Ottoman Legacy in Yugoslavia’s Disintegration and Civil
War’, in L. C. Brown (ed.), Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the
Balkans and the Middle East, New York, 1996, 78–99.
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Russia’s own military frontier, near the border with Poland, in

present-day Ukraine. The Serb settlements were named ‘New
Serbia’ and ‘Slav Serbia’. Local population viewed the newcomers
with suspicion, as agents of Moscow, but eventually the settlers
would assimilate into the local Slav population.90
Meanwhile, the language and culture of Habsburg Serb com-
munities became increasingly exposed to Russian influences.
In response, the authorities financed publication of religious
and secular texts in the Serbian, rather than the Russian, vari-
ant of the Old Slavonic and controlled the import of books from
Russia. This resulted in the lessening of Russian influence among
Habsburg Serbs in the late eighteenth century. At the same time,
Serb students attended Austrian, Hungarian and other central
European universities, bringing back to their community the
ideas of Rationalism and Enlightenment.
Venetian-held Dalmatia represented another destination for
Orthodox refugees fleeing war and violence, mostly from modern
Montenegro and Kosovo. Large population movements towards
the Adriatic coast occurred during the Cretan War between the
Ottomans and Venetians (1645–69) and continued through the
eighteenth century. Important Orthodox South Slav cultural
and religious centres were established in the towns of Dalmatia
and Istria and in Trieste.91 Orthodox migrants also settled in the
Dalmatian hinterland. Some of them joined uskok brigands who
socially resembled the hajduks of the Balkan interior.92 By the
90
Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 190–93. The eighteenth-century Serb
frontier society provides inspiration for one of the most celebrated Serbian
novels, Miloš Crnjanski’s Seobe (Migrations), which consists of two parts,
published in 1929 and 1962, respectively. The second part deals with the
migration to Russia.
91
ISN, III-1, 92–99, IV-2, 7–66.
92
C. W. Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in Sixteenth
Century Adriatic, Ithaca, NY, 1992. See also D. Roksandić, Triplex Confinium,
ili o granicama i regijama hrvatske povijesti, 1500–1800, Zagreb, 2003.
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1750s, around 40,000 Orthodox Serbs (who were often referred

to as Morovlachs, regardless of whether they were of Vlach origin
or not) lived in Dalmatia, mostly in rural areas where Venetian
authorities had settled them, but there were also prosperous Serb
communities in the coastal towns of modern Croatia.93 Small but
influential urban Serb communities were formed in Zagreb and
‘civil Croatia’ – or rather what was left of it following the Ottoman
conquest and the creation of the Habsburg Military Border. As rel-
atively prosperous and educated town dwellers, successful traders,
merchants and bankers, they resembled Croatian Jews in terms of
social status and as a small non-Catholic minority (the two groups
sadly shared a similar fate during the Second World War).
In the seventeenth century, Venice represented the main ally of
Orthodox Christian clans of Montenegro (Monte Nero – Black
Mountain – was the name given to the mountains in the hinter-
land of old Zeta because of their dark appearance when observed
from the sea). Led by Metropolitan Danilo (of the Petrović Njegoš
clan, 1697–1735), Montenegrins established closer contacts with
Russia in the early eighteenth century,94 but maintained links with
the maritime republic. When another Ottoman–Venetian conflict
broke out in 1714, Venice paid ‘salaries’ to Montenegrin clan leaders
engaged in combat against the Ottomans. It also provided shelter
for around 2,000 refugees, mostly women, children and elderly.95
New Migrations and the Abolition of the

Patriarchate
Following another Austrian–Ottoman war (1716–18), Belgrade
and present-day central Serbia once again came under the
93
Ćirković, The Serbs, 183–88; N. Moačanin, Town and Country in the Middle
Danube, 1526–1690, Leiden, 2005; Roksandić, Srbi; Wolff, Venice and the Slavs.
94
Ćirković, The Serbs, 185.
95
G. Stanojević, ‘Jedan Mletački platni spisak Crnogorskih glavara iz 1715.
godine’, Istorijski zapisi (Titograd [Podgorica]), 4 (1960), 785–88.
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Habsburg rule, under the terms of the Treaty of Passarowitz/

Požarevac.96 The Austrians appointed an imperial governor
of ‘the Kingdom of Serbia’ and Emperor Charles VI (1711–
40) added ‘King of Serbia’ to his long list of titles. He might
have also claimed the Serbian crown on the ground of being
simultaneously the King of Hungary, whose monarchs, as men-
tioned previously, claimed the title Rex Serviae in the thirteenth
century. In 1718, the Habsburgs also extended and consoli-
dated their control over parts of Hungary and Romania, in the
newly established Banat of Temesvár, a melting pot made up of
Romanian, Serb, Croat and other populations, including newly
settled Germans.97
Recruiting centres across ‘Serbia’ enlisted men of fighting age
for service in the Austrian army. In order to fight the brigandry,
the new authorities introduced local police, the pandours, which
recruited some former hajduks who thus effectively ‘legalized’
their control of the Belgrade–Paraćin road in what is today central
Serbia. It was during this period that Belgrade became an important
centre of ‘Serb’ life, thanks above all to the activities of Habsburg
Serbs. Closer links were established between the Sremski Karlovci
and Belgrade Metropolitanates, as the former raised funds to open
Serbian schools in Belgrade. Further down south, Niš replaced
Belgrade as a major Ottoman fortress on the border with the
Habsburg empire, while the Niš pashalik became a de facto new
‘military border’. The number of Orthodox Christians living in Niš
increased from around 10,000 to 17,500. This was due to both an
amnesty that encouraged refugee return and to the arrival of fresh
migrants from territories further south, namely Kosovo and the
96
97
K. Roider, ‘Nationalism and Colonization in the Banat of Temesvar, 1718–
1778’, in I. Banac et al. (eds), Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Wayne S.
Vucinich, Boulder, Co, 1981, 87–100.
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Sandžak of Novi Pazar, where Christians were being pushed out by

Muslim Albanians and Slavs.98
In 1737, thousands of Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Albanians
from Kosovo and Sandžak responded to Emperor Charles’ call to
rise against the Ottomans. An insurgency had been secretly planned
between Vienna, Serbian Patriarch Arsenije IV (1725–48) and
Catholic Albanian clan leaders, but ultimately it came to nothing.
Reinforced by troops from Bosnia, the Ottomans easily defeated
the rebels and pushed towards Belgrade. Like his (indirect) prede-
cessor and namesake, the Serb patriarch led another wave of refu-
gees, Slavs and Albanians, to southern Hungary. Under the terms
of the Belgrade Treaty of 1739, the Austrians withdrew north of
the city. The old Ottoman–Habsburg border, with Belgrade as the
northernmost Ottoman city, was thus re-established.
The Ottomans supported the appointment that same year of
Joannikios (Joanikije) III, a Phanariot Greek, as the new patri-
arch at Peć (Serbian patriarch 1739–46; ecumenical patriarch in
Constantinople, 1761–63). Vienna meanwhile recognized exiled
Arsenije IV as the Patriarch of Sremski Karlovci, so once again
two rival Serb church centres existed for a while.99 Arsenije’s death
in 1748 ended this duality. In 1766, Constantinople abolished the
Peć Patriarchate, which thus ceased to exist as an independent
church organization for the second time in its history.
A period of turbulence followed the restoration of the Ottoman
rule over ‘Serbia’ in the late 1730s. Muslims and Christians alike
rebelled against higher taxes introduced by the Belgrade vizier.
98
Zirojević, Srbija pod turskom vlašću, 228; Tričković, Beogradski pašaluk,
307–72.
99
As is the case with Kallinikos, who replaced exiled Arsenije III, the Serbian
Orthodox Church today recognizes Joanikije as the Patriarch from 1739,
the year Arsenije IV went to exile. During his enthronement at the St Sava
Temple in Belgrade in February 2021, new Serbian Patriarch Porfirije held a
crosier that had belonged to Arsenije IV. Porfirije’s full title is His Holiness
the Archbishop of Peć, Metropolitan of Belgrade and Karlovci, and Serbian
Patriarch.
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The Janissaries’ mistreatment of Christian peasants continued to

cause population movements towards the Habsburg lands. There
was also immigration, mainly of Muslims from neighbouring
Bosnia, who tended to settle in urban areas. Rural population
decreased further, as whole areas became depopulated due to the
war and post-war violence. According to Ottoman sources, out
of 1,546 registered villages in the Smederevo sanjak, nearly three
quarters were listed as ‘abandoned’ or ‘long deserted’ in 1741.100
Things were about to get even worse before they would briefly
improve. Another war, this time between the Habsburg and Russian
empires against the Ottoman state, broke out in 1768. Russian
Empress Catherine II the Great (1762–96) called upon the Balkan
Christians to rise against the sultan. The Ottoman defeat in 1774
did not bring a ‘liberation’ of ‘Serbia’, but it was nevertheless signif-
icant. According to terms of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (mod-
ern Bulgaria), Russia was now to act as a protector of Orthodox
Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The sultan was simultaneously
symbolically acknowledged as the leader of Muslims living outside
the Ottoman Empire.
Russia’s main aim was to re-incorporate the Crimean Peninsula
and secure passage of its ships through the Straits. It would never-
theless exercise considerable political and cultural influence among
the Orthodox Balkan peoples, including the Serbs. On the other
hand, it is important to keep in mind that the Serbs living outside of
the Ottoman Empire continued to be exposed to central and west
European influences.
Enlightenment
Austria, Hungary and the Italian cities channelled Romantic,
nationalist ideas that reached educated Habsburg Serbs in the
eighteenth century. They included Zaharije Orfelin (1726–95),
100
Ćirković, The Serbs, 176.
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a Venice-based Serb Renaissance man and polymath born in

Vukovar (modern Croatia). In 1761, Orfelin published ‘A cry for
Serbia’, a poem that lamented the Serbs’ loss of independence in
the Middle Ages and their subjugation to foreign rule. His con-
temporary Dositej Obradović (1739–1811) was among the most
important South Slav Enlightenment thinkers and later also the
first education minister in Serbia’s revolutionary government.
Born Dimitrije Obradović in Ciacova/Čakovo (modern Romania),
he joined a Serb Orthodox monastery at Fruška Gora and took a
monastic name Dositej. Having grown disillusioned with monas-
tic life, he took teaching posts in Dalmatia, Trieste and Vienna,
whence after a six-year stay he left for western Europe. In 1782,
aged around 43, ‘Demetrius Obradovics aus Serbien’ enrolled
at Halle University to study philosophy with Johann August
Eberhardt (1739–1809).101 Following his studies, he lived briefly
in London, where he learned English and tutored and translated
from classical Greek and Latin. A plague on the wall of a house in
Clements Lane where he lived in 1784, placed by Yugoslav gov-
ernment-in-exile during the Second World War, is a testament to
his London stay.
Obradović understood the Serb nation as a community based
on common language rather than on confession, thus anticipating
the work of Vuk Karadžić, discussed in the next chapter. Because
they spoke the same or mutually comprehensible vernaculars, he
regarded as members of a single nation South Slav inhabitants
of Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro and Dalmatia. This
brought him in conflict with the Orthodox church, which did not
imagine Serb nation outside of Orthodoxy. Indeed, Obradović
and the so-called Jozefinci (‘Josephinites’) – mostly younger
101
H. Zundhausen [Sundhaussen], Istorija Srbije od 19. do 21. veka, transl. from
German by T. Bekić, Belgrade, 2009, 95–98; cf. The Life and Adventures of
Dimitrije Obradović, Who as a Monk Was Given the Name Dositej, Berkeley, CA,
1953.
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liberal-nationalist Serbs who called upon Emperor Joseph and

Empress Catherine the Great to intervene against the Ottoman
Empire – clashed with conservative and traditionalist circles,
some of whom were close to or came from within the Orthodox
church. This anticipated both the generational conflicts of
nineteenth-century Serbia and more generally political and iden-
tity debates between, broadly speaking, conservatives and liberals
that have continued into the twenty-first century, albeit under
changing circumstances and in different contexts.
However, the church also fostered progressive ideas and in
the eighteenth century it attracted highly educated individuals
such as Archimandrite Jovan Rajić (1726–1801), considered the
first historian of Serbia. Born in Sremski Karlovci into a mixed
Bulgarian–Serb family of modest means, Rajić attended Jesuit and
Protestant schools in Hungary prior to making a journey – almost
entirely on foot – to the Russian Empire, where he studied the-
ology and liberal arts in Kiev. His biography resembled in some
key respects that of Hristifor Žefarović (c.1690–1753), another
learned South Slav whose identity was both Bulgarian and Serbian
(and who was born in what is today North Macedonia). Žefarović
travelled widely, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was recognized
as an important ‘humanist’ in Central Europe and died in a mon-
astery in Moscow. His Stemmatographia (Vienna, 1741), commis-
sioned and funded by Patriarch Arsenije IV, contains engravings
of medieval Serbian and Bulgarian rulers and saints. Inspired by
Croatian ‘Slav revivalists’, it contributed significantly to the imag-
ining of the Serbian Middle Ages in the modern era and therefore
to the emergence of Serbian as well as Yugoslav national ideas in
the nineteenth century.102
Like Obradović and Žefarović, Rajić travelled widely –
across the Austrian, Ottoman (including Mt Athos) and Russian
empires. He too became an Orthodox monk, at the age of 46, after
102
ISN, IV-2, 166–81.
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settling back home following his travels. He would then spend

years researching and writing the first scholarly (by standards of
the day) history of Serbia – in fact a history of the Serbs, Croats
and Bulgarians, whom Rajić regarded as the ‘same-blooded’
nation. Mixing romantic-nationalist (Serb and South Slav his-
tory as a continuous struggle for independence) and transnational
(Serb history studied in a regional context) ideas, the book was
published in Vienna in 1794–95, with the financial support from
Metropolitan Stefan Stratimirović of Sremski Karlovci (1790–
1838). Essentially an update of the previous history ‘bestseller’
by Djordje Branković, the book remained for a while the stand-
ard reading for educated Serbs. Rajić, who also published literary
works, was regarded highly by his contemporaries, although not
necessarily by later literary critics.103
Significantly, these men of letters recognized that Serbs lived
scattered around south-eastern Europe and that they were part of
a larger group of linguistically and culturally related peoples. The
South Slav communities may have been separated in some cases
by political and confessional boundaries, but this kind of divi-
sions and identity markers were increasingly rejected in this age
of Enlightenment and Revolution. They could not have known
that they anticipated arguably the most important intellectual and
political questions of the modern Serbian history: the relationship
between the Serbs of Serbia and other Serb communities, between
the Serbs and other South Slavs, and more broadly between the
Serbs and (the rest of) Europe. The Serb Enlighteners belonged
to the broader European intellectual trends of their era, as did
their intellectual heir Vuk Karadžić. They force us to rethink the
relationship between the Enlightenment and Orthodoxy among
the Serbs, and other Balkan Orthodox, traditionally seen as two
103
J. Skerlić, Istorija nove srpske književnosti, Belgrade, 2006 (first publ. 1914),
44–49.
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disconnected worlds, and they also encourage us to see Serbian

history as part of wider history of Europe.104
The mostly illiterate peasant population on both sides of the
imperial frontier could not have read Rajić’s history and the
Romantic writings of Orfelin and Obradović, nor could they have
read hagiographies of medieval Serbian rulers and saints. Where
and as much as it existed, their sense of group identity and a place
in history was fostered through the previously discussed oral
tradition, which recalled Serbia’s medieval independence and a
tradition of resistance against the ‘Turks’. Similar themes were
recalled in religious sermons. Moreover, churches and monas-
teries built by the Nemanjić kings and post-Nemanjić princes
and despots and relics and frescoes of medieval Serbian saints
served as visual ‘reminders’ – for those who understood them as
such – of the pre-Ottoman ‘Serb civilization’. When the Serbs’
religious-political centre shifted north of the Danube and Sava,
Habsburg Serbs built replicas of medieval monasteries or their
modern, Baroque-style versions.105
This contributed to the creation of a proto-national Serb iden-
tity by the late eighteenth century that transcended the Ottoman–
Habsburg border. How widespread the idea of a Serbian nation
and its medieval ‘Golden Age’ had been beyond the church and
104
P. M. Kitromilides (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion in the Orthodox World,
Oxford, 2016, specifically for Serbia the contributions by Bojan Aleksov, Marija
Petrović and Nenad Ristović, and Kitromilides, ‘The Orthodox Church and
Modern State-Formation in South-East Europe’, in W. van Meurs and A.
Mungiu-Pippidi (eds), Ottomans into Europeans: State and Institution-Building
in South-East Europe, London, 2010, 31–50; cf. M-J Calic, The Great Cauldron:
A History of Southeastern Europe, transl. from German by E. Janik; first publ. in
German in 2016, Cambridge, MA, 2019, 201–202, passim.
105
N. Makuljević, ‘Migrations and the Creation of Orthodox
Cultural and Artistic Networks between the Balkans and the Habsburg Lands
(17th–19th Centuries)’, in O. Katsiardi-Hering and M. Stassinopoulou (eds),
Across the Danube: Southeastern Europeans
and Their Travelling Identities (17th–19th C.), Leiden, 2017, 54–64.
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educated circles is hard to say, despite the existence of rich oral

tradition.106 The ‘Serb’ identity also appears to have had some
appeal beyond ‘core’ Serb communities, as those who came to
identify with Serbs ethnically, culturally and confessionally
included non-Serb and non-Slav individuals and groups. (Just like
some Serbs adopted identities of non-Serb and non-Slav peoples
due to mixing and migration.) At the same time, both Serb and
non-Serb elites seemed unsure how to call the people who iden-
tified as Serbs: simply Serbs or ‘Slavonic-Serbs’ (Slaveno-Serbi)
or perhaps the ‘Illyrian nation’ (not to mention various regional
names and archaic terms referring to medieval Raška). As men-
tioned previously, educated Serbs were aware of linguistic, ethnic
and historical ties between the Serbs and other South Slavs and
with the Slavs more generally. They sometimes imagined links
with Balkan peoples of the classical era, even though these had
disappeared from historical sources long before the arrival of the
Slavs in the region.
Without the misrule of renegade Janissaries and sustained
intercommunal violence in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, a rebellion of Serb peasants, initially supported
by ‘legal’ Ottomans before it transformed into a ‘national revo-
lution’ with the help from Habsburg Serbs, may not have bro-
ken out. Consequently, the modern Serbian state may not have
formed – or at least not when, and where, it did.
106
J. Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, Princeton,
NJ, 2020, 130–56; R. Detrez, ‘Pre-national Identities in the Balkans’, in R.
Daskalov and Tch. Marinov (eds), Entangled Histories of the Balkans: National
Ideologies and Language Policies, Leiden, 2013, 13–65.
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4
Revolution (1788–1858)
u
Fateful Encounters
Nemenikuće was a predominantly Christian village located just
south of Belgrade. It formed part of a timar belonging to an
Ottoman agha, a ‘young, blonde, tall man, with a pot-marked face
[…] who was so good he could have been a Christian’, recalled
Nemenikuće-born Milovan Vidaković (1780–1841), the author of
the earliest Serbian novels. One of six siblings raised by a widowed
farmer Stefan Vidaković, Milovan was born and spent his child-
hood in the village. Milovan’s uncle had fled to Hungary following
a dispute with one of the agha’s men, but generally the relation-
ship between the Muslim agha, who married a local woman, and
the Christian villagers was good. In common with many other
inhabitants of the Smederevo sanjak, the Vidakovićs were ances-
tors of refugees – in this case Herzegovinians who had settled in
‘Serbia’ in the late seventeenth century, at the time of the popu-
lation movements discussed in the previous chapter. This was a
patriarchal society that functioned according to a long-established
set of norms and customs specific to the region. As heads of
extended households (zadruge or kuće), elder men usually had the
final say on family matters, but collective decision-making based
on consensus was practiced.1 Although sometimes romanticized
1
M.-J. Calic, Društvena istorija Srbije, 1815–1941, transl. from German by
R. Gašić, Belgrade, 2004, 48–57; N. Mišković, Bazari i bulevari: Svet života u
Beogradu 19. veka, transl. from German by R. Gašić, Belgrade, [2010], 106–24;
St. K. Pavlowitch, ‘Society in Serbia, 1791–1830’, in R. Clogg (ed.), Balkan
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as pre-modern peasant democracies, it was indeed possible for

individual voices to be heard and considered in these traditional
households. Thus, Milovan’s sister refused to marry a wealthy
elder man, who came to ask for her hand having been given per-
mission by the girl’s father and grandfather. Vidaković’s claim that
this man was Koča Andjelković (1755–88), the future hero of the
Austrian–Ottoman war, has been disputed by scholars.2
Not far from another Ottoman periphery to the east of the Balkans,
a very different encounter took place in Spring 1787. Catherine the
Great and Joseph II met in Sevastopolis (Sevastopol), a port city in
Crimea, recently built by Catherine’s lover Prince Potemkin. Russia
had occupied and then annexed Crimea in 1783, causing perhaps
100,000 Muslim Tatars to flee to the Ottoman Empire.3 On the
way to Sevastopolis (the name of which was meant to recall classical
Greek presence in the area), Catherine’s yacht passed under a trium-
phal arch that bore the inscription ‘The Way to Byzantium’ – one of
Potemkin’s many creations aimed to please the empress who dreamt
about the ‘restoration’ of the ‘Greek Empire’. It was to be located
roughly in modern Greece, Bulgaria, and North Macedonia and
given to her young grandson Konstantin Pavlovich (1779–1831),
rather obviously named after Constantine the Great. The Russian
empress and Austrian emperor plotted the partition of Ottoman
European possessions, although Joseph was mainly interested in
Poland and in securing Russian support in an event of Austria’s war
against Prussia.4 The imperial rendezvous in Crimea and the Great
Society in the Age of Greek Independence, London, 1981, 137–56; O. Srdanović-

Barać, Srpska agrarna revolucija i poljoprivreda od Kočine krajine do kraja prve vlade
kneza Miloša, 1788–1839, Belgrade, 1980.
2
P. Popović, Milovan Vidaković, Belgrade, 1934, 8; cf. M. Vidaković, Uspomene,
Belgrade, 2003.
3
D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, New Haven, CT, 2001, 15.
4
L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, London, 2000 (first publ. 1958),
192–94; cf. D. Howard, A History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge, 2017,
226–27; P. Bushkovitch, A Concise History of Russia, Cambridge, 2011, 133.
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Powers’ rivalry set in motion events that would directly affect the
lives of the people of the Smederevo sanjak.
A long conflict between the Ottoman state and the Janissaries,
which had begun during the reign of Sultan Mahmud I (1730–54) –
one of the reasons why the Ottoman Empire was perceived as
internally weak, and not only by Catherine and Joseph – would
also have a profound impact on the history of the Serbs. Pushed
out of the core regions by Mahmud’s western-inspired military
reforms, formerly elite but now mostly ill-disciplined Janissaries
moved to remote parts of the empire, including the Balkans,
where they frequently terrorized Christian population (through
raids, raised taxes, arbitrary executions) and clashed with local
Ottoman authorities.
With the backing of Britain and Prussia, and hoping to retake
Crimea, the Ottomans declared war on the Russian Empire in
August 1787. Ideally, they would have liked to also overturn the
1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which, as we have seen, formally
made Russia the protector of the Ottoman Orthodox. Austria mean-
while closely monitored developments in the Balkans, looking for
an opportunity to retake Belgrade and the strategic Morava valley,
the aquatic spine of the Smederevo sanjak. There, rebel Janissaries
clashed with the Belgrade pasha, large Muslim landowners and
Christian peasants. The latter were exposed to growing taxation
demands and requests to surrender personal weapons, which led
to frequent skirmishes. An Austrian spy reported that ‘Serbia’ was
in a state of anarchy. This seemed to ring true in January 1788, fol-
lowing public execution of a group of Serbs accused of treason for
their alleged pro-Austrian activities, which led to an escalation of
violence in the province. Sensing an opportune moment, Vienna
declared war on the Ottoman state the following month.5
5
ISN, IV-1, 355–64; S. Novaković, Tursko carstvo pred srpski ustanak, 1780–
1804, Belgrade, 1906, 57–58; D. Pantelić, Vojno-geografski opisi Srbije pred
Kočinu krajinu od 1783. i 1784. god, Belgrade, 1936.
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The conflict that broke out in February 1788, and would go

on until August 1791, was the fourth Habsburg–Ottoman war of
the past century (1683–99; 1716–18; 1739; 1788–91). This time,
it took place in the backdrop of the Russian–Ottoman war in
the east and the French Revolution in the west, but once again
much of the fighting took place in what is today Serbia. It may be
argued that the century of Habsburg–Ottoman conflict had had
a more profound impact on the Serbian history than the previ-
ous two and a half centuries of Ottoman rule. Memories of the
temporary ‘restorations’ of ‘Serbia’, albeit within the Habsburg
imperial framework, lived on among the local population; as
did the legacy of violence and forced population movements.
In the late eighteenth century, present-day central Serbia was a
sparsely populated area, covered in forest. The mass emigration
of Christians into the Habsburg monarchy was somewhat off-
set by the arrival of Orthodox Slavs from neighbouring Ottoman
provinces, who helped maintain a clear Christian majority in the
sanjak. While Muslims had also emigrated, many, mostly from
Bosnia, had also moved into the Smederevo sanjak in the eight-
eenth century. They would feel increasingly uncertain about their
future, despite, or perhaps because, they belonged to the ruling
minority, and the vast majority will depart from Serbia in the dec-
ades that followed.6
Back in early 1788, as news reached Nemenikuće that
Janissaries were pillaging and burning Christian villages, the
Novakovićs and their neighbours sought shelter in a nearby for-
est. As the fighting escalated, they set on a longer journey, along
the well-established route to the Habsburg Monarchy. Christian
6
M. B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804–1918, New York, 1976, 2 vols,
I, 21; Š. Hodžić, ‘Migracije muslimanskog stanovništva iz Srbije u sjeveroistočnu
Bosnu izmedju 1788. –[sic] 1862. godine’, Članci i gradja za kulturnu istoriju istočne
Bosne, II, Tuzla, 1958, 65–143, 65; cf. J. Cvijić, La péninsule balkanique: geographie
humaine, Paris, 1918, chs 10–12.
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peasants abandoned their homes in a hurry, taking with them

only what they could. Sometimes this included domestic ani-
mals – sources of food and income and, perhaps, sentimental
reminders of the home they may never see again. Refugee col-
umns passed by deserted villages, vineyards and orchards, tree
branches bowed under the weight of unpicked apples, pears and
plums. Some changed their mind, unable to leave and appar-
ently preferring to risk their lives rather than start afresh in exile.
Many others left never to return, joining a sizeable Serb diaspora
in Hungary and Austria. Echoing the abbot of Hopovo during
the ‘Great Migration’ a century earlier, Milovan Vidaković com-
pared Serb refugees to ‘Israelites fleeing to Egypt’.7 However, the
Danube and the Sava Rivers were no Red Sea. Just like during
the previous centuries, the movement of peoples and goods con-
tinued despite frequent fighting. This ensured that the border
between the two seemingly very different empires, and between
large Serb communities on the two sides of the frontier, was not
a pre-modern Iron Curtain.8
Once they reached the apparent safety of southern Hungary,
refugees of fighting age were recruited by Habsburg officers of
Serb origin, the Orthodox clergy and traders and merchants,
whose networks of contacts extended on both sides of the border.
The latter included Koča Andjelković. A farmer from Panjevac, a
village on the banks of the Velika Morava River near Jagodina, he
too hailed from a family of migrants, whose origins were proba-
bly in modern Kosovo. Koča made his fortune through livestock
export, but marriage to a woman from a well-off family helped
too9 – and must have gone some way towards compensating for
the earlier romantic rejection, if Vidaković’s version of events is
to be trusted.
7
Vidaković, Uspomene, 43–44.
8
St. K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History behind the Name, London, 2002, 26.
9
D. Pantelić, Kočina Krajina, Belgrade, 1930, 16–18.
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Andjelković was quickly promoted to the rank of captain in Major

(later Colonel) Mihailo Mihaljević’s ‘Serbian’ Freikorps. Lack of
food and fear of Ottoman reprisals made the mobilization of the
peasants difficult, but Andjelković’s pre-war reputation and con-
tacts helped him overcome these obstacles. Consisting mainly of
Habsburg and Ottoman Serbs, Kapetan Koča’s 10,000-strong mili-
tia quickly gained control of the countryside south of Belgrade.
Low morale among the Ottoman troops due to food shortages,
irregular wages and internal conflicts contributed to Koča’s suc-
cess, though his troops did not manage to capture any towns. This
allowed the Ottoman troops to regroup and launch a successful
counteroffensive. Hit by hunger and desertion, and with no aid
from Austria forthcoming, the Freikorps were forced to retreat.
Andjelković’s men, however, continued to raid Ottoman garrisons
in ‘Serbia’, until their leader was captured and publicly executed
near the modern Serbian–Romanian border in September 1788.
The war that continued for three more years is remembered in
the Serbian tradition as Kočina Krajina (Koča’s War).10
The peace agreement signed in Svishtov (modern Bulgaria) in
August 1791 re-established the Ottoman sanjak of Smederevo.
The Habsburgs’ sense of loss was heightened by the death, the
10
The legend of Kapetan Koča survives to this day and was fostered in both
royalist and socialist Yugoslavia. Panjevac was renamed Kočino Selo (Koča’s
Village) in the 1930s. Several decades later, a popular Yugoslav comic book series
featured a two-part issue on Kapetan Koča and his military campaign against the
Ottomans. The series was best known for its main characters, World War II–era
Partisan children-soldiers Mirko and Slavko, but it also featured other historical
Yugoslav and pre-Yugoslav resistance leaders and historical events. An old oak
tree just outside Kočino Selo, on the left bank of the Velika Morava River,
where Andjelković allegedly recruited his troops, still stands. It has been a state-
protected ‘monument of nature’ since 1958. This was a place where the author
of this book and his younger sister were sometimes taken as children in the late
1970s and early 1980s. An ideal spot for a break in nature and a ‘history lesson’
from grandparents, retelling the story they had themselves once heard on the
very same spot (our paternal grandmother was born and grew up in the village).
A good example perhaps of how oral history works in practice.
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previous year, of Emperor Joseph II and of Field Marshal von

Laudon, the military governor of Habsburg-occupied Serbia.
(In 1792, Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) finally ceded the Crimea
and the surrounding territory near the Black Sea to Russia).
There was a familiar post-war pattern. Ottoman reprisals against
Christians caused further emigration to the Austrian Empire.
Probably only a general amnesty granted by the sultan prevented
another mass exodus of Orthodox Serbs. The amnesty also
caused a sense of resentment among some Muslims when former
Freikorps fighters returned to start or resume the profitable live-
stock trade.
The war of 1788–91 anticipated the ‘Serbian revolution’, or
the First Serbian Uprising, the beginning of which is traditionally
dated to 1804. Andjelković had belonged to the same, emerging
social class of prosperous farmers and livestock traders who would
lead the 1804 insurgency, having had their privileges taken away
by the Janissaries. Frequent warfare and forced population move-
ments of the eighteenth century disadvantaged settled farmers but
encouraged more entrepreneurial among them to start dealing
in livestock, especially pigs, that found customers in neighbour-
ing Habsburg-held Hungary. In the late eighteenth century, the
trade between Ottoman ‘Serbia’ and central European markets
boomed, forcing the authorities to employ 62 staff at the Zemun
border crossing to oversee the import of livestock. Towards the
end of the century, 160,000 pigs and 4,000 cattle annually were
exported from Ottoman ‘Serbia’ into central Europe. In 1777–86,
Hungary imported on average 1,300,000 francs worth of pigs
annually from the Ottoman Empire, mainly from Serbia. The
Treaty of Svishtov allowed free trade between the Habsburg and
Ottoman states, boosting the economy and the standard of liv-
ing of Christian farmers in the Smederevo sanjak. In the 1790s,
most Christians in the province owned between 20 and 200 pigs,
but the richest among them possessed even more. Karadjordje
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Petrović, who would lead the 1804 uprising, apparently owned

300 pigs, 3,000 sheep, 70 cattle and 16 horses.11
The First Serbian Uprising, 1804–13

Post-war reforms introduced by Selim III improved the position of
the Balkan peasantry, but it was the appointment, as the Belgrade
vizier, of Haji Mustafa Pasha in 1793 that would prove especially
popular among the local population. The new pasha expelled the
Janissaries and fully restored the autonomy of Serb village com-
munities (knežine). The knezes (village leaders) resumed their role
as tax-collecting intermediaries between the Christian peasantry
and Muslim landowners. The highest-ranked knezes were known
as obor-knezes (sing. obor-knez), from German ober (upper, higher)
and Slav knez. They were essentially Christian chiefs of nahije
(pl. from nahija – a word of Turkish origin meaning district); this
linguistic mix perfectly captured the historical legacies in what
was soon to become modern Serbia.
The Christians nicknamed Haji Mustafa Pasha ‘srpska majka’ (the
Serbian mother). If public opinion surveys existed at the time, he
would have been well ahead of Leontije (Leontius), a not especially
popular Phanariot Greek Metropolitan of Belgrade. Further conces-
sions followed, including permission to (re-)build churches and, cru-
cially, the right to bear light arms. Made in order to help defend the
province from Janissary raids, the decision would have profound con-
sequences. It enabled village leaders and other prosperous Christians
to keep menservants, who acted, if necessary, as armed bodyguards.12
11
M. Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, 1790–1918, Belgrade, 1989, 2 vols, I, 93; T.
Stoianovich, ‘The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant’, Journal of Economic
History, 20:2 (1960), 234–313, 282–83.
12
ISN, IV-1, 402–19; R. Zens, ‘In the Name of the Sultan: Haçi Mustafa Pasha of
Belgrade and Ottoman Provincial Rule in the Late 18th Century’, International
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 44:1 (2012), 129–46.
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Fiercely loyal to their masters, the momci (‘bachelors’, ‘lads’) were

provided with weapons, clothes, food and share of the booty (which
sometimes included Christian women kidnapped as would-be brides
for the momci). Numbers varied, but prominent Serbs employed up
to 50 momci and were able to recruit additional men when required.13
Aleksa Nenadović, the obor-knez of the Valjevo nahija in western
Serbia, could apparently mobilize around 1,800 men.14 Members of
these peasant militias, employed by the pasha against the Janissaries,
often had prior combat experience, as veterans of the 1788–91 war
and/or as former brigands.
The main source of instability in the Belgrade province was the
neighbouring sanjak of Vidin (modern north- western Bulgaria).
There, Pasvanoğlu Osman Pasha (1758–1807) effectively created a
breakaway statelet in the early 1790s, which in addition to Janissaries
attracted demobilized Muslim veterans and brigands, collectively
known as kirjalis or yamaks, as well as Christian rebels and adven-
turers.15 The former included Muslim refugees from ‘Serbia’ who
sought to force their way back into the province; among the latter was
Rigas Pheraios (1757–98), a Greek writer and revolutionary of Vlach
origin, and a certain Nedeljko Popović, probably a Habsburg Serb
who served as Pasvanoğlu’s bazirgân-pasha, or ‘finance minister’.16
In November 1801, together with a Greek teacher and a friend
of Pasvanoğlu’s, Popović delivered to Napoleon the pasha’s offer
13
L. Ranke, History of Servia and the Servian Revolution, from original mss. and
documents, transl. from German by Mrs Alexander Kerr, London, 1847, 68–69,
119; Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds, 166.
14
Prota Mateja Nenadović, Memoari, Belgrade, 2001 (originally publ. 1893), 37.
15
R. Zens, ‘Pasvanoğlu Osman Paşa and the Paşalik of Belgrade, 1791–1807’,
International Journal of Turkish Studies 8:1–2 (2002), 89–104. Kirjalis sometimes
included Christians, and were in any case ‘multi-ethnic’, consisting of Albanians,
South Slavs and Turks.
16
Smederevo refugees: Zens, ‘Pasvanoğlu’, 91; Pheraios: R. Clogg, A Concise
History of Greece, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002, 28–29. Popović: Novaković,
Tursko carstvo, 383. Pheraios was captured and killed by Haci Mustafa’s men in
Belgrade, where a street is named after him today.
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of an alliance against the sultan. The French were about to settle

their differences with the Ottoman state, so nothing came out of
the proposed collaboration.17 However, while the Porte deployed
its troops against the French, the defence of the Smederevo san-
jak was left solely to Haji Mustafa’s men, commanded by his son,
and Serb peasant militias. The Janissaries captured Belgrade in
December, executed the pasha and abolished the Christian privi-
leges. Four Vidin Janissaries, who called themselves dahis (dahije,
dayis),18 were the real rulers of the sanjak even after a new pasha
sent by the Porte arrived in Belgrade the following year. The
dahis, Mehmed Foça-oğlu, Küçük-Ali, Aganli-Bayraktar and
Mülla Yusuf, divided the province into their own fiefdoms and
kept closer ties with Vidin than with Constantinople. As it would
turn out, the province would never be again fully incorporated
into the Ottoman state, although not in the way the dahis would
have imagined.
They raised local taxes, oppressed the Christians and clashed
with Muslim sipahi landowners. Initially at least, the conflict ignored
supposedly deep religious divisions and it had elements of a local,
‘civil’ war. Küçük-Ali was born into a Djevrlić family of the Rudnik
nahija in western Serbia,19 and at least two other dahis were proba-
bly also Balkan-born. Late Haji Mustafa Pasha was a Greek Muslim
from Plovdiv (modern Bulgaria), while Pasvanoğlu’s father was from
Tuzla, in north-eastern Bosnia.
As the Ottoman control of the Balkans faced a near collapse,
loyalty often shifted and crossed ethno-confessional boundaries.
Apart from Belgrade and Vidin, a semi-autonomous province of
Ioannina, which included parts of modern Greece and Albania,
17
Novaković, Tursko carstvo, 383–85.
18
Probably after the deys of North Africa, Muslim rebel soldiers who around the
same time clashed with the Ottoman authorities there. Ranke, 66.
19
Miloš Obrenović, who would lead the Second Uprising and become the prince
of autonomous Serbia, came from the same region.
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was established under Ali Pasha, an ethnic Albanian.20 Following

the dahis’ takeover, Albanian and Bosnian Muslim Janissaries and
kirjalis moved to ‘Serbia’, attracted by opportunities for quick profit
at the expense of Christians and Muslim landowners, thus making
the predicament of the local population even more difficult.21 From
their Serbian base, the dahis raided nearby Ottoman provinces.
Thus, for example, Aganli-Bayraktar’s men looted and pillaged
Muslim property in eastern Bosnia, apparently with little regard
for the lives of their co-religionists. By contrast, aforementioned
Aleksa Nenadović enjoyed a good relationship with the Muslims
of Srebrenica, the previously mentioned mining town situated just
across the river Drina from his knežina in western Serbia. ‘I want
you to raise your army, and Turks from all towns [in the sanjak] will
join us too, so that we can fight your friend Haji-bey and burn down
Srebrenica’, Aganli-Bayraktar told Nenadović. The latter protested,
aware of the likely tragic consequences for the Bosnian Muslim
population, especially after the dahi instructed him to provide his
momci with plenty of rakija (a strong type of local brandy) to drink
before battle.22
Meanwhile, friends of late Haji Mustafa, well-off Muslims and
Christians, who included Petar Ičko, a Hellenized Vlach from Belgrade,
plotted to overthrow the dahi regime from their temporary exile in
Zemun.23 Contacts existed also with Habsburg Serb and other South
Slav merchants, who controlled trade in the lower Danube and who
would provide food and weapons in exchange for livestock. In January
1804, Montenegrin Prince-Bishop Petar I Petrović Njegoš (1784–1830)
20
Ali Pasha probably spoke little Turkish and made Greek the language of his
‘court’. Although he fought loyally against Napoleon, the pasha effectively ruled
over his own mini state in which a Greek Ottoman culture prospered. Howard,
A History of the Ottoman Empire, 234.
21
V. Ćorović, Istorija srpskog naroda, Belgrade, 2013, 602.
22
Nenadović, Memoari, 37–38.
23
Ćorović, Istorija srpskog naroda, 603–604; Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije,
I, 97–98.
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informed the abbot of the Dečani monastery in Kosovo that he was

ready to send troops in aid of the Belgrade Serbs.24
In the end, a rebellion broke out across the province in February
1804 in response to a massacre of prominent Christians ordered
by the dahis. Sources vary, but over the course of several days in
late January and early February between 70 and 150 knezes, live-
stock merchants and Orthodox priests were executed, apparently
in an attempt by the dahis to prevent a rebellion. The ‘slaugh-
ter of the knezes’, as the event is known in the Serbian tradition,
caused both fear and anger. People fled to hills and mountains in
anticipation of further violence; some joined hajduk bands; others
simply hid. According to popular tradition, desperate and home-
less among the reaya called upon surviving leaders to resist the
dahis’ terror. The latter had little choice anyway, as their lives and
livelihoods were threatened. Uncoordinated resistance broke out
across the sanjak.
In the central region of Šumadija, the insurgency was led by
the previously mentioned wealthy pig farmer Djordje Petrović
(1762–1817). Known as Karadjordje (Black George), either for
his dark complexion or for his temper or perhaps both, his back-
ground and career resembled that of Koča Andjelković: both
men were first-generation migrants (Karadjordje’s parents were
born in Montenegro), both came from humble backgrounds
but became successful livestock traders, and both served in the
Austrian Freikorps in 1788–91. After the war, Karadjordje returned
home to take advantage of the amnesty. Before ‘legitimizing’ his
business, he spent some time with the band of Stanoje Glavaš,
a well-known hajduk from Šumadija who clashed with both
the Ottomans and Serb knezes, whose property his men looted.
Karadjordje also fought against Vidin Janissaries as a bölükbaşı
24
Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, I, 26; T. Stoianovich, ‘The Segmentary
State and La Grande Nation’, in E. D. Genovese and L. Hochberg (eds),
Geographic Perspectives in History, Oxford, 1989, 256–80, 270–72.
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(buljubaša in Serbian, an Ottoman military rank equivalent of

captain) in the Serb militia loyal to Haji Mustafa Pasha.25
It was Glavaš whom an assembly of around 60 prominent
Serbs – disguised as a wedding party – held in the village of
Orašac on 14 February 1804 (Candlemas according to the Julian
calendar) initially asked to lead the insurgency.26 Glavaš, however,
thought himself unsuitable due to being a hajduk, so the choice
then fell on Karadjordje. A little bit of all at once – a respected
farmer-trader, a war veteran and a former hajduk, Karadjordje’s
humble origins were also likely to appeal to ‘ordinary’ people
mistrustful of the wealthy knezes. If things were to go wrong,
the knezes could always place the blame on a former brigand
thus hopefully protecting them and the people from reprisals.
Karadjordje too initially expressed reservations about his suita-
bility for leadership, due to his short fuse and bad temper, but
such qualities were deemed necessary for the task by the assem-
bly. The new leader swore an oath in front of a local priest, giv-
ing the occasion a sacral dimension. (Figure 4.1). The same day
the insurgents burnt a nearby road inn (han), killing or expelling
its Muslim staff. This was the symbolic beginning of the First
Serbian Uprising. Road inns were burnt elsewhere in the early
stages of the insurgency, as relatively easy targets symbolic of
the Ottoman rule. They had been typically built through forced
labour (kuluk) of the Christians, including apparently Karadjordje
himself. In retrospect, these acts anticipated large-scale anti-
Muslim violence and destruction of property, but for the time
being no suggestion was made that Christians and Muslims could
not coexist.27
25
R. Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, Belgrade, 2000, 2 vols, I, 35–36; Petrovich, A History
of Modern Serbia, I, 31.
26
Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, I, 98–99.
27
Ibid, 99; Pavlowitch, Serbia, 30; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, I, 29–31;
Ranke, 127; cf. B. Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States,
1804–1920, Seattle, WA, 1986, ch. 2.
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figure 4.1 The Orašac Assembly (1804), Karadjordje standing in

the m
iddle, holding a banner. A nineteenth-century illustration,
unknown author (Wikipedia)
The myth of Black George, a fearless hero who defied the ‘Turks’,
spread quickly. It probably had something to do with millenarian
beliefs, common throughout Europe at the time and with a long
history among Serbs, as previously mentioned. A seventeenth- or
eighteenth-century (depending on source) Montenegrin prophet
Stanj Šćekić foretold the appearance of a man of dark complex-
ion somewhere between the rivers Lim (northern Montenegro,
near Karadjordje’s ancestral home) and Danube (therefore in
the Smederevo sanjak), to bring ‘the long era of troubles to an
end’ and liberate ‘many Serbians’. A series of natural phenom-
ena in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries only
added to widespread expectations of the arrival of a messiah,
St Sava, Kraljević Marko or perhaps a new hero-liberator. Several
decades later, a woman in Kosovo told Ami Boué, a Vienna-based
geologist and traveller, that ‘Christians here await Prince Miloš
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[Obrenović, Karadjordje’s successor – see below] like a messiah,

to liberate us at last from our oppressors’.28
Initially Karadjordje’s influence did not extend beyond
Šumadija. To the west, in the Valjevo nahija, prota (protoiereus or
archpriest) Mateja, son of late obor-knez Aleksa Nenadović, sought
help from Austrian/Hungarian officials and prominent Habsburg
Serbs, who, however, instructed him that as an Ottoman subject
he should negotiate with the ‘Turks’. In an attempt to coordinate
the resistance, Prota Mateja travelled to Šumadija in late March
1804, but failed in meeting Karadjordje. ‘Black George knows not
how to write, nor does he have a secretary, but he is good at fight-
ing the Turks’, Karadjordje’s men told the visitor before instruct-
ing him to go back, mocking the priest’s attempts to correspond
with potential allies.29
As much as they detested the dahis’ rule, ‘ordinary’ people were
often unwilling or afraid to fight. A combination of financial
incentives, forced mobilization and manipulation on part of rebel
leaders was used to boost up the ranks. Prota Mateja, whose word
as a clergyman carried a certain weight, told exaggerated stories
of Karadjordje’s victories and manipulated both Christians and
Muslims into joining the rebellion by persuading a local Muslim
to pretend to be the sultan’s envoy. The belief that ‘the tsar
[sultan] was with us’ encouraged those otherwise fearful of the
Janissaries and sceptic about armed resistance to join the ranks.
According to Vuk Karadžić, one of the main chroniclers of the
28
The sightings of comets of 1781, 1797 and 1807; strong thunderstorms on
14 January (OS) 1801, on the eve of St Sava’s Day, the eclipse of the moon
on the same day in 1804 and of the sun two weeks later. Stoianovich, Balkan
Worlds, 168–70. Could have Šćekić heard about the teachings of Sabbatai Zevi
(1626–76), an Ottoman Jewish prophet and a self-proclaimed messiah who spent
the last years of his life in Ulcinj (present-day Montenegro)? On Zevi see M.
Mazower, Salonica, the City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950,
London, 2004, 71–74. Boué cited in V. Stojančević, Miloš Obrenović i njegovo
doba, Belgrade, 1966, 332.
29
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rebellion, the insurgents had to reassure the Christian peasantry

until as late as 1806 that their fight was not against the Ottoman
authorities.30
A series of rebel victories led to Austrian-mediated peace talks
in May 1804 in Zemun, which failed when no guarantees for
the withdrawal of the Janissaries could be given by the Belgrade
pasha.31 The Serbs then communicated their demands to the
Porte through church channels and simultaneously approached
Russia’s diplomatic representatives in Constantinople. They
sought a kind of autonomy enjoyed by the Greek Ionian islands
and the Danubian principalities, in both cases guaranteed by the
Russian tsar. Meanwhile, they continued to acquire weapons from
Habsburg Serbs, often in exchange for livestock or with money
earned through the sale of pigs. Habsburg authorities turned a
blind eye to arms and men-in-arms illegally crossing the border,
as volunteers from Hungary and the Military Border joined the
insurgents. Reinforcements came also from Montenegro, Bosnia–
Herzegovina and other neighbouring provinces; the volunteers
included a handful of Bulgarians and Greeks.32
At this time, the insurgents enjoyed support from regular
Ottoman troops in Bosnia. By summer 1804, they had all but
defeated the enemy, despite Pasvanoğlu sending supplies as well
as 1,000 kirjalis commanded by Kosançali Halil Agha (in the Serbian
tradition known as Gušanac-Alija – another local Muslim, whose
family hailed from Gusinje, on the modern Albanian–Montenegrin
border). When the dahis attempted to flee to Vidin, they were
captured at Ada Kale, a Danubian island, and executed in early
August – either by Karadjordje’s men or regular Ottoman troops,
depending on source, but in any case, with the approval of the Porte.
30
Karadžić quoted in D. Djordjević, Ogledi iz novije balkanske istorije, Belgrade,
1989, 18; cf. Nenadović, Memoari, 48–53, 98–99.
31
32
Ibid, 47–48; Djordjević, Ogledi, 148–49.
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It seemed as if the rebellion was over, and that peace and order
would be restored in the province. However, Bekir Pasha, the sul-
tan’s envoy who had previously suppressed a revolt of Bosnian ayan
(local notables), considered the Serbs’ demand for autonomy guar-
anteed by Austria as unacceptable because it would have violated
the Ottoman sovereignty. The kirjalis, who held the Belgrade for-
tress, then kidnapped the pasha, agreeing to release him only after
the insurgents paid a ransom. A tense, unofficial truce followed as
the winter approached.33
Continuing their search for an empire-protector – in their view
only another emperor could speak to the sultan directly – the Serb
insurgents sent a delegation to Russia that, after several weeks
of travelling, reached St Petersburg in early October. Having lis-
tened to what they had to say, Prince Adam Czartoryski, a Polish-
born Russian Foreign Minister, told his guests that ‘Serbia is far
away from Russia, and anyway we are friends with the Turks.’ He
gave them some money, symbolic gifts and a piece of practical
advice: choose a leader and elect a government so that Russia and
other countries would know who represented the Serbs (which
suggests that Karadjordje had not yet been accepted by all insur-
gents as their leader).34
33
D. Djordjević, Istorija moderne Srbije, 1800–1918, Belgrade, 2017, 53;
Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, I, 106; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia,
I, 34; cf. Zens, ‘Pasvanoğlu’, 102–103. One hundred and ten years later,
during the July 1914 crisis, the Serbian government rejected the presence
of Austrian inspectors investigating the assassination of Franz Ferdinand,
pointing out, not unreasonably, that this would have violated the country’s
sovereignty. The outcome would be the outbreak of the First World War,
discussed later on in the book.
34
V. St. Karadžić, ‘Pravitel’stvuiushchi soviet Serbskii’ za vremena Kara-Djordjijeva, ili
otimanje ondašnjijeh velikaša oko vlasti, Vienna, 1860, 1; cf. Nenadović, Memoari,
88–92. Karadžić, ever the linguist, complained that instead of the Russian
word soviet the Serbian equivalent vijeće should have been used when the first
revolutionary government was established later on.
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Despite failing to negotiate an agreement with the Ottoman

officials and to secure support from either Austria or Russia, the
insurgents refused to give up weapons unless their autonomy was
restored, and the Janissaries were banned from returning to the
province. As a result, by early 1805, the conflict transformed from
a civil war between the renegade Muslims and the Christians and
Muslims loyal to the Sultan into a war between Christian rebels
and the Ottoman state. As the Serb insurgents won important
battles during the summer, the sultan declared jihad and deployed
troops from Bosnia, but these failed to crash the rebellion. The
fighting continued simultaneously with unsuccessful attempts to
find a diplomatic solution. Austria and Russia, and increasingly
also France, became involved. In August–September 1806, it
appeared that a peace agreement was within reach, after the sul-
tan met with previously mentioned Belgrade merchant Petar Ičko
and gave verbal assurances of autonomy for Serbia in exchange
for an annual tribute. Then another Ottoman–Russian war broke
out in late December, over the status of the Danubian principal-
ities. Karadjordje’s men captured Belgrade the same month and,
encouraged by Russia, demanded full independence. Pasvanoğlu’s
death in January 1807, at the age of 69, removed another power-
ful enemy. Except for two Ottoman garrisons, the whole sanjak
of Smederevo was now under the insurgents’ control. Thus, in
less than three years, more than three centuries of Ottoman rule,
interrupted by short periods of Habsburg occupation, was effec-
tively over. The Ottoman rule would be re-established, but only
temporarily as it would turn out. Because of the profound political
and social changes that followed, the rebellion has been described
by Leopold Ranke, and subsequent historians, as a revolution.35
According to traditional historiography, medieval Serbia had
been restored in the early nineteenth century under Karadjordje’s
35
Ranke, op. cit.; R. Ljušić, Tumačenja Srpske revolucije, Belgrade, 1992.
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leadership. However, neither he nor other rebel leaders saw

themselves as successors of the medieval kings, emperors and des-
pots, even when tradition of resistance against the Ottomans was
recalled by the insurgents. Heraldic symbols of medieval Serbia,
mostly invented in Central Europe and Dalmatia in the previous
centuries, were circulated by Habsburg Serbs, as ‘visual remind-
ers’, alongside saintly relics and church frescoes, of Serbia’s
medieval ‘golden age’. However, the rebel leaders did not know
where Serbia was supposed to be. Out of twelve obor-knezes who
formed the first revolutionary government (the soviet – see the
following text), only four were literate. When in 1807 Hajduk
Veljko Petrović, a Robin Hood–type brigand from eastern Serbia,
informed the soviet of his intention to occupy a territory near
the Timok River (in present-day eastern Serbia) and thus extend
Serbia’s borders, the ‘ministers’ did not seem to know where this
region was. Even educated Serbs and ‘national revivalists’ and
church leaders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-
ries were not always sure where the Serbs lived, nor indeed which
groups and individuals living in ethnically and religiously mixed
Serbo-Croat speaking space of the central and western Balkans
should be considered Serb.36
A Russian diplomatic mission headed by Konstantin
Rodofinikin (c.1760–1838), a Tsarist diplomat of Greek ori-
gin, arrived in Belgrade in August 1807. Russia’s ‘ambassador’
was given one of the best houses in the city, Küçük-Ali’s former
residence. However, the relationship between Rodofinikin and
Karadjordje was marked by tension and mistrust. The Serb leader
suspected the Russian envoy of plotting with rival Serb leaders
to limit his power, and it did not help that Rodofinikin estab-
lished a close relationship with Metropolitan Leontije, a fellow
36
Ćirković, The Serbs, 181; Djordjević, Ogledi, 19, 145; ISN, V-1, 12–14; M.
Popović, ‘Vuk medju Ilirima’, in Kovčežić: Prilozi i gradja o Dositeju i Vuku, 6,
Belgrade, 1964, 5–18, 5.
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Greek whom the Serbs generally mistrusted.37 Rodofinikin’s dip-

lomatic manners, dress and way of life were alien to the proud,
but crude and illiterate insurgents, in a similar way that they
found educated Habsburg Serbs’ dress and manners eccentric and
foreign to them. One example was Rodofinikin’s failed attempt
to introduce a tradition of tea drinking. The custom never took
off among the rakija consuming Serb rebels, not even after the
Russian mixed tea with rum.38
Some sort of dual Ottoman–Serb government had been estab-
lished previously in the main towns of the province, but by late
1806, inter-communal relations worsened. Things were not helped
by a poor harvest, as Muslims and their property were attacked by
Christians; many fled as a result, mostly to eastern Bosnia. When
the insurgents captured Belgrade in December 1806, they pillaged
the city for two days, killing or forcibly converting many Muslims,
but Jews and Christians suspected of loyalty to the ‘Turks’ were
targeted as well.39 Despite being promised safe passage, around
250 Ottomans, including Suleiman Pasha, who had been trapped
in the Belgrade fortress during the winter, were massacred in
early March 1807. Adult Muslim men were killed in other places,
too, and only those who converted to Christianity were spared.40
Meanwhile, Muslim women were raped, made mistresses and
forced to convert to Christianity (which for those born into
37
G. Jakšić, Evropa i vaskrs Srbije (1804–1834), Introduction by É. Haumant,
Belgrade, 1933 (4th revised edn), 117–19; Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, I, 195–96.
38
Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, I, 147–48 & II, 267–70. Russian officials therefore
inspired the formation of the first Serbian government and attempted to
tackle the problem of alcoholism among the Serbs. So much for national
stereotypes.
39
Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, I, 169; cf. S. Bandžović, ‘Muslimani u Smederevskom
sandžaku: progoni i pribježišta’, in M. Arnautlić (ed.), 150 godina od protjerivanja
muslimana iz kneževine Srbije, Orašje, 2013, 9–49; Hodžić, ‘Migracije
muslimanskog stanovništva’.
40
Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, I, 172; Ranke, 114.
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Christian families would have been the second forced conversion).

Some of them married Serbian men, which if anything offered
protection. Turban-wearing Serb leaders therefore did not just
resemble their enemy visually, but often behaved like the dahis.
One of Karadjordje’s commanders kept his own haram, despite
already being married to a Christian woman.41
Contemporary accounts mention unmarked graves of Serb
‘deserters’ shot by the rebels; Serb and other Orthodox town pop-
ulation was mistrusted by Karadjordje’s men for their ‘Ottoman
appearance’ and suspected of collaboration with the ‘Turks’.
Similarly, Jews, known as the ‘Turkish people’ (turski ljudi) for their
loyalty to the Ottoman state, were victims of violence, plunder
and even murder, which forced many to flee the city. The attacks
ceased only after the Russians and Karadjordje’s Jewish contacts in
Zemun intervened on behalf of remaining Belgrade Jews.42
In May 1807, Sultan Selim III was overthrown by the Janissaries,

while Napoleon’s army made gains against Russia. An Ottoman–
Russian truce that followed extended to Serbia. With the help
from Habsburg Serbs, the rebels went about organizing a govern-
ment and rule of law over the territory they controlled. That same
year saw the establishment of district magistrates followed by, in
41
Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, II, 267. It seems that polygamy was practised unofficially
among Serbs. An early twentieth-century Serbian ethnographer recorded
stories of Koča Andjelković’s two wives: one from Serbia and another one from
southern Hungary (S. Mijatović, Belica (Naselja i poreklo stanovništva), Srpski
etnografski zbornik, LVI (Belgrade), 1948, 166n). Miloš Obrenović openly kept
in mistresses, which in one instance led to tragedy when Princess Ljubica
Obrenović shot one of her rivals, knowing she would avoid punishment because
she was pregnant at the time. Miloš allegedly fathered several illegitimate
children and continued to keep mistresses even at an advanced age while in exile.
42
B. Hrabak, Jevreji u Beogradu do sticanja ravnopravnosti (1878), Belgrade, 2009,
225–26.
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1811, the creation of the Grand Court (Veliki sud). Meanwhile, the
soviet underwent a ‘reshuffle’ at the beginning of 1811 and now
was comprised of six ministries – of war, defence, foreign affairs,
finance, justice and education. Karadjordje presided over the new
governing body but kept the overall military command as well. His
official title now was the ‘supreme leader’ (vrhovni vožd – another
Russian term), although his power was kept in check by the soviet
and the rival obor-knezes and vojvodas.43
The newly introduced portfolio for education was held by
Dositej Obradović, albeit for a few months only; the first educa-
tion minister in Serbia’s history died in April 1811. Obradović had
moved to ‘liberated’ Serbia four years earlier. Approaching 70 and
well-travelled, he must have seen Belgrade as a small, Oriental
town. He initially stayed with a wealthy Serb kafana owner (and
Karadjordje’s fellow former Freikorps veteran), whose cellar was
well stocked with food and wine, something that Obradović appre-
ciated. Karadjordje, who during peacetime resided in Topola, a
village in Šumadija, sent his eldest son Aleksije (1801–30) to live
with and study under Dositej. Previously dressed like any other
Serbian peasant boy, Aleksije now wore ‘European’ clothes pro-
vided by Rodofinikin. Following the death of their landlord, the
tutor and his pupil moved to the Russian ‘embassy’, much to the
chagrin of Austrian envoys, who competed with the Russians for
influence in Serbia.
Many Serbian leaders, including Karadjordje, were illiterate,
but they understood the importance of education. The Ottoman
43
Verhovni serbskoga naroda vožd (Supreme leader of the Serbian people) was one of
the versions of his title, but in the early years of the rebellion he was more of a
military commander than a political, let alone ‘supreme’, leader. Karadjordje, or
rather his secretaries, signed a letter to the Austrian emperor of 18 January 1807
as servischer Ober Commandant, sammt den Ältesten der Nation. In French, he was
Commandant en chef de nation Servienne, but the French referred to him simply
as Général (which he was not). Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, I, 99; Ljušić, Vožd
Karadjordje, II, 256.
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sanjak of Smederevo was an overwhelmingly peasant and illiter-

ate society in which the only education available to Christian boys
was that offered in Orthodox monasteries. It was therefore quite
remarkable that by 1808 revolutionary Serbia had 50 secular ele-
mentary schools as well as the Belgrade Grand School, founded by
Dositej. Within a year from opening in 1808, the Grand School
moved to a larger house to accommodate a growing number of
pupils. A three-year long education included classes in history,
geography, mathematics, Serbian and German languages, law,
church singing, fencing and gun shooting. Among those attend-
ing the Grand School was Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), a
20-year-old administrative employee of the revolutionary govern-
ment. Within several years, Karadžić would emerge as the most
important linguist, folklorist and cultural historian of his era, not
just among the Serbs.44
Educated and educating Habsburg Serbs were active on both
sides of the imperial border. A Serb gimnazija (lycée) opened in
1810 in Novi Sad (then southern Hungary) thanks to a dona-
tion by a wealthy Serb businessman. It quickly became a pres-
tigious institution, attracting, among others, eminent Slovak
linguist Pavel Šafárik, who in the 1820s served as the school’s
master. The teaching staff included Milovan Vidaković, who had
in the meanwhile become the author of the first Serbian novels –
popular romances inspired by similar German-language litera-
ture and classical Greek and medieval Serb legends. Vidaković’s
work came under criticism from Vuk Karadžić for its low artistic
value and for being written in archaic Serbian. The books, how-
ever, sold well among Habsburg Serbs, even after Vidaković’s
Bohemian lifestyle and an alleged homosexual affair with a pupil
44
St. K. Pavlowitch, Božid’art: istorije života, dela i okruženja Božidara
Karadjordjevića, pariskog umetnika i balkanskog kneza (1862–1908), transl. by Lj.
Mirković, Belgrade, 2012 (first publ. in French, 1978), 18–21.
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cost him his job in 1824.45 For all their differences, it is unlikely
either Vidaković or Karadžić would have become men of letters
had they not ended up as refugees in the Habsburg Monarchy.
The first modern theatre performances in Serbian were staged
in 1813 in Pest (modern Budapest) thanks to Joakim Vujić,
a Hungarian Serb who would establish Serbia’s first theatre
in Kragujevac 21 years later. It was also in Pest where wealthy
Habsburg Serbs founded in 1826 the Matica srpska, a cultural
association that ‘from the very beginning aimed at presenting
Serbian culture to Europe and at enlightening the people’. The
Matica, the first such Slav cultural organization, later moved to
Novi Sad with the financial support of Sava Popović Tekelija, one
of the richest Serbs at the time. It remains there today, as a state-
funded, oldest Serb cultural institution that preceded by over two
decades the founding in Belgrade of the Serbian Learned Society,
the predecessor of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.46
Tekelija, an Arad-born and Pest-based (in modern Romania and
Hungary, respectively) merchant and lawyer, had sent financial aid
to the Serb rebels and advocated their cause abroad. In June 1804,
he urged Napoleon to support the creation of a large Serb or South
Slav state that would act as a buffer against Austria and Russia. ‘The
Serbian uprising so far is in fact an act of brigandage and endless
bloodshed’, Tekelija wrote to Napoleon, ‘but with the right support
and guidance the Serbs would make an important contribution to
European politics’. The future state would unite the ethnically and
linguistically kindred population that lived between modern Slovenia
in the north-west, the Adriatic in the south and the Black Sea in
the east. Tekelija acknowledged the existence of religious divisions
but believed these would be eventually overcome. ‘[I]f during the
French revolution a desire and enthusiasm for freedom and equality
45
Popović, Milovan Vidaković, 210–49.
46
For a brief history of the Matica srpska see its website: www.maticasrpska
.org.rs/en/matica-srpska/.
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could unite the Catholics, Calvinists, Lutherans and Jansenists [a

branch of Catholicism]’, Tekelija wrote, ‘would it not be possible
that nationalism would similarly lead to the unification of the Serbs
and to weaken religious fanaticism, removing the questions of faith
by focusing on the issues of nationalism and fatherland?’47
Subsequent events anticipated the ‘western’ approach to the

‘Serbian question’ throughout the nineteenth century. When the
Russian–Ottoman truce expired in 1809, the fighting returned to
Serbia once again. The insurgents repelled the enemy attacks and
launched counteroffensive in several directions, hoping to draw
fellow Orthodox populations into the war and waiting to receive
further outside help. Karadjordje sent an emissary to Napoleon
after later that year a war broke out between Austria and France.
In its essence, the envoy’s message echoed Tekelija’s letter. The
rebel leaders wished ‘to confide [Serbia’s] destiny to the puissant
protection of Great Napoleon’ and invited the soldiers of La Grande
Nation to Serb garrisons. The messenger was too late, however, as
peace had been concluded between France and Austria before he
was able to present the proposal. Then in February the following
year, the Serbs informed the French that they would agree to an
armistice with the Ottoman Empire providing France would guar-
antee Serbia’s borders and acknowledge Karadjordje as a hereditary
ruler. In return, Serbia would provide the French Illyrian Provinces
cheap supplies of livestock and food and ensure the restoration of
the Belgrade cotton route, diverted elsewhere by war. A loan of 1.5
million francs was also requested. If France did not respond to the
proposal, Serbia would be forced to seek protection from Russia.
The French noted but did not act. Napoleon assured Austrian
47
S. Tekelija, Opisanije života moga, Belgrade, 1989, 137–38.
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Foreign Minister Prince Metternich of his opposition to Russia

extending its influence in the region through Serbia; the best way of
preventing this would be to preserve the territorial integrity of the
Ottoman state.48
The priority for the ‘west’ was to maintain the Ottoman Empire
in the Balkans, but if that were to become impossible, the Russian
influence must be minimized, either through political control
(Serbia after 1878) or occupation (Bosnia in 1878) by Austria.
Thus, Karadjordje’s attempt to exploit the Powers’ rivalry failed.
It would not be the last time Serb leaders attempted to profit from
it, with varying degrees of success.
The French Revolution and the establishment of Napoleon’s
Illyrian Provinces boosted the idea of the Sava-Kupa commercial
system and by extension of the concept of a large Illyrian/South
Slav state. When an autonomous Serbian principality was estab-
lished in 1829/30, the ‘Napoleonic option’ was no longer there.
Serb elites would seek other solutions to the ‘Serbian question’
from the 1840s, while never abandoning the idea of collaboration
with other Balkan peoples. It may be argued that the creation of
the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 saw the return
to the original idea.49
Meanwhile, the war against France forced Russia to con-
clude peace with the Ottomans. Article 8 of the Bucharest Peace
Treaty, signed in May 1812, envisaged a limited autonomy for
Serbia within the Ottoman Empire and amnesty for the insur-
gents. When the Serbs eventually learned of the terms of the
Treaty, they ‘rejected’ it at an assembly convened in Kragujevac
in January 1813. Demands to surrender weapons and allow the
return of Ottoman soldiers and administrators were deemed
unacceptable. Serbia was now alone against a large empire deter-
mined to retake the breakaway province.
48 49
Stoianovich, ‘The Segmentary State’, 275–77. Ibid, 279–80.
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Karadjordje had just over 40,000 lightly armed men under

his command. He proposed to the Ottomans a ceasefire, to buy
some time, and pleaded with Vienna and St Petersburg to allow
his people to migrate to Russia via Austria. Migration – like sev-
eral times before (and since) – seemed like the only way to sur-
vival. But these were desperate pleas made in desperate times and
they fell on deaf ears. As Ottoman troops marched on during
the summer and early autumn of 1813, they set whole villages
on fire, killed or enslaved civilians, raped women and destroyed
or looted Christian property. Made up mostly of Albanian and
Bosnian Muslims, the Ottoman expedition force ruthlessly and
quickly crushed the short-lived revolutionary state. People hiding
in hills and forests and columns of refugees moving northwards
once again dominated the regional landscape. In late October,
with Belgrade about to fall, Karadjordje and his family, together
with Metropolitan Leontije and Rodofinikin, crossed the Danube
to the safety of Zemun. It is estimated that around 100,000 ref-
ugees may have fled to the Austrian Empire during this time.50
In retrospect, the Treaty of Bucharest was not quite the com-
plete disaster for the Serbs it seemed in late 1813. It was the
first international guarantee of Serbia’s autonomy. When the
Principality of Serbia achieved full autonomy in 1829, it would be
based on the Treaty.51
Upon crossing the border into the Habsburg Monarchy in October

1813, Karadjordje and Aleksije (seen as heir apparent?) were placed
in a separate quarantine from the other refugees, and were eventu-
ally transferred to Graz, in Austria. The defeated Serb leader and
the veteran of Austria’s lost war of 1788–91, Karadjordje was given
accommodation and salary equivalent to an Austrian colonel but
50 51
Pavlowitch, Božid’art, 22. Jakšić, Evropa, chs 14–15, Article 8: 407.
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was effectively kept under house arrest. Running out of money and
patience, Karadjordje wrote to the Graz military commander on
31 March 1814, asking for financial help and to be allowed to be
reunited with the rest of his family. Aleksije, who wrote the letter,
signed it in the name of ‘Djordje Petrović, Lieutenant General of
His Imperial Majesty the Tsar of all Russia and holder of the Grand
Cross of the Order of Saint Anna’. If Karadjordje hoped to impress
his hosts with his honorary Russian titles, he failed. The Habsburg
authorities cited the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, which obliged them
to prevent any subversive activities originating in their territory
against the Ottoman Empire, and there was an additional pressure
from Austrian and Hungarian merchants who demanded financial
compensation from Karadjordje for damages their businesses suf-
fered because of the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Russians hoped to
persuade the exiled Serb leader to accept Article 12 of the Treaty
of Bucharest.
The Treaty awarded Bessarabia to Russia, and it was there that
Karadjordje, reunited at last with his family, was transferred in late
October 1814. It was also there that he established contact with
Philiki Etairia, a secret Greek revolutionary organization. His pleas
to Tsar Alexander I (1801–25) to be allowed to return to Serbia
and relight the insurgency were rejected. In the immediate after-
math of the Napoleonic wars and the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna,
there was little appetite among the Powers for another war. The
Russian authorities planned to send Karadjordje further east, but
in June 1817, he secretly returned to Serbia with the help of his
Greek contacts.
Language of the Nation

The 1813 defeat erased Serbia from the political map of Europe,
where it had briefly reappeared as a breakaway Ottoman province
(having previously been ‘re-established’ by Austria in the eighteenth
century). Within several years ‘Serbia’ will appear on a cultural map
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of Europe, in no small part due to activities of Vuk Karadžić. Having

joined the rebellion against the dahis in 1804 as a 17-year-old in his
native western Serbia, Karadžić left for Sremski Karlovci, in southern
Hungary, the following year in order to study. As already mentioned,
he then continued his studies in Belgrade under Dositej Obradović,
while simultaneously working as an employee of the revolutionary
government. Young Vuk showed a greater affiliation for books than
guns even before due to an illness he lost all function of his left leg.
During the 1813 debacle, Karadžić, together with tens of thou-
sands of his compatriots, fled to the Austrian empire, eventually
reaching Vienna. There he met Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844), an
ethnic Slovene who worked as a librarian and a censor for pub-
lications in Greek and Slavonic languages at the imperial court.
Impressed by Vuk’s talent for languages and knowledge of South
Slav folklore and customs, Kopitar encouraged Karadžić to study
Serbian grammar and language and to publish oral poems he had
already collected.52 The ambitious and bright Serbian refugee
needed little encouragement. Building on the work of another
Serbian language reformer, and under the influence of Kopitar and
German linguists, he simplified the Serbian Cyrillic, introducing a
30-letter phonetic alphabet, in use today across former-Yugoslavia.
Karadžić published two volumes of Serb/South Slav oral poetry in
1814–15 in Vienna (at the time of the peace congress there fol-
lowing the Napoleonic wars). In 1818, the first Serbian–German–
Latin dictionary compiled by Karadžić appeared. It was followed
by a short Serbian grammar, which Karadžić published in 1824 in
Leipzig in German translation by Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), one
of Europe’s most eminent philologists and folklorists.
Thanks to Grimm, Karadžić caught attention of Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe (1749–1832). Vuk visited the celebrated German poet
52
I. Merchiers, Cultural Nationalism in the South Slav Habsburg Lands in the Early
Nineteenth Century: The Scholarly Network of Jernej Kopitar (1780–1844), Munich,
2007, 251.
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at his home in Weimar in October 1823. As he walked slowly due

to his lame leg upstairs to Goethe’s study, a large standing statue
of Juno, a Roman goddess of fertility and state, and the great man
himself greeted Vuk. Pointing at Grimm’s letter of recommenda-
tion, a review of Karadžić’s Grammar and a German translation of
a Serbian folk poem collected by Vuk, Goethe told his visitor: ‘You
see, this is not the first time you are under my roof; you have been
here a while.’ They went on to have a long discussion during the
rest of the day – ‘the greatest day of my life’, Karadžić wrote to
Kopitar.53 A largely self-taught Vuk took difficult and sometimes
literally painful steps to meet Goethe, arguably the greatest repre-
sentative of the European culture of his era. It was as if Serbia, for
centuries under Ottoman rule, was being admitted into (western)
Europe, a Serbian literary scholar noted.54
Karadžić, who was soon to receive an honorary doctorate at
Jena, one of the oldest German universities, befriended in Vienna
a young German historian on sabbatical from his duties at Berlin
University. Leopold Ranke, subsequently regarded as the founder
of critical historiography, was fascinated with the destiny of small
nations in the Ottoman Empire, including the Serbs, whose rebel-
lion preceded but was much less known than the then ongoing
Greek War of Independence. Karadžić provided source material
for, and may have de facto co-authored, Ranke’s Die Serbische
Revolution, the first scholarly history of Serbia, published in
Hamburg in 1829. The Serbian and South Slav oral poetry and
gusle (a signle-stringed instrument) players – such as Bosnian-born
Filip Višnjić – became modern-day Homeric figures known and
53
Kopitar i Vuk, ed. and compiled G. Dobrašinović, Belgrade, 1980, 149–52;
M. Popović, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 1787–1864, Belgrade, 1964; D. Wilson,
Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 1787–1864: Literacy, Literature and
National Independence in Serbia, Oxford, 1970.
54
H. Zundhausen [Sundhaussen], Istorija Srbije od 19. do 21. veka, transl. from
German by T. Bekić, Belgrade, 2009, 100.
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admired by educated Europeans thanks above all to Karadžić. He

became a celebrity within central European intellectual circles,
and it may be said that his work contributed to a certain level of
Serbophilia that at the time existed among educated Europeans,
albeit on a much smaller scale than the early nineteenth-century
Helenophilia.
Prior to the French Revolution and German Romanticism,
nation was usually understood as a concept based on a special legal
status, at least in that part of Europe. In the case of the Serbs,
this translated to the status and privileges of the Serbian church,
both in the Ottoman and in the Habsburg Empires, and so pre-
modern ethnicity came to be closely associated with religion. Serb
Enlightenment thinkers of the late eighteenth century moved
beyond this by pointing out linguistic and cultural ties among the
South Slavs, as discussed in the previous chapter. It was through
the activities of Karadžić and his prominent central European sup-
porters that Serbs were introduced to the modern concept of the
nation as a community of people who spoke the same language. At
the same time, educated Europeans came to know the Serbs as a
nation with its own language, culture and history.
Most Serbs spoke, and speak, a dialect of Serbo-Croat known
as štokavski, also spoken by many Croats, including those living in
Dubrovnik where a rich South Slav literary tradition developed
under the influence from Venice. In addition to Serbia and parts
of Croatia, štokavski was also spoken in Bosnia, Herzegovina and
Montenegro. A significant part of historic Croatia though was
populated by speakers of distinct čakavski and kajkavski dialects
(the latter of which is close to the Slovenian language). The found-
ing fathers of Slavonic linguistic studies, including Czech Josef
Dobrovský, Slovak Šafárik and Slovene Kopitar, believed that
all štokavski speakers were Serbs. They disregarded confessional
differences between the štokavski speakers (who included Eastern
Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Muslims), in line with the liberal-
nationalist ideas of this era. Karadžić accepted this thesis.
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Moreover, his interest in the Volksgeist (the spirit of the people)

was inspired by the work of German philosopher Johann Gottfried
Herder (1744–1803).
Meanwhile, the Serbian church maintained that Serbs can
only be Orthodox Christian. Traditional Habsburg Serb intel-
lectuals and writers similarly rejected or were slow to accept
Karadžić’s ideas and his language reform. During the early dec-
ades of its existence, the official journal of the Matica srpska was
published in slavenoserbski, an archaic form of Serbian influenced
by Russian. For cultural-symbolic and political reasons, both
the main cultural organization of the Habsburg Serbs and the
Metropolitanate of Sremski Karlovci rejected Karadžić’s promo-
tion of the Serbian language as it was spoken by the people, not
how it was meant to be spoken or how it may have been spoken
once. Vuk, however, gained followers among younger Serb and
other South Slav intellectuals.55
Indeed, and paradoxically perhaps, Karadžić was arguably bet-
ter received among proto-Yugoslavist Croats than by many of
his fellow Serbs. Known as ‘Illyrians’, a group of Croat intellec-
tuals developed in the late 1820s and early ‘30s the first Yugoslav
programme, largely in response to Magyarization policies by
Hungarian authorities in Croatia-Slavonia. Essentially, they argued
that Serbs and Croats, although separated by religion, belonged
to one nation because they spoke the same language. The mainly
kajkavski-speaking Illyrians switched to the štokavski dialect to
strengthen their argument. While uncomfortable with Karadžić’s
‘all štokavski speakers are Serbs’ thesis (which he later modified), the
Illyrians published his work and that of his disciples. The Illyrians
proposed a ‘neutral’ Illyrian moniker for the language and the peo-
ple, which Karadžić and most Serbs rejected as artificial, that is not
used by the people. Nevertheless, ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ positions on
the language and national questions in the mid-nineteenth century
55
Ž. Mladenović, Vuk Karadžić i Matica srpska, Belgrade, 1965.
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figure 4.2 Dositej Obradović, lithograph by Anastas

Jovanović, 1852 (Wikipedia)
were not as removed as it may seem today, and in many ways Vuk
Karadžić brought them closer together.
Karadžić experienced financial problems throughout his life,
and his difficult relationship with Prince Miloš and the Serb
Orthodox church did not help. Yet, he continued to work tire-
lessly and travelled across the region, collecting ethnographic data
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figure 4.3 Vuk Karadžić, lithograph by an unknown author, c.1850

(Wien Museum, Inv.-Nr. W 3354, CC0, https://sammlung
.wienmuseum.at/en/object/396039/)
and spreading his ideas to those willing to listen. They included

Prince-Bishop Petar Petrović II Njegoš of Montenegro – among
the first South Slav authors to accept Karadžić’s reform, despite
also being a high Orthodox cleric. Karadžić’s linguistic reform
was eventually adopted in the second half of the nineteenth
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century, and his work was celebrated almost universally across

former-Yugoslavia until the disintegration of the country in the
1990s. He remains the central figure in the modern history of
Serbia, as important to its emergence as Karadjordje and Miloš
Obrenović. Without Karadžić, the standard languages spoken
today in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia
might have been different. The Serbo-Croat ‘disintegrated’
together with Yugoslavia, but it remains the same language, and
Serbs, Croats and others do not require a dictionary or an inter-
preter to understand each other. Its standardization by Karadžić
and other prominent South Slav linguists in Vienna in 1850
anticipated Yugoslavia by nearly 70 years. The Vienna agree-
ment also decreed that Cyrillic and Latin would be equal alpha-
bets of the language spoken by the Serbs and Croats. For this
reason, the Serbo-Croat was among rare biglossial world lan-
guages. Even though Cyrillic has in recent years become Serbia’s
official alphabet, it has not replaced Latin. Despite later politi-
cized readings of Karadžić’s work, his language reform and his
understanding of the nation were in line with progressive, liberal
European ideas of his era.56
The Second Serbian Uprising, 1815–30

The Serbia from which Karadžić and Karadjordje fled in 1813
initially resembled scenes from a horror film. Dead bodies lay
outside Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress all the way to the Terazije
square. Stench of human flesh and fear of violence kept people
away, leaving stray dogs to roam freely the city’s abandoned
streets. People continued to die after the war was over, initially
from hunger and then from an outbreak of plague in Spring 1814.
In April–May, between 10 and 15 plague-related deaths were
56
Popović, Vuk, 326–38, and ‘Vuk medju Ilirima’; Sundhaussen, Istorija Srbije,
98–108.
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recorded daily in Belgrade alone. Towns across Serbia were aban-

doned, as people moved to countryside, afraid of infection. The
epidemic reached its peak in mid-July when the number of daily
cases in Belgrade alone approached 80.57
The plague notwithstanding, an amnesty issued by the Porte
encouraged exiled Serbs to return. They included Glavaš,
now employed in the Ottoman service to help maintain order.
Tensions remained high, however, leading, in Autumn 1814, to
a short-lived rebellion in western Šumadija led by Hadži-Prodan
Gligorijević, a veteran of the First Uprising. (Gligorijević fled to
Bessarabia and would later join the Greek War of Independence).
A more sustained resistance broke out roughly in the same area
the following April. It subsequently became known as the Second
Serbian Uprising. In reality, it was a 15-year-long chess game
between Miloš Teodorović Obrenović (c.1780–1860), the obor-
knez of the Rudnik nahija, the Belgrade pasha and the Porte. Like
Karadjordje, Miloš hailed from a family of Montenegrin migrants.
Although not among the main leaders of the First Uprising, he
was close to Karadjordje – the two men were kumovi (sing. kum), a
sworn kinship, and Serbian equivalent of best man and godfather
combined. With the collapse of Karadjordje’s state, Miloš did not
flee abroad. An arch pragmatist, a skilled and patient politician
with a strong survival instinct, he stayed out of the failed 1814
rebellion and may have even helped suppress it. He used a com-
bination of military force or threat of force, negotiation and brib-
ery to secure concessions from the Ottomans, starting with the
restoration of the pre-1804 local autonomy, which he personally
negotiated in 1815 with Marashli Ali, the new pasha of Belgrade.
In ‘domestic’ affairs, Miloš controlled nascent political insti-
tutions, trade and economy. In the process, he removed poten-
tial rivals, including Karadjordje, who was assassinated, together
with a Greek aide, on Miloš’s orders in 1817, soon after secretly
57
M. Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, Belgrade, 1908, 3 vols, I, 72–74.
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crossing into Serbia. Miloš wanted no part in what he thought

would be another grand failure and he certainly did not wish to
share leadership with anyone. His rejection of a Balkan-wide revo-
lution also meant that he was content, initially at least, for the for-
mer Smederevo sanjak to remain within the Ottoman framework,
so long as it enjoyed self-government under his and his heirs’ rule.
That same year Miloš was recognized by the Porte as a hereditary
prince of Serbia, an act that ipso facto acknowledged the auton-
omy of the province.
Miloš personally delivered Karadjordje’s severed head to the
Belgrade pasha as proof of his loyalty; it was then sent on to
Constantinople and placed on public display. Just over six cen-
turies after Grand Župan Nemanja, the founder of first inde-
pendent medieval Serb polity, had been publicly humiliated
in Constantinople (see Chapter 2), the head of the first leader
of modern Serbia was displayed there with similar purpose –
to demonstrate the empire’s victory over unruly barbarians
from the periphery. The real winner, however, turned out to
be Miloš. Besides eliminating his main rival among Serbs, he
demonstrated to the Porte that he, rather than the pasha, was in
control of the Belgrade province, at least when it came to Serb
affairs. Indeed, Miloš fully controlled parallel Serb institutions
that were established alongside the Ottoman ones as part of the
agreement to restore the Christians’ autonomy. This was the
beginning of a ‘dual government’ in what was not Serbia yet
but was no longer simply the sanjak of Smederevo either. It was
a sort of a two-state solution for the ‘Serbian question’ in this
Ottoman province.
There were frequent tensions and periodic outbreaks of lim-
ited violence, but this should not obscure peaceful coexistence
and everyday interactions between Christians, Muslims and
Jews, between South Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Tsintsars, Vlachs
and Armenians, and between local and international traders and
merchants. During the period of the ‘dual government’, Serbia’s
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Table 4.1 Population of Serbia, 1815–1874
Year Population
1815 401,350
1833* 678,192 (increase of 276,842)
1840 828,895 (+ 150,703)
1847 928,648 (+ 99,753)
1854 998,919 (+ 70,271)
1861 1,118.646 (+ 119,727)
1874 1,353,890 (+ 235,244)
*Includes the population of the six new districts.

Source: Miloš Jagodić, Naseljavanje kneževine Srbije, 1861–80,
Belgrade, 2004.
‘Christian’ capital was in Kragujevac. Belgrade remained the

Ottoman seat until the last pasha left in 1867. Most Serbia’s
Muslims lived in towns, around half of them in Belgrade. In
1818, their number was estimated at 5,000 households (2,500 of
which in Belgrade) that probably amounted to at least 15–20,000
people.58 The total population of the province around this time
was c.400,000 (see Table 4.1).
Karadjordje’s assassination marked the beginning of nearly a
century-long feud between the Karadjordjević and Obrenović
families, whose male heirs would alternate on the Serbian throne
during the nineteenth century.59 It was the first major political
assassination in Serbia’s modern history, but it would not be the
last. It marked the beginning of a ‘tradition’ of conflict between
58
Ibid, II, 256.
59
It finally ended in 1903, when the last Obrenović king and queen were
brutally murdered by a group of army officers. Karadjordje’s grandson Petar
returned from exile to be crowned the following year, as the new, and last, as
it turned out, king of Serbia; in 1918, Petar I became the first Yugoslav king.
He did not play part in the conspiracy against Aleksandar Obrenović, but the
officers involved in the 1903 regicide included a grandson of Karadjordje’s
murdered Greek aide.
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previously close friends and kumovi in the Serbian politics, infa-

mously demonstrated again in late- and post-Yugoslav Serbia,
when Slobodan Milošević eliminated his former political mentor
Ivan Stambolić, first politically and then physically (see Chapters
7 and 8).
Autonomous Principality
Unsurprisingly, Miloš’s rule resembled that of an Ottoman pasha,
the only sort of government he had been familiar with. In some
ways, he was more authoritarian than his Ottoman ‘predecessors’.
He collected tax (out of which he paid a tribute to the sultan and
bribed Ottoman officials), acted as a supreme judge in the princi-
pality, often interfered in personal lives of his subjects and treated
his employees as de facto slaves. This led to several failed rebel-
lions. After a major revolt of 1826 was suppressed, Miloš ordered
that its leaders be executed, but allowed the peasants who partici-
pated to pillage and loot his property. Winning over and keeping
people on his side, in addition to being feared by them, was the
recipe for his long rule.
Although he was unquestionably the leader of the Serbs of the
Belgrade province, Miloš was not a Serb nationalist, at least not
in the modern meaning of the word. Like Karadjordje, he did
not see himself as a successor of the ancient kings and despots,
although he did express an occasional interest in Serbia’s medi-
eval history. His daily routine included early morning prayer,
in which no reference whatsoever was made to St Sava or any
other medieval Serb saint.60 Moreover, Miloš never let Sultan
60
Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, II, 702–703, and chs 36–38 for more details about
Miloš’s private life, including his extramarital affairs. See also Pirh [Otto
Dubislav von Pirch], Putovanje po Srbiji 1829, transl. into Serbian by Dragiša J.
Mijušković, Belgrade, 1899, 63–71; cf. G. Stokes, ‘The Absence of Nationalism
in Serbian Politics before 1840’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 4:1
(1976), 77–90.
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Mahmud II (1808–39) doubt his loyalty. Not only did Serbia reg-
ularly pay the annual haraç (tax) to the Porte, but it had stayed
out of the Greek Revolution, which broke out in 1821. Similarly,
several years later, Miloš would not support a rebellion of Bosnian
Muslim beys opposed to the imperial reform. Indeed, the Serb
leader offered military support and food to the Ottoman army;
only food was accepted – and paid for. The Serbian prince even
acted as a mediator between the two sides and at one stage the
Porte communicated with the Bosnians through Miloš’s office.61
As part of the dual administration, Miloš set up a People’s
Office (Narodna kancelarija), a successor to the old soviet. This de
facto government was made up of obor-knezes and presided over
by the prince, who soon established an absolute control over the
body. The People’s Office doubled-up as a supreme court for the
Christians, while its ‘foreign’ section included the Turkish Office,
staffed by local Muslims, Greeks and Serbs fluent in Ottoman
Turkish. The office mainly served for the communication with
the Porte. Interpreters were usually not required when it came
to communicating with local Ottoman authorities, who typically
spoke Serbian or a related South Slav vernacular.
Not unusually for a society that had developed within an empire,
Serbia’s inhabitants, regardless of their ethno-religious back-
ground, could converse in more than one language. Habsburg-
born Nićifor Ninković, who joined Karadjordje’s rebellion in
1807, spoke German, Hungarian and Serbian; after the collapse
of the First Uprising, he spent some time in Constantinople
training to be barber, where he also learned Ottoman Turkish,
Greek and Vlach. While his biography and range of languages
may have been atypical, Ninković’s ability to converse in more
than one language was by no means unique. He frequently mixed
Serbian and Ottoman Turkish and sometimes Greek and Vlach
61
Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, III, ch. 18; M. Marinković, Turska kancelarija kneza
Miloša (1815–1839), Belgrade, 1999, 46–48.
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in everyday communication with Christians, Muslims and Jews

he encountered in Belgrade and Kragujevac, where he served as
Miloš’s personal barber in the 1820s.62
By keeping in check domestic rivals and controlling the local
trade, Miloš became the richest man in the principality and pos-
sibly beyond. This in turn enabled him to bribe Ottoman offi-
cials in Belgrade and Constantinople. Another Russian–Ottoman
war, of 1828–29, ended in victory for the former. The September
1829 Treaty of Adrianople (Edirne) essentially confirmed a con-
vention, signed between the Ottoman and Russian Empires three
years previously in Akkerman (Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi in modern
Ukraine), which, among other things, provided for the restoration
of Serbia’s autonomy in its 1813 borders. Mahmud II issued a hattı
şerıf (charter) the following month, fulfilling the treaty obligations
concerning Serbia, whose autonomy within the Ottoman Empire
was to be guaranteed by Russia. (In addition to Serbia, Greece,
Moldavia and Wallachia were also granted autonomy under the
terms of the treaty; however, Greece became fully independent
the following year, while Russian troops entered the Danubian
principalities and practically ended the Ottoman rule there).
Announcing the news to a hastily elected assembly in Kragujevac
in February 1830, Miloš took much of the credit for Serbia’s
autonomy and used the language of the new era: ‘It has been a
full fourteen years since I have opened the imperial gate and have
worked constantly to gain for our beloved Fatherland the rights
that shall pass to us and to our posterity and that shall last forever
as long as there is a Serbian race.’63
Two more hattı şerıfs followed in 1830 and 1833, extending
Serbia’s autonomy to include the right to have an army, judiciary,
62
N. Ninković, Berberin kneza Miloša, Belgrade, 2016.
63
Cited in Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, I, 126. See also Gavrilović,
Miloš Obrenović, III, 478–96; Jakšić, Evropa, the Akkerman convention: 321–22,
407–408, the Treaty of Adrianople: 336, 409.
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health and postal service. The 1830 hattı şerıf was issued in time to
be read at an assembly convened on 12 December (21 November
OS) 1830 – St Andrew’s Day, the anniversary of Karadjordje’s vic-
tory at Belgrade in 1806 and the Karadjordjević family slava (family
patron saint day). Miloš therefore symbolically linked his diplo-
matic success, which formally ended the Second Serbian Uprising,
with one of Karadjordje’s major military victories during the First
Serbian Uprising. The 1833 charter finally provided for the incor-
poration of the six adjacent districts into the Serbian principality
promised by the 1826 Akkerman Convention (see Map 5.1).64
In exchange for the autonomy, Serbia was to pay the Porte an
annual tax (haraç) of 2,300,000 Ottoman kuruş (approximately
£33,000), silver coins that replaced akçe in the eighteenth century.
This was a reduced figure that Miloš secured through bahşiş, an
Ottoman custom that essentially amounts to bribing, of Ottoman
administrators and even the sultan himself. The tax was to be paid
in the Ottoman currency, which would continue to lose its value,
rather than in the more stable Venetian ducat. To provide some
context, Miloš spent over 1.4 million kuruş on bahşiş in 1829, and
another 1.2 million in 1833. He was able to afford this because
the tax he collected from his Christian subjects far outweighed
the annual tax paid to the Porte. According to a British report, in
1837, the head tax brought in £150,000, while the haraç that year
amounted to £21,900.65 Meanwhile, the ever-growing Ottoman
government expenditure – due to the costs of the 1828–29 war
against Russia and of the Tanzimat (administrative reform) –
reached 400 million kuruş (7 million Venetian ducats) by the end
of the 1830s; this was up from 18 million kuruş (2 million duc-
ats) government expenditure of the late eighteenth century. The
64
Jakšić, Evropa, 411–18. For full details see Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, III, parts
2 & 3.
65
M. Palairet, The Balkan Economies, c. 1800–1914: Evolution without Development,
Cambridge, 1997, 88.
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near bankruptcy of the Ottoman state – prevented by loans from

Armenian, Greek and Jewish bankers from Constantinople –
undoubtedly suited Miloš’s agenda.66 Meanwhile, the Belgrade
Metropolitanate was allowed to appoint its own clergy inde-
pendently from the Patriarchate in Constantinople.67 Thus, the
direct Ottoman-Phanariot control of the Serbs of the Belgrade
province ended at the same time, in 1829/30.
The departure of remaining Muslim sipahis during the 1830s
facilitated Miloš’s agrarian ‘revolution’. As part of the deal with
the Porte, remaining Muslim population – p erhaps around 15,000
people – was to evacuate the principality, apart from those living
in the garrisons. It is estimated that 40–50,000 Muslims lived in
the sanjak of Smederevo prior to the 1804 uprising, out of perhaps
less than 400,000 people. The principality became a land of small
Christian peasant households, and while the prince ruled over his
subjects through fear, he was also popular, having abolished both
the direct Ottoman rule (1829) and serfdom (1835). The lure of
free land and tax privileges for the peasantry made Serbia a small
oasis of freedom in south-eastern Europe. It also transformed it
from a land of emigration to one of immigration, at least as far as
non-Muslims were concerned. Serbia was a frontier society whose
agrarian reform led to a land grab and exploitation of nature
resembling in some ways contemporaneous developments in
America’s Wild West. Meanwhile, Miloš invested his personal for-
tune in Austrian banks and Romanian property. A small, prosper-
ous middle class formed, but the prince prevented the emergence
66
Serbia’s haraç: Ćirković, The Serbs, 191; Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, III, 483–84;
Miloš’s bribes: Stojančević, Miloš Obrenović i njegovo doba, 252–53; Ottoman
government expenditure: Ş. Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire,
Cambridge, 2000, 189. One sterling pound exchanged for 69 kuruş in 1829,
while two years later it was 80 kuruş. Ibid, 191; Constantinople bankers:
Howard, A History of the Ottoman Empire, 249–51.
67
Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, III, 497–504; Dj. Slijepčević, Istorija
Srpske pravloslavne crkve, Belgrade, 2012 (first publ. in 1986), II, 207–10.
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of a wealthy land-owning elite similar to Romanian boyars who

might have threatened his position.68
The emigration of Muslims radically changed urban life and
reduced the population of Serbia’s towns. Belgrade needed
around 80 years to reach its 1780 population figure (perhaps
around 20,000 people); similarly, towns such as Užice, known
as the ‘Little Istanbul’ due to its minaret-laden landscape,
underwent a rapid social-ethnic transformation. Muslims would
remain in Serbia’s main towns until the 1860s, but their life had
by then increasingly evolved around the remaining Ottoman
garrisons. Meanwhile, around 665,000 Eastern Orthodox
from Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Sandžak,
Vojvodina and Macedonia immigrated into Serbia in 1834–74.69
During this period, the population of Serbia rose from close to
680,000 to over 1,350,000 people (Table 4.1). The principal-
ity also attracted non-Serb migrants, including Christians and
Jews from the Habsburg and Romanian lands. The arrival of
Ashkenazim Jews meant that Serbia’s Sephardim were no longer
the predominant Jewish group.
Meanwhile, Serb population in Hungary in the mid-
nineteenth century was estimated at close to 900,000 (up from
750,000 in 1821). This figure does not include the population
of the Military Border in Croatia-Slavonia, where, according
to a Habsburg census, around 340,000 Orthodox/Serbs lived in
1843 (out of a total population of c.735,000; the rest were mostly
Catholics/Croats). Meanwhile, Hungary’s Serbs migrated south,
to present-day Vojvodina or into the Serbian principality. Thus,
68
Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, III, 464–81; J. R. Lampe and M. R. Jackson, Balkan
Economic History, 1550–1950, Bloomington, IN, 1982, 111–14; Palairet, Balkan
Economies, 85–88; Pavlowitch, Serbia, 34–35.
69
Immigration number: Calic, Društvena istorija, 48; Belgrade population:
Mišković, Bazari, 172; cf. H. Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik Serbiens,
1834–1914: Mit europäischen Vergleichsdaten, Munich, 1989.
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for example, the Serb population of Szentendre decreased by

one-third by the early 1840s, while in 1839, there were only 50
Serbs living in Esztregom, previously home to a sizeable Serb
community.70
In 1837, a plague that had allegedly originated in Egypt reached

Niš and Pirot – in present-day Serbia but then Ottoman towns
just south of the Serbian principality. With less than twenty qual-
ified doctors and a handful of poorly equipped hospitals, Serbia
sought assistance from the experienced medical staff of the Zemun
quarantine.71 Within a short period of time, field hospitals and
quarantines were built near border crossings and military-style
trenches were dug along the entire border with (the rest) of the
Ottoman Empire. Meant to prevent illegal entry and spreading of
the virus, these measures in practice reinforced Serbia’s physical
separation from the Ottoman state – as well as from Serb commu-
nities south-east of the border. This impacted trade and human
70
Ćirković, The Serbs, 194–97; Z. Djere (Györe), ‘Skica promena etničkog sastava
stanovništva na tlu današnje Vojvodine 1526–1910. godine’, Istraživanja
(Novi Sad), 15 (2004), 105–23. The Military Border population figure: G.
E. Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1750–1888: A Study of an
Imperial Institution, Chicago, 1966, 125. The numbers fluctuated through the
nineteenth century, depending, among other reasons, on the deployment of
military regiments. Serbian and Croatian historians have sometimes disagreed
over the numbers, identity and inter-communal relationship of the frontier
population. See, for example, a debate between Vasilije Krestić and Mirko
Valentić in Časopis za suvremenu povijest (Zagreb), 15:3 (1983), 119–68.
71
In late eighteenth century, around 20,000 people crossed 18 border
crossings/quarantines along the 1,800-kilometres long Habsburg–Ottoman
border. Nobody was exempt from quarantine rules, not even diplomats, but
these border crossing facilitated rather than hinder trade and population
movements. See J. Pešalj, ‘Monitoring Migrations: The Habsburg-Ottoman
Border in the Eighteenth Century’, PhD dissertation, Leiden University,
2019.
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traffic, after a large number of Christians had fled to Serbia fol-

lowing a recent anti-Ottoman rebellion in Pirot.72
Despite strict quarantine measures, first cases of the ‘east-
ern plague’ were reported in Serbia in summer 1837. The virus
was brought in via infected Ottoman soldiers on their way to
the Belgrade garrison. They were allowed to enter Serbia after
a compulsory stay at a border quarantine, despite several sol-
diers reporting feeling unwell; it turned out a quarantine doctor
seconded from Zemun failed to detect plague symptoms. The
plague reached central Serbia, but further spread of the infec-
tion was prevented thanks to Stefan-Stevča Mihailović, a capable
Jagodina district chief and the future prime minister of Serbia
(see the next chapter), who immediately placed infected civilians
and the Ottoman soldiers in isolation.73
The presence of the latter offered a reminder of Serbia’s vas-
sal status; that the Ottoman military and civilian administration
were obliged to obey strict quarantine rules, apparently much to
the annoyance of the Belgrade pasha, testified of Serbia’s high
degree of autonomy. Local population and foreign traders were
affected by the closure of Serbia’s borders, but their objections
fell on deaf ears. Wealthier Serbs moved to country houses or
to the safety of Habsburg Hungary, which caused resentment
and a near-rebellion among those with no means to seek social
distancing and no connections to exit quarantine. It appears the
northern border was less strictly observed. English traveller
Julia Pardoe was able to briefly cross to Belgrade from Zemun
72
V. Stojančević, Knez Miloš i istočna Srbija, 1833–1838, Belgrade, 1957,
188–89.
73
D. Dedić, Kuga u Jagodini 1837. godine, Jagodina, 2009, www.arhivja
.org.rs/images/kuga_u_jagodini_1837.pdf; B. Kunibert [Cuniberti], Srpski
ustanak i prva vladavina Miloša Obrenovića, 1804–1850, transl. from French by
M. R. Vesnić, Belgrade, 1901, 506–17; Stojančević, Knez Miloš i istočna Srbija,
85–99.
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in the middle of the epidemic thanks to a permission by the

Ottoman authorities.74
The epidemic lasted three months and claimed 230 victims (out
of 283 confirmed cases), an extremely high death rate but a rela-
tively low figure in total. In comparison, reportedly nearly two-
thirds of the inhabitants of Niš died from the disease. Bartolomeo
Cuniberti, Miloš’s Piedmontese doctor, may have exaggerated when
he claimed that the Serbian prince saved Europe from the plague.
However, the swift measures implemented by the Serbian authori-
ties almost certainly prevented the spread of the virus into Belgrade,
Bosnia and Hungary. The epidemic provided Miloš with an oppor-
tunity to reaffirm his authority domestically and demonstrate the
degree of Serbia’s independence from the Porte. As the Covid-19
pandemic showed, major epidemics tend to lead to strengthening of
state control over territory and over lives of citizens, and it was no
different in Serbia of the late 1830s.75
The Fall of Prince Miloš

A major rebellion against Prince Miloš’s rule, which even his wife
and brother supported, had broken out in early 1835. Several
thousand people gathered outside the prince’s residence in
Kragujevac demanding a constitution, which they understood as a
guarantee that Miloš’s powers will be limited, and their own land
and property protected. The prince was forced to give in.76
74
The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836, London, 1838, 3
vols, III, 301–309.
75
While Miloš’s rule, as suggested above, resembled that of an Ottoman
pasha, when it came to immigration, he behaved more like a Habsburg. The
Austrian empire, like Miloš’s Serbia, welcomed immigration, but of non-
Muslims. This also explains why Serb/Orthodox refugees had been able to
settle in the Austrian and Hungarian lands in frequent, and frequently large
migratory movements, as already disccused.
76
Pavlowitch, Serbia, 36–41.
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Drafted by Dimitrije Davidović, Miloš’s Habsburg Serb secre-

tary and an admirer of the French constitutional system, Serbia’s
first constitution was adopted on 15 February 1835. It happened to
be the anniversary of the Orašac assembly that, as mentioned previ-
ously, elected Karadjordje as the leader of the uprising in Šumadija.
The konštitucija was a liberal document, inspired by French and
Belgian constitutions; it envisaged a power share between the
monarch and an elected people’s assembly. A third stake holder was
to be a council of elders, a remnant of the 1829 hattı şerıf, retained
perhaps to appease the Ottomans. The Ottoman-era serfdom,
however, was abolished, making Serbia a land of free peasants. The
constitution would be suspended after only two weeks (although
the abolition of the serfdom stood) because it was opposed by
almost everyone, including the three empires most closely involved
in Serbia’s affairs, none of which incidentally had a constitution at
the time. The Porte disliked the fact that an autonomous prov-
ince adopted a constitution on its own, and a highly liberal one at
that; its liberalism was the main reason Austria and Russia, which
especially detested the French influence, were also opposed to the
constitution. Miloš gladly took the opportunity to suspend a legal
document he did not want in the first place.77
In June the same year, the prince was invited to Constantinople
for talks, his first trip outside Serbia. Sultan Mahmud II arranged
for a welcome full of respect for the Mir-i Sirb (Emir of Serbia), as
the Ottomans usually addressed Miloš. The two sides exchanged
generous gifts; Mahmud II awarded Miloš a medal, an expensively
framed portrait of the sultan, which the Serbian prince would wear
with pride. The visit left a deep impression on Miloš, who prolonged
his stay to two and a half months, fascinated by life in the imperial
capital and keen to learn more about Great Power diplomacy.78
77
S. Jovanović, Političke i pravne rasprave, Belgrade, 1932, 2 vols, I, 9–12.
78
M. Aydin, ‘Istanbul Visit of the Serbian Knez Miloš Obrenović’,
in M. Ünver (ed.), Turkey and Serbia: Changing Political and Socio-Economic
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figure 4.4 Portrait of Prince Miloš Obrenović by Josef Brandt,

probably painted in Constantinople/Istanbul, 1835 (Wikipedia). Note the
framed portrait of Sultan Mahmud II on Miloš’s chest.
Following the examples of Austria and Russia, Britain and

France opened consulates in Serbia in the second half of the
1830s. Because the pro-constitution opposition enjoyed Russia’s
Dynamics in the Balkans, Istanbul, 2018, 33–46; Gavrilović, Miloš Obrenović, III,
511–43; Marinković, Turska kancelarija, 46–48.
252
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support, the British and the French backed the autocratic prince.79
This would not be the first time that foreign powers interfered in
Serbia’s domestic politics, nor that their interests abroad contra-
dicted their self-confessed values at home.
The Porte and Russia, which respectively exercised sover-
eignty over Serbia and guaranteed its autonomy, supported
‘Defenders of the Constitution’, as the oligarchs who opposed
Miloš became known. Finally in late 1838, a new Constitution
was drafted in Istanbul by Serbian, Russian and Ottoman experts.
It confirmed the hereditary rights of the Obrenović family;
the monarch’s power was to be limited, though not by a peo-
ple’s assembly, but by a 17-member council of elders. As Stevan
Pavlowitch put it succinctly: ‘The Porte had been anxious to
limit Miloš’s powers, to reduce his influence in the European
provinces more generally, and to please Russia. The “Turkish”
constitution – as it was called in Serbia – introduced government
by prince-in council. Russia and the notables were the winners.
Miloš was the loser.’80 He abdicated in June 1839, after several
tense months and after nearly 25 years in power. Miloš Obrenović
would spend almost two decades in exile, living off his Romanian
estate, until another political crisis resulted in his triumphant, if
short lived, return.
Defenders of the Constitution

Sixteen-year-old Mihailo Obrenović (1839–42, 1860–68) became
the new prince after his elder brother, and the original heir, Milan
died from an illness within weeks following Miloš’s abdication.
Due to Mihailo’s age, a three-man regency was appointed, con-
sisting of Miloš’s younger brother Jevrem Obrenović (1790–
1856), Toma Vučić Perišić (1787–1859), a veteran of the Second
79
St. K. Pavlowitch, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Serbia, The Hague, 1961.
80
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Uprising, and Avram Petronijević (1791–1852), another one of

Miloš’s former secretaries, who now also served as first minister.
The regency competed with the exiled prince who continued to
exert a significant influence through his supporters at home. In
1842, Vučić Perišić masterminded a palace coup forcing Mihailo
to abdicate, ending, for the time being, the Obrenović rule in
Serbia. With the approval of the Porte, Karadjordje’s younger
son Aleksandar was invited to return to the country and take
the throne (his elder brother Aleksije had died in 1830). During
Prince Aleksandar Karadjordjević’s reign (1842–58), the real
rulers of the country were the Defenders of the Constitution
(or Constitutionalists). They built a modern, centralized state
bureaucracy and set an ambitious foreign policy, with Serbia as the
core of a future independent Serb or South Slav state. The state
bureaucracy was built largely by educated Habsburg-born Serbs,
who represented the country’s only intelligentsia. The foreign pol-
icy was envisaged with the encouragement from exiled Polish and
Czech nationalists and was inspired by German and Italian uni-
fication movements. Ilija Garašanin (1812–74), interior minister
between 1842 and 1852, and briefly prime minister and foreign
minister in 1852–53 (he would again serve as foreign minister in
the 1860s), played a key role in both home and foreign affairs.81
Domestic reforms carried out by the Constitutionalists may be
seen as the third phase of the Serbian revolution (the first two being
Karadjordje’s insurgency and the emergence of the autonomous
principality under Miloš, respectively). The reforms rested on the
ideas of progress and modernity, understood by Serbia’s elites as
synonymous with the emancipation from the Ottomans as well as
from Miloš’s autocratic rule. Ironically, as mentioned later, around
this same time the Ottoman rulers sought to modernize the empire.
81
This section draws on S. Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji i njihova vlada (1838–1958),
Belgrade, 3rd rev edn 1933 (1st publ. 1912), which remains the best study of the
Constitutionalist regime.
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The Constitutionalists faced an enormous challenge, worked

under budget limitations and lacked qualified cadres. Nevertheless,
they achieved a considerable success in the domestic affairs, if
not quite fully meeting their ambitious goals. Among their key
achievements were the regulation of land ownership and trade, a
judiciary reform, modernization of the police and the country’s
postal service, and an improved road network. However, by the
end of the 1850s, there were still only around 1,200 kilometres
of roads in the whole of the country. Nascent industrialization
was felt mainly in Belgrade and areas bordering the Habsburg
monarchy – partly thanks to the navigation of the Danube and
Sava, where an Austrian steamboat company operated from the
1830s and 1840s, respectively. In rural areas, things changed
slowly following the radical land reform of the 1830s.
In 1844, Serbia’s first Civil Law (inspired by the Austrian
equivalent) was adopted, while two years later the country’s first
Supreme Court was established. The legal reform, however, was
undermined by a shortage of qualified personnel. For example,
in the mid-1840s, three regional court chiefs were illiterate, ten
of them could barely read, only three had more than elementary
education and only one was a lawyer. At the same time, courts
were overworked, partly due to slow and inadequate expertise
and partly because people frequently sued each other, enjoying
the newly won rights, and sometimes simply out of inat (that
allegedly Serbian character trait discussed in Introduction).
Garašanin hoped to solve the problem by granting greater pow-
ers to the gendarmerie, but this encouraged police brutality and
corruption.
Meanwhile, the peasantry was burdened by debt as loan sharks
profited from a slow regulation of the banking system. There
were complaints that Habsburg-born Orthodox bishops lived
in luxury, while village priests behaved arrogantly and immor-
ally. All these factors contributed to the loss of popularity of the
Constitutionalists, despite the benefits and progress they brought.
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There was a feeling that Miloš’s personal autocracy had been

replaced by an autocracy of state bureaucracy.
The 1838 Constitution regulated trade, but it did not bring
benefits to all of Serbia’s citizens. Like Ottoman sultans and
pashas, Miloš appreciated the loyalty and good business relations
with Jewish merchants and traders. The Constitutionalists, on
the other hand, introduced discriminatory regulations concern-
ing freedom of movement and trade of Serbia’s Jews, favouring
their Christian competition. Things would change in 1878, when
Serbian Jews would receive equal citizen rights. In the meanwhile,
discriminatory measures by the Constitutionalists did not seem
to discourage the immigration of Habsburg Jews, as their num-
bers steadily grew. Around 1,800 Jews lived in Belgrade in the late
1850s (around 10 per cent of the city’s population), up from 1,500
in the early 1830s.82
Well-paid and smartly dressed civil servants became a symbol of
the Constitutionalist regime. Everyone wanted to become one or to
know one, for such connections (veze – see Introduction) promised
certain privileges. Habsburg-born civil servants tended to be more
professional and less corrupt, perhaps because they did not have
close friends and relatives in Serbia. This made them unpopular, and
complaints could be heard about the domination of the ‘Germans’
(nemačkari), as they were pejoratively known. Even Metropolitan
Petar of Belgrade (1833–59), a Croatian-born Serb, was dismissed as
a ‘foreigner’ by his critics.
State schools employed Habsburg Serb teachers, but the gov-
ernment set out to create a ‘native’ educated elite. From 1839, state
scholarships were awarded to brightest young men – and eventu-
ally women, too – to enable them to study, initially usually Law,
in Austria, France and Saxony. The number of scholarships rose
each year as Paris soon became the main destination for Serbian
82
Mišković, Bazari, 174–75.
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students.83 A vibrant, small group of young Serbs educated abroad,

collectively known as ‘Parisians’ (parizlije) brought back ideas of
progress and change. Belgrade’s Grand School (not to be con-
fused with Dositej Obradović’s school of the same name) opened
in 1863; in 1905, it became Belgrade University. Paradoxically,
one of the Constitutionalists’ major achievements – the creation
of a ‘native’ educated class – was also to prove to be their undoing.
Ilija Garašanin, according to historian Slobodan Jovanović, ‘always

had a plan and a programme, like a typical European bureaucrat
of his era.’ Despite his bureaucratic crudeness and lack of personal
life due to an almost complete immersion in politics, Garašanin
had charisma and a sense of humour. A tall, physically imposing
man and a decisive politician, he proved popular with the liber-
al-nationalist youth. A self-educated representative of the older
generation, Garašanin bridged the generational gap between the
Old Men (starci) and the ‘Parisians’. While he never really got
on with the ‘Germans’, he could at least work with them. Vučić
Perišić, meanwhile, was more effective communicating with the
masses; above all a man of action, he would practically retire from
politics during periods of relative stability.84
Garašanin’s foreign policy motto was: ‘neither with Russia, nor
with Austria, but with the western powers, above all France’. His
Francophilia made him a natural ally of Prince Czartoryski and his
transnational network of agents, established after the failed Polish
revolution of 1830–31. As Russia’s foreign minister Czartoryski
had in 1804 largely dismissed Serb overtures, as we have seen; sev-
eral decades later, as a Polish exiled leader, he envisaged Serbia as
83
Ibid, 93–94; Lj. Trgovčević, Planirana elita: O studentima iz Srbije na evropskim
univerzitetima u 19. veku, Belgrade, 2003.
84
Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji, 96, 327, 330–36.
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a key member of a future Europe made up of smaller, independ-

ent states that would keep in check Austrian and Russian imperi-
alisms. In 1844, František Zach, Czartoryski’s Czech agent in the
Balkans, drafted a plan for the creation of a large South Slav state
around Serbia. Garašanin edited the document – which remained
unknown to public until the early twentieth century – and turned it
into a plan (known as Načertanije) to create a large state that would
bring together Serb communities across the Balkans into a mod-
ern version of Stefan Dušan’s empire. Like Czartoryski, Garašanin
established a network of agents, mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
where his contacts extended beyond the Orthodox population
when communication with Bosnian Franciscans was established.85
Not all South Slav initiatives came from Belgrade or Paris. In
addition to the Illyrian group in Zagreb, Serb-feeling Roman
Catholics from Dalmatia also advocated cooperation with Serbia.
Ethnic, historical and religious ties with Montenegro would give
birth to plans – popular in both Montenegro and Serbia – for
the unification of the two ‘Serb states’.86 Garašanin’s work was
subsequently interpreted by historians as ‘Greater Serbian’ or
‘pan-Yugoslav’, depending on author and context. He was above
all interested in Serbia and the Serbs but understood the impor-
tance of cooperation with neighbouring peoples and friendly
Powers. In line with many of his compatriots, especially the young
liberals, Garašanin believed that Serbia’s borders were unjust and
85
Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, I, 460–84; P. N. Hehn, ‘The Origins of
Modern Pan-Serbism: The 1844 Načertanije of Ilija Garašanin’, East European
Quarterly, 9:2 (1975), 153–71, and ‘Prince Adam Czartoryski and the South
Slavs’, The Polish Review, 8:2 (1963), 76–86; R. Ljušić, Knjiga o Načertaniju:
Nacionalni i državni program Kneževine Srbije (1844), Belgrade, 2004;
D. Mackenzie, Ilija Garašanin: Balkan Bismarck, New York, 1985, 42–61.
86
I. Banac, ‘The Confessional “Rule” and the Dubrovnik Exception: The Origins
of the “Serb-Catholic” Circle in Nineteenth-Century Dalmatia’, Slavic Review,
42:3 (1983), 448–74; D. Vujović, Ujedinjenje Crne Gore i Srbije, Titograd
[Podgorica], 1962.
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that, like other European nations, the Serbs too should be able
to unite and live in a free and independent state. Garašanin’s
ideas developed not in isolation but were influenced by European
trends of his era; this was true even of his somewhat contradictory
and romantic dream about the resurrection of medieval Serbia,
which was neither a nation state nor did it overlap territorially
with nineteenth-century plans for a Greater Serbia or Yugoslavia.
Garašanin saw Hungary and the Polish and Czech exiles as allies
against Austria and Russia, respectively; he did not regard the
Ottoman state as the main threat to Serbia’s aspirations. Among
the Powers it was France, and among national unification move-
ments the Italians and the Germans who provided the inspiration
for the Serbian politician. There, old divisions created by religion
and history were to be overcome by loyalty to the nation, and this,
too, was Garašanin’s hope for the Serbs and the South Slavs.
A Society Transformed
As already seen, under Miloš’s leadership, Serbia had transi-
tioned from an Ottoman sanjak to a tributary principality that
was also increasingly understood as a Christian Serb state. In the
place of the departed Muslims came mainly Christian immigrants
attracted by the promise of free land.87 In the process, Serbia
became less and Bosnia more Muslim, something that remains
insufficiently acknowledged in historiography. Similarly, while
much has been written about the importance among Serbs and
other Balkan Christians of oral tradition of the ‘Turkish yoke’ and
the Christians’ resistance against the ‘Turks’, a similar tradition –
of battles against the Empire, Janissaries and rebel Christians and
87
Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, I, 78–79; V. Stojančević, ‘Tursko stanovništvo
u Srbiji pred Prvi srpski ustanak’, Zbornik za društvene nauke (Novi Sad), 13–14
(1956), 127–34, 132; M. Jagodić, Naseljavanje kneževine Srbije, 1861–1880,
Belgrade, 2004, 28.
259
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the suffering of local Muslims – existed among the Muslims of

Bosnia, many of whom were refugees or descendants of refugees
from Serbia. Contemporary accounts show that Serbia’s Muslims
feared the brutality of Karadjorde and his men.88 Ottoman first-
hand accounts of the Serbian Principality are similarly, and under-
standably, laced with bitterness and fear, though some sympathy
existed for Prince Aleksandar and the Constitutionalist regime
among Belgrade’s remaining Ottomans.89
When Melek Hanım arrived in Belgrade in 1847 with her
husband Kıbrıslı Mehmed Emin, the newly appointed Pasha of
Belgrade, she found a shrinking ‘Turkish’ community of perhaps
500 families, who lived on Ottoman state support, ‘in considera-
tion of the prosperity they had formerly enjoyed, and which the
Serbians had monopolized.’ Belgrade Muslim women had paler
skin and hair than the women of Constantinople; married women
tended to use strong make-up and dye their hair dark, presuma-
bly to look more ‘Turkish’. They were also more religious than
the new pasha’s wife, who drunk alcohol and did not mind eat-
ing from a table that included pork dishes at dinners hosted by
Prince Aleksandar Karadjordjević (Iskender-bey, as the Ottomans
called him) and Princess Persida (Figure 4.5). Melek Hanım found
the Belgrade Ottoman fortress a depressing place, with no gar-
dens and with poor supplies during winter months when the rivers
and roads were frozen. She used her business acumen to help the
locals, and in the process boost her finances. The monotony of
everyday life was interrupted by an incident following the murder
88
Ljušić, Vožd Karadjordje, II, 272; H. Kamberović, Husein kapetan Gradaščević
(1802–1834): Biografija, Gradačac, 2002, 12.
89
M. Marinković, ‘Srbija prve polovine XIX veka u Istoriji čudnovatih dogadjaja u
Beogradu i Srbiji Rašida Beogradjanina i memoaru Ibrahima Mansur-Efendije’,
Zbornik Matice srpske za istoriju, 61–62 (2000), 179–86. E. A. Aytekin, ‘Belgradî
Raşid and his Vak’a‐i Hayret‐Nüma: A Local Muslim Perspective on Dual
Administration in Belgrade During Serbian Autonomy’, in S. Aslantaş et al.
(eds), Belgrade, 1521–1867, Belgrade, 2018, 315–26.
260
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figure 4.5 Princess Persida Karadjordjević (1813–73), consort of Prince
leksandar. Portrait by Uroš Knežević, 1855 (Wikipedia). Note Persida’s
A
oriental dress. Born into the prominent Nenadović family in western Serbia
(the previously mentioned Prota Mateja was a close relative), Persida was
just 17 when she married Karadjordje’s younger son Aleksandar, six years
her senior, in Khotyn, Bessarabia (then Russia, today Ukraine), where exiled
members of the Karadjordjević family lived at the time. Persida played a
prominent role in the social and cultural life of mid-nineteenth-century
Belgrade. After Prince Aleksandar was deposed in 1858 (see below), they
emigrated to Timișoara (Romania). The princely couple had 10 children, six
of whom lived into adulthood. King Petar I of Serbia (and Yugoslavia) was
their eldest surviving son.
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of a Christian by a Muslim in summer 1848. The perpetrator

escaped justice with the help of the Belgrade Ottoman authorities.
Christians demonstrated outside the fortress and tensions threat-
ened to get out of hand. Things calmed down thanks to those in
positions of power – the prince, the pasha and his wife all appealed
for peace and worked together to resolve the crisis.90
Not all Belgrade Muslim women were strict believers and not
all lived on state support. Some survived on the edge of the soci-
ety, trying to make the most out of the dual government. A well-
known Belgrade courtesan Bula Nesiba, who as a 2-year Christian
child Katarina was converted to Islam following the fall of the
city in 1813, fell foul of the Ottoman law in 1830. She avoided
being expelled from the city by converting back to Orthodoxy. As
a Christian, she was now outside the reach of the Ottoman legal
system and was allowed to stay in Belgrade. In what may have
been the case of a (presumably) attractive young woman playing
on macho instincts of two powerful male rivals, Kata Nesiba, as
she became known, had Prince Miloš personally intervene on her
behalf with the Belgrade pasha. Following this, she continued to
entertain a religiously mixed clientele until the Serb authorities
eventually expelled her from the city in the 1840s, before she was
able to re-convert to Islam.91
Kata Nesiba was one of approximately 150 Belgrade prosti-
tutes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her story is in
some ways symbolic of this transitional period. Other courtesans
90
[Melek Hanım ] Thirty Years in the Harem, or, The Autobiography of Melek-
Hanum, Wife of H. H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha, I, London, 1872, 138–49; cf. I.
Ćirović, ‘[An] Ottoman Woman, Agency and Power: Melek Hanım in Belgrade
1847–1848’, in Aslantaş et al. (eds), Belgrade, 1521–1867, 363–82.
91
I. Janković, Kata Nesiba: Istinita i ilustrovana istorija jedne beogradske bludnice i njene
borbe za ustavna prava, 1839–1851, illustr. by V. Mihajlović, Belgrade, 2014,
and ‘Opšte bludnice: Prostitucija u Beogradu u prvoj polovini 19. veka’, God. za
društv. ist, 22:2 (2015), 25–51; cf. V. Jovanović, ‘Prostitucija u Beogradu tokom
19. veka’, God. za društv. ist, 4:1 (1997), 7–24.
262
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included former haram women, sex slaves imported from the

Austrian Empire, and local Christian women, sometimes mar-
ried or widowed, driven to prostitution by poverty. At politically
sensitive times, Ottoman and Serbian authorities would arrest
or temporary remove from Belgrade well-known troublemakers
and prostitutes. A common cause of tension and physical conflict
between the Christians and Muslims was jealousy and competition
for women – not surprisingly perhaps considering that at the time
Belgrade men outnumbered women (60 to 40 per cent in 1834
and 62 to 38 per cent fifteen years later). This was mainly due to
the immigration pattern that saw single men moving to Serbia in
search of jobs.92
Unsurprisingly, women – rather than their male ‘clients’ –
tended to be blamed for disturbing ‘public morality’. Thus, in
January 1838, an army captain and commander of the prince’s
guard asked the (Christian) police to prevent prostitutes from
approaching and seducing his soldiers. Two years later, the
Belgrade authorities received a request from the head of the
Orthodox church in Serbia to expel from the city a well-known
prostitute. The Belgrade police files include records of sexual
violence against under-age girls and reports of ‘seduction and
sodomy’ of young boys. Sexual violence was not uncommon in
the countryside either. Most inmates of a late nineteenth-century
female-only prison in Požarevac were women who killed men –
often their husbands or other family members – after they had
been abused and maltreated.93
Old Muslim communities were not the only victims of Serbia’s
nascent modernization. A rapidly growing population, due to
immigration and birth rates higher than anywhere else in Europe
92
Mišković, Bazari, 173.
93
M. Jovanović et al. (eds), Živeti u Beogradu, 1837–1841: Dokumenta uprave grada
Beograda, Belgrade, 2003, 449–53; M. A. Popović, Zatvorenice: Album ženskog
odeljenja Požarevačkog kaznenog zavoda (1898), Belgrade, 2017.
263
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bar Hungary and Russia (45 per 1000; in preindustrial western

Europe the birth rates reached 30 per 1000), created the need for
additional arable land that could only be created by deforestation.94
The forests of Šumadija gave birth to modern Serbia – first as shel-
ter and source of food for the insurgents, then as additional land
their partial destruction created in autonomous Serbia. As geolo-
gist and travel-writer Ami Boué shrewdly observed, the Ottomans
might have defeated Karadjordje’s rebellion if they had slaughtered
pigs rather than men and if they had burned the forests, which pro-
vided food for the pigs95 – and shelter for the rebels, one might add.
The modernization also created smaller households and opened
prospects for people willing to move to towns. This resulted in
decline, if not quite the end of extended families that had formed
the nucleus of the Balkan society during the pre-modern era. In
the mid-1830s, Serbia, like the rest of the Balkans, remained a pre-
dominantly agricultural society. Out of around 700,000 popula-
tion, which lived on a territory of 38,000 square kilometres, the
urban population numbered only 50,000 people, of whom pos-
sibly around one-half lived in Belgrade. Many towns were in fact
semi-rural societies, and their population remained diverse even
as the Muslims were departing. In addition to Serbs, there were
Jews, Greeks, Tsintsars (Hellenized Vlachs), Roma, Armenians
and others; many would assimilate, even while preserving their old
identity.96
After the 1878 Congress of Berlin, Serbian Jews were fully eman-
cipated, as the newly independent Balkan states were obliged to
grant full citizen rights to their minorities. This encouraged fur-
ther immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from neighbouring Austria-
Hungary, who joined a long-established Sephardim community
in Belgrade and several other towns. Roma continued to enjoy a
separate status they had gained in the Ottoman Empire but were
94
Calic, Društvena istorija, 49; Palairet, Balkan Economies, 98–103.
95
Pavlowitch, Serbia, 32. 96 Ibid, 34; Mišković, Bazari, 172–73.
264
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finally fully integrated into the Serbian legal and tax system in
1884, when the nomadic communities were obliged, formally
at least, to settle down. Regardless of whether they remained
semi-nomadic or not, most Roma continued to be treated as de
facto second-class citizens. On the other hand, because they were
not regarded as ‘Turks’ by either Serbs or Ottomans, Muslim
Roma were not included in the diplomatic agreements between
the Serbs and the Ottomans, sanctioned by the Powers, which
regulated the departure of Muslims from Serbia.97
The Serbs and the 1848 Revolution

The Hungarian revolutionary manifesto of March 1848 trig-
gered declarations demanding civic and religious freedoms, inde-
pendent schools and use of their own language by several Serb
groups in Habsburg Hungary. In the countryside, Orthodox
peasants rebelled against large landowners. On 12–14 May (1–3
May O.S.) 1848, a Serb assembly was held in Sremski Karlovci
(Figure 4.6). It was attended by the church and political leaders
and various other ‘people’s representatives’. The assembly pro-
claimed a Duchy of Serbia (Vojvodstvo Srbija, today better known
as Vojvodina), and elected as the vojvoda (duke) a Habsburg Serb
army Colonel Stefan Šupljikac (1786–1848), who accepted his new
rank only after the emperor’s approval (but died several months
later from an illness). The deputies also proclaimed Metropolitan
Josif Rajačić the ‘Serb Patriarch’. Amid declarations of loyalty
to ‘our Emperor and King and Father Ferdinand’, those present
also recalled Serbia’s ‘glorious past’. The legality of the assembly
97
I. Janković, ‘Pravni status Roma u Kneževini Srbiji’, Pravni zapisi (Belgrade),
VII:2 (2016), 297–323, and ‘Socijalni status Roma u Kneževini Srbiji’, God. za
društv. ist, 24:1 (2017), 7–24. The position of Roma was worse in neighbouring
Romania, where they were kept as slaves in some cases. By contrast, slavery was
not legalized in modern Serbia.
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figure 4.6 Pavle Simić, Serbian National Assembly, [Novi Sad] 1 May 1848
(1848). The Matica srpska Gallery, Novi Sad, GMS/U 2873
was supposed to be based on the ‘privileges’ issued by Emperor

Leopold I to their ancestors following the ‘Great Migration’, and
on the (largely symbolic) continuity with the Serbian despotate,
which ‘transferred’ to southern Hungary following the Ottoman
conquest in the fifteenth century.98
Meanwhile, young liberal-nationalist activists assumed
a greater role. They introduced mass politics to Habsburg
Serbs, by campaigning across southern Hungary and agitat-
ing for the ‘national cause’. To what extent their messages
resonated among ‘ordinary’ Serbs is not known. Only a small,
educated elite could read written proclamations, but by going
98
Ćirković, The Serbs, 196–203; Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije, I, 485–596; ISN,
V-2, 45–108; cf. I. Deák, Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians
1848–1849, New York, 1979; P. M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New
History, Cambridge, MA, 2016, ch. 4.
266
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to the people the national agitators hoped to bring the nation

to them. Savka Subotić, one of the first feminists among
Hungarian Serbs, aged 14 during the Revolution, later recalled
how liberals wore specially made hats that featured Serbia’s tri-
colour flag and the following written message: ‘Long live Serb-
Slavjan, Vojvoda Stefan!’.99 Among them was a young lawyer
and journalist Svetozar Miletić (1826–1901), the future leader
of the Hungarian Serbs who would briefly serve as the mayor
of Novi Sad.
Serbia officially remained neutral. It sent financial aid to
Hungary’s Serbs and volunteers crossed the border to join
Hungarian Serb revolutionary units, but Vučić Perišić declared
that the country had no business across the border. Concerned
that his Načertanije plan would stand no chance without the
Hungarian support, Garašanin urged Prince Aleksandar to
resist the nationalists’ calls for Serbia to intervene on behalf of
Hungarian Serbs. He need not have worried. Aleksandar was
a counter- revolutionary and knew that his rivals, the exiled
Obrenovićs, supported the Hungarian Serbs and Croats. Prince
Mihailo was in Novi Sad at the time, while Prince Miloš travelled
to Zagreb to meet with Croat ‘Illyrians’, where he was briefly
detained on Serbia’s request. However, not everyone within
Serbia’s establishment was opposed to the Hungarian Serb rev-
olution. A high-ranking member of the Constitutionalist gov-
ernment resigned to join Serb volunteers in southern Hungary.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire officially protested because of
Serbia’s aid to the Hungarian Serbs, but secretly hoped for the
unification between Vojvodina and Serbia, which would have
meant the restoration of the Ottoman sovereignty over the lower
Pannonian plain.100
99
S. Subotić, Uspomene, ed. by A. Stolić, Belgrade, 2001, 43.
100
ISN, V-1, 276–77.
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The prospect of revolutionary changes and in particular the

Hungarian nationalism encouraged Serb–Croat cooperation.
In March 1848, Ljudevit Gaj of the Illyrian Party in Zagreb
approached Serbia for financial support, while at the same time
Hungarian Serbs sought to establish closer ties with Croatia,
within the Habsburg Monarchy. Meanwhile, General Josip Jelačić
(born in what is now Novi Sad, Serbia) was elected in Zagreb
as the new Ban (governor) of Croatia. This medieval title, and
the Sabor (Assembly), provided symbolic links with the eleventh-
century Croatian kingdom. Serb Patriarch Rajačić gave personal
blessings at Jelačić’s inauguration.
The government of Lajos Kossuth rejected the South Slav
revolutionary proclamations. The Hungarian patriotism was
in full swing, boosted by figures such as poet and revolutionary
Sándor Petőfi (real name Alexander Petrovics), whose mother, like
Kossuth’s parents, was Slovak, while his father may have been of
Serb descent.101 In June, there were armed clashes between local
Serb militias and Hungarian troops. The Hungarians sent a loyal-
ist descendant of Patriarch Arsenije III to mediate in the conflict
and a 10-day ceasefire was agreed. However, a Russian offen-
sive against the Habsburg state in July led to renewed fighting
in southern Hungary. This time Serb refugees fled south, closer
to or into Serbia. Those from wealthy families, such as Savka
Subotić, found it hard to live without the comfort they had been
used to, even though Savka’s temporary exile in Zemun was not
comparable to the experiences of earlier Orthodox refugees who
101
R. A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918, Berkeley, CA,
1974, 381. Petőfi’s romantic-nationalist poetry inspired nineteenth-century
Hungarian Serb poet and painter Djura Jakšić, who as a 16-year-old fought
in the 1848 revolution, and Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, a hugely popular poet,
born into a Serbianized Vlach family in Novi Sad. B. Aleksov, ‘Jovan
Jovanović Zmaj and the Serbian Identity between Poetry and History’, in D.
Mishkova (ed.), We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern
Europe, Budapest, 2009, 273–305.
268
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fled in the opposite direction. The fear of losing home, however,

was real and it must have triggered cross-generational traumas of
these descendants of migrants. When a fellow refugee from Novi
Sad told Savka’s mother in a crying voice that ‘we will all become
homeless and beggars as not even a stone has been left intact in our
town [Novi Sad]’, everyone sat in silence for a while.102
In the meantime, Garašanin instructed Serbia’s envoy in
Constantinople to draft a plan for the creation of a Serbian
vice-kingdom within the Ottoman Empire. According to the pro-
posal, the Porte would extend the Serbian hattı şerıfs of 1829–33 to
Bosnia, Herzegovina, Albania, ‘Old Serbia’ (Raška and Kosovo),
Macedonia and Bulgaria, creating a large, self-governing Balkan
kingdom under the sultan’s suzerainty. The Porte rejected the
proposal, but Garašanin’s agents across the Balkans, and espe-
cially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, continued to propagate closer
ties of these regions with Serbia. At the same time, Serbia’s
nationalist youth called for the liberation of the Serbs living under
‘foreign rule’ and for an internal liberation from Serbia’s author-
itarian regime; František Zach travelled to Cetinje where he was
received warmly by Prince-Bishop Njegoš; there was a talk of a
Serb–Bulgarian union. The Habsburg Serbs’ hopes of territo-
rial autonomy received a boost when in late 1848 the Habsburg
Monarchy turned against Hungary. A joint Croat–Serb army
commanded by Jelačić marched on Pest, and Vienna recognized
the self-proclaimed ‘Duchy of Serbia’ and its Patriarch.
For a brief period, two ‘Serbias’ existed on the Habsburg–
Ottoman border: a highly autonomous Principality of Serbia
to the south and the revolutionary, self-proclaimed Duchy of
Serbia to the north of the border. Hungary’s defeat ended, for
the time being at least, its quest for independence. At the same
time, the Hungarian Serb position was weakened, partly due to
102
Subotić, Uspomene, 45–46.
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internal divisions between the military, the political leaders and

the church, but mainly because the Habsburgs had no intention
of supporting Serb autonomy now that the Hungarians were
defeated. In November 1849, Vienna proclaimed the ‘Duchy
(Vojvodstvo) of Serbia and the Banat of Temesvár (Temišvar)’ as
a new crownland. It had a mixed Serb–Romanian–Hungarian–
German population, its autonomy was little more than symbolic
and it was abolished anyway in 1860.103
The St Andrew’s Assembly

Serbia remained out of but was not unaffected by the Crimean
War, fought in 1853–56 by the Ottoman Empire, France and
Britain against Russia. The 1856 Paris Peace Treaty, which ended
the war, provided for a collective guarantee of Serbia’s autonomy
by Russia, Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and Sardinia (later
Germany and Italy, respectively). The Treaty also granted Serbia
free Danube navigation rights, which helped the principality’s
nascent industrialization.104 Internally, Prince Aleksandar hoped
to marginalize the Council and establish a personal regime, but
could not achieve this without Garašanin and Vučić Perišić, two
oligarchs who enjoyed popular support. The trouble was that the
prince deeply disliked both politicians. The feeling was mutual,
and Francophile Garašanin and Russophile Vučić Perišić also
mistrusted each other. Then in late September 1857, news broke
out of a plot to assassinate Prince Aleksandar. It was master-
minded by Stefan Stefanović Tenka, president of the Council,
and Cvetko Rajović, president of the Supreme Court. It tran-
spired that Prince Miloš funded the conspiracy, but unbeknown
103
ISN, V-1, 274–77.
104
Ćirković, The Serbs, 211; Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji, 280; cf. Č. Antić,
Neutrality as Independence: Great Britain, Serbia and the Crimean War,
Belgrade, 2007.
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to the exiled Obrenović prince, the conspirators planned to ask

the Powers to install a foreign monarch in Serbia following the
removal of Aleksandar Karadjordjević. Death sentences for the
conspirators were overturned due to an intervention by the Porte,
which sent a high official to investigate the crisis on behalf of
the guaranteeing Powers. The Ottoman envoy concluded that the
public opinion had turned against the Karadjordjević prince after
the elderly conspirators were publicly humiliated and tortured,
and that it would be therefore best if they received life sentences
instead. The conspirators would be pardoned after the fall of
Prince Aleksandar and the Constitutionalist regime in 1858, and
Rajović would even briefly serve as prime minister.
Personally not involved in the plot, Garašanin and Vučić Perišić
had sought to remove Aleksandar by other means. In Garašanin’s
mind that could be only achieved through a people’s assembly,
and in this he was supported by the nationalist youth on whom
the 1848 revolutionary ideas had made a strong impact. Unlike
the earlier Serbian state scholars, who were above all interested in
studies, the ‘48 generation was all about action. The leading rep-
resentatives of the revolutionary generation were liberals Jevrem
Grujić (1827–95), Vladimir Jovanović (1833–1922) and Jovan
Ristić (1831–99), who would play a major part in the Serbian pol-
itics during the subsequent period. Educated in newly established
Serbian schools, where they studied Vuk Karadžić’s ethnographic-
historical work, and at French and German universities, where
they were introduced to liberal ideas of that era, these young
men believed in the historical greatness of the Serbian nation.
They wanted to end both the Ottoman sovereignty over Serbia
and what they perceived as similarly oppressive regime of Prince
Aleksandar and the Constitutionalist oligarchs. Encouraged by
Garašanin, the young liberals began a campaign for elections for
a people’s assembly.105
105
Jovanović, Ustavobranitelji, 316, 358–63.
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The elections were called for 15 November (O.S.) 1858,

after Garašanin received reports from district chiefs that there
was a popular mood for change. Candidates opposed to Prince
Aleksandar, not all of whom were necessarily pro-Obrenović,
won in the majority of electoral districts. The new assembly, set
on removing the prince, convened on 30 November in a Belgrade
brewery (because there was no permanent parliament building),
on St Andrew the First Called – ironically, the Karadjordjević
family slava (patron saint). Dramatic arrival of people’s deputies
from across the country contributed to a revolutionary atmos-
phere. Accompanied by priests and peasants, tall, warrior-like
men riding white horses descended on the city; dressed in colour-
ful folk costumes and carrying guns and sabres, they resembled
South Slav folk heroes rather than Serbia’s first parliamentari-
ans. Vučić Perišić was dressed like one of Karadjordje’s early
nineteenth-century insurgents, in contrast to Garašanin’s west
European appearance.106
The Porte welcomed the elections outcome and sent its repre-
sentative to the assembly – who turned out to be a friend of, or
may have been bribed by Miša Anastasijević, the assembly chair-
man. This wealthy businessman lobbied for his son-in-law Djordje
Karadjordjević (the son of Karadjordje’s first-born son Aleksije) to
succeed the throne.107 Meanwhile, Garašanin might have fancied
himself as Serbia’s Napoleon III, whom he had met and greatly
admired. A tense two-month period followed, during which the
prospects of the princely palace being stormed and rumours of a
military coup forced both the embattled prince and the deputies
who called for his abdication to seek safety in the city’s Ottoman
garrison. The prince then abdicated in late December, but the
crisis was not over yet. Masses gathered to defend the assembly –
106
Ibid, 378–85; A. Radenić, Svetoandrejska skupština, Belgrade, 1964.
107
Djordje’s younger son was Paris-based artist Božidar Karadjordjević (1862–
1908), known among friends as ‘Bijou d’art’. See Pavlowitch, Božidart.
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from ‘defenders of the Constitution’ – but were kept under con-

trol by the police, commanded by previously mentioned Stevča
Mihailović. Meanwhile, Garašanin controlled the army, but
nobody seemed to control another armed group of around 600
momci (lads) who roamed freely the streets of Belgrade, answer-
ing only to gazda (boss) Filip Stanković. A merchant, debt col-
lector, gambler and womanizer, Stanković behaved like a hajduk
chief. It emerged he was in Miloš Obrenović’s pay, but was toler-
ated by the liberals, who ultimately gained upper hand over the
Constitutionalists.108
The ‘people’s revolution against the bureaucrats and loan
sharks’, as Slobodan Jovanović described the events of late 1858,
may be seen as the fourth and final phase of the Serbian revo-
lution. It had begun in 1804 with Karadjordje’s uprising, was
followed by Miloš-led ‘second uprising’ and agrarian revolution,
before the Constitutionalists deposed the prince at the beginning
of their ‘bureaucratic revolution’ and continued the transforma-
tion of the society of the former Smederevo sanjak. It is therefore
ironic that the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ resulted in a reac-
tionary outcome – not unlike the 1848 revolution in neighbour-
ing Hungary, incidentally (and, not unlike Slobodan Milošević’s
‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ of the late 1980s, discussed in
Chapter 7). Despite all the liberalism of the politicians who
brought down the Constitutionalists, and despite the presence
of republican ideas among those seeking changes, the Assembly
asked aged Prince Miloš to return and within days the Porte
approved him as Serbia’s new-old prince. As another historian
put it, ‘[i]n a small-scale analogy to the French National Assembly
of 1789, the St. Andrews’ skupština set both Prince Alexander and
Ilija Garašanin packing. But instead of establishing a republic, the
Liberal leaders and assembly could think of nothing better to do
108
S. Jovanović, Druga vlada Miloša i Mihaila (1858–1868), Belgrade, 1923, 5.
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than recall old Prince Miloš to the throne.’109 The establishment

of a republic, however, may not have been realistic at the time
and not only because, strictly speaking, Serbia remained part of an
empire. After the end of the short-lived French Second Republic
in the early 1850s, the only European republic at the time of the
St Andrew’s Assembly was Switzerland, a federal republic only
since 1848.
In any case, Miloš’s second reign would be short lived. He died
in September 1860, aged around 80. Serbia’s prince once again
became Mihailo – now 37, married to a Hungarian countess and
set on leaving his mark on the history of Serbia and the Balkans.
109
G. Stokes, Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in
Nineteenth-century Serbia, Durham, NC, 1990, 8.
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5
Independence (1860–1914)
u
Ottoman Departures
On 16 September 1861, Christians and Muslims in Serbia
celebrated, respectively, the 38th birthday of Prince Mihailo, his
first since returning to the country just under a year earlier, and
the beginning of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic year,
and one of four sacred months when warfare is forbidden. Felix
Kanitz, a Hungarian Jewish traveller and scholar, witnessed the
celebrations while walking in central Belgrade that evening with a
group of Serbian friends. ‘In 1861 Belgrade was still the Eldorado
of most peculiar contrasts’, Kanitz recalled.
Around 6pm streetlamps were turned on in the Christian part of the

town. Sound of music could be heard mixed with shouts ‘Long live
[the prince]!’ … At the same time the Sahat kula (clock tower) at the
[Ottoman] fortress announced 12 midnight according to the Turkish
time. Sound of bells had hardly stopped when cannon shots, fired at
exact intervals, marked the beginning of the festival of Muharram, the
birthday of Muhammad, Allah’s great prophet. Fifteen minarets in the
[Muslim part of] town and the fortress were lit at the same time as if by
a magic wand, while at the same time pyramid-, star-, coat-of-arms- and
letter-shaped lights were switched on at the Great Market in honour
of Prince Mihailo’s birthday. It was like a scene from a fairy tale, only
spoiled somewhat by a full moon.
A military orchestra and a children’s choir performed in honour

of the prince, while Christians and Muslims sat together outside
a stand ‘built for the occasion by an opportunistic Persian’ – chat-
ting, drinking tea, lemonade and sherbet (an Ottoman Turkish
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soft drink) and smoking Oriental-style pipes. After a muezzin’s

call for prayer, the only Muslims left on the streets were mem-
bers of the Ottoman police, but Christians continued to party
uninterrupted.1
Kanitz describes a multicultural Belgrade where two main
groups, typically depicted as antagonistic towards each other,
celebrated jointly and simultaneously, with mutual respect and
taste for Ottoman-era refreshments. Even more remarkable
is that this seemingly idyllic scene took place less than a year
before an incident in the city led to armed clashes and provoked a
major international crisis. Five years later, Serbia’s last Ottomans
would depart from the de facto independent and increasingly
national state. Kanitz was likely unaware of less than idyllic
relationship between Ottoman soldiers and Christian popula-
tion in smaller garrison towns, but for all periodic tensions and
incidents, the two main communities had coexisted more or
less peacefully during the ‘dual government’. Prince Aleksandar
and the Constitutionalist regime had enjoyed a relatively good
relationship with the Ottomans, and even Prince Mihailo, who
adopted a more nationalist course upon returning to the throne,
established a cordial relationship with Alı Rızâ, the last Pasha
of Belgrade. The polyglot, Paris-educated pasha and his Greek-
born, half-French wife Meira, who had a taste for music and
arts, were well-integrated members of the Belgrade high soci-
ety, attending and hosting salons and dinner parties for the local
1
F. Kanic [Kanitz], Srbija: Zemlja i stanovništvo, od rimskog doba do kraja
XIX veka, transl. from German by G. Ernjaković, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1985,
I, 39–41. The translation of the quoted text into English is mine; cf.
N. Mišković, Bazari i bulevari: Svet života u Beogradu 19. veka, transl.
from German by R. Gašić, Belgrade, [2010], 189–90. As part of the ‘dual
government’, discussed in the previous chapter, streets of towns were
patrolled by both Ottoman and Serbian police. For different ‘time zones’ in
the Ottoman Empire, see A. Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time
and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire, Chicago, 2015.
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nascent aristocracy and foreign consuls. Alı Rızâ Pasha took

Serbian language classes; his teacher was Matija Ban, a Catholic
Serb from Dubrovnik and a Yugoslav activist who had moved
to Belgrade in the 1840s. Meanwhile, Meira became a close
friend of Anka Konstantinović, Prince Mihailo’s first cousin,
and Margarita Ban (Matija’s wife), who was also of Greek ori-
gin. This was a small, cosmopolitan group of Belgrade’s ‘upper
class’, in which women played an important, increasingly eman-
cipated role. It resembled similar social gatherings in central and
west European capitals – but also elsewhere in the Balkans and in
Constantinople, where foreign diplomats and western-educated
Ottomans brought modern ideas and customs during the reigns
of sultans Abdülaziz (1861–76) and Abdülhamid II (1876–1909).2
It is important though to take a nuanced view of cross-
communal relations. The late Ottoman era witnessed an
increased polarization of inter-confessional relations, especially
between Christians and Muslims. The two main communities
in the Serbian principality lived in their own, largely separate
worlds. At the same time, there was a greater blurring of tra-
ditional boundaries established by the ever-evolving millet sys-
tem.3 The scene Kanitz described was perhaps possible only in
a highly autonomous Serbia. For all the tolerant nature of the
Haji Mustafa Pasha regime of the late eighteenth century, such
joint celebrations among different communities with seemingly
equal rights would have been unthinkable in the Ottoman sanjak
2
M. Kokanović Marković, ‘Ženski umetnički saloni Anke Obrenović i Mejre
(supruge Ali Riza Paše): Nova uloga žene u društvu’, Muzika: Časopis za
muzičku kulturu (Sarajevo), 21:1 (2017), 28–43; P. D. Dimitrijević-Stošić,
Posela u starome Beogradu, Belgrade, 1985; E. Boyar and K. Fleet, A Social
History of Ottoman Istanbul, Cambridge, 2010, ch. 8; cf. G. Sluga, The Invention
of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon, Princeton, NJ, 2021.
3
N. Clayer, ‘Religious Pluralism in the Balkans during the late Ottoman
Imperial Era: Towards a Dynamic Model’, in R. Murphey (ed.), Imperial
Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean, London, 2016, 101–14.
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of Smederevo. In that sense, Kanitz was probably right that

‘[t]he festive mood was respected by both sides, but many elderly
Muslims could not forget the good old times when the [Christian]
reaya was obliged to give way and bow in front of every turban’.4
Serbia’s new, more nationalist course vis-à-vis the Ottoman
authorities had begun during Miloš’s brief second reign (1858–60).
Having lost none of his political instinct, the elderly prince used
nationalism to appease the Liberals and discredit the Turkophile
Constitutionalists. But it was Miloš’s heir and successor Mihailo
who during his own second reign (1860–68) set Serbia on collision
course with the Ottomans. Mihailo’s main goal was Serbia’s inde-
pendence. The ambitious Serbian prince wanted to go one step
further than his father, the architect of the country’s autonomy.
Unlike Miloš, an illiterate autocrat, Mihailo was an enlightened
despot whose vision of Serbia was as an enlarged, independent
and modern state. He looked up to Napoleon III (French presi-
dent, 1848–52, emperor 1852–70), a supporter of the Italian and
Romanian unification movements. An English priest and travel-
ler, who was granted audience with Mihailo, later wrote how he
expected to meet a Balkan prince who would talk about liberating
his country and fighting the ‘Turks’. Instead, he was received by a
well-read, polyglot prince in a rather modest study with little fur-
niture but full of books, documents and maps. Mihailo talked, ‘in
perfect French’, about education and economy and was curious to
know the Englishman’s impressions of his country.5
The nationalist Liberals approved Mihailo’s foreign policy but
opposed his domestic autocratic rule. The prince marginalized
the National Assembly (Narodna skupština – one of the Liberals’
greatest achievements), the Council and the Supreme Court.
4
Kanic, 41.
5
Rev. W. Denton, Servia and the Servians, London, 1862, 233–35. Benjámin
Kállay, Austro-Hungarian consul-general in Belgrade, similarly noted
Mihailo’s excellent French. Dnevnik Benjamina Kalaja, 1868–1875, ed. by
A. Radenić, Belgrade/Novi Sad, 1976, entry for 20 April 1868, 25.
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figure 5.1 Prince Mihailo Obrenović, c.1850

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Mihailo pushed through a law on the ‘people’s army’, which bur-

dened Serbia’s budget and alarmed the Ottomans. Most Liberals
were marginalized or went to exile, as the prince found allies
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among his old enemies, the Constitutionalists, now known as the

Conservatives. This resulted in Garašanin’s appointment as prime
minister (1861–67). Garašanin shared Mihailo’s vision of Serbia as
a South Slav Piedmont, independent from Russia and Austria, and
believed that Serbia needed to unite with Habsburg and Ottoman
Serbs and other Balkan peoples. It was around this time that he
coined the doctrine ‘The Balkans to the Balkan peoples’.6
A French colonel was brought in to serve as Serbia’s war min-
ister, while František Zach, Prince Czartoryski’s Czech agent,
was tasked with training the Serbian army officers. Within a
short period of time, Serbia, a country of 1,250,000 million peo-
ple, built an army of 90,000 soldiers and could mobilize further
60,000 men. The Ottomans and the Austrians took notice. Serbia
possessed the largest army in the Balkans, but in reality it was a
poorly equipped and trained militia-type force.7
The militarization of Serbia contributed to growing tensions
between the Christians and Muslims in the principality. After
an incident at a water fountain queue in Belgrade in June 1862,
Ottoman soldiers murdered a Serbian boy; during the ensuing
violence, a Serb dragoman (interpreter) and three gendarmes
were also killed. Several days of armed clashes followed, during
which the Ottomans bombarded the city from the fortress. The
damage was relatively small, mainly because Ottoman guns were
outdated. However, there was a real danger of a full-blown war,
and the Powers called a peace conference in Istanbul. The Serbian
delegation, headed by Jovan Ristić, requested the withdrawal of
the remaining Ottoman troops from Serbia. The Ottomans on
their part demanded that Serbia reduced its army. France and
Russia supported the Serbs, while Austria and Britain sided with
6
S. Jovanović, Druga vlada Miloša i Mihaila (1858–1868), Belgrade, 1923,
63–86, 89–92, 210–11; M. B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia,
1804–1918, New York, 1976, 2 vols, I, 215–16.
7
Jovanović, Druga vlada, 304–15.
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the Ottomans. In the end, a compromise solution saw the remain-

ing Muslim civilians (between 3,000 and 7,000, depending on
source) leave Serbia, while two smaller Ottoman garrisons were
abandoned. In return, Serbia agreed to reduce its army to a size
deemed acceptable by the Ottomans – and Austrians. The depar-
ture of Muslim civilians did not go without resistance, especially
in Užice, home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the
principality. In the end, with the Serbian army threatening to
intervene, Serbia’s last Muslim civilians left, mainly for eastern
Bosnia. There they initially lived in refugee camps, before even-
tually integrating into the new environment.8
The departure of Serbia’s Muslims during the nineteenth cen-
tury was regulated by the Powers, and by the Ottoman and Serb
authorities, as we have seen in the case of the early 1830s hattı
şerıfs. In some ways, it anticipated the infamous 1923 Treaty of
Lausanne, which made the Greek–Turkish population exchange
compulsory. The modern international legal framework designed
to protect minorities living in newly emerging nation states was
developed in the nineteenth century. The Concert of Europe –
that is the balance of power established at the 1815 Congress of
Vienna – ‘fashioned, apportioned, and reconstituted states, devot-
ing a good part of its energy to the regulation of majority-minority
dynamics in the Ottoman Empire and various states formed from
its gradual “retreat from Europe”’.9 It was also during this period,
8
Mišković, Bazari, 189–216; cf. A. D’Alessandri, ‘The Muslim Question in
Serbia 1862: Bombardment of Belgrade and the Newborn Kingdom of Italy’,
in V. G. Pavlović (ed.), Italy’s Balkan Strategies (19th–20th Century), Belgrade,
2014, 29–44; Lj. P. Ristić, ‘The Bombing of Belgrade (1862) and the Cession
of Fortresses to Serbia (1867) in British Politics’, in Aslantaş et al. (eds),
Belgrade, 1521–1867, Belgrade, 2018, 407–26.
9
U. Özsu, Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers,
Oxford, 2015, 32–33; cf. M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an
Idea, London, 2012; A. D. Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security
and the Language of Transgression, Cambridge, 2021, esp. Introduction.
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and in relation to the ‘Eastern Crisis’, that the Powers attempted

to manage humanitarian crises caused by forced population
movements.10
Taking advantage of an anti-Ottoman rebellion in Crete
and Austria’s defeat against Prussia in 1866, Serbia managed
to eventually negotiate the full withdrawal of Ottoman troops
from its territory. In two highly symbolic acts, Prince Mihailo
first travelled to Istanbul in early 1867 to personally thank Sultan
Abdülaziz – a grace-saving gesture meant to imply the sultan’s
suzerainty. Then on 19 April, Alı Rızâ Pasha handed over the keys
of the Belgrade and three other Ottoman fortresses to Mihailo and
the Serbian army for ‘safekeeping’, before leaving the city on 24
April. ‘Around 11:00am virtuous Alı Rızâ Pasha, who had hitherto
commanded all Turkish garrisons in Serbia, departed from the
city in the prince’s car’, reported Serbia’s Official Gazette. He
was given a guard of honour by the Serbian army, while a military
orchestra played as he boarded a ship at the Sava River, in the
presence of Serbian gendarmerie in festive uniforms. By early
May 1867, the last Ottoman soldiers left. Serbia continued to pay
an annual tribute to the Porte and to fly the Ottoman state flag
over the Belgrade fortress, but for all intents and purposes it was
now an independent state.11
10
D. Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman
Empire, 1815–1914, Princeton, NJ, 2012; cf. J. Manasek, ‘Empire Displaced:
Ottoman-Habsburg Forced Migration and the Near Eastern Crisis, 1875–
1878’, PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 2013.
11
The citation from Srbske novine (Official Gazette) in Kokanović Marković,
32. See also Jovanović, Druga vlada Miloša i Mihaila, 204–209; Petrovich, A
History of Modern Serbia, I, 316–19; Ristić, ‘The Bombing of Belgrade’; S.
Rajić, ‘Belgrade and the City Question [of] 1866/1867 in the Confidential
Correspondence of [the] Foreign Office’, in Aslantaş et al. (eds), Belgrade,
1521–1867, 423–36. Between leaving Belgrade in 1867 and his death in
Autumn 1876, Alı Rızâ was the vali (governor) of Ottoman villayets in
Anatolia, Libya and, briefly in 1876, Herzegovina.
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Serbia’s Balkan Alliances

It seemed as if the 1860s was to be the decade when the national
liberation movements of the 1840s would finally succeed.
Following Garibaldi’s defeat of the Kingdom of Naples, a united
Kingdom of Italy, under Vittorio Emanuelle I (1861–78) was pro-
claimed in March 1861, shortly after the first Italian parliament
convened in Turin. Prussia’s victories against Austria (1866) and
France (1871) led to the proclamation, in Paris in January 1871,
of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I (1871–88) and
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1871–90). Later that year, Italy
completed its unification by finally incorporating Rome (minus
the Vatican).
Austria’s defeat against Prussia forced Vienna to grant Hungary
a de facto independence. The 1867 Ausgleich (Compromise) trans-
formed the Habsburg Monarchy into a dual, Austro-Hungarian
Empire. A Hungarian–Croat compromise followed, but it could
not prevent the revival of the Yugoslavist politics in Habsburg
Croatia. In 1866, Josip Juraj Strossmayer, the Roman Catholic
Bishop of Djakovo, and Franjo Rački, a cannon and historian,
founded the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb –
the first time the word ‘Yugoslav’ was used officially.12
Meanwhile, Prince Mihailo dreamed of creating a large South
Slav state, which in addition to Serbia would include Bosnia,
Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Bulgaria. Serbia, as the
12
The Academy was renamed the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in
1941, and then again in 1991, the original name having been restored between
the end of the Second World War and the (second) end of Yugoslavia.
For nineteenth century Yugoslavism, see I. Banac, The National Question in
Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Ithaca, NY, 1984; A. Djilas, The Contested
Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953, Cambridge,
MA, 1991, ch. 1; M. Gross, ‘On the Integration of the Croatian Nation: A
Case Study in Nation Building’, East European Quarterly, 15:2 (1981), 209–25;
D. Rusinow, ‘The Yugoslav Idea before Yugoslavia’, in D. Djokić (ed.),
Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992, London, 2003, 11–26.
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only ‘free’ South Slav state, and the only one with its own polit-
ical institutions and a relatively modern army, was to be at the
core of a future ‘Yugoslavia’, with Mihailo, naturally, its ruler.
The Serbian ruler’s ambitious vision should be understood in the
context of the era, which saw the creation of several independent
or quasi-independent (in the case of Hungary) nation states.13
Contacts were made, via Vuk Karadžić, with Montenegro’s
new prince, Nikola, who like Mihailo, ascended to the throne
in 1860. Serbia also provided shelter and funds to Bulgarian
revolutionary Georgi Rakovski. Bulgarian revolutionary publi-
cations were printed in Belgrade, while Rakovski’s ‘Bulgarian
Legion’ joined Serbian forces during the 1862 clashes with the
Ottomans in Belgrade. (The Legion would be disbanded soon
and Rakovski would move to Bucharest). Close contacts were
also kept with Hungarian Serbs, who had seen the abolition of
Vojvodina in 1860, and with Strossmayer and Croat Yugoslav
activists. Meanwhile, Serbia’s and Montenegro’s agents operated
in Bosnia-Herzegovina.14 There was a hope that this predomi-
nantly Serbo-Croat speaking Ottoman province with around 40
per cent Orthodox population could be joined to Serbia. When
in 1867 Napoleon III told Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister
Count Andrássy that in the event of the collapse of the Ottoman
rule in the Balkans, Bosnia should go to the Habsburg Empire
(this idea had circulated previously, as discussed in Chapter 4),
the Hungarian politician allegedly responded that ‘the ship
is full’, and that Bosnia should be instead joined with Serbia.
Andrássy’s thinking was based on three not unreasonable prem-
ises: first, from Hungary’s point of view, too many Slavs had
already lived in the Dual Monarchy; second, in exchange to
13
G. Jakšić and V. J. Vučković, Spoljna politika Srbije za vlade kneza Mihaila:
Prvi Balkanski savez, Belgrade, 1963.
14
ISN, V-1, 286–301; cf. R. J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd edn,
Cambridge, 2005, 75–76.
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receiving Bosnia, Serbia would be obliged to abandon any plans

for uniting with Habsburg Serbs and Croats; and third, Russia’s
influence would weaken because of what would amount to a
Habsburg–Serb ‘compromise’.
It is very likely that Andrássy conveyed the same m essage to
Mihailo Obrenović when they met the same year at the Serbian
prince’s Hungarian countryside house. When in Spring 1868
Benjámin Kállay arrived in Belgrade as the new Habsburg consul-
general, his aim was to bring Serbia to Austria-Hungary’s camp,
by offering Belgrade the whole or part of Bosnia-Herzegovina.15
Austria-Hungary also saw Serbia as its main trade partner in the
Balkans, and it was for that reason that it wished to see a new rail-
way linking Belgrade with southern Balkans, as Kállay told Prince
Mihailo in April 1868.16
Mihailo Obrenović was a liberal-nationalist, in the nineteenth-
century sense of the word, and he may have been a South Slav
patriot, but he was not a Pan-Slav. He asked Kállay why the
Habsburg Monarchy was so afraid of Pan-Slavism. When the
Habsburg consul responded that it was Pan-Russianism rather
than Pan-Slavism he was concerned about, Mihailo explained
that the Pan-Slavism would ultimately fail over the question of
language – because the Slavs did not speak the same language
they could not unite into a single nation. The main reason the
Serbs harboured sympathies for Russia, Mihailo explained, was
because it was the only Great Power that came to their aid dur-
ing the anti-Ottoman uprisings. Now that Serbia’s autonomy is
15
I. D. Armour, Apple of Discord: The ‘Hungarian Factor’ in Austro-Serbian
Relations, 1867–1881, West Lafayette, IN, 2014; Jovanović, Druga vlada
Miloša i Mihaila, 218–24; cf. R. Okey, ‘A Trio of Hungarian Balkanists: Béni
Kállay, István Burián and Lajos Thallóczy in the Age of High Nationalism’,
Slavonic and East European Review, 80:2 (2002), 234–66.
16
Dnevnik Benjamina Kalaja, entry for 28 April 1868, 29–30; cf. J. R. Lampe
and M. R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950, Bloomington, IN,
1982, ch. 4.
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collectively guaranteed by the Powers what good has it brought

the country, Mihailo asked rhetorically.17
Andrássy and the Habsburg foreign office would several years
later abandon the ‘Bosnia to Serbia’ plan, but the idea apparently
continued to circulate in western diplomatic circles. In 1871,
British ambassador to Constantinople asked Serbia’s diplomatic
representative there if Belgrade would consider abandoning its
quest for full independence in exchange for being allowed to
unite with Bosnia-Herzegovina within the Ottoman framework.
The Serbian diplomat answered positively.18 This, of course,
resembled similar proposals by Garašanin and Ristić, discussed
in Chapter 4 and in the following text. It is possible – while being
sensitive to different contexts and circumstances – to make an
analogy with Serbia’s Yugoslav politics in the twentieth century.
During the century, various Serb leaders opted for a state frame-
work that would bring together most Serbs living in the western
Balkans, even if it meant abandoning the idea of a smaller, inde-
pendent Serbia.
Back in the mid-1860s, Mihailo did not think Serbia could
wage a successful war against the Ottomans without its Balkan
allies, and he certainly did not want to declare war on Austria,
despite calls from the Liberals and the nationalist youth to
join Italy and Prussia in 1866. Among those in favour of war
was liberal Vladimir Jovanović, whom Mazzini had written
to encourage the Serbs to join the Italian struggle against the
Habsburgs. Jovanović, who at the time lived in exile in southern
Hungary, joined forces with Svetozar Miletić, Jevrem Grujić,
Jovan Jovanović Zmaj and others in advocating a Serb or South
17
Dnevnik Benjamina Kalaja, entry for 28 April 1868, 29–30.
18
Hristić to Ristić, Pera [a district of Istanbul], 13 April 1871, Pisma Filipa
Hristića Jovanu Ristiću (1868–1880), compiled by G. Jakšić, Belgrade,
1953, 56–59; cf. S. Rajić, Spoljna politika Srbije: Izmedju očekivanja i realnosti,
1868–78, Belgrade, 2015.
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Slav unification in which Serbia was to play the role of Piedmont

in the Italian unification. In summer 1866, they formed in Novi
Sad the ‘United Serbian Youth’, inspired by similar Italian and
German organizations.19 Serb liberals advocated the liberation
of all European nations and their unification into some sort of
United States of Europe of which a united Serbian or South Slav
state would be a member. Nineteenth-century Serbian nation-
alism had its own specific features, but it was influenced by and
developed within the wider European context. Usually neglected
in literature on Serbia is the tradition of federalism and pan-
Europeanism – and of republicanism and socialism, as discussed
in the following text.
It is tempting to ponder how different the history of
Southeastern Europe, and indeed the world, would have been
if Serbia had united with Bosnia-Herzegovina in the nineteenth
century, in which case Montenegro likely would have joined the
union as well. Similarly, one might wonder if the South Slavs,
including Croats and Slovenes, and possibly Bulgarians, had
united in the 1860s or 1870s, whether a common national iden-
tity would have formed in this hypothetical Yugoslavia, like it did
in Italy and Germany. There, regional, linguistic, historic and, in
the case of the latter, religious differences were not necessarily
19
Jovanović, Druga vlada Miloša i Mihaila, 227–41. See also G. Stokes,
Legitimacy Through Liberalism: Vladimir Jovanović and the Transformation
of Serbian Politics, Seattle, WA, 1975. Vladimir Jovanović named his son
Slobodan (Freedom) and daughter Pravda (Justice), introducing these names
to the Serbs (only Slobodan took off). Slobodan Jovanović would become
one of Serbia’s greatest historians, jurists and literary critics, famed for his
writing style which did not obscure his sharp analytical skills. His work on
nineteenth-century Serbia, which informs much of this chapter, remains
unmatched. Jovanović briefly served as prime minister of London-based
Yugoslav government-in-exile during the Second World War. He died
in 1958, as an émigré in London, having been also born in exile, in 1869
in Novi Sad, where his father had fled due to political differences with
Prince Mihailo.
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lesser than those that existed among the South Slavs (they remain
to this day, but so do the countries, unlike Yugoslavia). And what
would have happened with Bosnia’s Muslims in either of these
imaginary scenarios? Would they have been expelled and exposed
to violence, like local Muslim population had been in Serbia and
Greece, and later also in Bulgaria and Montenegro? Or would
have the awareness of the kinship between Orthodox, Catholic
and Muslim Slavs in Bosnia and Serbia, and differences between
‘our Turks’ and ‘real’ Turks and non-Slav Muslims, which some
Serb advocates made at the time, eventually prevailed?20
Mihailo’s ‘Balkan programme’ clearly did not follow a single
thread; like Garašanin’s Načertanije it was incoherent and
self-contradictory. There existed, throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, concurrent, sometimes contradictory
and conflicting ideas about a unified Serb or South Slav state.
This was not necessarily unique to the Serbs – similar trends may
be observed in the case of Croats, Greeks and indeed German and
Italian unification movements.
In October 1866, Serbia and Montenegro signed a pact at
Cetinje that envisaged their unification and a joint action to liber-
ate ‘the Serbian people from the Turkish yoke and to unite them
in one Serbian state’, under Prince Mihailo. However, there was a
rivalry between the two ruling houses. Nikola suspected Mihailo
wanted to marginalize the Montenegrin dynasty. A peace agree-
ment between Prince Nikola and Ottoman Omer Pasha Latas, an
20
E. Hajdarpašić, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the
Balkans, 1840–1914, Ithaca, NY, 2015, 207–16. When Yugoslavia was
eventually created in 1918, attempts were made to integrate Muslim South
Slavs into a supranational and secular Yugoslav nation. Indeed, it was in
Yugoslavia, albeit not until the late 1960s, that Bosnia’s Muslims were
recognized as a distinct nation. See X. Bougarel, Islam and Nationhood
in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Surviving Empires, London, 2018, and, by the
same author, ‘Bosnian Muslims and the Yugoslav Idea’, in Djokić (ed.),
Yugoslavism, 100–14.
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ethnic Serb convert to Islam, signed in 1862, had in turn aroused

suspicion in Belgrade about the Montenegrin ruler’s motives.21
The relationship with the Bulgarians also hit the rocks when
in April 1867 Bulgarian revolutionaries convened in Bucharest to
declare as their aim the creation of a ‘Yugoslav Empire’ around
a large Bulgarian entity that would incorporate Macedonia and
Thrace. From Serbia’s point of view, this represented a depar-
ture from a previous plan for a united Serbo–Bulgarian state and
Orthodox church. Later that year, Mihailo secured alliance with
Greece, the only independent Christian Balkan state at the time
and the only one with a navy and western support. This was a
coup for Belgrade, but like with the Bulgarians, rivalry over
Macedonia put a spanner in the wheels of the Greco–Serb alli-
ance. In February 1868, a pact was signed between Serbia and
recently united Romania, which, like Serbia, enjoyed internation-
ally guaranteed autonomy within the Ottoman state.22 Ultimately,
however, these initiatives came to nothing, because the Serbian
prince was assassinated several months later.
The aforementioned English traveller had noted that Mihailo
liked to walk or drive together with Princess Julia with very little
security. ‘Certainly no sovereign in Europe maintains less state,
or dispenses so thoroughly with guards as Prince Michel’, the
Englishman wrote.23 On 11 June (29 May O.S.) 1868, Mihailo,
21
Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, I, 323–34; D. Vujović, Ujedinjenje Crne
Gore i Srbije, Titograd [Podgorica], 1962, 25–26. Omer Pasha (1806–71) was
born Mihajlo Latas (and therefore was the namesake of his contemporary
Mihailo Obrenović) in a Serb Orthodox family in the Habsburg Croatian
Military Border. He later converted to Islam and distinguished himself in the
Crimean War and in crushing both Muslim and Christian rebellions against the
sultan in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nobel Prize–winning, Bosnia-born Yugoslav
writer Ivo Andrić’s novel Omerpaša Latas (1977) was published in 2018 as a New
York Review of Books classic: Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan, in Celia
Hawkesworth’s translation and with an introduction by W. T. Vollmann.
22
Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, I, 326–28.
23
Denton, 233.
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by now estranged from his wife, was picnicking at the Topčider

park with his cousin and lover Katarina, and a small party that
included Katarina’s mother Anka Konstantinović and one of
Garašanin’s sons, who was the prince’s adjutant. They were
ambushed by a group of assassins who shot Mihailo and Anka
(who tried to protect the prince). Mihailo had some powerful
enemies, including the Liberals and supporters of exiled Prince
Aleksandar Karadjordjević, and he was not exactly popular among
the Habsburgs and the Ottomans either. However, while the
assassins were quickly arrested and tried, the question who was
really behind the assassination remains unanswered.24
Mihailo’s Balkan alliances anticipated the events of 1912–13,
when regional pacts, against the Ottoman Empire, and rivalries,
over Macedonia, led to two Balkan Wars. The union between
Serbia and Montenegro was not achieved until late November
1918, just days before their unification with the Habsburg South
Slavs into the new Yugoslav state. Ironically, this was done under
the rival Karadjordjević dynasty – by then the Obrenovićs would
be extinguished and the Petrovićs exiled.
Childless Mihailo was succeeded by his 14-year-old nephew
Milan (prince 1868–82, king 1882–88). A two-men regency was
appointed to rule in Milan’s name until he came of age. The
regents, Milivoje Blaznavac (1824–73) and Jovan Ristić, were
rather different in terms of personality and ideology. Blaznavac was
ambitious, French- and German-educated; unlike his fellow liberal-
nationalist ‘Parisians’, Blaznavac’s ideology was pragmatism.
24
ISN, V-1, 301; Jovanović, Druga vlada Miloša i Mihaila, 262–64; G. Stokes,
Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in Nineteenth-Century
Serbia, Durham, NC, 1990, 131–45. The Habsburg authorities investigated a
possible role played by Prince Aleksandar, who lived in exile in Hungary, but
could not prove his complicity in the conspiracy. I. D. Armour, ‘Hungary’s
Failed Bid to Control Serbia: The Trial of Alexander Karadjordjević,
1868–1871’, International History Review, 31:4 (2009), 740–70.
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He married Katarina Konstantinović, an old flame, after Mihailo’s

death. The marriage and rumours about him being Prince Miloš’s
illegitimate son made Blaznavac one of the most powerful men in
the country. Indeed, many believed he might attempt to seize the
throne. Ristić, educated mainly in Berlin, was a liberal-nationalist
who had also enhanced his social status through marriage to a
woman from a wealthy and politically well-connected family. He
earned reputation as an exceptionally skilled diplomat while serv-
ing as Serbia’s envoy in Constantinople during the negotiations
over the Ottomans’ withdrawal.25
Mihailo had de facto suspended the 1838 Constitution and
marginalized the National Assembly, after the revolutionary
events of 1858 gave it a more prominent role. A new constitution
was promulgated in 1869. It reconfirmed and extended hereditary
rights of the Obrenović dynasty, while preventing the return of
the exiled Karadjordjević family; the assembly became the leg-
islative body, responsible for new laws and amending old ones,
jointly with the prince. The constitution fell short, however, of
establishing a parliamentary government, as the ministers were
not responsible to the assembly. Finally, the 1869 Constitution
introduced a near universal male suffrage, enabling all tax-paying
males to vote in elections. It was a compromise between advocates
of a genuine people’s assembly (Ristić) and state bureaucracy
(Blaznavac). It also meant that the old political conflict dating
back to the 1850s was revived.26
Nascent ‘Europeanization’
The departure of Ottoman troops in the 1860s, and more gener-
ally of ‘Turkish’ population, was understood as inseparable from
25
S. Jovanović, Vlada Milana Obrenovića, Belgrade, 1934 (2nd, revised edn),
3 vols, I, 1–33.
26
Ibid, 106–10, 133–34.
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Serbia’s modernization, as the country gradually adopted, some-

times superficially, ‘European’ values and appearances. Ironically
perhaps, the last Ottoman pasha of Belgrade and his wife were
an integral part of the early modern social life among the upper
classes, as already mentioned. What is generally unacknowledged
even in anti-nationalist historiography focusing on Serbia’s rela-
tionship with Europe is that the Ottoman Empire too had sought
to modernize and ‘Europeanize’ at around the same time, which
in some cases led to resistance from anti-reform Muslims, in the
Balkans and elsewhere.27
The National Theatre building in Belgrade (opened in 1869)
is a good example of these ‘European’ trends in architecture.
Newly built hotels, cafes and restaurants, and guilds and pro-
fessional associations’ buildings (some of which remain in the
Knez Mihailova and nearby streets in downtown Belgrade) also
followed ‘European’ models. This was mirrored in private life.
Middle and upper classes hosted private parties, where guests
would play music, dance, recite poetry and read prose – not unlike
similar social gatherings in ‘western’ Europe, introduced by
returning students and foreign diplomats. Women, usually daugh-
ters and wives of the rich and powerful, played a major role in
the ‘Europeanization’ of the social life, and so this process is also
associated with the beginnings of the emancipation of women and
the arrival of first feminist ideas in Serbia.28
The ‘return’ to Europe meant moving away from the Ottoman
era. Serbia’s urban spaces were increasingly ‘freed’ of any obvi-
ous reminders of this past, though this was not fully achieved as
27
F. F. Anscombe, State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands,
Cambridge, 2014, ch. 4; Howard, A History of the Ottoman Empire, ch. 6.
28
N. Božinović, Žensko pitanje u Srbiji u 19. i 20. veku, Belgrade, 1996;
Kokanović Marković, ‘Ženski umetnički saloni’; Lj. Trgovčević, ‘Žene
kao deo elite u Srbiji 19. veka: Otvaranje pitanja’, in L. Perović (ed.),
Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima XIX i XX veka, II: Položaj žene kao merilo
modernizacije, Belgrade, 1998, 251–68.
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Ottoman-era houses and cobbled streets survived well into the

twentieth century.29 In agreement with the Porte, which was not
always respected, abandoned mosques, some of which had been
damaged or destroyed during the wars of the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, were not to be demolished but simply
left abandoned. This was a sad ultimate faith for most Muslim
religious shrines and many other objects that testified of the
Ottoman civilization across the Balkans.
Rural areas were less affected by the nascent modernization,
but there, too, change slowly took place. A British journalist
who travelled through Serbia in the 1890s was struck by ‘the
unmistakeable [feel of the] Orient’ of the southern regions
joined to Serbia in 1878 (see the following text); these parts felt
like ‘a different country’ in comparison to the northern regions
that had become autonomous in 1829.30 There the countryside
had been predominantly Christian even prior to the 1804 insur-
gency. The departure of Muslims, who lived mainly in urban
areas, had a major impact on Serbia’s society, as discussed pre-
viously. Some smaller towns (varošice, pl. from varošica – after
város, the Hungarian word for town) in central Serbia (Bagrdan,
Batočina, Ražanj) lost their Oriental urban or semi-urban
29
A. Kadijević, ‘Arhitektura: Okvir privatnog života u srpskim zemljama od
početka 19. veka do Prvog svetskog rata’, in A. Stolić i N. Makuljević (eds),
Privatni život kod Srba u 19. veku, Belgrade, 2006, 251–58; N. Makuljević,
Umetnost i nacionalna ideja u XIX veku: Sistem evropske i srpske vizuelne
kulture u službi nacije, Belgrade, 2006; Mišković, Bazari, op. cit. See also M.
Jovanović, ‘Bourgeois Worlds and Urban Nightmares: The Post-Ottoman
Balkan City through the Lens of Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers’, Journal of
Urban Cultural Studies, 5:2 (2018), 187–206.
30
H. Vivian, Servia: The Poor Man’s Paradise, London, 1897, 264. Novels
by Bora Stanković and Stevan Sremac, classic nineteenth-century Serbian
writers, offer an excellent insight into a Serbian-Ottoman society in transition
following the departure of the Ottomans from present-day southern Serbia.
Their most popular works have been adapted for stage and screen in recent
years, drawing record audiences.
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character following the emigration of Muslims in the early

nineteenth century; subsequently, they transformed into large
Christian villages.
There was indeed something contradictory in the ‘return to
Europe’ and the ‘restoration of Stefan Dušan’s empire’ narra-
tives. Similarly, the ‘rediscovery’ of Serbia’s medieval ‘greatness’
and Byzantine Orthodox heritage seemed to ignore that for long
periods of time medieval Serbia was in conflict with Byzantium,
as discussed earlier in the book.31 Typically perhaps for a society
in transition, nineteenth-century Serbia – not yet post-Ottoman,
and not yet quite ‘European’ – was full of contradictions, as it
searched for its place in a Europe of large, competing empires
often hostile to the emerging nation states.
Socialists and Radicals

During the 1870s, socialist ideas were brought to Serbia by
returning students, just like liberalism had been imported in the
1850s by the likes of Grujić, Ristić and others. The main socialist
thinker was Swiss-educated Svetozar Marković (1846–75). Born
in Zaječar, eastern Serbia, into a teacher’s family, Marković spent
his formative years in Jagodina and Kragujevac, before going
abroad to study at the Zurich Polytechnic. There he became
familiar with and was influenced by the work of Russian socialist
and nihilist Nikolay Chernishevsky (1828–89) and poet and phi-
losopher Nikolay Nekrasov (1821–78). Like in the case of Serbian
liberal nationalism introduced by the ‘Parisians’, Marković’s was a
socialism with a local flavour. He and his followers believed Serbia
could avoid the industrialization and capitalism of the western
31
A. Ignjatović, ‘Byzantium’s Apt Inheritors: Serbian Historiography, Nation-
Building and Imperial Imagination, 1882–1941’, Slavonic and East European
Review, 94:1 (2016), 57–92.
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style and instead build a society based on farming cooperatives

and village communes.32
Socialist ideas may have failed to spread widely among the
largely illiterate peasantry but had a profound impact on young
intellectuals. The new generation responded to Marković’s call for
a critical engagement with traditional secular and religious insti-
tutions. Their role model was Bazarov, a fictional hero of Russian
writer Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. A new culture
of debate spread across the country. Town streets seemed invaded
by slim and pale young nihilists with long, messy hair and compul-
sory glasses (worn regardless of one’s eyesight). These young men
walked in groups and appeared constantly engaged in argument
and debate, refusing to wear ties and take school exams, rejecting
tradition and authority.33
Serbian socialists promoted women’s rights and it is not sur-
prising that young, educated women became attracted by their
ideas. Draga Ljočić (Figure 5.2) was the first woman who attended
lectures at Belgrade’s Faculty of Philosophy in 1871, before mov-
ing to Zurich to study medicine. Born into a Serbianized Tsintsar
family from Šabac, she married Raša Milošević, another follower
of Svetozar Marković and one of the founders of the Radical Party
(see the following text). Ljočić graduated in 1879 – having inter-
rupted her studies during the 1876–78 wars, when she joined the
Serbian army and earned the rank of Lieutenant – to become the
first Serbian-born woman with a university degree and a doctor’s
title. Despite her qualifications, she had to wait two years after
graduating to get a job, as a ‘doctor’s assistant’. First female students
graduated in Serbia in 1891. This was ahead of Austria-Hungary
32
L. Perović, Srpski socijalisti 19. veka: Prilog istoriji socijalističke misli,
3 vols, Belgrade, 1985–95, and Pera Todorović, Belgrade, 1983;
W. D. MacLellan, Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Socialism,
Princeton, NJ, 1964; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II; 375–79.
33
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, I, 260–62.
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figure 5.2 Draga Ljočić (1855–1926), Serbia’s first female doctor

(Museum of the Serbian Medical Society, Belgrade)
(1897) and Germany (1900), and comparable to Greece (where

women were finally allowed to study in 1890) and the Ottoman
Empire (1894), but behind France (1863), Switzerland (1867) and
Sweden and the UK (both 1873). Europe generally lagged the
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USA, where already in 1833 female students were admitted to

study Medicine at Oberlin College.34
Also belonging to Marković’s circle were Anka and Milica
Ninković, sisters from Novi Sad, then in southern Hungary,
who moved to Kragujevac to live near their political role model.
Alarmed by what he called ‘communist ideas’ and horrified by
the prospect of ‘foreign’, female revolutionaries, Prime Minister
Danilo Stefanović (the brother of Stefan Stefanović Tenka,
leader of the failed conspiracy against Prince Aleksandar dis-
cussed in the previous chapter), ordered the deportation of the
sisters from the country.35 The government intimidated and
harassed socialists and their sympathizers, who included mem-
bers of the Orthodox clergy. In 1874, Marković was arrested on
charges of ‘igniting a revolutionary spirit’. Upon his release, he
left Serbia for Trieste, to seek cure for tuberculosis, but died
there in February 1875, aged just 28. Marković wrote prolifi-
cally during his short life and reached wider audiences through
newspapers and journals his associates and he published. These
included a scholarly journal Rad (Work) and a political magazine
Oslobodjenje (Liberation).
One year after Marković’s death, Serbia’s first workers’ demon-
strations broke out in Kragujevac, home to an arms factory with
600 employees. The workers were joined by others, and one of
the strike leaders was a local priest. The demonstrators displayed
34
Božinović, Žensko pitanje; A. Stolić, Sestre srpkinje, Belgrade, 2015; Lj.
Trgovčević, Planirana elita: O studentima iz Srbije na evropskim univerzitetima
u 19. veku, Belgrade, 2003, 190. After Paris, Zurich became the most popular
destination for Serbian students of both sexes; nearly one half of Serbian
students in Zurich were women; only around 5 per cent of Serbian state
scholars were women in 1882. Most Serbian female students were socialists
and feminists.
35
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, I, 354, 417; I. Pantelić, ‘Milica Ninković’, in
F. de Haan et al. (eds), A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and
Feminisms, Budapest, 2006.
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a red banner and, the authorities claimed, called for the estab-
lishment of the republic and the ‘commune’. Fearful that Serbia
was going through its own Paris Commune moment, the prime
minister sent in the army that brutally supressed the ‘Red Banner’
(Crveni barjak), as the event became known. Journalist and cam-
paigner Pera Todorović, a close collaborator of Marković, avoided
a prison sentence by enlisting to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
where a Christian rebellion had been going on for almost a year.36
The failed ‘communist revolution’ in Serbia alarmed conserv-
atives elsewhere, or perhaps presented them with an opportunity
to point at Serbia’s instability. Gabriel von Rodich, a Habsburg
army general and governor of Dalmatia (and, incidentally, an eth-
nic Serb from the Military Border), had in early 1876 lobbied
Montenegro’s Prince Nikola against an alliance with Belgrade
(see the following section). Rodich cited the ‘Red Banner’ ‘rev-
olution’ as one of the reasons why Montenegro should stay away
from Serbia.37
The ‘Eastern Crisis’ overshadowed the emergence of socialist
ideas in Serbia. Marković’s legacy, however, lived on. In 1881, his
followers formed the People’s Radical Party. One of its founders
was Nikola Pašić (1845–1926), also born in Zaječar and Zurich-
educated. In less than a decade, Pašić’s organizational skills and
Todorović’s political journalism would transform this mostly
intellectual, urban group of young men into Serbia’s first modern
political party and a de facto peasant movement. Apart from the
Radical Party, Marković’s ideas would influence a small but influ-
ential Social-Democratic Party of Dimitrije Tucović. The Social-
Democrats helped form the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
in 1919, as discussed later. Three most important political
36
ISN, V-1, 375–76. For the Paris Commune see J. Merriman, Massacre: The
Life and Death of the Paris Commune, New York, 2014.
37
H. Grandits, The End of Ottoman Rule in Bosnia: Conflicting Agencies and
Imperial Appropriations, London, 2022, 140.
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parties in Serbia’s history – the Radicals, the Democrats and the

Communists – could trace their origins back to Serbia’s first social-
ist thinker.38
The Eastern Crisis

The peasant rebellions in Herzegovina and Bosnia of summer 1875
were initially seen as spontaneous, local disturbances likely to be
short-lived. It soon became clear that they were neither entirely
spontaneous nor local. The legacy of the crisis went well beyond the
region and lasted long after the 1870s.39 As mentioned previously,
most of the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina spoke the same
language that was spoken in Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia. The
linguistic unity, however, was contrasted by a confessional hetero-
geneity: in a country of around 1,300,000 people, in 1879, 39 per
cent were Muslims, of whom perhaps 7,000–10,000 were large
38
Upon coming to power in Yugoslavia in 1945, the Communists renamed
Jagodina (one of Marković’s home towns) to Svetozarevo; only Tito and
a very few Party members had places named after them. In 1948, exiled
youth members of the Democratic Party (which was also founded in 1919
by, among others, a liberal and pro-Yugoslav break-away faction of Pašić’s
Radicals) established in Paris the Oslobodjenje group, in honour of Marković’s
journal of the same title. Under Desimir Tošić’s leadership, they advocated
the democratization of Serbia and Yugoslavia. Tošić’s political mentor and a
key member of the Oslobodjenje, Democrat politician Božidar Vlajić (1888–
1974) was married to Zorka (d. 1949), a daughter of Draga Ljočić and Raša
Milošević. See Nesentimentalni idealisti: Desimir Tošić, Božidar Vlajić i uvodnici
časopisa Naša reč (Paris-London, 1848–1990), ed. and compiled by D. Djokić,
Belgrade, 2013, 34.
39
H. Grandits, ‘Violent Social Disintegration: A Nation-Building Strategy in
Late-Ottoman Herzegovina’, in Grandits, N. Clayer and R. Pichler (eds),
Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans: The Great Powers, the Ottoman Empire and
Nation-Building, London, 2011, 110–34; cf. M. Ekmečić, Stvaranje Jugoslavije,
1790–1918, Belgrade, 1989, 2 vols, I, 273–99; B. Jelavich, The Establishment
of the Balkan National States, 1804–1920, Seattle, WA, 1986, ch. 10; St. K.
Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945, London, 1999, 108–14; L. S.
Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453, London, 2000 (first publ. 1958), ch. 21.
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landowners (some of whom were of ethnic Turk and other

non-Slav background but had been Slavicized by then). Around
43 per cent of Bosnia’s population was formed of Orthodox
Christians, the majority of whom were peasants. The land that
they toiled was owned by Muslims who would typically receive
between one-third and one half of the crop. A small number of
Orthodox belonged to a prosperous urban elite of merchants
and traders, while others were clergymen, teachers and intellec-
tuals. Roman Catholics, most of whom lived in predominantly
rural areas of western Herzegovina and central Bosnia, made
up around 18 per cent of the population. A small and prosper-
ous Jewish community of less than 3,500 people lived mostly in
urban centres such as Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and Travnik.
The landowners tended to be Muslims while most sharecropping
peasants were Christian; of the latter, around 74 per cent were
Orthodox and 21 per cent Roman Catholic.40 The relationship
between the Muslim landowners and Christian farmers was com-
plex and by no means as mutually hostile as traditionally por-
trayed, though not always harmonious either. There was a clear
sense of social and religious hierarchy and the relationship usually
deteriorated during periods of political and social upheavals.
Serbian (and other South Slav) intellectuals and political
leaders – as well as ‘external’, Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian
‘actors’ – had long been aware of the linguistic, cultural and ethnic
similarities of the population of the western Balkans. The South
Slav ‘Great Ideas’, such as the plans of Garašanin and Prince
Mihailo, have been already discussed. With all this in mind, it is
not hard to understand why, once the Herzegovinian and Bosnian
40
Population figures for 1879: R. J. Donia, ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina under
Austria-Hungary: From Occupation to Assassination’, in J. R. Lampe and U.
Brunnbauer (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European
History, London, 2020, ch. 14, 135; sharecropping peasants and Muslim
landowners: Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans, 107; cf. Stavrianos, The
Balkans, 397.
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uprisings broke out, it was likely that Serbia would get involved,
even though it risked being occupied again by Ottoman troops.
Serbia’s leadership was initially undecided over what to do
when the disturbances started in Herzegovina in June 1875. The
government was formally neutral, on the advice of both Austria-
Hungary and Russia, yet it did not prevent volunteers from Serbia
from joining the rebels. The nationalist liberals agitated for war,
although Ristić initially tried to revive an old idea as a diplomatic
solution to the crisis: Serbia and Montenegro would unite with
Bosnia and Herzegovina, respectively, and remain under Ottoman
suzerainty as tributary principalities. The idea was rejected by
everyone, and it especially upset Prince Nikola, who thought
no ruler of Montenegro could ever willingly accept vassal sta-
tus. Meanwhile, Prince Milan, soon to turn 21, had his priorities
elsewhere. When the rebellion broke out, he was abroad, woo-
ing 16-year old Natalie Keshko (1859–1941), a Florentine-born
daughter of a Bessarabian-Russian army officer and a Moldavian
princess. The young couple would marry several months later.
Upon returning to the country, Milan spoke against the war, for
which the nationalist youth labelled him ‘Vuk Branković’, the
alleged traitor at the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. Just weeks earlier he
had been hailed as a ‘king’ by the same youth which had hoped
Milan would revive the medieval Serbian kingdom.
Convinced it was only a matter of time before Serbia entered
the war, patriotic Serbs from southern Hungary flocked into
Belgrade. They hoped to witness a historic moment, but were
shocked by the Serbian capital’s semi-Oriental appearance and
dusty roads with ox-driven cars. In Slobodan Jovanović’s words,
‘armed against hot May weather with sun-shielding umbrellas and
handheld fans, [these central European men and women] looked
more like carefree tourists than Kosovo avengers’, even if they
talked war louder than the locals.41 As the violence continued in
41
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, II, 2–3.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina and stories spread – some real, others

exaggerated or invented – of massacres of Orthodox Christians by
Ottoman regular army and paramilitaries, it increasingly became
clear that Serbia would not stay out of the conflict. To make things
worse from Milan’s point of view, exiled Petar Karadjordjević, late
Prince Aleksandar’s son, joined Christian volunteers in Bosnia.
Although Petar fought under a nom de guerre, the news of his par-
ticipation in the war quickly spread. Petar’s popularity in Serbia
unsurprisingly alarmed the Obrenović camp.42
In the end, Serbia’s troops entered Bosnia on 17 June 1876,
officially under the pretext or ‘restoring order’ and prevent-
ing further spread of violence. The insurgents welcomed them
by declaring the unification of Bosnia with Serbia. Serbia, how-
ever, was hardly able to annex Bosnia, despite the support for the
idea among some sections of the local population. It went to war
against a superior enemy unprepared, and under pressure from the
nationalist opinion. The Serbian army – in reality a peasant mili-
tia – was poorly trained and equipped. Nevertheless, it consisted
of 125,000 troops, divided into four ‘armies’, the largest of which
was commanded by Russian General Chernyayev, one of around
600 (mostly) Slavophile officers who came to Serbia against the
wishes of the Russian government and the tsar. Chernyayev was
given the Serbian citizenship; his and the presence of interna-
tional volunteers, mercenaries and adventurers, including Italian
garibaldini, gave hope that Serbia was not fighting alone.43
Belgrade’s only ally was tiny Montenegro, which agreed to
enter the war in exchange for 40,000 ducats. This was a considera-
ble sum that represented more than half of Serbia’s state reserves.
Greece and Romania stayed out of the conflict, arguing that the
treaties concluded with Mihailo were no longer valid following
42
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, I, 428–55, 489–90.
43
D. MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, 1875–1878, Ithaca, NY,
1967; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II, 380–401.
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the assassination of the Serbian prince. Serbia placed hopes in

a rebellion in Bulgaria and Russia’s military intervention. The
former never materialized, not even after the ‘Bulgarian horrors’
that shocked western European public. The latter eventually took
place, but only following Serbia’s defeat in February 1877.
Technically still an Ottoman province, there was a real danger
that Serbia might once again be occupied by the sultan’s troops.
Chernyayev’s exaggerated claims that the whole of Russia was
behind him were tragically exposed as Ottoman bashi-bazouks
(irregulars) and Circuasians spread terror, burned villages and
massacred civilians. Meanwhile, Russian ‘liberators’ increasingly
looked like ‘occupiers’. At the beginning of the crisis, Serbian
towns were full of gallant Russian officers who drunk French
wine and charmed the locals, especially young women. Now
drunk Cossacks and Russian adventurers were refusing to pay res-
taurant bills, frequently got involved in fist fights and harassed
local women.44 Meanwhile, Austria-Hungary and Russia decided
against intervening militarily though they sought ways to pre-
vent the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and Montenegro. The
Habsburgs set their sights on Bosnia-Herzegovina and Russia on
Bulgaria. Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov communicated this
to Serbian diplomats, but they chose to listen to Count Ignatyev,
Russia’s pro-war ambassador in Constantinople, who encouraged
the South Slav principalities to confront the Ottomans.
By interfering indirectly in the events in the Balkans, Austria-
Hungary and Russia demonstrated a disregard for Ottoman
sovereignty. Soon they would intervene more directly. Under
pressure from its Slavophile public, Russia declared war on the
Ottoman Empire in April 1877. A victory was won by January the
following year, but not before Serbia had rejoined the war under
Russia’s pressure. This time the Serbian army performed well.
44
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, II, 69–70.
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Only a desperate fight by Ottoman soldiers recruited locally,

among ethnic Albanians, and diplomatic pressure on Belgrade
by Austria-Hungary, prevented Serbia from taking over Sandžak
(that is the old Raška region) and Kosovo.
In June 1878, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania were rec-
ognized as independent states by the Powers that convened in
Berlin to end the Balkan crisis. As part of the deal, Serbia and
Romania were obliged to grant full citizenship rights to their
Jewish communities; Serbia also agreed to build a railway, which
was Austria-Hungary’s condition. The two regions most affected
by insurgency and fighting, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria,
formally remained Ottoman. However, Austria-Hungary was to
occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sandžak, a decision incidentally
made on 28 June,45 while Bulgaria (and Eastern Rumelia) was
granted autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. The Habsburg
occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was justified on the grounds
that the Ottomans were unable to keep peace there; however,
the Ottoman rule had been largely restored, and there was little
fighting in Bosnia during the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78.46
Demands for autonomy by an Albanian nationalist committee
that convened in Prizren was by contrast ignored by the Congress
of Berlin (which preceded by a few years the Berlin Conference of
1884, sometimes known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’).
Serbian foreign minister Jovan Ristić was in the German capital
during the congress, though Serbia, like the other Balkan princi-
palities whose destiny was being decided, was not invited to take
part. He was, however, remembered by Ranke, the author of the
first scholarly history of Serbia and Ristić’s former professor at
45
Ironically, since this was not only the anniversary of the 1389 Kosovo Battle
but also the date on which a Young Bosnian assassinated the heir to the
Habsburg throne in Sarajevo in 1914, an event that sparked the First World
War, as discussed in the next chapter.
46
Grandits, The End of Ottoman Rule, 252.
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Berlin University. The 83-year-old historian sent a telegram con-

gratulating Ristić on his country’s independence. When Ristić
returned to Berlin the following year, this time as prime min-
ister, he met with Ranke. ‘His hair resembled moss, he dressed
shabbily, but had lively and light eyes.’ The grand old historian
congratulated him again on Serbia’s independence and added that
liberty represented the ‘source of life and progress’.47
The 1878 Congress of Berlin achieved its main aims: it prevented
a total collapse of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, and it blocked
Russia’s attempt to control the region via an independent ‘Greater
Bulgaria’, created by a short-lived treaty between the Russian and
Ottoman empires signed in San Stefano in March the same year.
Austria-Hungary’s occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of the
Sanjak of Novi Pazar (Sandžak) also prevented, for the time being
at least, the expansion of Serbia and Montenegro into the South
Slav provinces that were now only nominally Ottoman; moreover,
it strengthened the defence of Austrian-held Dalmatia against the
Italian and South Slav irredenta, something the Habsburg mili-
tary commanders had been concerned about for decades.48 Finally,
the Congress of Berlin made sure Serbia and Montenegro did not
share a border, making their potential union less likely. Thus, the
Congress also prevented the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’.
Newly independent Serbia nevertheless extended its territory
(Map 5.1) by some 11,000 square kilometres, to a total of 48,600
square kilometres; its population increased to 1.7 million – up
by perhaps 350,000 inhabitants of the newly acquired Niš–
Pirot–Vranje triangle. At least 70,000 Muslims, and a smaller
47
J. Ristić, ‘Leopold Ranke i oslobodjenje Srbije’, Glas SKA (Belgrade), XXXI,
1892, and Diplomatska istorija Srbije za vreme srpskih ratova za oslobodjenje i
nezavisnost, 1875–1878, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1896, I, 184–254.
48
J. Schindler, ‘Defeating Balkan Insurgency: The Austro-Hungarian Army
in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1878–82’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 27:3 (2004),
528–52, 529.
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number of Bulgarian Christians, from the new regions departed,

pushed out or encouraged to leave. The former included nearly
50,000 ethnic Albanians as well as Muslim Slavs, ethnic Turks
and Circassians. Meanwhile Orthodox Christian refugees from
Kosovo and Montenegro emigrated to Serbia, effectively replac-
ing the departed Muslims. Kosovo Serbs would continue to leave
and settle in Serbia in the years that followed.49 This informal
exchange of populations meant that post-1878 Serbia became
ethnically more Serbian, and Kosovo more Albanian.
The agrarian question was one of the key issues facing the
Serbian government. As before, the land previously owned by large
Muslim landowners was divided into smaller parcels (between
three and four hectares) and given to Christian peasants, many of
whom were recent immigrants. Serbia’s budget was spent on the
war and even though it no longer paid the annual tribute to the
Porte, this time it could not afford to finance the newly freed peas-
ants by paying off the departed Muslim landowners (even though
it was obliged to do so by terms of the Congress of Berlin). When
an attempt to make the peasantry compensate the former landlords
failed, the state settled the debt in full in 1882. It then made the
peasants compensate the state in payments made in instalments
over the following 15–20 years. Unlike in the 1830s, the land did
not come free, and the cost of independence was especially felt by
the people of the new regions.50
There was a feeling among nationalists that the outcome of the
Berlin Congress concerning Bosnia-Herzegovina was a national
49
M. Jagodić, ‘The Emigration of Muslims from the New Serbian Regions
1877/1878’, Balkanologie, 2:2 (1998), https://journals.openedition.org/
balkanologie/265; Pavlowitch, Serbia, 65; cf. K. Karpat, Ottoman Population,
1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics, Madison, WI, 1985,
chs 3 & 4; N. Stefanov, Die Erfindung der Grenzen auf dem Balkan: Von einer
spätosmanischen Region zu nationalstaatlichen Peripherien: Pirot und Caribrod
1856–1989, Wiesbaden, 2017, ch. 3.
50
Jagodić, ‘The Emigration of Muslims’; Jovanović, Vlada Milana, II, 248–49.
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catastrophe similar to the defeat at Kosovo in 1389. Some, like

Ristić, hoped that when its final status is discussed, Serbia would
be able to ‘rescue’ Bosnia from the Habsburgs. This is perhaps
the reason why the National Assembly, except for two national-
ist youth deputies, received the news of Austria-Hungary’s occu-
pation of the neighbouring province without much protest. In a
country where the Ottoman rule was still in living memory, the
newly won independence and the territorial expansion in the south
was deemed by many as a success, the disappointment over Bosnia
notwithstanding.51
Meanwhile, the Habsburg occupation was met in Bosnia-
Herzegovina by armed resistance by Muslim and Orthodox Serb
guerrillas, who, sometimes jointly, fought against the occupation
forces for another several years. The Austro-Hungarian army
undertook a major counter-insurgency campaign to fully occupy
the province that had rebelled against the Ottomans and did not
seem to want to be under the Habsburgs either.52
Party Politics
Ristić was appointed the prime minister for the second time in
October 1878, but resigned two years later, due to his opposition
to Austria-Hungary’s increasing interference in Serbia’s affairs.53
A lawyer and politician Milan Piroćanac (1837–97) formed a new
government dominated by young politicians–intellectuals in their
30s and 40s, including historian Stojan Novaković (1842–1915,
education), Čedomilj Mijatović (1842–1932, finances and foreign
affairs) and Milutin Garašanin (1843–98, Ilija Garašanin’s son, as
51
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, II, 227–28; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II,
399–400.
52
M. Ekmečić (ed.), Otpor austrougarskoj okupaciji 1878. godine u Bosni i
Hercegovini, Sarajevo, 1979; Schindler, ‘Defeating Balkan Insurgency’.
53
Ristić to Hristić, Belgrade, 2 October 1880, in Pisma Jovana Ristića Filipu
Hristiću, 280–81.
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interior minister). Known as the Progressives, they represented

liberal-minded younger intelligentsia and would become one of
two main political parties formed during the emergence of modern
party politics in Serbia.54
Parliamentary elections held in November 1880 were largely
free and fair. They resulted in a catastrophic defeat for the old
liberals, who won only 7 out of 128 seats, but represented a tri-
umph for the radicals, who secured 76 seats. When Prince Milan
objected to the appointment of Nikola Pašić as deputy president
of the new National Assembly, parliamentary deputies elected
on the radical list grouped around their leader. This marked the
birth of Serbia’s first modern political party, soon to be officially
named the People’s Radical Party. The Radicals were the new
party of the people, who replaced the out-of-touch old liberals.
Pašić was a capable leader and organizer and probably the first
politician in Serbia who understood the importance of having
a party programme and a vision for the country. The Radicals
reached out to people by opening party branches across the coun-
try. A poor orator who anyhow spoke very little (which fuelled
rumours about his family’s alleged Bulgarian origins), Pašić left
his political opponents and allies alike guessing his thoughts or his
next move. In a largely illiterate society and in an era before the
mass media, he was nevertheless easily recognizable by his long
beard, which also made him look like a wise old man and a mis-
tic, even before he grew old. He was totally dedicated to politics,
married late (to a daughter of a wealthy Serb from Trieste) and
lived a quiet family life. Pera Todorović, on the other hand, was
the man of the people, a dandy and a hedonist. In 1881, he looked
older than his 29 years, due to spending years in exile and suffer-
ing from a liver disease. Always well dressed and groomed, with
54
The section that follows draws on Jovanović, Vlada Milana, II, 306–453; V.
Kazimirović, Nikola Pašić i njegovo doba, 1845–1926, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1990, I,
chs 2–4; and Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II, 415–33.
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a cylinder, glasses (which he wore as a fashion statement), dark

beard and tight hand-gloves, Todorović was an attention seeker,
a party fanatic and a political actor; contemporaries suspected he
was a morphine user and a homosexual.
The independence may have been followed by the birth of
modern politics in Serbia, but it did not result in political stability.
The main domestic dispute was over foreign policy. Following
the Congress of Berlin Serbia became a de facto Habsburg sat-
ellite. Prince Milan and the Progressives supported the pro-
Habsburg foreign policy, but the Radicals strongly opposed it. A
trade agreement between Serbia and Austria-Hungary signed in
June 1881 – which Ristić had rejected, but his Progressive suc-
cessor approved of – turned Serbia, in the Radicals’ view, into a
colony of an empire that, to make things worse from their point
of view, had also occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina. The trade agree-
ment was followed by a secret convention, obliging Serbia to
give up territorial pretensions in Bosnia. In exchange, Austria-
Hungary would curb any anti-Obrenović activities on its territory
and support Serbia’s potential territorial expansion in Ottoman
Kosovo and Macedonia. Around this time, Prince Milan removed
Metropolitan Mihailo of Belgrade, a nationalist with links to
Russia and pro-Serb agitators in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Initially, only Milan and Foreign Minister Mijatović knew
about the secret convention. When it became public in 1893,
the pro-Radical public accused the Obrenović camp of betraying
national interests. However, Milan’s pro-Russian critics had been
unaware of Russia’s tacit approval of Austria-Hungary’s expansion
into Bosnia and its de facto control over Serbia; Russia’s focus was
on Bulgaria. Nominally independent Serbia thus had little choice,
regardless of Milan and the Progressives, but to effectively turn
into a Habsburg satellite.
During winter 1882/83, the government introduced com-
pulsory primary education (at the time less than 10 per cent
of Serbia’s population was literate) and compulsory military
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service, as part of a reform designed to introduce a modern

army based on conscription. From the point of view of Serbia’s
peasantry, both these measures meant taking away from farm-
ing duties able-bodied young men and as such were not wel-
comed. This boosted the Radicals’ support across the country.
As part of the secondary education reform, a greater empha-
sis was given to studying the Serbian language and natural
sciences. German became the main foreign language, at the
expense of Latin and classical Greek. Although History was
not specially affected by the reform, it became the most pop-
ular subject thanks to a textbook on general history written by
a Belgrade lyceum teacher, an old liberal formed intellectually
during the 1848 Revolution. The textbook interpreted history
as a conflict between the monarch and the people and glori-
fied the French Revolution. Unbeknown to the government,
Serbia’s youth was therefore taught to oppose the prince and
favour a revolution.
Meanwhile, the construction of the Belgrade–Niš–Vranje rail-
way opened doors to large foreign capital in Serbia. It resulted,
however, in a major scandal when the investor – L’Union Générale,
a French company run by Vienna-based Paul Eugène Bantoux
(1820–1904) – was given the contract without public competition.
A National Assembly deputy accused the government of corrup-
tion, citing a recent example of bribes being used to gain a con-
tract for railway construction in Wisconsin, USA. Then news of
the investor’s bankruptcy broke out in January 1882. France and
Austria-Hungary agreed to bail out the government in Belgrade
by forming a new society for the construction and exploitation
of Serbian railways, which significantly reduced the govern-
ment’s debt. Arguing their position was untenable, Piroćanac
and Garašanin Jr handed in their resignations, but Milan begged
them to reconsider. They agreed on the condition that Serbia was
elevated to a kingdom. Romania did the same the previous year,
but the thinking here was to take away public attention from the
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scandal rather than necessarily follow the neighbour’s example.

The government counted on the power of patriotic sentiment.
Milan, on his part, welcomed the suggestion as an opportunity
to increase his civil list; he owed money to Bonteux and had also
made some poor stock investments. Austria-Hungary supported
the idea, and Russia had no objections. On 22 February 1882,
Serbia was elevated to a kingdom.
National celebrations followed, with guns firing from the
Belgrade fortress, as towns across the country were hastily deco-
rated; schoolchildren danced on streets above all excited because
there was no school that day. The new king hosted a reception for
the political leaders, and even the Radicals toasted to his health.
The honeymoon would not last long, however, as old political
battles soon resumed and intensified. Milan’s first foreign trip
as king was to Vienna in October 1882. He was almost assassi-
nated upon his return to Belgrade, by widow of the brother of
late socialist Svetozar Marković – an army colonel and a Radical
supporter who had been executed on Milan’s orders.
Parliamentary elections of September 1883 were the first elec-
tions contested by political parties, but the campaign felt more
like a run up to a civil war. The peasantry was further alienated
when in the summer the government ordered livestock branding.
The election results brought a resounding victory for the Radicals,
who secured two-thirds of the National Assembly seats. The
Progressive government accepted the defeat, but not the king,
who simply ignored the results and appointed an old liberal as
prime minister. The new premier ordered an immediate surren-
der of personal weapons, hoping to prevent violence, but achieved
exactly the opposite. In October, a peasant rebellion broke out
in the Timok area of eastern Serbia, Pašić’s home region and a
Radical stronghold. Peasants clashed with the gendarmerie, as
local priests, teachers and Radical politicians provided leadership.
In late 1883, eastern Serbia resembled Šumadija and western
Serbia of early 1804. Just like in the case of the anti-Ottoman
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uprising, it turned out the revolt had not been as spontaneous

as it had seemed at first. Pašić and the Radicals played a major
part in inciting and organizing the rebellion, which was brutally
suppressed by the army. Nearly 100 rebel leaders, many of them
Radicals, were sentenced to death, and over 600 received prison
sentences. Pašić fled to Bulgaria but was sentenced to death in
absentia.55
An ill-advised war against Bulgaria two years later marked the
beginning of the end of Milan’s turbulent reign. The Plovdiv
coup of September 1885, which led to the unification of Bulgaria
and Eastern Rumelia (within the Ottoman empire), was planned
by Russia and Bulgarian nationalists. Milan feared that Bulgaria,
territorially now larger than Serbia, would take over Macedonia
with Russia’s assistance. The government agreed that Serbia
must intervene, but the public was unenthusiastic; in the mean-
while, Pašić campaigned against the war from his Bulgarian exile.
Hoping to avoid a regional war, Austria-Hungary attempted to
secure a territorial compensation for Serbia in western Bulgaria,
an idea supported by Britain and Germany, but crucially not by
Russia.56
Milan was neither a Serb nationalist nor a Pan-Slav patriot.
His thinking was more pragmatic: he saw the war an opportu-
nity to prevent Bulgaria’s hegemony in the Balkans and to earn
him a personal glory, perhaps to compensate for the political and
financial scandals and his growing unpopularity. Serbia declared
war on Bulgaria in early November 1885. Bypassing experienced
Serbian officers, the king placed himself at the head of an invad-
ing army of 50,000 troops. On 7 November, the Serbian army
suffered a catastrophic defeat at Slivnica, losing over 2,200 men,
55
Kazimirović, I, ch. 5; G. Stokes, Politics as Development: The Emergence of
Political Parties in Nineteenth-century Serbia, Durham, NC, 1990, ch. 8.
56
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, III, 230–31; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia,
II, ch. 8.
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including 49 officers (Bulgaria’s casualties, around 1,800 men,

were also significant). Milan pondered abdication, as Bulgarian
troops crossed into Serbia. After a heavy battle in which both sides
suffered heavy losses (Serbs 1,258 and Bulgarians 1,112 men), the
Bulgarian army captured Pirot. Serbia’s invasion of Bulgaria thus
not only failed spectacularly, but it also led to the enemy counter-
offensive and temporary occupation of parts of Serbia. Belgrade
was saved a complete humiliation by Austria-Hungary that forced
Bulgaria to cease hostilities and withdraw its troops from Serbia.57
Fresh elections were held in September 1887, and once again
the Radicals triumphed, winning 87 seats in the parliament, to the
Liberals’ 59 seats. This resulted in a Radical-dominated govern-
ment, but rather than any Radicals, two non-party figures and army
colonels were appointed as prime minister and foreign minister,
respectively.58
Milan and Natalie were by now estranged, and the king no
longer hid from public his lover, who happened to be the wife of
his personal secretary. The church reluctantly granted the royal
couple a divorce in October 1888. A new, more liberal constitu-
tion was adopted before the end of the year, which appeased the
Radicals and repaired the king’s damaged reputation somewhat.
He remained set on abdicating, however. It was a decision he hid
from the public more successfully than his love affairs. Having
ensured that a regency, headed by elderly Ristić, would safeguard
the throne for his 13-year-old son Aleksandar and managed to
wipe most, if not all his debt, Milan abdicated in the presence of
a mostly unsuspecting audience of Serbian politicians and foreign
diplomats. Milan read his abdication letter in front of Orthodox
priests holding a bible, a cross and a candle, while a royal guard
57
I. D. Armour, ‘“Put Not Your Trust in Princes”: The Habsburg Monarchy
and Milan Obrenović of Serbia, 1881–1885’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 56:3–4
(2014), 201–37; cf. Jovanović, Vlada Milana, II, 318–21.
58
Jovanović, Vlada Milana, III, 372–83, 409.
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carrying the national flag stood next to them. At the end of what
a contemporary described a piece of political theatre of which the
Belgrade National Theatre would have been proud, Milan knelt
in front of his young son, addressed him with ‘Your Majesty’ and
swore allegiance to the new king. Milan was only 35 years old and
he looked forward to a life of luxury abroad with his mistress. A
bon vivant, whose turbulent marriage and affairs made him a regu-
lar feature in European press, Milan Obrenović was the inspiration
for Terence Rattigan’s 1953 play The Sleeping Prince and for the
character played by Laurence Olivier in Prince and the Showgirl
(1957), opposite to Marylin Monroe.59
Nation, Society and Economy

Serbia came out of the 1876–78 wars both as a loser and as a vic-
tor. Despite the disappointment over Bosnia, the independence,
combined with the territorial gain in the south at the expense of
the Ottoman Empire, provided a sense of national pride. The year
1878 was understood by many in Serbia as the renewal of state-
hood lost in 1459. Consequently, the Ottoman rule, although
it lasted over three centuries (not counting short periods of the
Habsburg occupation), was seen as a temporary interruption of
Serbia’s statehood – the dark ages that were finally over. It was in
this context that the 500th anniversary celebrations of the Kosovo
Battle took place in June 1889.
As the anniversary approached, political differences between
the main parties were put aside for the sake of a joint com-
memoration. The original initiative to mark the anniversary came
59
V. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination,
New Haven, CT, 1998, 47; cf. Kraljica [Queen] Natalija Obrenović,
Moje uspomene, transl. from the French original by I. Pavlović, ed. by Lj.
Trgovčević, Belgrade, 1999. Ironically, young Milan laid the foundation
stone for the Belgrade National Theatre in August 1868, in what was one of
his first public appearances as prince.
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from Vojvodina; a series of events was planned to take place across

Serbia, culminating with a ceremony at the Serbian Academy,
which was presided in 1889 by Čedomilj Mijatović. In his address,
Mijatović argued that ‘[a]n inexhaustible source of national pride
was discovered at Kosovo [in 1389]. More important than lan-
guage and stronger than the Church this pride unites all Serbs
in a single nation’.60 In 1876, Serbia’s declaration of war on the
Ottoman Empire had referred to the ‘mission of Kosovo’, while
Prince Nikola of Montenegro proclaimed that ‘[u]nder Murad
I the Serbian empire was destroyed – now during the reign of
Murad V it has to rise again!’61 It was only at the time of the
500th anniversary of the battle that St Vitus’ Day became Serbia’s
national holiday.62
In 1896, a British visitor to Belgrade attended a memorial service
for the fallen at the Kosovo Battle at the Cathedral of St Michael
the Archangel. The service was conducted by Metropolitan
Mihailo, who had in the meanwhile returned to his old post fol-
lowing Milan’s abdication. Present also were King Aleksandar and
Prince Nikola:
Metropolitan Michael stepped on to the ambo, a low circular platform

consisting of three steps, and delivered a vehement political speech,
60
Cited in T. A. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389, Boulder, CO, 1990,
129. Mijatović would later serve as Serbia’s minister in London. See his The
Memoirs of a Balkan Diplomatist, London, 1917. For a sympathetic biography,
see S. G. Markovich, Grof Čedomilj Mijatović: Viktorijanac među Srbima,
Belgrade, 2006.
61
Cited in D. Djordjević, ‘The Tradition of Kosovo in the Formation of
Modern Serbian Statehood in the 19th Century’, in W. S. Vucinich and T.
A. Emmert (eds), Kosovo: Legacy of Medieval Battle, Minneapolis, MN, 1991,
309–30, 317–18.
62
I. Čolović, Smrt na Kosovu polju: Istorija Kosovskog mita, Belgrade, 2016; D.
Djordjević, ‘The Role of St Vitus Day in Modern Serbian History’, Serbian
Studies, 5:3 (Spring 1990), 33–40; M. Ekmečić, ‘The Emergence of St
Vitus Day as the Principal National Holiday of the Serbs’, in Vucinich and
Emmert (eds), Kosovo, 331–42.
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welcoming the Prince of Montenegro and anticipating a revival of the

old Servian Empire, which survives so lustily in every Servian heart.63
Whether every Serb shared the Metropolitan’s sentiments is dif-

ficult to know, but the Kosovo mythology had a wider appeal and
did not just fuel dreams of a revived Serbian empire. The 500th
anniversary of 1389 was also commemorated in Croatia, despite
restrictions imposed by the Habsburg authorities, concerned about
manifestations of Serb–Croat solidarity and Yugoslav nationalism.
A leading Zagreb daily newspaper had several issues seized for
containing articles about the Kosovo Battle, but on 27 June 1889,
it managed to publish the following lines: ‘we Croatians – broth-
ers by blood and by desire with the Serbs – today sing: Praise to
the eternal Kosovo heroes who with their blood made certain that
the desire for freedom and glory would never die. Glory to that
people who gave them birth.’64 During a symposium held at the
Yugoslav Academy in Zagreb, Franjo Rački, the Academy presi-
dent, stated that the event was convened as part of the institution’s
mission to study ‘all important developments from the past of the
Croatian and Serbian people’.65 A theatre performance about the
Kosovo Battle staged in the Dalmatian town of Split was inter-
rupted by the police, but a Croatian actor travelled to Belgrade
to play Prince Lazar in another play on the theme. Meanwhile,
a Czech pan-Slav organization sent to Belgrade a wreath across
which the following was written: ‘The Czech Nation. 1389. +27/6
1889. From Ashes to Greatness.’, while a Russian newspaper wrote:
‘Not to praise the memory of Kosovo in Russia means treason
to Slavic ethnic feeling.’ At the same time, the Russian embassy
63
Vivian, Servia, 209–10.
64
Cited in Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, 128.
65
My emphasis – note the singular form. F. Rački, ‘Boj na Kosovu: Uzroci i
posljedice (Čitao u sjednici filologičko-historičkoga razreda jugoslavenske
akademije znanosti i umjetnosti dne 15/27 lipnja 1889.), Rad JAZU (Zagreb),
XCVII, 1889, 1–68.
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in Vienna commemorated the anniversary with the help from

Serbian and Croatian cultural organizations.66
In the late nineteenth century, Serbia’s art – painting, poetry and
literature – moved from religious and other ‘anational’ themes to
‘painting’ the nation. The Serbian Middle Ages were ‘discovered’
by Habsburg-born Serbian artists in parallel with their discovery
by historians. Events surrounding the early nineteenth-century
uprisings, which gave birth to modern Serbia, were also the subject
of the art in service of the nation.67 At the same time, the greater
public interest in the Kosovo Battle contributed to the birth of
critical historiography in Serbia. On the 500th anniversary of the
Battle, archimandrite and historian Ilarion Ruvarac published
a critical study on Prince Lazar, which led to a fierce polemic
between the new generation of historians led by Ruvarac and the
older, romantic authors. Another historian, Ljubomir Kovačević,
demonstrated that there was no evidence that Vuk Branković had
been a traitor in 1389 (see Chapter 2).68
By the end of the nineteenth century, Serbia’s population grew
to around 2.5 million, due to a high birth rate (in rural areas 40 per
1,000) and continued immigration of Orthodox Christians from
Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia. The country’s economy
also grew. For example, the grain produce doubled between the
1860s and the late 1890s. The main source of income remained
livestock export to the Habsburg Monarchy – to Hungary and
further into central European markets. Meanwhile, Serbia’s
exports to Habsburg territories that would later form Yugoslavia
(Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia) amounted to 2 per cent or less
prior to 1914. Mainly thanks to livestock trade, Serbia’s export
66
Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, 129–30, 208n.
67
Makuljević, Umetnost i nacionalna ideja; cf. V. Grmuša, ‘Creating Art
Song in the South Slav Territories (1900–1930s): Femininity, Nation and
Performance’, PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018.
68
See B. Mitrović, Nastanak moderne istorijske discipline u Srbiji i Bugarskoj, Novi
Sad, 2017.
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figure 5.3 Serbian peasants from the Belgrade district, Serbia (Photo-
graph by Vico Mantegazza, L’Illustrazione Italiana, Year XXX, No 15, April
12, 1903, via Getty Images)
value tripled between the second half of the 1830s and second
half of the 1850s (i.e. during the Constitutionalist regime); it then
nearly quadrupled by the end of the century. As a result, industri-
alization remained slow and limited to a few urban centres. In late
nineteenth century, only 14 per cent of Serbia’s population lived
in towns of 2,000 or more people.69
A Critical Decade, 1903–14

King Aleksandar’s reign was marked by his attempts to impose
an authoritarian rule and by his unpopular marriage to Draga
Mašin (née Lunjevica), a divorcee perhaps 12 years the king’s
senior, with something of a reputation. When one government
minister warned the king, he dismissed it as a malicious rumour.
69
J. R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, Cambridge,
1996, 56–57.
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‘Do you know any of these alleged past lovers?’, Aleksandar

asked. ‘Yes, Your majesty. Me.’, came the reply. The wedding
went ahead amid resignations by ministers and protests from
within the church. The royal couple was unable to have chil-
dren, and rumours began circulating about Draga’s alleged plot
to install her brother as heir to the throne.
The pro-Habsburg king’s disregard for constitution and dem-
ocratic procedures and the queen’s unpopularity sealed the fate
of the unfortunate royal couple. They were assassinated in the
early hours of 11 June (29 May O.S.) 1903 by a group of army
officers, who included Capt Dragutin Dimitrijević-Apis, Col
Mašin, Draga’s former brother-in-law and Lt Col Naumović
(the direct descendant of Karadjordje’s Greek aide, killed on
Miloš Obrenović’s orders – see Chapter 4). The conspirators
enjoyed the support of several politicians who had turned against
the king. The regicide took place on the 35th anniversary of the
assassination of Prince Mihailo, but this was probably a coinci-
dence and, in any case, should be understood in the context of
an era when political assassinations were frequent rather than
some allegedly inherent Serbian tradition. Nevertheless, the
European public was shocked, and Britain and the Netherlands
broke off diplomatic relations with Serbia until the conspirators
were removed from positions of power. This finally happened
on the third anniversary of the regicide, although the military
continued to play a role in Serbian politics, to the detriment of
the country’s fragile democratic institutions.70
Quite apart from the change of dynasty, 1903 represented a
turning point in the Serbian and South Slav history more broadly.
Petar Karadjordjević’s coronation was scheduled for September
70
S. Jovanović, Vlada Aleksandra Obrenovića, 3 vols, 2nd edn, Belgrade, 1934–
35; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II, ch. 9; D. Vasić, Devetstotreća
(Majski prevrat): Prilozi za istoriju Srbije od 8. jula 1900 do 17. januara 1907,
Belgrade, 1925.
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1904, in the centenary year of the uprising led by his grandfather.

As if to announce a new era in Serbia’s history, the coronation-
related celebrations were dominated by pan-South Slav mani-
festations, with artists and intellectuals from Croatia, Slovenia,
Montenegro and Bulgaria joining their Serbian counterparts.
For all its Piedmont-inspired political ambition, Belgrade became
a South Slav cultural centre. The country’s intellectuals and lib-
eral-minded politicians responded enthusiastically to Yugoslavist
ideas and ideals, even though the political mainstream remained
mostly Serbo-centric.71
Feelings of ‘ordinary’ people vis-à-vis Yugoslavism, while
harder to gauge, were likely complex. Many supported the
nationalist narrative about Serb liberation and unification with
neighbouring provinces. On the other hand, Belgrade preferred
international to national cultural offerings in the city, including
theatre and musical performances. Meanwhile, pan-Yugoslav
cultural events became common, as Habsburg South Slav intel-
lectuals and artists frequently visited the Serbian capital and, in
some cases, moved there. They included the Slovenian ethno-
geographer Niko Županič, Croatian poets Tin Ujević and Antun
Gustav Matoš and celebrated sculptor Ivan Meštrović. Arguably
the best-known advocate of Yugoslavism at the time, Meštrović
had famously, and controversially, exhibited at the Serbian pavil-
ion at the 1911 Rome Expo, despite being a Croat from Austria-
Hungary, which had its own pavilion. Meštrović would design
the ‘Kosovo avenger’ medal awarded to Serbian soldiers who
took part in the modern battle for Kosovo (during the Balkan
Wars, discussed in the following text). His major, and never com-
pleted, project was inspired by the Kosovo battle and was called
71
D. Stojanović, Kaldrma i asfalt: Urbanizacija i evropeizacija Beograda 1890–
1914, Belgrade, 2008; D. Tošić, Jugoslovenske umetničke izložbe 1904–1927,
Belgrade, 1983; Lj. Trgovčević, Naučnici Srbije i stvaranje Jugoslavije,
1914–1920, Belgrade, 1987.
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the Vidovdan [St Vitus’ Day] Temple. Meanwhile, in April 1914,

Belgrade marked the 250th anniversary of the Zrinski-Frankopan
uprising against Habsburg rule, an important Croatian (and
Hungarian, incidentally) historical event.72
Not quite the ‘golden age of democracy’ in Serbia as traditionally
claimed, the country nevertheless seemed to enter an era of greater
political freedoms.73 The new king, who had previously translated
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, stayed out of party politics. Serbia
had a democratically elected parliament and government, and there
was a lively political debate facilitated by free press. The political
scene was dominated by aging Nikola Pašić, who had in the mean-
while become a conservative statesman. In 1904, younger members
of the Radical Party broke away to form the Independent Radical
Party. Together with Croat and Slovene democrats and liberals,
they established the Democratic Party in Sarajevo in 1919, which
competed for power with the Radicals during the 1920s.
In 1903, the Socialist-Democratic Party, Serbia’s first workers’
party, was founded by a group of young socialists, includ-
ing Radovan Dragović, Dragiša Lapčević, Triša Kaclerović
and Dimitrije Tucović. They had contacts with Bulgarian and
Croatian socialists and social-democrats, and collaborated with
Karl Kautsky, the leader of Germany’s Social-Democrats. Tucović
played a prominent role at the Eighth Congress of the Second
International held in Copenhagen in 1910, when he publicly
criticized the Austrian Social-Democrats’ support of Habsburg
72
Lampe, Yugoslavia, 94.
73
O. Popović Obradović, Parlamentarizam u Srbiji od 1903. do 1914. godine,
Belgrade, 1998; D. Stojanović, Srbija i demokratija 1903–1914, Belgrade,
2003, and ‘Serbia’s Promise and Problems, 1903–1914’, in Lampe and
Brunnbauer (eds), The Routledge Handbook, ch. 11; H. Zundhausen
[Sundhaussen], Istorija Srbije od 19. do 21. veka, transl. from German by
T. Bekić, Belgrade, 2009, 225–42; cf. D. T. Bataković, ‘Storm over Serbia:
Rivalry between Civilian and Military Authorities (1911–1914)’, Balcanica
(Belgrade), XLIV (2013), 307–56; Djordjević, Istorija moderne Srbije, 311–15.
321
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imperialism in Bosnia. He was equally vocal in his opposition

to Serbia’s expansionist wars of 1912–13 and the anti-Albanian
oppression in Kosovo. Building on Svetozar Marković’s work,
the Serbian Social-Democrats promoted a Balkan federation as
an alternative to nation states.74
Unlike either Austria-Hungary or Russia, at the time Belgrade’s
main foe and ally among the Powers, respectively, early
twentieth-century Serbia was a parliamentary democracy. As we
have seen, the country abolished serfdom in the 1830s, well before
Habsburg, Russian or Ottoman empires did so. For all its faults
and weaknesses, Serbia’s democracy developed out of a long strug-
gle between political groups and institutions that had through
much of the nineteenth century fought against authoritarian
princes and kings. The interference by army officers connected
with the 1903 regicide destabilized the country and contributed to
a three-way conflict between the government, the military and the
crown. This situation was not unique to Serbia. Civilian and mil-
itary authorities clashed elsewhere in the early twentieth century,
including in France (the Dreyfus Affair), the Ottoman Empire,
Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary.75
In foreign policy, post-1903 Serbia orbited towards Russia and
France. This, and Serbia’s overtures to and appeal among the
Habsburg Serbs and other South Slavs, made the relationship
with Austria-Hungary especially difficult and at times bordering
on military confrontation. It was also in 1903 that Benjámin Kállay
and Károly Khuen-Héderváry, long-serving, authoritarian and
74
I. Avakumović, History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Aberdeen, 1964,
I, ch. 1; D. Lapčević, Rat i srpska socijalna demokratija, Belgrade, 1925; N. M.
Popović, Dimitrije Tucović: Njegov život i rad, Belgrade, 1934; J. Robertson,
‘Imagining the Balkans as a Space of Revolution: The Federalist Vision
of Serbian Socialism, 1870–1914’, East European Politics and Societies and
Cultures, 31:2 (2017), 402–25.
75
C. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London, 2013,
214–25.
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capable imperial ‘viceroys’ of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia-

Slavonia, respectively, died.76 The relaxation that followed
in Croatia enabled the emergence of Croat–Serb political
cooperation. A Croat–Serb Coalition was formed in late 1905,
winning, the following year, elections for Croatia’s Sabor. The
Coalition included the Serb People’s Independent Party and the
Serb People’s Radical Party, two main Habsburg Serb parties,
and their two Croat counterparts: the Croatian Party of Rights
and the Croatian People’s Progressive Party. The fifth coalition
partner, the Social-Democratic Party of Croatia-Slavonia, had
an ethnically mixed membership.
The ‘New Course’ brought about by the Coalition is sometimes
seen – not unjustifiably, but not without simplification either – as
a third phase in the near-century-old Yugoslav Idea. It had begun,
as we have seen, with the Illyrians in the 1830s, was revived by
Strossmayer and Rački in the 1860s, and gained a new life through
a political movement that talked about a union of the South
Slavs within the Habsburg Monarchy, while increasingly looking
towards Belgrade. One of the leaders of the Coalition was Ante
Trumbić, a Croat from Dalmatia, the future leader of the wartime
Yugoslav Committee and the first foreign minister of Yugoslavia.77
In Bosnia, the annexation crisis of 1908–09 (and indirectly the
concurrent Young Turkish revolution in the Ottoman Empire)
radicalized the nationalist youth, especially though not exclu-
sively among the Eastern Orthodox. According to the 1910
Habsburg census, Orthodox Serbs made up 43.5 per cent of
Bosnia’s population, Muslims 32.5 per cent and Catholic Croats
76
Lj. Aleksić-Pejković, Odnosi Srbije sa Francuskom i Engleskom, 1903–1914,
Belgrade, 1965; A. Mitrović, Prodor na Balkan: Srbija u planovima Austro-
Ugarske i Nemačke, 1908–1918, Belgrade, 1981; W. S. Vucinich, Serbia
between East and West: The Events of 1903–1908, Stanford, CA, 1954.
77
N. J. Miller, Between Nation and State: Serbian Politics in Croatia before the First
World War, Pittsburgh, PN, 1997; cf. M. Gross, Vladavina Hrvatsko-srpske
koalicije, 1906–1907, Belgrade, 1960.
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22.8 per cent (the decrease of Muslims from nearly 40 per cent in
1879 was due to their emigration to the Ottoman Empire follow-
ing the Habsburg occupation). A local assembly enjoyed limited
autonomy and was representative of the numerical strength of
the three main ethno-religious groups, while agricultural reforms
were being gradually introduced. However, Ottoman-era serf-
dom survived until the First World War, longer than anywhere
else in Europe – an important but often overlooked reason for the
radicalization of the South Slav youth in Habsburg Bosnia. Three
quarters of all Bosnia’s serfs were local Serbs, which made them
resentful and more likely to look towards Serbia.78
Meanwhile, an uprising against the Ottoman rule in Macedonia
had broken out in summer 1903 (the St Elijah Day, or Ilinden,
Uprising). It was organized by the Internal Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), a militant group engaged
in guerrilla activities and political assassinations. The rebels were
crushed brutally by an Ottoman force recruited mainly among
local Albanians. At the same time, an often-violent rivalry between
Bulgarian, Greek and Serb agitators, educators, priests and paramil-
itaries went on. They all claimed Macedonia on competing historic
and equally dubious ethnic grounds; each side hoped their own
Orthodox church would prevail among the local Christian popu-
lation. The hope was to assimilate the local Slavs, many of whom
seemed nationally indifferent, even if linguistically they were
closest to Bulgarians. A separate Macedonian ethnic identity had
also begun to develop, at least among some intellectuals. Did
the Ilinden insurgents fight for a Macedonian state or for unifi-
cation with Bulgaria, then still an autonomous Ottoman prov-
ince? The debate continues to this day, among scholars as much
78
H. C. Darby, ‘Bosnia and Hercegovina’, in S. Clissold (ed.), A Short History of
Yugoslavia, Cambridge, 1966, 71; V. Dedijer, Sarajevo 1914, 2nd edn, 2 vols,
Belgrade, 1978; Donia, ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in Lampe and Brunnbauer
(eds), The Routledge Handbook; V. Masleša, Mlada Bosna, Sarajevo, 1964, 31.
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as among political leaders of Bulgaria and North Macedonia.79

In 2020, Sofia blocked the beginning of North Macedonia’s EU
accession talks until Skopje acknowledged the (allegedly) Bulgarian
origins of the Macedonian ethnicity and language.
Their rivalry over Macedonia notwithstanding, Serbia and
Bulgaria, where Russia continued to exercise strong influence,
concluded a customs union in 1905, an event that prompted a
ban on Serbia’s exports by Austria-Hungary. The Dual Monarchy
was concerned about the impact of the Serb–Bulgarian reconcili-
ation on the regional balance of power and how it might influence
Habsburg South Slav politics. Because Serbia’s main export was
hogs, the customs war became known as the ‘Pig War’. The eco-
nomic sanctions did not destroy the Serbian economy, as Belgrade
reached out to new markets thanks to developing the meat pro-
cessing industry. In 1911, the ‘Pig War’ ended with the signing
of a new trade agreement between the two countries on more
favourable terms from Serbia’s point of view.80 When Austria-
Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 (an act that Russia
did not oppose), Pašić and the Radical government were against
war despite pressure from the nationalist public and elements
within the military to intervene. The government’s aim remained
the creation of a large Serbian state that would include Bosnia,
but it was aware that without Russia’s support, or any other pow-
erful allies, Serbia would be no match for the Dual Monarchy.81
This undermined the government’s position as officers involved in
the 1903 regicide attempted to interfere in the country’s politics.
Anti-Habsburg sentiments grew, not surprisingly given that many
79
Lampe, Yugoslavia, 91–92; K. Brown, Loyal unto Death: Trust and Terror in
Revolutionary Macedonia, Bloomington, IN, 2013.
80
D. Djordjević, Carinski rat Austro-Ugarske i Srbije, 1906–1911, Belgrade,
1962; M. Palairet, The Balkan Economies, c. 1800–1914: Evolution without
Development, Cambridge, 1997, ch. 10; Sundhausen, Istorija Srbije, 230–42.
81
Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II, 554–61.
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genuinely believed that Austria-Hungary annexed a ‘Serb land’.

When a decade earlier a British visitor asked a group of Serbian
schoolchildren ‘what they knew about Bosnia’, one boy
replied at once that the inhabitants were Servians, but were unfortu-
nately under the government of Austria for the present. He added that
the religion was partly Orthodox and partly Muhammadan, but that Bos-
nian Muhammadans were equally of Servian race and Servian patriotism.
It is evident that love of country and a pride in the national idea are early
instilled into the young Servian’s mind.82
Bosnia-Herzegovina was a source of Serb–Croat competing claims

and mutual tensions; a Bosnian Muslim national identity was also
beginning to shape, even if some Muslim intellectuals identified as
Croats and, less frequently, Serbs. The rivalry over Bosnia, not nec-
essarily paradoxically, was also an argument in favour of Yugoslavia.
The understanding of the nation as a community of speakers of the
same language was not a South Slav invention, but it influenced
Serb, Croat and other regional nationalisms. At the time when Italy
and Germany united because of a common ethnicity – and in both
cases following wars against the Habsburg Monarchy – it should
not be surprising the South Slavs aimed to do the same. For all the
nationalist Serb and South Slav rhetoric, it is not hard to under-
stand why many wondered why Bosnia-Herzegovina should form
part of a German–Magyar governed empire rather than of a South
Slav nation state, considering that the population of the province
was overwhelmingly South Slav and Serbo-Croat speaking.
The Ottoman defeat against Italy in Libya in 1911 and the con-
tinued instability in Macedonia encouraged those wanting to see
the end of the Ottoman rule in southern Balkans to act. They
included Russian ministers in Belgrade and Sofia, who facilitated
a Serbian–Bulgarian pact in March 1912. A three-way partition
82
Vivian, Servia, 194; cf. C. Jelavich, South Slav Nationalisms: Textbooks and
Yugoslav Union Before 1914, Athens, OH, 1990.
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of Macedonia was discussed, in acknowledgement of Greek

claims there. The two countries were then joined by Greece
and Montenegro and in a stunning joint offensive that began in
October quickly defeated the Ottoman army. Officially the war
ended in May 1913 with a peace treaty signed in London, but effec-
tively it had been over in a month.83 As the triumphant Serbian
army entered Kosovo, there were reports of collective hallucina-
tion among soldiers believing they were marching next to Prince
Lazar and medieval Serbian knights who fought at Kosovo in
1389.84 Serbia sought to secure access to the Adriatic Sea by occu-
pying northern Albania, but Serbian, and Montenegrin, troops
were forced to withdraw by Austria-Hungary, which pushed for
the creation of an independent Albanian state.
Feeling short-changed by Serbia and Greece over the territo-
rial share of Macedonia, Bulgaria declared war on its erstwhile
allies in June 1913. Romania and the Ottoman Empire now
joined the Serb–Greek–Montenegrin alliance which, unsurpris-
ingly, defeated a seriously outnumbered Bulgarian army. A peace
treaty signed in August in Bucharest ended the Second Balkan
War. Bulgaria had to accept a smaller part of Macedonia (Pirin),
while Greece and Serbia received much larger shares, respectively
the Aegean and Vardar Macedonia. (The latter is the present-day
independent country since 2019 called North Macedonia). The
Ottomans restored control over Edirne/Adrianople and the sur-
rounding area. Romania gained southern Dobrudzha/Dobrogea
at the expense of Bulgaria, while Albania was created as an inde-
pendent state. The main victor, in the short term at least, was
Serbia. It doubled-up in territory, gaining around 40,000 square
83
K. Boeckh and S. Rutar (eds), The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception
to Historic Memory, London, 2017; R. C. Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912–13:
Prelude to the First World War, London, 2002; M. N. Todorova, Scaling the
Balkans: Essays on Eastern European Entanglements, Leiden, 2018, 510–34.
84
T. Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, New
Haven, CN, 1997, 71.
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figure 5.4 Young girls dressed as soldiers in the Serbian army at a Purim
Party, Belgrade, early twentieth century (The Oster Visual Documentation
Center, Beit Hatfutsot, courtesy of Dr. Rephael Fiazza, Israel)
kilometres of land; in addition to Vardar Macedonia, Serbia

received much of Kosovo and Sandžak. The rest of ‘Old Serbia’
went to Montenegro, which also significantly enlarged its terri-
tory and now bordered Serbia (Map 5.1).85
As a result of the territorial expansion, Serbia’s population
grew from 2.9 million to 4.5 million people. Because most of the
new inhabitants were Muslim Albanians and Slavs and Orthodox
Macedonian Slavs, Serbia could no longer be seen as an ethni-
cally homogenous nation state. Not that it ever was, but cultural
Serbianization seemed a natural course of action to Serbian elites, as
alternative nationalisms were not developed in the conquered terri-
tories that the elites regarded as historically Serbian (through their
being part of the medieval Serb state and under the jurisdiction of
the Serbian patriarchate until late eighteenth century).
85
M. Jagodić, Novi krajevi Srbije, 1912–1915, Belgrade, 2013.
328
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Mitrovica
Pancevo
ˇ
Zemun Danube R
Belgrade
. Kladovo
Šabac
Požarevac
Loznica Orašac Porecˇ
Valjevo
Rudnik Negotin
Takovo Kragujevac
Užice ˇ
Čacak Zajecar
˘
Paracin
´ ´
Požega Karanovac Deligrad Gurgusovac
(Kraljevo) (Knjaževac)
Aleksinac
Raška
Niš Pirot
Kuršumlija
Novi Pazar
Leskovac
Peć Vranje
Priština
Prizren Kumanovo
HUNGARY Tetovo Skopje
ROMANIA
BOSNIA 1804 Veles Štip
1833 Debar Kicevo
ˇ
MONTE- 1878 Kruševo
NEGRO BULGARIA Prilep
Ohrid
Bitola
1913
ALBA N I
ITALY
A
Pashalik of Belgrade
GREECE
Acquired in1833
Gained at Congress of Berlin 1878
Acquired in Balkan Wars 1913
map 5.1 Serbia’s territorial expansion, 1804–1913. Drawn by Joe

LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/, based on a map originally published in
Michael B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804–1918, New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 2 vols, vol. 2, p. 400
Early twentieth-century Serbia was home to between 6,000

and 7,000 Jews. The majority belonged to the Sephardim and
Ashkenazim groups (the former settled in the Ottoman Empire in the
late fifteenth century after their expulsion from Spain and Portugal;
the latter emigrated to Serbia mostly from Austria-Hungary during
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the nineteenth century). There was a small number of Mizrahim,

who lived in the newly acquired, formerly Ottoman territories.
Having been granted full citizenship rights in 1878, Jews played
a role in the creation of the modern Serbian society and occu-
pied a prominent place in the country’s arts and cultural scene. By
the early twentieth century, they had been fully integrated, many
declaring themselves ‘Serbs of Moses’ faith’, and regarding Serbian
to be their mother tongue. Meanwhile, philosemitism developed
among Serbs, especially during and after the Balkan Wars and the
First World War, in which around 600 Jewish officers and soldiers
fought in the Serbian army, of whom 150 lost their lives.86 Anti-
Jewish prejudice and antisemitism have existed in Serbia, including
in some Orthodox Church circles and among conservative intel-
lectuals. However, antisemitism was neither as widespread nor as
deeply rooted as it was in Central Europe, and no pogroms took
place in Serbia, unlike in Poland and the Russian Empire.
The cost of victory was high, around 30,000 dead and thousands
of wounded.87 At the same time, the territorial enlargement went
hand in hand with an enhanced prestige among the Habsburg
South Slavs, as leaders of the Croat–Serb Coalition and Bosnian
Serbs publicly celebrated Serbia’s victories. A Yugoslav state was
now seen as an attainable goal, especially among nationalist organ-
izations in Serbia and radicalized youth in Bosnia and Croatia.
Meanwhile, Bosnia’s Muslims understandably remained appre-
hensive. Memories of the expulsion of Serbia’s Muslims in the
nineteenth century were ‘refreshed’ by news of violence against
southern Balkan Muslims during the Balkan Wars. Particularly
violent were clashes between the Serbian army and ethnic
Albanian guerrillas, who resisted the incorporation into Serbia
86
Spomenica poginulih i umrlih srpskih Jevreja u Balkanskom i Svetskom ratu,
1912–1918, Belgrade, 1927, 4.
87
D. Šarenac, ‘The Forgotten Losses: Serbian Casualties from the Balkan
Wars 1912–1913’, Analele Universităţii ‘Ovidius’ din Constanţa, seria Istorie,
10–11 (2013/14), 85–102.
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and instead sought to join the newly created Albania. Atrocities

were committed during both Balkan Wars, by all sides. Foreign
correspondents – Trotsky among them – reported about prac-
tices that towards the end of the century would become known as
‘ethnic cleansing’. The atrocities of the Balkan Wars were evoked
by some scholars, political analysts and journalists in the wake
of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia as events that antici-
pated the ethnic violence of the 1990s. Curiously, the atrocities of
the 1941–45 period were rarely mentioned in this respect, even
though they had a greater causal significance for setting a prec-
edent for ethnic cleansing – if nothing else than for the simple
reason that they had left an imprint on the collective memory
of still living political actors and their nationalist followers who
played a key role in the 1990s.
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6
War and Interwar (1914–1944)
u
The Sarajevo Assassination and the July Crisis

In early August 1914, a tall, dark-haired young man boarded one of
the last England-bound ferries to leave the port of Ostend before
Germany’s invasion of Belgium. Just days earlier, Austria-Hungary
had declared war on Serbia, an event that marked the beginning of
the First World War. The man had a dual, Austro-Hungarian and
Serbian citizenship. Born in 1887 in Donji Poplat, an Orthodox
Serb village in Habsburg-occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dimitrije
Mitrinović became involved in student politics in Mostar and
Sarajevo. He wrote the first South Slav Futurist manifesto before
moving to Munich in 1913 to study art history under Heinrich
Wölfflin. The young Herzegovinian quickly stood out among his
peers and before long mixed with Kandinsky, Klee and collab-
orated with the Blue Rider and Blut-Bunt artistic groups. Erich
Gutkind, a German-Jewish philosopher known for pacifist and
mystic views, became a friend and an important intellectual influ-
ence. Gutkind’s family sheltered Mitrinović in Berlin before he
could escape to Britain via Belgium.1
Mitrinović’s fear for his safety in Germany, which declared
war on Serbia a week after Austria-Hungary, was not hard to
1
P. Palavestra, Dogma i utopija Dimitrija Mitrinovića: Počeci srpske književne
avangarde, Belgrade, 1977; N. V. Petrović, Dimitrije Mitrinović, Windsor,
Canada, 1967; A. Rigby, ‘Dimitrije Mitrinović (1887–1953)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, Oxford, 2008; cf. V. Dedijer, Sarajevo 1914, 2nd edn, 2
vols, Belgrade, 1978; M. Martens, U požaru svetova: Ivo Andrić – jedan evropski
život, transl. from German by V. Fröchlich, Belgrade, 2020, 32–42.
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understand. Anti-Serb demonstrations and riots erupted in

Bosnia and Croatia and elsewhere in the Habsburg Monarchy
as the news of the assassination spread. The authorities did not
organize the riots but did little to prevent propaganda or indeed
acts of anti-Serb violence. Prominent Serbs, and sometimes
other South Slavs known for their pro-Serb, pan-Yugoslav views,
were arrested; their property, schools and churches were dam-
aged or destroyed, while the use of Serb Cyrillic was banned in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. By the end of July, up to 5,500 Serbs had
been arrested and interned, and, depending on source, between
700 and 2,200 of these died during the war of maltreatment.
During summer 1914, around 460 Serbs were executed, some by
the Schutzkorps, a militia composed mainly of local Muslims and
Croats. In Trebinje (one of the hotspots of the 1875 Herzegovinian
uprising), 103 Serbs were hanged without trial between late June
and August 1914; a further 82 were hanged in the village of Zubci
near the border with Montenegro. There were other cases of pub-
lic executions of Serb civilians throughout the region by the par-
amilitaries. Perhaps as many as 5,200 Serb families from eastern
Bosnia were expelled to Serbia.2
However, there was another reason for Mitrinović’s sense of
urgency in summer 1914. Even his closest friends in Germany
were unaware that he had been involved in the revolutionary
South Slav youth politics. Mitrinović belonged to the milieu of
Young Bosnia, an informal revolutionary youth group named
after Young Italy. He was the author of a 1912 document that
called for resistance – as a form of cultural and political action
rather than violence – to Austro-Germanization, Magyarization
2
Figures from I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History,
Politics, Ithaca, NY, 1984, 367n, and for Trebinje and Zubci: C. Carmichael,
‘Culture, Resistance and Violence: Guarding the Habsburg Ostgrenze with
Montenegro in 1914’, European Review of History, 25:5 (2018), 705–23, 712; cf.
Dedijer, Sarajevo 1914, II, 11–12 & ch. 15; A. Mitrović, Srbija u Prvom svetskom
ratu, 2nd edn, Belgrade, 2004, 18–32.
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and Italianization of the South Slavs. It also rejected the servility

of older generations, demanded the abolition of large estates,
aristocracy and serfdom, and the unification of the Habsburg
South Slavs with Serbia and Montenegro. The document is con-
sidered the political manifesto of Young Bosnia.
Like most Young Bosnians, including Gavrilo Princip, Franz
Ferdinand’s assassin, Mitrinović grew up in a predominantly
peasant Serb Orthodox environment, where oral tradition was
an important part of life. Stories of major historical events and
resistance to the Ottomans were passed on through genera-
tions. This was also a society profoundly shaped by the previ-
ously discussed Eastern Crisis of the 1870s – a society where
local, regional and global politics met with such a profound
impact.
The revolutionary Bosnian youth read and debated intensely,
despite, or perhaps because, being surrounded by a sea of illit-
eracy. Mitrinović’s early political influences included Mazzini,
Masaryk and Marx, as well as Russian anarchists, narodniki, and
socialists. Among those whom Mitrinović influenced was young
Ivo Andrić. Born in 1892 into a Roman Catholic family in cen-
tral Bosnia, the future author of The Bridge on the Drina and the
1961 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature also belonged to the
Young Bosnia milieu.
Unlike his school friend Bogdan Žerajić, who committed sui-
cide after a failed attempt to assassinate the Habsburg governor
of Bosnia in 1910 and was found with a copy of Russian anarchist
Peter Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution, and unlike
the eight years younger Princip (who visited Žerajić’s grave the
night before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand), Mitrinović
did not advocate terrorism and revolution to achieve the Yugoslav
unity. Instead, he preferred cultural and political action, resist-
ance through publications and public lectures. Both Mitrinović
and Princip, however, belonged to a transnational ‘network’
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of revolutionaries, nationalists, anarchists and socialists. The

emphasis on the Young Bosnians’ Serb (rather than Yugoslav)
nationalism and on their apparent obsession with Serb mythol-
ogized past has been a feature in centenary-driven best-selling
histories of the First World War. In reality, things were rather
more complex.3
In a move unlikely to calm the existing tensions in the region,

the Austro-Hungarian authorities organized military manoeuvres
in Bosnia, with a central manifestation taking place in Sarajevo
on 28 June 1914 attended by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as
inspector general at the manoeuvres. Present were also his wife
Duchess Sophie and senior political and military officials, includ-
ing General Oskar Potiorek, Bosnia’s Habsburg governor. The
events of that day in Sarajevo would forever change the course
of history. They are well-known and so require only a summary.
Following an unsuccessful attempt at the archduke’s life by a
Young Bosnian (a local high school student), his friend Princip
found himself unexpectedly presented with an opportunity to
assassinate Franz Ferdinand, accidentally also killing Duchess
Sophie. Security measures were surprisingly lax, but both youths
were immediately arrested together with most of their accom-
plices. Only one of them, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, managed
to escape across the porous Habsburg–Montenegrin border; he
would also be arrested, before escaping from a Montenegrin
3
Dedijer’s Sarajevo 1914 remains invaluable for an understanding of the origins
and history of Young Bosnia. See also P. Palavestra, Književnost Mlade Bosne,
Belgrade, 1994 and M. Vojinović, Političke ideje Mlade Bosne, Belgrade, 2015;
cf. C. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London, 2013;
J. Zametica, Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of
World War One, London 2017.
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prison. A wider revolutionary network, with a central cell in

Sarajevo, was soon discovered. Princip and two other Young
Bosnians had recently been in Serbia. As far as can be ascertained
from sources, it was there that they decided to assassinate the
archduke and approached for assistance a secret society known as
the ‘Black Hand’.
Previously, rogue members of the Serbian army began to
interfere directly with the country’s politics after the Bosnian
annexation crisis, which led to a civil–military conflict in Serbia.4
The key figure in the ‘military party’ was Lieutenant Colonel
Dragutin Dimitrijević-Apis, in early 1913 promoted to the head
of the army intelligence and later on to the rank of colonel.5 Apis
was one of the leaders of the Unification or Death secret society
(called by its opponents the Black Hand). This m ilitant–national-
ist group was formed in 1911 by officers and politicians involved
in the earlier conspiracy against King Aleksandar and Queen
Draga. The Black Hand had close links with another national-
ist organization, the National Defence. Broadly speaking, these
two organizations advocated the creation of an enlarged Serb
state at the expense of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires
but were not averse to collaborating with pan-Yugoslav groups
and individuals. Ljubomir Jovanović-Čupa, the editor of journal
Pijemont (Piedmont) and the main ideologue of the Black Hand,
was openly pro-Yugoslav. Apis too had not been opposed to the
idea of South Slav unification.6 Like Young Bosnia, the Black
Hand was exposed to international influences – its programme
4
M. B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804–1918, New York, 1976,
2 vols, II, 554–62.
5
D. T. Bataković, ‘Storm over Serbia: Rivalry between Civilian and Military
Authorities (1911–1914)’, Balcanica (Belgrade), XLIV (2013), 307–56, 332;
D. MacKenzie, Apis: The Congenial Conspirator. The Life of Colonel Dragutin T.
Dimitrijević, Boulder, CO, 1989, ch. 10.
6
S. Jovanović, ‘Apis’, in Moji savremenici, Windsor, Canada, 1962, 399–459, 440.
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and statute drew inspiration from Italian, German and Russian

secret revolutionary organizations, and appears to have had con-
tacts with the Young Turks and the German military.7 The Black
Hand rituals and symbols were also influenced by Free Masons,
of whom Jovanović-Čupa and possibly Major Vojin Tankosić,
another key figure in the organization, had been members.
Indeed, many European revolutionaries at the time, including
Garibaldi, had been Free Masons.8
Members of the nationalist organizations in Serbia increas-
ingly believed the government was incapable of fulfilling Serbian
‘national goals’ and began to challenge its authority, especially in
the newly acquired territories in Kosovo and Macedonia.9 The
civil–military conflict caused the fall of the government in early
1914. It probably also led to King Petar stepping aside, citing
old age and illness; his son, Crown Prince Aleksandar, reigned
in his name as regent. Aleksandar would also clash with the Black
Hand, while his autocratic tendencies created tensions with
the Pašić government. The civil–military conflict, by no means
unique to Serbia, needs to be considered when the events of May–
June 1914 are analysed. As does the wider political context. The
Serbian government indirectly supported South Slav leaders in
Austria-Hungary, who increasingly viewed Serbia as a South Slav
Piedmont following the Balkan Wars.10 The Habsburg authori-
ties attempted to discredit the leaders of the Croat–Serb Coalition,
especially the Serbs, in two staged trials for high treason, but in
the process only humiliated themselves and strengthened the
7
Dedijer, Sarajevo 1914, II, 198–202.
8
Bataković, 325; L. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, New Haven, CT,
2007, 42.
9
Jovanović, ‘Apis’, 404–406.
10
Serbia probably did more for the creation of Yugoslavia than Piedmont for
the unification of Italy. S. Malešević, ‘The Mirage of Balkan Piedmont: State
Formation and Serbian Nationalisms in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Century’, Nations and Nationalism, 23:1 (2017), 129–50.
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resolve of the growing Serb–Croat front.11 Belgrade, however,

was careful not to provoke the neighbouring empire and give it
excuse to accuse Serbia of endangering its territorial integrity.
Following the Balkan Wars, the Serbian government simply was
not in a position to wage another war, let alone against a more
powerful and hostile neighbouring empire.12
That was, in brief, the context in which the Austro-Hungarian
army organized military manoeuvres in Bosnia in June 1914.
Tensions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary and between
at least some elements of the local population and the imperial
authorities, the existence of the nationalist revolutionary organ-
izations in an era when political assassinations were common, in
addition to the date chosen for the visit to Sarajevo of the heir to
the Habsburg throne, all combined for a high-risk setting. As A.
J. P. Taylor noted, ‘If a British royalty had visited Dublin on St.
Patrick’s Day at the height of the Troubles, he, too, might have
expected to be shot at.’13
Yet, the day began in festive mood on both sides of the Serb–
Habsburg border. ‘For the first time since Kosovo, Serbia cel-
ebrated St Vitus Day as a day of Resurrection of Serbdom’,
Jovan Jovanović, Serbia’s minister in Vienna later wrote. He was
referring to the outcome of the Balkan Wars, which saw Serbia
and Montenegro incorporate the ‘core’ territories of the medi-
eval Serbian state. ‘[M]any Serbs and Croats, especially from
Dalmatia, went to Kosovo, and across Serbia people swam in a
[sea of] patriotic fervour’, Jovanović wrote, revealing the presence
of Yugoslavist ideals. When a choir sang the Croatian national
anthem outside a restaurant in central Belgrade, passers-by
11
Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 87–90; cf. R. W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav
Question and Habsburg Monarchy, London, 1911, chs 9 & 10.
12
Dj. Stanković, Nikola Pašić i jugoslovensko pitanje, Belgrade, 2 vols, 1985, II,
11–12.
13
A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918, Oxford, 1971
(first publ. 1954), 520.
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broke into a spontaneous applause, according to an eyewitness.14

Meanwhile, the Viennese went to the nearby Baden spa to cel-
ebrate the Feast of St Peter and St Paul (which fell on 29 June)
and enjoy good weather. ‘The day was mild, there was not a cloud
in the sky above the spreading chestnut trees, it was a day to feel
happy.’, Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig remembered.15
Also on his way to joining the celebrations in Kosovo was Prime
Minister Pašić. In midst of a campaign before forthcoming par-
liamentary elections, called for 14 August, it was at the Lapovo
train station in central Serbia that he learned of the assassination
of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo around midday.16
Both Serbia and Montenegro immediately halted Kosovo-
related manifestations and sent condolences to Vienna, con-
demning the murder publicly and in confidential communication.
Montenegro’s official description of the assassination as ‘a mind-
less terrorist act [carried out] by isolated daydreamers’ was
endorsed by Serbia’s envoy in Vienna, who in a telegram to the
Belgrade foreign ministry described it as ‘an isolated act [carried
14
J. M. Jovanović, Borba za narodno ujedinjenje, 1914–1918, Belgrade, 1935,
19; cf. D. Djokić, ‘Serbia, Sarajevo and the Start of Conflict’, in A. Sharp
(ed.), 28 June: Sarajevo 1914–Versailles 1919. The War and Peace that Made the
Modern World, London, 2014, 10–29. Jovan M. Jovanović, who during the
interwar period led the Agrarian Party, was known by his nickname Pižon
(French word pigeon in its Serbianized form). There was also a Ljubomir
Jovanović-Patak (Duck), not to be confused with Ljubomir Jovanović-
Čupa (A messy haired one), the Pijemont editor. It is indeed something of a
Serbian tradition to give politicians a nickname: Pašić was known as Baja,
Ljuba Davidović as Ljuba Mrav (Ant) and Čika (Uncle) Ljuba, while King
Petar I was called Čika Pera (Uncle Pete). During the Second World War,
Dragoljub-Draža Mihailović was Čiča (an Uncle or an Old Man), which
incidentally was similar in meaning to one of Tito’s nicknames, Stari (Old
Man). More recently, Slobodan Milošević was widely referred to as Sloba.
15
S. Zweig, The World of Yesterday, London, 2011 (first published in German,
1942), 237–38.
16
M. Cornwall, ‘Serbia’, in K. Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914, London,
1995, 55–96, 56.
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out] by two national fanatics’.17 Zweig recalled that in Baden music

stopped and people promenading seemed disturbed as the ‘unex-
pected news passed from mouth to mouth’, though ‘there was no
special shock or dismay to be seen on the faces of the crowd, for
the heir to the throne had not by any means been popular.’18
The initial reaction by Serbia’s leadership to the news from
Sarajevo was typical of Belgrade’s position over the next few
weeks: it condemned the assassination, distanced itself from the
perpetrators and was careful not to antagonize Austria-Hungary.19
It could do and did little about the general sense of jubilation –
mixed with a sense of anxiety – among the Serbian public, though
it did appeal for public restraint. Jovan Jovanović sent repeated
warnings from Vienna that an inflammatory tone of the Serbian
press was not helpful and only served to fuel Austro-Hungarian
propaganda that portrays the assassination as an act planned in, if
not by, Serbia. Soon after the news of the assassination reached
Serbia, the government proclaimed that it was prepared to put
on trial any person found in the country who was involved in
the assassination, but in reality did little to carry out a full-scale
investigation.20
Austria-Hungary did not make any specific requests up until it
delivered its ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July, nearly a month after
the assassination. Until then, the Serbian government had hoped
it would be possible to avoid war. In July, Serbia’s politicians were
engaged in the campaign for the elections (which would never take
place), while business and trade links between citizens of the two
17
Jovanović to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Serbia,
Vienna, 29 June (16 June O.S.) 1914, DokSPKS, VII-2, 423; Novica
Rakočević, Crna Gora u Prvom svjetskom ratu, 1914–1918, Podgorica, 1997
(first publ. 1969), 26.
18
Zweig, 238–39.
19
Jovanović to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vienna, 30 June (17 June O.S.)
1914, DokSPKS, 430; cf. Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 11–12.
20
Jovanović to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vienna, 29 (16) June and 30
(17) June 1914, DokSPKS, 422, 429.
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countries went on as usual. Serbia’s military was hardly any more

prepared for war, relying on outdated defence plans in an event of
attack by Austria-Hungary. Meanwhile, Vojvoda (Field Marshal)
Radomir Putnik, the chief-of-staff of the Serbian army was on hol-
iday in Gleichenberg, an Austrian spa.21 Indeed, many of Europe’s
leaders, including Kaiser Wilhelm and Habsburg and Russian dip-
lomats in Belgrade went on holiday in July.
The predominant sentiment in Vienna and Budapest was
that Serbia was to be punished not just for the murder of Franz
Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie but also for the Serbs’ aggressive,
anti-Habsburg nationalism. Its 10-point ultimatum to Belgrade
was created to be rejected. It blamed Serbia for not accepting the
annexation of Bosnia. It claimed that the assassination was planned
in Belgrade, where the assassins received financial support, train-
ing and weapons (which was correct, except that the government
was not involved), and that Serbia’s border officials secured a safe
passage for the assassins, which was correct, although, again, this
was done without the approval and knowledge of the government
in Belgrade. The Dual Monarchy demanded of Serbia to ban all
publications that spread anti-Habsburg propaganda, to dissolve the
National Defence (no reference to the Black Hand was made) and
remove all military personnel who were involved in activities against
Austria-Hungary. Points 5 and 6 demanded of Serbia to agree to
the participation of Austro-Hungarian officials in the suppression of
anti-Habsburg activities inside Serbia and a full joint investigation
of all persons involved in the conspiracy who are to be found on
Serbia’s territory, respectively. Because these two points demanded
presence of foreign investigators in Serbia, they were deemed, not
just by Serbia, as impeding the country’s sovereignty if accepted.22
As the Habsburg army began to move towards the border with
Serbia, Regent Aleksandar asked Tsar Nicholas for Russia’s help.
21
Jovanović, Borba za narodno ujedinjenje, 22; Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 56.
22
Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 58–67.
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The government informed the British minister in Belgrade that

Austro-Hungarian demands ‘were such that no government of
an independent state could ever comply fully’ and hoped Britain
might influence Austria-Hungary to modify its position. Edward
Grey, the British Foreign Minister, and Winston Churchill, the
First Lord of the Admiralty, agreed with Serbia’s assessment of
the ultimatum as extremely harsh, but neither Britain nor other
potential allies were able to exert much influence on Vienna.23
The Serbian cabinet worked on the text of the reply almost non-
stop. The document, authored by Pašić and Stojan Protić, was
drafted in good time, but its French translation was not finished
until just before the d eadline.24 While the cabinet was in session,
Serbian public waited impatiently and anxiously. Foreign journal-
ists and spies descended on Belgrade, as all sorts of rumours spread
and newspapers published sensationalist stories, though press
reporting was more moderate than previously. There was a sense
of anxiety and fear, and there was hope that Russia will come to the
rescue, though the latter ‘did not have any influence on Serbia’s
reply’, Jovan Jovanović recalled.25 The tsar’s reply to Belgrade’s
plea arrived two days after Serbia had responded to the ultimatum.
Indeed, Serbia’s decision-making was more independent from
St Petersburg than it is often assumed and in any case Russia’s sup-
port was by no means certain in summer 1914.26
According to Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, Austro-Hungarian
minister in Belgrade, Pašić delivered the reply five minutes before
the deadline. ‘His extremely intelligent eyes looked drearily seri-
ous’, Giesl recalled, adding that Pašić told him in imperfect German
that his government accepted some demands and as for the rest its
23
Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 456; Jovanović, Borba za narodno ujedinjenje, 25–27;
Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 60.
24
Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 63–64.
25
Jovanović, Borba za narodno ujedinjenje, 26.
26
Cornwall, ‘Serbia’; Vasilij N. Štrandman [Basil de Strandman], Balkanske
uspomene, Belgrade, 2009.
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hopes rested with the ‘loyalty and chivalry of you [Giesl] as an

Austrian General’. Giesl left Belgrade almost immediately, his and
his staff’s luggage already packed, but not before breaking off dip-
lomatic relations with Serbia. In expectation of an imminent attack
on Belgrade, the government set off for Niš, some 240 kilometres
south of the capital. The army headquarters moved to Kragujevac
(the nineteenth-century capital located in central Serbia), albeit
without the chief of staff, who was still in Austria-Hungary.27
Serbia’s reply was measured carefully, its tone in stark contrast
to the combative language of the ultimatum. The Belgrade gov-
ernment accepted all demands, but claimed it did not understand
fully point 5, while as regards point 6, it was prepared to accept
it so long as it did not contravene international law or domestic
judiciary, in effect rejecting these two demands. The reply ended
with a note stating that ‘[t]he Royal Government considers it to
be in the interest of both parties not to hurry in deciding this mat-
ter’, adding that it was prepared ‘in the event that the Imperial
and Royal Government is not satisfied with this reply’, to either
bring the dispute ‘before the International Court in the Hague’
or to ask for the mediation by ‘the Great Powers’ that assisted in
solving the post-annexation crisis in March 1909.28 The Serbian
response was so well put together that Alexander Musulin von
Gomirje, one of the authors of the ultimatum, described it as
‘[t]he most brilliant specimen of diplomatic skill’ he had ever seen.29
27
Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 64. In a gentlemanly act, the Habsburg
authorities arranged for a special train to transport Vojvoda Putnik back
to Serbia after the war had been declared. Putnik promptly assumed the
command of the Serbian army and oversaw its successful defence and
counterattack in August–September.
28
Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 66; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, II, 617.
29
Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 464. Musulin’s family hailed from an Orthodox Serb
village near Gomirje, in the Croatian Military Border. Because his ancestors
converted to Catholicism, this branch of the Musulins ‘became’ Croats. In
any case, Baron Musulin von Gomirje was one of many Habsburg South
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Kaiser Wilhelm now believed there was no longer any reason

for war and that Austria-Hungary should call off military mobi-
lization. Serbia followed Russia’s advice and withdrew its forces
from the border with the Dual Monarchy into the hinterland,
although full mobilization was still carried out.30 In neighbouring
Montenegro, the government in Cetinje cabled Belgrade follow-
ing an emergency session on 24 July, to say Russia’s advice should
be followed, but that in any case Montenegro stands with Serbia,
as ‘her [Serbia’s] destiny is our destiny too.’ Austria-Hungary’s
declaration of war arrived in Niš at around lunchtime on 28 July.
Written in French, it was cabled by ordinary telegraph service via
Bucharest. According to some eyewitnesses, Pašić received the tel-
egram while having lunch at a restaurant called Evropa (Europe).
Not sounding the least surprised, he allegedly said: ‘Austria has
declared war on us. Our cause is just. God will help us.’31 King
Nikola proclaimed that ‘Our Serbian People will emerge from
the tribulation that has been imposed on us and secure a bright
future. My Montenegrins are already at the border, ready to die
for the defence of our independence.’32
Hours later, Belgrade was bombarded, while cries of ‘Serbien
muss Sterbien’ (‘Serbia must die’) could be heard through the
Dual Monarchy. Exactly one month after the Sarajevo assas-
sination, the Great War had thus begun, which neither Serbia
nor Austria-Hungary would survive. The latter disintegrated,
its South Slav territories joining Serbia and Montenegro in the
new, Yugoslav state that was formed on 1 December 1918; in the
process, Serbia and Montenegro ceased to exist as independent
Slavs – including Orthodox Serbs – who identified with and served the empire
loyally. His mastery of the French was one, though not the only, reason why
he was asked to draft the ultimatum. Zametica, Folly and Malice, 543.
30
‘Manifest kr.[aljevske] srpske vlade’, Belgrade, 25 (12) July 1914, DokKSHS, 1.
31
Mitrović, Srb. u prv. sv. ratu, 5, 68; Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia, 618.
32
‘Proklamacija crnogorskoga kralja Nikole’, Cetinje, 7 August (25 July) 1914,
DokKSHS, 6–7; cf. Rakočević, 32–34, 46.
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countries. Serbia’s wartime losses were possibly higher than that

of any other country, relatively speaking, and Serbia suffered
more than any other part of future Yugoslavia.
The invading Austro-Hungarian troops, which included
South Slav conscripts, committed atrocities and war crimes.
Between 3,000 and 4,000 civilians were executed in the region
of Šabac in the early stages of the war; there were instances of
torture and rape, destruction of religious and cultural sites and
killing of domestic animals, vital for the human survival in this
predominantly agricultural society. Some 50,000 civilians were
confined to concentration camps (40,000 in Austria-Hungary,
the rest in Serbia), not counting tens of thousands of prisoners
of war (PoWs). Meanwhile, Belgrade and other Serbian towns
were indiscriminately bombarded. Many individuals had shrap-
nel wounds that led to the rapid spread of infectious diseases
and is probably linked to the terrible spread of typhus. When
Bulgarian troops moved into Serbia in Autumn 1915, they too
committed crimes against civilians, targeting priests, teachers
and women. By October 1915, the population of Belgrade shrunk
to 7,000–12,000 from the pre-war total of nearly 82,500 due to
death, arrest (including many intellectuals), forced r esettlement
and fleeing, either abroad or to countryside.33
33
J. Knežević, ‘Reclaiming Their City: Belgraders and the Combat against
Habsburg Propaganda through Rumours, 1915–18’, in S. Goebel & D.
Keene (eds), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and
Commemorations of Total War, London, 2011, 101–18, 102; J. R. Lampe,
Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, Cambridge, 1996, 109; J. Lyon,
Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War, London, 2015;
B. Mladenović, ‘The Bulgarian Occupation Regime in Serbia 1915–1918 in
the Light of Austro-Hungarian Documents’, Tokovi istorije (Belgrade), 3, 2020,
11–26; M. Pisarri, Sul Fronte Balcanico: Guerra e crimini contro la populazione
civile in Serbia tra il 1914 e il 1918, Novi Sad, 2019; Pavlowitch, Serbia, 100; R.
A. Reiss, How Austria-Hungary Waged War in Serbia: Personal Investigation of a
Neutral, Paris, 1915; cf. J. E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in
Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918, Cambridge, 2009.
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According to a recent study, Serbia lost 162,172 soldiers and

officers (the figure includes those who died on battlefield, in
military hospitals and in prisoner-of-war camps, but not around
8,750 losses suffered in the 1917 Toplica Uprising). There were
around 29,500 disabled Serbian army veterans (this was 45.4 per
cent of all Yugoslavia’s ‘war invalids’). Tens of thousands of civil-
ians also died during the war, many from typhoid fever. Another
recent study estimates a population decrease in Serbia at around
525,000 (nearly 314,000 in the territory of pre-1912 Serbia) for
the period 1911–21 – due to war, disease (typhoid fever, Spanish
flu) and emigration. Pre-1912 Serbia, according to the same
study, lost 17.2 per cent of its male and 3.9 per cent of its female
population during the decade. Demographic losses for the same
period may have been as high as 1,152 million people.34 Material
damage was just as devastating. Serbia’s agriculture, industry and
mines were exploited by the occupation authorities, with no plans
for development or for linking them to Habsburg territories in
34
Military losses: M. Bjelajac, ‘Ratni gubici Srbije u Prvom svetskom ratu:
Kontroverze oko brojeva’, Tokovi istorije, 1, 2021, 41–84. (I am grateful
to Dr Bjelajac for helping me calculate the total figure from a detailed
overview of Serbian, Entente and Central Powers’ estimates he provides);
population decrease and demographic losses: M. Jagodić and O. Radonjić,
‘Pyrrhic Victory: The Great War and Its Immediate Consequences for
Serbia’s Economy’, in I. Vujačić and M. Arandarenko (eds), The Economic
Causes and Consequences of the First World War, Belgrade, 2015, 219–35, 224;
disabled veterans: J. P. Newman, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans
and the Limits of State-building, 1903-1945, Cambridge, 2015 and ‘Forging
a United Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes: The Legacy of the First
World War and the “Invalid Question”’, in D. Djokić and J. Ker-Lindsay
(eds), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies, London,
2011, 46–61; Lj. Petrović, Nevidljivi geto: invalidi u Kraljevini Jugoslaviji,
1918–1941, Belgrade, 2007, 119–21; Spanish flu: V. Krivošejev, Epidemija
španske groznice u Srbiji 1916–1918, Novi Sad, 2020. The official Yugoslav
figures produced for the Paris Peace Conference talked of 402,435 military
and 845,000 civilian casualties – the total of 1,247,435 dead would have
represented 28 per cent of Serbia’s pre-war population, but these figures
were inflated.
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figure 6.1 Nikola Pašić, Prime Minister of Serbia, 23 July 1914 (Photo
by The Print Collector/Print Collector Getty Images)
the west. Livestock decreased significantly (e.g. horses by over 50

per cent and sheep by over 35 per cent) due to requisition by the
occupation authorities and death. Out of 450 industrial facilities
in pre-1912 Serbia, only 95 still existed in 1919, of which just
a few were functional. Before their withdrawal, the occupation
forces blew up bridges and railways, while in Belgrade residential
homes were vandalized.35
Between Serbia and Yugoslavia

Pašić’s coalition government informed in early September 1914
its diplomatic representatives in London, Paris and Petrograd that
‘our aim is to create, out of Serbia, a powerful south-western Slav
state that would include all Serbs, all Croats and all Slovenes.’
Serbia’s ‘Yugoslav war aim’ was made public in December, when
35
Jagodić and Radonjić, 227–31; Lampe, Yugoslavia, 109–10.
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the National Assembly convened in Niš proclaimed that Serbia

fought ‘to liberate and unite all our unliberated brethren: Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes’ into one state.36
It was around this time that Mitrinović started working at the
Serbian legation in London. He may have arrived in Britain pen-
niless, but he was not without contacts. He communicated with
Prince Kropotkin, a fellow Slav émigré in Britain, mixed with
the Bloomsbury set, and contributed to the New Age – an influ-
ential publication, albeit with a declining circulation, edited by
Alfred Orage – writing on world affairs under a pseudonym. After
New Age, came New Britain and New Europe, chairmanship of the
British branch of the Adler Society, and finally New Atlantis,
Mitrinović’s own utopian-philosophical circle, whose members
continued to meet long after his death in 1953. He was buried at
London’s Highgate cemetery, not far from Marx, one of his early
influences. Around the same time, Tito’s Marxist government
exonerated Colonel Apis and celebrated Princip and the Young
Bosnians for their pro-Yugoslav and socialist views – an excellent
example of how contemporary events, and regime needs, influ-
ence interpretations of the past. However, Mitrinović and his role
in the creation of Yugoslavia has been largely forgotten. As part
of his job at the Serbian legation, he became involved in pro-
Yugoslav propaganda activities and helped organize exhibitions
of Yugoslav artists in Britain during the war, including Croatian
sculptor Ivan Meštrović, who was a member of the London-based
Yugoslav Committee.
Formed in Florence in late 1914, before relocating to
London the following year, the Yugoslav Committee was led by
36
D. Djokić, ‘From Salonica to Belgrade: The Emergence of Yugoslavia,
1917–1921’, in J. R. Lampe and U. Brunnbauer (eds), The Routledge Handbook
of Balkan and Southeast European History, London, 2020, ch. 19, and, for
more details, Nikola Pašić and Ante Trumbić: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes, London, 2010, and Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar
Yugoslavia, London, 2007.
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Dalmatian Croat politicians Ante Trumbić and Frano Supilo. The

Committee received financial support from the Serbian govern-
ment, but their relations were often strained due to disagreement
over the nature of a future union. Moreover, the Committee’s
propaganda was directed not only against Austria-Hungary but
also against Italy, Serbia’s ally. Prime Minister Pašić believed
the Yugoslav unification should be led by Serbia, not counting
Bulgaria the only independent South Slav state other than its
close ally, Montenegro, which capitulated in early 1916. Trumbić
and Supilo, on the other hand, preferred an equal union, albeit
of unequal partners. Unlike the Habsburg Slav lands, Serbia was
an independent country and unlike the Yugoslav Committee, the
Serbian government had the democratic legitimacy, an army and
powerful allies among the allied governments. The Committee
included distinguished South Slav political and intellectual per-
sonalities, including Meštrović and Serbian-American scientist
and Columbia University professor Mihajlo Pupin.
In April 1915, Britain, France and Russia promised Italy
Dalmatia and Istria in exchange for entering the war on the
side of the Entente. When they found out about the secret
London Treaty, both the Serbian government and the Yugoslav
Committee ‘rejected’ and campaigned against it. The allies had
not informed Serbia of their negotiations with Italy but envisaged
a ‘compensation’ for Serbia in Bosnia and Serb Orthodox major-
ity parts of Croatia. Later that year, the Entente ‘offered’ Serbia,
through Petrograd, Bosnia-Herzegovina in exchange for surren-
dering the Serbian share of Macedonia to Bulgaria, which would
result, it was hoped, in Bulgaria joining the allies. Serbia rejected
the offer. It is sometimes suggested that the secret diplomacy of
1915 amounted to a green light by Serbia’s allies for the creation
of, after the war, a Greater Serbia. According to this narrative, the
Serbian leadership sacrificed ‘national interests’ for Yugoslavia
out of a sense of duty and loyalty towards the other South Slavs.
Serbia could not have rejected the London Treaty since it was not
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privy to its signing. As for the proposed Bosnia–Macedonia swap,

in August 1915, Macedonia was part of Serbia, unlike Bosnia-
Herzegovina. The Pašić government was essentially being asked
to surrender a territory it controlled (and for which it had fought
in the Balkan Wars) in exchange for the lands Austria-Hungary
had recently annexed and for which it was, as we have seen, pre-
pared to risk major regional and international confrontations (in
1878, 1908 and 1914).
Secret diplomacy was common during the war – for example,
in 1916, the Entente promised Romania the Banat region, parts
of which were claimed by Serbia, so Bucharest would enter the
war on its side. Such promises depended very much on the war’s
outcome, which nobody could have predicted in 1915 or 1916.
Although Italy ended up on the victors’ side, it did not receive
all the territories it had been promised in London. This was
partly because Serbia, and through Serbia the other South Slavs
as well, was among the victors in the war, and partly because the
US President Wilson was opposed to secret treaties and instead
favoured national self-determination. At the same time, if Serbia
had been against the South Slav unification, it likely would have
been allowed at the end of the war to incorporate all or some of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vojvodina and Serb-populated parts of the
former Croatian Military border. Among the Powers, Italy for
one would have been in favour because it would have paved a way
to Rome annexing Dalmatia, Istria and parts of Slovenia. It is hard
to imagine that Montenegro would have stayed out of a union
with an enlarged Serbia, regardless of any opposition from Italy.
However, even such a Greater Serbia would have been a de facto
smaller Yugoslavia, with large Muslim Slav, Macedonian Slav,
Bosnian Catholic and ethnic Albanian, Hungarian and German
minorities.
After it won heroic victories at Cer and Kolubara in August
and November–December 1914, respectively, and managed to
hold on for a year and a half, the Serbian army finally gave in to
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figure 6.2 Civilians fleeing the Habsburg army invasion of Serbia, c.1914
(Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)
the superior enemy. In October 1915, Bulgaria joined Austria-

Hungary and Germany in a concerted attack on two fronts.
Facing a total defeat during winter 1915/16, the army, together
with members of the government, the King’s family and some
civilians, crossed the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to
reach Greece, still a neutral country. Some within the Serbian
leadership believed the army should face the superior enemy at
the site of the 1389 Kosovo Battle and perish there like Prince
Lazar and his knights did. Common sense prevailed and the army
set off on an epic journey instead. It took with them thousands
of Habsburg army prisoners of war, including a young Croatian
writer Mile Budak, the future minister in the Second World War
Croatian government. Budak later wrote an autobiographical
novel describing the experience. In one scene, starving Serbian
soldiers and their prisoners, walking skeletons virtually indistin-
guishable from each other, sat around a dead horse and shared
whatever meat was left of the unfortunate animal.37
37
M. Budak, Ratno roblje: Albanski križni put austrougarskih zarobljenih časnika,
Zagreb, 1991 (first publ. 1941), 128.
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Following the retreat, during which tens of thousands died

of starvation, cold, disease or fighting Albanian guerrillas and
brigands, the Serbian government-in-exile and most of the army
reached Corfu in early 1916. Around 120 National Assembly dep-
uties who retreated together with, or as members of, the army,
convened in exile. Serbia may have been occupied, but its exiled
government had at its disposal a parliament and an army. It was an
exhausted force, reduced by one half to less than 150,000 surviv-
ing soldiers and officers, but nevertheless an army. After Serbia’s
defeat, Pašić unofficially adopted a ‘minimalist’ aim, of restoring
and possibly extending Serbia, before eventually uniting with the
other South Slavs. At the same time, Regent Aleksandar, Pašić’s
coalition partners, the Independent Radicals and most Serbian
intellectuals maintained a ‘Yugoslav line’. Rather than seeing this
as the lack of ‘national unity’, lamented by nationalists, Serbia’s
politics during the Great War showed a remarkable capacity for
plurality and d
ifference of opinion.
During the First World War, the myth of the medieval Kosovo
battle proved useful to the Entente propaganda in which Serbia’s
history was viewed exclusively in terms of a heroic struggle
against tyranny (Ottoman Turks, Hungarians, Austro-Germans,
Bulgarians – all, of course, the Entente wartime enemies). On the
anniversary of the battle in 1915 and 1916, British and French
schools offered lessons on Serbian history, while a Kossovo
Day Committee was formed in London by Elsie Inglis, R. W.
Seton-Watson and Arthur Evans of the London Times among
others. In early July 1916, Anglican priests prayed for Serbia
and its dynasty, joined by Archimandrite Nikolaj Velimirović
of Žiča monastery, the first Orthodox Christian to preach at St
Paul’s Cathedral. (In 2016, Serbian Patriarch Irinej (2010–20)
held a service at the Cathedral jointly with Justin Welby, the
Archbishop of Canterbury (since 2013), to mark the centenary
of the event). Velimirović would later take part in liturgies at
New York’s St John the Divine, the largest Gothic cathedral in
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North America, where on 16 June 1918 a special service was held

to mark ‘the Kossovo Day’ – as both a Serbian national day and
a day dedicated to the South Slavs ‘and other oppressed nations’.
US sculptor Malvina Hoffman (a pupil of Rodin and an admirer
of Meštrović) had previously visited the Gračanica monastery in
Kosovo, and upon her return lit candles she brought back from
the monastery during ‘a special service of thanksgiving on 15
June, Kossovo Day, attended by 5,000 Yugo-Slavs and directed
by Reverend Howard C. Robbins, then Dean of the Cathedral,
and one of the most loyal and devoted friends of Yugo-Slavia
throughout the war.’38
The Corfu Declaration

An emphasis on wartime disagreements between the Serbian gov-
ernment and the Yugoslav Committee in the existing literature
tends to overshadow equally important examples of mutual under-
standing on key issues such as a common goal to create a Yugoslav
state under the Serbian dynasty, and a somewhat exaggerated
claim that all South Slavs spoke the same language. Members of
the Yugoslav Committee argued that Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
were and had always been one nation, kept apart only by divisions
imposed by their foreign rulers. However, they also believed that,
38
M. Hoffman, Heads and Tales, New York, 1936, 126. Three quarters of a
century later, on 28 March 1994, the New York Newsday reported: ‘The
Episcopal bishop of New York yesterday dedicated Palm Sunday services
and a new sculpture at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to victims of the
killing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bishop Richard Grein also asked churchgoers
to remember the Jewish victims of the Holocaust during World War II and
the Armenians who were slaughtered by the Turks in the early part of the
century.’ Thus, it might be said that St John the Divine Cathedral – where,
incidentally, funeral services were held, in 1935 and 1943, respectively,
for Mihajlo Pupin and Nikola Tesla, two great American-Serb scientists –
symbolizes the highs and the lows of Serbia’s history and of its standing in
the West, on both ends of Yugoslavia.
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like other national ideas, ‘the idea of Southern Slav unity was mod-
ern in its essence’, and that it demanded ‘clear self-consciousness, a
wide mental outlook, and an enlightened intelligentsia.’39
Another overlooked unifying factor was the belief in a moral supe-
riority of their cause. They viewed themselves as representatives
and advocates of liberal-democratic values, which included national
self-determination – just like their western allies, but unlike their
main enemies, the Habsburg and German empires and Bulgaria
(whose monarch, incidentally, styled himself tsar – or emperor).
When in May 1917 South Slav deputies in the Austrian parliament
called for autonomy within the Habsburg Empire, Trumbić issued
an appeal to the British parliament, dismissing the declaration
as unrepresentative and the Reichsrat (Austrian parliament) as an
undemocratic institution. The May declaration accelerated talks
between the Serbian government and the Committee, leading to
their meeting at Corfu that summer and a joint statement that ‘this
three-named [Serb-Croat-Slovene] people of ours is one accord-
ing to blood, spoken and written language, the feelings of unity
and continuity and compactness of territory in which it lives’. The
Corfu Declaration included another important statement: ‘[…]
the authorised representatives of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes […]
demand on the basis of the principle of free national determina-
tion that the [Yugoslav nation] be wholly liberated […] and united
in a free, national and independent state…based on modern and
democratic principles.’40 This was one of the arguments deployed
by the Yugoslavs at the Paris Peace Conference (see the following
text). The nineteenth-century visions of a greater South Slav state,
formed around Serbia, did not stand a chance mainly because of the
39
‘Idea of Southern Slav Unity’, Southern Slav Library (London), 5 (1916), 17.
40
‘Krfska deklaracija od 20. (7.) jula 1917’, DokKSHS, 96–99. My emphasis; cf.
K. St. Pavlowitch, ‘The First World War and the Unification of Yugoslavia’,
in D. Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992, London,
2003, 27–41.
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lack of support of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and most

other Great Powers. Such visions were simply not compatible with
the ‘Concert of Europe’ nor how the Powers imagined the Eastern
Question should be resolved. Things would change following the
1912–18 wars, which saw the end of both Ottoman and Habsburg
rule in the Balkans, while the idea of a South Slav union gained
a powerful supporter in the United States, which entered the
war in April 1917. The Yugoslav agitators’ argument that Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes were members of a single ethnic nation fitted
President Wilson’s ideology. At the same time, Russia, Pašić’s main
ally but somewhat sceptical of a Serb–Croat union, had exited the
war following the 1917 revolutionary turmoil.
From Salonica to Belgrade

A three-way political struggle from before the war between
Prime Minister Pašić, Regent Aleksandar and Colonel Apis
came to a head in late 1916. The first two put on hold their
differences to remove Apis, who may or may not had been con-
spiring against one or both. Accused of plotting to assassinate
the regent, the Black Hand leader and several other members
of the organization were executed after a hasty trial in Salonica
in June 1917, prompting the fall of the coalition government.
Serbia’s reputation among the Allies suffered as a result of
what was obviously a show trial, and there were also suspicions
that the whole affair was arranged to facilitate a separate peace
between Serbia and Austria-Hungary.
Despite competing visions of Yugoslavia, evolving views and
reversals among the South Slav leaders, all key political actors
supported a Yugoslav union by late 1918: Serbia’s government, the
regent, and opposition parties, the South Slav emigres in London,
Croatian, Slovene and Serb political leaders in Austria-Hungary,
and Montenegro’s political emigration. To be sure, the idea of a
Serb-dominated centralized Yugoslavia was close to Pašić’s heart,
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and it was probably also how many Serbs understood Yugoslavia,

consciously or not. However, the pro-Yugoslav Serbian opposi-
tion and Serbian intellectuals included federalists and republicans,
making it difficult to view the Serbian politics as a united front.41
Although Yugoslav nationalism was largely a secular project,
it received support from the main religious groups, Serbian
Orthodox dioceses and the Roman Catholic Church in Habsburg
South Slav regions. Muslims from Bosnia-Herzegovina were on
the margins of Yugoslav unification, but their intellectuals sup-
ported cooperation, and sometimes identified with Croats and/
or Serbs. Muslims from Kosovo, Macedonia and Sandžak fought
in the Serbian army, having been mobilized after Serbia took
over these regions in 1912–13. The Jewish community of future
Yugoslavia also supported the creation of the new state that
brought Ashkenazim and Sephardim together as Yugoslavs.
Recuperated and rearmed by the French and the British, Serbian
troops had taken back a small part of Vardar Macedonia before
the end of 1916, but this came at the heavy cost of 4,000–5,000
killed and wounded at the Battle of Kajmakčalan/Kaimaki. The
Serbian and Bulgarian armies subsequently dug in behind trenches
usually associated with the Western front. For about a year, the
Balkan front remained relatively quiet, so much so that Georges
Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, mockingly described
the Allied troops in Macedonia, mainly French and Serbian, as
‘gardeners of Salonica’. The brutality of the Bulgarian occupa-
tion inside Serbia provoked a short-lived uprising in the south-
ern Toplica region in February 1917. One of the leaders of the
rebellion was Kosta Pećanac, a Četnik (Serb guerillas) commander
who had prior to the war fought the Ottomans and Bulgarians in
Macedonia.42 The breakthrough came in mid-September 1918.
41
Lj. Trgovčević, Naučnici Srbije i stvaranje Jugoslavije, 1914–1920, Belgrade,
1987.
42
A. Mitrović, Toplički ustanak: Mesto u srpskoj istoriji, Belgrade, 1993.
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figure 6.3 A Serbian soldier being shaved in a trench by one of

his comrades at the Macedonian front, c.1916 (Topical Press Agency/
Getty Images)
Under the command of French General Franchet d’Espèray,

the Serbian army, British and French units, many of them from
Africa and India, and Greek and Italian divisions pushed back and
defeated combined Bulgarian, Austro-Hungarian and German
forces. In early October, the Serbian troops were in southern Serbia
and Kosovo, and on 1 November, Belgrade was liberated. The army
then pushed the enemy out of Vojvodina, Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Montenegro and rushed to the eastern Adriatic to prevent Italian
occupation of contested territory in Dalmatia, Istria and Slovenia.
The Serb–Croat–Slovene Kingdom

Meanwhile, Habsburg South Slav political representatives formed
a National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in Zagreb on
8 October 1918. Three weeks later, and one day after Austria-
Hungary sued for peace, on 29 October, the Council proclaimed
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the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, a transitional polity

independent from Austria-Hungary and on its way to unification
with Serbia and Montenegro. Statements of support came from
Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Novi Sad. It might be said that with this
act, Zagreb rejected the May Declaration and began implement-
ing the Declaration of Corfu. On the same day, the Croatian Sabor
(Assembly) and ban (Governor), two medieval institutions pre-
served under the terms of the 1102 Pacta conventa with Hungary,
and a similar arrangement with Austria in 1527, severed all ties
with Budapest and Vienna. The Sabor recognized the supreme
authority of the National Council, in the process dissolving itself
and the office of the ban. An independent Croatia had thus existed
for a matter of minutes, between the proclamation of independ-
ence from Austria-Hungary and the decision to enter the new,
Slovene–Croat–Serb state, as an important step towards a full
Yugoslav union. Serbia gave up its sovereignty by entering the
union with the Slovene–Croat–Serb state on 1 December 1918, as
had Montenegro, whose pro-Serb leaders proclaimed the unifica-
tion with Serbia a week previously, but Croatia too gave up its cen-
turies-old institutions. Previously, representatives of the Serbian
government, the National Council and the Yugoslav Committee
met for talks in Geneva in early November. The Serbian oppo-
sition also took part, siding with the Habsburg Yugoslavs and
against Pašić over the question of the nature of the union. A joint
declaration promised a union of equal partners, but it ultimately
came to nothing due to its rejection by both the Serbian parlia-
ment and the National Council.
Ironically, the greatest threat to Yugoslav territorial ambitions
was posed by two of Serbia’s wartime allies, Romania and Italy. The
dispute with Romania and Hungary over the Banat region would
be settled by its partition at the Paris Peace Conference – mainly
between Yugoslavia and Romania, with only a small part going
to Hungary. The disputed region saw disturbances and violence
between various military units loyal to newly created states and
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Béla Kun’s communist republic. A short-lived ‘Serb–Hungarian

Baranja–Baja Republic’ was proclaimed in Pečuj/Pécs in August
1921, under the presidency of Petar Dobrović, a Hungarian
Serb modernist painter. Serb/Yugoslav army occupied parts of
Hungary before withdrawing after the Peace Conference.43
In Autumn 1918, Italian forces sought to occupy the east-
ern Adriatic, as promised in the secret Treaty of London. The
Yugoslavs claimed same territory on the nationality principle and
cited Croatian historical ‘state rights’. As Italian troops advanced
towards central Croatia and Slovenia, the army of the Slovene–
Croat–Serb state, hastily assembled from former members of the
disbanded Habsburg army and police, issued a plea for help to
the Entente. The Serbian High Command responded by sending
troops to the contested territories. The capture of Ljubljana by
Italians was only prevented by a unit made up of former prisoners
of war commanded by a Serbian officer. Rijeka/Fiume and the Bay
of Kvarner/Carnaro was defended by the Second Battalion of the
50th Serbian Infantry Regiment. Only the presence of allied troops
prevented an outbreak of a war between Italy and Serbia/the South
Slavs. Serbian troops were greeted as liberators, but the level of
support among Croats and other non-Serbs for a union with Serbia
is hard to estimate. Several contemporary sources suggest that sup-
port existed among ‘ordinary people’ for some sort of a South Slav
union. Most people, however, were probably indifferent to what
kind of state they would live in as long as it brought peace, stability
and relative prosperity. After four years of war and at the time when
there was widespread hunger, uncertainty prevailed in the South
Slav regions of the rapidly dissolving Habsburg Empire.
In late 1918, Trumbić was in Paris but urged the National
Council to press ahead with the unification with Serbia, given the
43
I. J. Lederer, Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study in
Frontiermaking, New Haven, CT, 1963, 100–103; Prota S. Mihaldžić,
Dnevnik, ed. by D. Njegovan, Novi Sad, 2000, 172–73; A. Mitrović,
Jugoslavija na Konferenciji mira, 1919–1920, Belgrade, 1969.
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grave situation in his native Dalmatia. When in mid-November

Regent Aleksandar conveyed to the National Council Serbia’s
desire to start talks about unification, the Zagreb deputies
responded with enthusiasm. The only dissenting voice came from
the Croatian People’s Peasant Party, but its leader Stjepan Radić
was in a small minority, and not opposed to some sort of a South
Slav union. Meanwhile, predominantly Serb municipalities in
Bosnia-Herzegovina also pushed for the unification, while on 25
November representatives of Hungarian Serbs proclaimed the
unification of Vojvodina with Serbia – the only act of union still
in place today.
Italy supported the Albanian, Macedonian and Montenegrin
guerrillas opposed to the creation of Yugoslavia or, in the case of
some Montenegrins, to what they believed was the occupation of
Montenegro by Serbia. Supporters of exiled King Nikola rose in
arms against the Podgorica Grand National Assembly of the Serb
People in Montenegro, which had proclaimed Montenegro’s
union with Serbia on 26 November. The proclamation cited
Wilsonian principles of national self-determination and historic
and ethnic unity with Serbia and Serbs; it was to be the last phase
in a centuries-long struggle to (re-)unite two Serb states. The
Podgorica deputies saw Montenegro’s merger with Serbia as a
step towards a broader South Slav union. They were supported
by both the Montenegrin communists and the Orthodox church.
In anticipation of the restoration of a united Serbian Orthodox
Church, and echoing the decisions of the Podgorica Assembly,
the Metropolitanate at Cetinje declared on 16 December 1918
that ‘the Archiepiscopal Council of the autocephalous church in
Montenegro unanimously decided to unite with the independent
Holy Orthodox Church in the Kingdom of Serbia’.44
44
I. Avakumović, History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Aberdeen, 1964,
48n; R. Radić, Život u vremenima: Patrijarh Gavrilo (Dožić): 1881–1950,
Belgrade, 2011, 127.
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AUSTRIA HUNGARY
AUSTRIA- HUNGARY
TIA-SLAVONIA
CR OA
BOSNIA-
DA HERZEGOVINA
LM KINGDOM
AT
IA OF
ADRIATIC SERBIA
KINGDOM
SEA OF
ITALY MONTENEGRO
Post 1918 borders of Yugoslavia

Austro-Hungarian lands
Hungary
Austrian lands ALBANIA
GREECE
Croatia (associated with Hungary)
Bosnia-Herzegovina
(Austrian-Hungarian condominium)
map 6.1 The formation of Yugoslavia in 1918. Drawn by Joe LeMonnier,

https://mapartist.com/, based on a map originally published in Stevan K.
Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, London: Benn, 1971, p. 49
After a 48-hour journey through war-damaged country, Zagreb

delegates arrived in Belgrade at the end of November, to formally
seek the unification with Serbia. They were received by Regent
Aleksandar at 8:00 p.m. on 1 December 1918 in a temporary res-
idence near the Terazije Square in central Belgrade. Present also
were three Serbian government ministers (but not Prime Minister
Pašić, who was away), and Vojvoda (Field Marshal) Mišić, chief of
staff of the supreme command of the Serbian army. The National
Council’s address stated that Slovenes, Serbs and Croats, who
had temporarily created their own state, decided to unite with
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Serbia on the principle of national self-determination in a uni-

fied kingdom under the Karadjordjević dynasty and a modern,
democratic government. The address ended with cheers for
King Petar, Regent Aleksandar, the ‘whole, united Serbo–Croat–
Slovene people’, and a ‘free, united Yugoslavia’. Aleksandar duly
responded by announcing, in the name of his father King Petar,
‘the unification of Serbia with the lands of the independent State
of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs into a united Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes.’ Later that month, the Serbian skupština
convened to endorse the act of union and in the process dissolve
itself. The new kingdom was informally called Yugoslavia, until in
1929 it became its official name.
A provisional Serb–Croat–Slovene National Assembly (also
called the skupština) and a government were set up, taking into
account regional and party representation. The Radicals were
considered the largest party, but due to a conflict with the Regent,
Pašić did not become the first Yugoslav prime minister – that hon-
our went to his party comrade Protić. Trumbić, not a member
of any political party, was appointed Yugoslavia’s first Foreign
Minister. He would spend much of the following year and a half
in Paris, as Pašić’s deputy in the Yugoslav peace delegation. A
294-member provisional parliament convened on 1 March 1919 on
the basis of regional representation. Pre-1912 Serbia had 84 dep-
uties, Kosovo and Macedonia 24, Montenegro 12, Vojvodina 24,
Bosnia-Herzegovina 42, Croatia-Slavonia 60, Dalmatia 12, Istria
4 and Slovenia 32. As the largest South Slav group (see Table 6.1),
it should not have come as a surprise that Serbs formed a major-
ity in the interim representation, but complaints about Serb over-
representation were nevertheless heard, and were not unjustified.
Centralism prevailed eventually, following prolonged parlia-
mentary debates and backroom deals. The Democrats (newly
formed by the Independent Radicals, members of the Croat–Serb
Coalition and Slovene liberals) and Pašić’s Radicals were the
largest parties in the November 1920 elections for a Constituent
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Table 6.1 Population of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by ethnicity, 1921
Total population 11,985,000

Total number of South Slavs, of which:* 9,835,000 (82% of the total
population)
Serbs (incl. c.200,000 Montenegrins) 4,813,000 (40.1%)
Croats 2,797,000 (23.3%)
Slovenes 1,020,000 (8.5%)
Bosnian Muslims 740,000 (6.2%)
Macedonians 465,000 (3.9%)
Largest non-South Slav ethnic minorities:
Germans 512,000 (4.3%)
Albanians 484,000 (4%)
Hungarians 472,000 (3.9%)
Source: B. Kočović, Etnički i demografski razvoj u Jugoslaviji, od 1921. do 1991. godine,

2 vols, Paris, 1998.
*Kočović’s figures are estimates as the 1921 population census recorded language and
religion only.
Assembly, with 92 and 91 seats, respectively (out of total 419

seats). The rivalry between the two parties was set aside to advo-
cate a centralist constitution they both preferred. Meanwhile,
alternative proposals were tabled, including from Serb federal-
ists and republicans. Communist deputies initially took part in
parliamentary sessions, before boycotting the vote on consti-
tution. Sima Marković (1888–1939), a Serb Social-Democrat
and one of the founders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia,
shouted ‘Long live the Soviet republic!’, to which other deputies
responded with ‘Long live the King!’. During the 1920s, when
the Party functioned illegally following its ban by the authori-
ties in the wake of the assassination of a Democract defence min-
ister by a communist in July 1921, Marković represented ‘right
fraction’, which advocated a federal Yugoslavia; the ‘left frac-
tion’ supported the then Comintern line that as the creation of
the ‘bourgeois’ Versailles peace Yugoslavia should dissolve; this
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changed from the mid-1930s when Yugoslavia came to be seen

by Moscow as an important member of the ‘Popular Front’. With
most Party leaders either in Yugoslav prisons or in Soviet exile,
factionalism continued into the late 1930s, until Comintern-
backed Tito was appointed in Moscow the new general secretary
of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Marković and other rival
leaders, such as Montenegro-born Petko Miletić (1897–c.1940),
disappeared in Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union.45
Back in 1921, the Democrat–Radical alliance only succeeded
in pushing through their centralist proposal thanks to the sup-
port of Muslim deputies from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and
Macedonia, in exchange for political and economic concessions.
The vote was 223 for and 35 against, with 161 abstentions. Without
the boycott by the third and fourth largest political parties, the
Communists (58 seats) and the Croatian Peasant Republican
Party (50), respectively, the centralist proposal would not have
won a clear majority and it might well have been rejected.
The vote took place on 28 June, the anniversary of the 1389
Kosovo Battle and of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination, and
exactly two years after, the peace treaty with Germany signed at
Versailles. Thus, from the very beginning, the Yugoslav Kingdom
was associated with the central Serbian historical event and with
the consequences of the 1914 assassination.
Parallel to preparing for elections for the constituent assem-
bly, the interim Yugoslav government needed to assemble a del-
egation for the peace conference that began in Paris in January
1919. Initially accepted by the conference as a delegation of the
Kingdom of Serbia due to Italy’s opposition to the Yugoslav (and
Serb-Montenegrin) union and the other Allies’ reluctance to
accept recent Habsburg subjects (and in one case a former Austrian
45
A. Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution,
1919–1953, Cambridge, MA, 1991, chps 2 & 3; M. Djilas, Memoir of a
Revolutionary, transl. by D. Willen, New York, 1973.
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minister, now the leading Slovene member of the Yugoslav team),

the delegation also suffered from internal rivalries. Pašić, who was
the head of the delegation, and Trumbić, his deputy and Foreign
Minister in the provisional government, nonetheless managed to
put their differences aside, largely because they, and other del-
egates, shared a common goal: the international recognition of
the Serb–Croat–Slovene Kingdom in the borders the South Slavs
claimed on ethnic, historic and geopolitical reasons.
The delegation was not without some major advantages. Many
of the territories it claimed had a South Slav majority, much
of this territory was also under the control of the Serbian/new
Yugoslav army, and Serbia’s war effort counted for considerable
international prestige. Among sympathetic allies, and citing the
Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, the Yugoslavs
had some powerful weapons with which to counter the rival claims
of their neighbours, especially Italy. Pašić’s reputation meant that
it did not matter much that the Yugoslavs were the only major
delegation not led by a head of state or government; on the other
hand, having to consult the government in Belgrade for all key
decisions slowed down the delegates’ work. By the time the dele-
gation left Paris in July 1920, it had secured international recog-
nition of the country and most of the territories it had originally
claimed. The one exception was the dispute with Italy over the
eastern Adriatic, which was eventually mostly resolved in Rapallo
in November 1920, to the full satisfaction of neither side.
On the surface at least, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes (as Yugoslavia was officially known between 1918 and
1929) was a prototype ‘successor state’ to the Habsburg monar-
chy. It was burdened by a complex pre-war legacy, including a
delayed (certainly in comparison with western Europe and North
America) and regionally uneven modernization. Its population
had suffered unprecedented losses through violence and disease
during the wars of 1912–1918, and infrastructure was seriously
damaged. The violence, albeit on a smaller scale, continued into
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the 1920s, like it did elsewhere in post-war Europe.46 Yet, the new
state appeared politically and economically viable, and despite
considerable challenges its future seemed relatively bright. As
did the future of the new international order created in Paris, of
which Yugoslavia was to be a key European member. Yugoslavia
was not created in Versailles, as has been sometimes claimed. The
fate of the interwar Yugoslav state, however, would increasingly
depend on the fate of the Versailles settlement, the first major
treaty that mentioned the Serb–Croat–Slovene state and thus
effectively amounted to its international recognition.
The peoples of what became Yugoslavia fought on different
sides during what, for Serbia at least, was a six-year war (1912–
18). It would be too simplistic to reduce this conflict to ethnic-
ity. Many Serbs fought loyally in the Habsburg army, while some
Croats and Slovenes joined the Serbian army, which also included
non-Serbs from Kosovo, Sandžak and Macedonia. Nevertheless,
Yugoslavia needed to reconcile a society that was in some ways
divided before it could be united. Both the unification process
and the interwar politics were dominated by Serbs from pre-1912
Serbia. To them it was natural that Serbia should dominate, since
it alone possessed a government, state bureaucracy, parliament
based on universal (male) suffrage and an army, capable of securing
the country’s borders before the peace delegation could achieve
Yugoslavia’s diplomatic recognition in Paris. The complex con-
stitutional debates have been discussed, and while centralism was
a Serb-preferred form of government, Pašić’s 1921 Constitution
did not provide for Serbia’s domination over Yugoslavia in the
way Bismarck’s Constitution enabled Prussia’s dominance of
the federal German Empire 50 years earlier. While there was an
46
D. Tasić, Paramilitarism in the Balkans: Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania,
1917–1924, Oxford, 2020; cf. R. Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First
World War Failed to End, New York, 2016; P. M. Judson, The Habsburg
Empire: A New History, Cambridge, MA, 2016, ch. 8, Epilogue.
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expectation that Macedonian Slavs would be assimilated into the

Serbian ‘tribe’, and possibly Bosnian Muslims too, no such plans
existed for Croats and Slovenes.
Society, Economy, Culture

Difficulties surrounding the formation of the Serbian Orthodox
Church in 1920 were not unlike those experienced by the South
Slav political leaders during the same period. The church was a
successor of the Peć Patriarchate, abolished in 1766, but it was
also a new institution that brought together the long-established
Orthodox centres in Belgrade, Cetinje and Sremski Karlovci
(and Ohrid, which had been claimed by the Bulgarian church).
This complex legacy was partly acknowledged in the title of the
modern Serbian patriarchs – Archbishop of Peć, Metropolitan of
Belgrade-Karlovci and the Serb Patriarch. There was an expec-
tation that a Montenegro-born bishop would become the head
of the Serbian church, because the head of state was from Serbia.
Similarly, Bosnian bishops pushed for their own candidate, but
in the end Serbia-born Metropolitan Dimitrije of Belgrade was
elected as the first modern Serb patriarch (1920–30). In some
ways, his election mirrored the political domination in Yugoslavia
of Serbs from Serbia.
The Serbian Orthodox Church was a national (that is Serb)
rather than state (Serb–Croat–Slovene/Yugoslav) church. Its
clergy welcomed the creation of Yugoslavia, among other rea-
sons because for the first time since the late sixteenth century,
most of its believers lived in a single state. On the other hand,
unlike in the kingdom of Serbia, there was no state religion in
Yugoslavia. The Serb–Croat–Slovene kingdom was in the eyes
of its creators and advocates the state of the Yugoslav nation,
which consisted of three ‘tribes’ (Serbs, Croats and Slovenes)
and three faiths (Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and Sunni
Islam). Thus, Muslim Slavs of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sandžak
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were implicitly acknowledged in the official discourse that, as

the original name of the state implied, explicitly recognized
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes only.47
Integrating a largely South Slav-populated area but often with-
out a sustained history of previous political and economic unity
was going to be a major challenge under the best of circumstances.
Formerly Habsburg Slovenia, Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina had
experienced a rising external trade and beginnings of industriali-
zation in the early twentieth century; to a lesser degree, the same
was true of Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Meanwhile, Serbia
had also seen growth of its exports, mainly of livestock, and nas-
cent industrialization. (However, this applied mostly to pre-1912
Serbia, which had no time to integrate fully the newly acquired
territories in the south). Austria-Hungary was Serbia’s main trad-
ing partner, but only 1 per cent of that trade was with Habsburg
Croatia. Thus, as John Lampe has shown, the Serb–Croat axis,
key to Yugoslavia’s success, had to be built without a prior history
of economic cooperation. To make things worse, when it was cre-
ated, Yugoslavia possessed four railway networks, five currencies
and six legal systems and custom unions. Particularly damaging for
trust building between Belgrade and Zagreb was a disagreement
over the rate at which the defunct Austro-Hungarian currency
should be exchanged for the new Yugoslav dinar. The compro-
mise rate of 5:1 satisfied almost nobody, as the former Habsburg
citizens of the new state demanded the 1:1 exchange rate, while
Serbia’s economic experts initially suggested 10:1.48
47
Radić, Život u vremenima, 113–16, and ‘Religion in a Multinational State: The
Case of Yugoslavia’, in Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism, 196–207, 197.
48
J. R. Lampe, ‘The Two Yugoslavias as Economic Unions’, in Djokić
(ed.), Yugoslavism, 182–95, 184–85, and ‘Unifying the Yugoslav Economy,
1918–1921: Misery and Early Misunderstandings’, in D. Djordjević (ed.),
The Creation of Yugoslavia, 1914–1918, Santa Barbara, CA, 1980, 139–56;
J. R. Lampe and M. R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950,
Bloomington, IN, 1982, 278–322.
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Once again, the question of land redistribution arose in the

aftermath of the 1912–18 wars. In addition to redistributing land
previously owned by large landowners, the interwar Yugoslav state
sought to alter the demographic picture in territories that Serbia
did not have the time to fully incorporate after the Balkan Wars – in
present-day Kosovo and North Macedonia. This was to be done
under the cover of the agrarian reform, as emigration of Muslim non-
Slavs from the southern territories to Turkey was encouraged. It was
also welcomed and facilitated by the newly created Turkish nation
state, which sought to populate depopulated parts of Anatolia –
where Greeks and Armenians had once lived – with Balkan Turks
and peoples of ‘Turkish culture’ (a label flexible enough to include
Albanians, though not necessarily Muslim Roma).
At the same time, the Yugoslav government sought to replace
departed ethnic Turks and Albanians with Slavs: Serb and
Montenegrin war veterans were given a priority, but all South Slavs,
including Bosnian Muslims, were encouraged to colonize Kosovo
and parts of Macedonia. As previously mentioned, Yugoslavia was
understood by its creators as the nation state of the South Slavs –
Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims. The ‘colonization’ went on
throughout the interwar period, but the process was slow and ulti-
mately it failed, partly because of the reluctance of colonists to move
to an area where local population was hostile to newcomers. A for-
mal agreement about the resettlement from Yugoslavia to Turkey
of around 200,000 Yugoslav ‘Turkish’ families was signed in 1938,
but it was never implemented due to the outbreak of the Second
World War the following year. The exact number of those who left
and those who settled, as well as those who returned, often with-
out notifying the authorities, is hard to establish, though an ethnic
Albanian majority in the territory of modern Kosovo and parts of
North Macedonia was maintained despite the departure of many.49
49
V. Jovanović, ‘In Search of [a] Homeland? Muslim Migration from
Yugoslavia to Turkey, 1918–1941’, Tokovi istorije, 1–2 (2008), 56–67;
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If the lack of previous economic cooperation between Serbia

and Croatia and problems posed by the agrarian reform created
a challenge to the new Yugoslav state, what to say about obsta-
cles facing the country’s military, tasked with integrating members
of until recently mutually belligerent armies? The new Yugoslav
army was built on the Serbian army, whose prestige in 1918 was
considerable. It included officers from four different armies and
military traditions: Austro-Hungarian, Montenegrin, Russian
(many ‘White Russian’ officers and soldiers were given asylum in
the newly created kingdom) and Serbian. There were in total 3,500
former Serbian officers, 2,590 officers from the former Austro-
Hungarian army (many of whom were ethnic Serbs), 469 from
the former Montenegrin army and 12 Russian Tsarist officers.
The Serbs, Montenegrins and Russians fought against the Austro-
Hungarians, but only the Serbian army emerged victorious from
the war; Montenegro capitulated in 1916, and Russia exited the war
the following year. The language of command in the new army was
Serbo-Croat, but with military terms from the Serbian army pre-
dominating. This was not surprising, since Croatian and Slovenian
military terms were associated with the defeated Habsburg army,
but it was bound to make the new army appear essentially Serbian
rather than Yugoslav. In addition, Serbian and Montenegrin tra-
dition of anti-Ottoman and anti-Habsburg ‘liberation wars’ and
resistance was especially promoted by the new army.50
The heroism of the Serbian army in the First World War was
rightly celebrated, but it was also mythologized, contributing to
E. Pezo, ‘“Re-Conquering” Space: Yugoslav Migration Policies and

the Emigration of Non-Slavic Muslims to Turkey (1918–1941)’, in U.
Brunnbauer (ed.), Transnational Societies, Transterritorial Politics: Migrations
in the (Post-)Yugoslav Region 19th-21st Century, Munich, 2009, 73–94;
cf. Z. Janjetović, Deca careva, pastorčad kraljeva: Nacionalne manjine u
Jugoslaviji, 1918–1941, Belgrade, 2005.
50
M. Bjelajac, ‘The Military and Yugoslav Unity’, op. cit, and his numerous
works on the subject published in Serbo-Croat.
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a public perception that unsurprisingly failed to fully account for

the complexity of Serbia’s Great War. Thus, for example, out of
some 10,000 Serbian soldiers who formed the defence of Belgrade
in 1915, perhaps as many as 1,500 were Sandžak Muslims and
Kosovo Albanians. Thousands of Christians and Muslims who
fought in the Serbian army came from the ‘new territories’, that is
Kosovo, Sandžak and Macedonia, and most of them were ances-
tors of modern Albanians, Macedonians and Sandžak Muslims/
Bosniaks. Members of a small Jewish community contributed
disproportionally to the Serbian officer corps in 1912–18. The
contribution of the Serbian Roma went beyond morale-boosting
music performances in military orchestras; many fought bravely
and lost their lives, despite having to deal frequently with discrim-
ination from their fellow soldiers and officers. At the same time,
Habsburg Serbs served in the imperial army and many fought at
the Serbian front. The Dual Monarchy’s lack of trust in the Serbs,
however, meant that, unlike in the case of other nationalities,
there were no predominantly Serb regiments. Nevertheless, in the
case of some units, Serbs made up between 27 and 56 per cent of
officers and soldiers. Thousands of them died as loyal Habsburg
soldiers but were absent from Serbian commemorative rituals and
memorials. The integration into the society of many war inva-
lids (c.77,000, of whom c.29,500 were Serbia’s veterans), many of
whom fought in different armies, posed a major challenge. These
marginalized narratives form part of interwar Yugoslavia’s com-
plex history and, more generally, the history of post-war memory
and commemoration in twentieth-century Serbia.51 However,
51
A. R. Miletić and D. Šarenac, Izmedju diskriminacije i neplanirane integracije: Albanci
i Bošnjaci u srpskoj uniformi, 1914–1918, Novi Sad, 2021; D. Šarenac, ‘A View
of the Disaster and Victory from Below: Serbian Roma Soldiers, 1912–1918’,
Social Inclusion, 8:2 (2020), 277–85; Newman, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War and
‘Forging a United Kingdom’; Petrović, Nevidljivi geto; G. Vasin, ‘Prečanski Srbi
u Velikom ratu’, Tragovi (Zagreb) 2:1 (2019), 52–77; cf. O. Manojlović-Pintar,
Arheologija sećanja: Spomenici i identiteti u Srbiji, 1918–1989, Belgrade, 2014.
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Croatian and Slovene historical events and figures were cele-

brated by the new army and, until 1929, when all ‘particularistic’,
including Serbian, symbols were banned, Croatian and Slovenian
military flags and regiments existed.
The Serbs dominated in the officer corps, but as years went by
and new, Yugoslav-educated officers arrived, this imbalance was
being addressed. Serb generals formed an absolute majority (in
1924 only 4 per cent of all generals were non-Serbs; in 1936, the
figure rose to 6.5 per cent), but junior officers were more evenly
spread, especially in the late 1930s. They included Zvonimir
Vučković, an ethnic Croat who served in the Royal Guard when
the Yugoslav government signed adherence to the Tripartite Pact
in 1941. Together with two other young officers – a Serb and
a Slovene, incidentally – Vučković went over to Greece, to join
a struggle against Italian invasion, rather than serve in an army
that was allied to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. By the time
the three men encountered the nearest Greek troops, news of a
military coup reversing the 25 March act had reached them, so
they returned to Yugoslavia. Soon afterwards, Vučković joined
Colonel Mihailović (see the following text).
Had it not been for the Second World War, it is likely that
eventually the army would have included considerably more
non-Serb officers, including generals. (However, the problem of
Serb and Montenegrin over-representation among army officers
existed, and was never fully resolved, in socialist Yugoslavia as
well.) As for the Yugoslav navy, the picture was almost reversed:
in early 1941, non-Serbs made up 82.41 per cent (or 567 out of
688) of all officers and admirals.52
At the same time, the preference among artists and intellectu-
als was for a Yugoslav cultural ‘synthesis’ rather than domination
of one ‘national’ tradition over another. Despite being the most
52
St. K. Pavlowitch, ‘How Many Non-Serb Generals in 1941?’, East European
Quarterly, 16:4 (1983), 447–52.
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optimistic adherents of Yugoslavism, the country’s intellectuals

recognized that a common Yugoslav culture had to be created for
the sake of national unity. Previously mentioned Croat sculptor
Meštrović was arguably the best known but not the only repre-
sentative of this ‘synthetic’ Yugoslavism. His sculptures combined
Croatian ‘western’ style with Serbian ‘eastern’ themes. Ivo Andrić,
another Croat and Roman Catholic like Meštrović, but born in
Bosnia, where he had become an adherent of a Yugoslav union
prior to the First World War, wrote his best novels in Belgrade
during the Second World War. By then, he had consciously
switched to writing in the Serbian ekavski standard of the Serbo-
Croat language.53
Interwar Belgrade was an important centre of modern art,
home to leading Yugoslav modernists such as Marko Ristić, Dušan
Matić and Stevan Živadinović-Vane Bor, who were well received
and collaborated with their counterparts in Croatia and Slovenia.
Brothers Ljubomir Micić and Branko Ve Poljanski (Micić), Serbs
from Croatia, published avant-garde journal Zenit in Zagreb and
Belgrade in the 1920s. They too explored East–West cultural
encounters, engaged with their European counterparts, including
Romanian-French Tristan Tzara, one of the central figures of the
Dadaist movement, and Soviet avant-garde artist El Lissitzky.54
Meanwhile, Vojvodina was home to French-educated impressionist
53
A. B. Wachtel, ‘Ivo Andrić, Ivan Meštrović and the Synthetic Yugoslav
Culture of the Interwar Period’, in Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism, 238–51,
and Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in
Yugoslavia, Stanford, CA, 1998; M. Janićijević, Stvaralačka inteligencija
medjuratne Jugoslavije, Belgrade, 1984; P. Troch, Nationalism and Yugoslavia:
Education, Yugoslavism and the Balkans before World War II, London, 2015,
51–138.
54
M. Božović, ‘Zenit Rising: Return to an Avant-Garde’, in R. Gorup (ed.),
After Yugoslavia: Post-Yugoslav Cultural Spaces and Europe, Stanford, CA,
2013, 135–48; Ljetopis SKD Prosvjeta (Zagreb), no. 1, 1996, ed. Č. Višnjić; J.
Milojković-Djurić, Tradition and Avant-Garde: The Arts in Serbian Culture
between the Two World Wars, Boulder, CO, 1984.
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figure 6.4 Zenit, No. 17–18, September–October 1922, cover design

El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, 1880–1941), courtesy of The
National Library of Serbia
Sava Šumanović, widely considered one of Serbia’s greatest paint-

ers, but almost unknown outside former-Yugoslavia. Together with
Branko Popović, Petar Dobrović, Veljko Stanojević, Jovan Bijelić,
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figure 6.5 Milena Pavlović Barilli (also spelled Barili, 1909–1945), self-
portrait, 1938 (Wikipedia). During the late 1930s, Pavlović Barilli travelled
in western Europe, meeting Cocteau and Breton among others, before
moving permanently to New York. She was born in Požarevac (eastern
Serbia, incidentally also the hometown of Slobodan Milošević, the future
Serb leader), during a short-lived marriage between Italian composer
Bruno Barilli, one of the signatories of the 1925 Fascist Manifesto (an act
that he allegedly regretted afterwards) and Danica Popović, a pianist and
a direct descendant of Karadjordje Petrović. Milena studied fine arts in
Belgrade and is today considered one of Serbia’s most important modernist
painters. In New York, she married a US officer and illustrated the Vogue
magazine covers before dying in a horse-riding accident in March 1945,
aged just 36.
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Milan Konjović, Toma Rosandić and Dragiša Brašovan, Šumanović

belonged to the Oblik (Form) group of painters, sculptors and
architects founded in Belgrade in 1926. They declared as their
main goal the promotion of modernism in Yugoslavia, in line with
latest European trends.55 Milena Pavlović Barilli was another
Serbian modernist painter who achieved international fame,
notably in the United States where she spent the last years of her
tragically short life.56
Serb–Croat Contests and Compromises

Practically all elections and major political decisions during the
interwar period were impacted by the relationship between the
Serbs and the Croats. Barely a year after the promulgation of the
1921 Vidovdan Constitution, the Democrats’ leader Davidović
began to call for a compromise with the Croatian Peasant
Republican Party, which boycotted the National Assembly.
Although he was unable to find a common ground with Radić,
Davidović and Democrat ministers resigned from Pašić’s govern-
ment in December 1922 due to disagreements over the govern-
ment’s ‘Croat politics’. Fresh elections, called for March, turned
into a referendum for or against the revision of the Constitution,
to allow for a greater decentralization of the country, the Croats’
main demand. The Radicals won 108 seats in a 313-seat parlia-
ment, 17 more than in 1920, and the Croatian Peasants emerged
as the second largest party in Yugoslavia with 70 seats. The
Democrats’ call for a compromise earned them an election defeat:
from being the largest party in the country in 1920 with 92 parlia-
mentary seats, three years later they were down to just 51 deputies.
Despite some contacts with the Democrats, Radić briefly formed
55
M. B. Protić, Srpsko slikarstvo XX veka, Belgrade, 2 vols, 1970. Šumanović
was killed, aged 46, by Croatian fascists in 1942.
56
I. Subotić et al., Milena Pavlović Barili: Pro Futuro, Belgrade, 2010.
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a ‘Federalist bloc’ with the Slovene People’s Party (also known

as the Clericals) and the Yugoslav Muslim Organization and con-
tinued to negotiate with Pašić’s Radicals. He also sought support
abroad for his cause – including in the Soviet Union, which at the
time called for the dissolution of ‘Versailles Yugoslavia’.
Political alliances and rivalries in Yugoslavia continued to shift.
Despite winning the 1923 elections, Pašić was forced to resign in
July 1924, paving the way for Davidović to form a government
together with the Slovenes and (Bosnian) Muslims. Radić sup-
ported, but did not join the governing coalition, partly because of
King Aleksandar’s opposition. The Democrat–Slovene–Muslim
government lasted only 100 days; it was essentially brought
down by Radić, who caused a ministerial resignation. Pašić once
again became prime minister, this time forming a coalition gov-
ernment with Svetozar Pribićević’s Independent Democrats.
Davidović’s move away from strict centralism led to a split within
the Democratic Party in 1924. Pribićević, formerly one of the
leaders of the pre-war Croat–Serb Coalition and one of the lead-
ing Democrats, broke away to form the Independent Democratic
Party, whose leadership remained Serb–Croat, though its elec-
torate was mainly Croatian Serb. The new government ordered
Radić’s arrest on suspicion of harbouring separatism, but internal
disagreements within the governing coalition led to fresh elec-
tions in February 1925. Radić was able to campaign from prison,
and his party again did well, winning 67 seats (down by just three
seats). The Radicals triumphed with 147 seats, close to 50 per cent
of the parliament. The Democrats’ divisions showed: Davidović
won 31 seats and Pribićević 21. The Slovenes and Muslims lost
three seats each since the previous elections, securing 21 and 15
deputies, respectively.
Radić, who had the backing of most Croats, wanted to talk to his
Serb counterpart. The problem was there was no such figure, as Serb
politics was much more pluralistic than Croat (and indeed Bosnian
Muslim and Slovene). Following the Radicals’ convincing election
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victory, Pašić came close enough to being the Serb r epresentative,

and in a major U-turn, Radić and the Croatian Peasant Party (hav-
ing dropped ‘Republican’ from the party name) ended the boycott
of the parliament and publicly accepted the monarchy on 27 March
1925. This paved the way to the Croatian Peasants entering gov-
ernment for the first time, in July 1925, which in turn prompted
Pribićević’s resignation.
The following month, the Croatian Peasant Party organized
millennial celebrations of the Croatian medieval kingdom. King
Aleksandar and Queen Marija visited Zagreb where they were
greeted by Radić with enthusiasm he had previously reserved for
verbal attacks on Belgrade. When the royal couple’s second son
was born two years later, he was named Tomislav, in honour of
the medieval Croatian king. It seemed in the mid-1920s that a
Serb–Croat question was finally resolved. Instead, things would
take a turn for the worse. Pašić and Radić, two strong personali-
ties, clashed in the government, leading to the resignation of the
elderly prime minister in April 1926. Pašić died, at the age of 81,
in December that year, allegedly after a bitter row with the king.
His successor was unable to hold the cabinet together, so new
elections were called for September 1927. The fourth – and last
ever Yugoslav democratic elections, as it turned out – resulted in
another convincing victory for the Radicals, who now won 112
seats in the National Assembly. The Croatian Peasants and the
Democrats once again came second and third, with 61 and 59 seats,
respectively. The Radicals formed a coalition government with the
Slovenes and Muslims, supported by several ‘dissident’ Democrats.
Davidović and most of the party remained in opposition.
Formerly bitter rivals, Radić and Pribićević reconciled, to
form the opposition Peasant–Democratic Coalition – a de facto
Croat–Serb coalition and the longest lasting political alliance in
Yugoslavia’s history. This, unfortunately, did not lead to a greater
political stability in the parliament. Heated debates between the
Radical and Peasant–Democratic deputies culminated on 20 June
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1928, when a Radical deputy from Kosovo shot dead two Croatian
Peasant Party members and mortally wounded Radić (who died
on 8 August from complications caused by the removal of the
assassin’s bullet). The assassin allegedly aimed at Pribićević as well
but missed. Radić’s funeral has been retrospectively seen by some
as a funeral for Yugoslavia. The Peasant–Democrat deputies left
for Zagreb and for a while it seemed as if the country was on the
brink of a civil war. That it did not happen was thanks to both
Belgrade and Zagreb appealing for calm. The Croat–Serb coali-
tion, which Radić helped form, continued to play a major role in
Yugoslav politics during the 1930s, under his and Pribićević’s suc-
cessors (the leader of the Croatian Serbs died in his Czechoslovak
exile in 1936).
Following a failed experiment with Anton Korošec, the Slovene
Clericals’ leader, as prime minister (the only non-Serb premier
in interwar Yugoslavia), on 6 January 1929, King Aleksandar
dissolved parliament, abolished the Constitution, banned all
‘sectarian’ political parties and proclaimed his personal dictator-
ship. Like Polish dictator Marshal Piłsudski, three years previ-
ously, Aleksandar blamed political parties for the crisis in which
the country found itself and identified himself as the saviour of
the national unity. ‘Blind political passions have begun to mis-
use the political system … to such an extent that it has become a
hindrance to any fruitful work in the State …’, Aleksandar pro-
claimed. ‘It is my sacred duty to preserve the unity of nation and
State by all means.’57
It was the Orthodox Christmas Eve, and Aleksandar may have
hoped that because of the holiday the Serbs at least will not fol-
low the news over the next few days. He had shown a tendency
57
‘Royal proclamation abrogating the Constitution and dissolving the
Parliament of the Serb-Croat-Slovene Kingdom’, Belgrade, 6 January 1929,
Yugoslavia through Documents: From Its Creation to Its Dissolution, compiled by
S. Trifunovska, Dordrecht, 1994, 190–91.
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to interfere in politics throughout the 1920s, but he was aware of

opposition to authoritarian monarchs in Serbia’s recent history.
In the event, Serb politicians would pose arguably the strongest
resistance to the dictatorship during the second interwar decade.
Initially, however, ‘ordinary’ people seem to have welcomed the
royal proclamation, tired of constant bickering among politicians
and frequent elections. Vladko Maček, Radić’s successor as the
Croatian Peasants’ leader, even issued a statement welcoming the
royal act, because it abolished the centralist Constitution. The dic-
tatorship was perceived as a temporary measure, until the crisis
is resolved and the country stabilized – this may have been the
reason why Yugoslavia’s democratic allies, France and Britain, did
not object to Aleksandar’s dictatorship. In October, the country
was officially renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, while nine new
administrative provinces cut across old historical borders. The
banovine (the reader will recall the medieval South Slav title ban,
also used in Austria-Hungary) were introduced to address Croat
demands for decentralization, were named after major rivers, and,
in one case, the sea. Water was meant to symbolize unity, but
critics pointed out that while economically the new administra-
tive division did not make much sense, it nevertheless ensured a
Serb majority in five provinces; Croats were a majority in two,
while the northernmost Dravska was a de facto Slovenia. The
changes appeared mainly cosmetic, as the bans were appointed
by the king and the country seemed even more centralized than
it had been under the democratically elected governments prior
to 1929. During the 1920s, local politics in Bosnia and Croatia
(and Slovenia) had been able to find space for autonomous activity.
This would be the case again in the second half of the 1930s, when
the dictatorship was gradually de facto abandoned. Aleksandar
believed, probably genuinely, that the South Slavs were members
of a single nation. Like the intellectuals, he realized that most
people had not yet developed a common identity and hoped his
‘Yugoslavizing’ dictatorship imposed from above would create the
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AUSTRIA
DRAVSKA HUNGARY
Ljubljana
Zagreb
DUNAVSKA ROMANIA
SAVSKA
Novi Sad
Banja Luka Belgrade

VRBASKA
Zadar (Zara) DRINSKA
Sarajevo
PRIMORSKA MORAVSKA
Split
ADRIATIC ZETSKA
SEA Niš
Cetinje
ITALY Skopje
Boundaries of Banovine 1929 VARDARSKA

Banovina of Croatia 1939
Italo-Yugoslav frontier 1918-1941 ALBANIA GREECE
map 6.2 Yugoslavia’s administrative division, 1929–41. Drawn by Joe

LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/, based on a map published in Dejan
Djokić, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia, London: Hurst,
2007, p. xv
Yugoslav nation. To achieve this, the regime was prepared to use

coercive measures if necessary.58
The king was supported by some Serb intellectuals. Thus, poet
Jovan Dučić welcomed the renaming of the country because it
emphasized the ‘sameness of the people’s blood and ideals’.
Although the Serb name was consigned to history, according to
Dučić, Serbia had ‘abandoned neither her past nor her glory’ but
58
I. Dobrivojević, Državna represija u doba diktature kralja Aleksandra 1929–1935,
Belgrade, 2005; C. A. Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s
Yugoslavia, Toronto, 2014; Troch, Nationalism and Yugoslavia, 190–213.
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had instead adopted a name ‘which is better suited for the devel-
opment of her history and ideals.’ After Aleksandar’s assassination
(see the following text), Miloš Crnjanski, arguably the best Serb
writer of his era, eulogized the ‘martyred king’, who had not only
united the Serbs, but had an equal compassion for the national
liberation from foreign oppression of Croats and Slovenes.59
Other Serb intellectuals remained in opposition to the dictator-
ship. Like the interwar Serbian politics, the Serb intellectual scene
during the period was pluralistic and often fostered lively debates.
What was common to most, however, was that the majority were
pro-Yugoslav and propagated the modernization and ‘westerniza-
tion’ of the Serbian and Yugoslav society.60
Aleksandar’s Yugoslavism from above failed for a variety of
reasons, and not only because, unsurprisingly for a dictator-
ship, it relied on oppression of political opponents, including
Serb opposition politicians, but above all Communists and
Croatian and Macedonian nationalists.61 To non-Serbs, espe-
cially Croats, Aleksandar’s regime was too Serbian, not only in
practice but symbolically. At the same time, Aleksandar’s meas-
ures meant that for the first time since 1817, when Prince Miloš
secured basic autonomy for Serbia within the Ottoman state,
no territory named Serbia existed. Many Serbs came to reject
the dictatorship, too, and not only because it put an end to par-
liamentary democracy, which they claimed to have achieved
in their pre-Yugoslav kingdom. From the mid-1930s onwards,
the Serbs increasingly began to complain that their history and
identity were being sacrificed for a wider Yugoslav ideal, and yet
59
V. Vujačić, Nationalism, Myth and the State in Russia and Serbia: Antecedents of
the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Cambridge, 2015, 206.
60
B. Prpa, Srpski intelektualci i Jugoslavija, 1918–1929, Belgrade, 2018; cf.
Janićijević, Stvaralačka inteligencija.
61
Dobrivojević, Državna represija; Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs, ch. 5; V.
Jovanović Slike jedne neuspele integracije: Kosovo, Makedonija, Srbija, Jugoslavija,
Belgrade, 2014.
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they were being accused by Croats and others of manipulating

Yugoslavism to Serbianize the country.62
Although he abolished political parties, Aleksandar understood
that his dictatorship needed political support. He filled govern-
ment posts with ‘dissidents’ from the major parties, including the
Croatian Peasant Party, except for the Slovene Clericals, whose
leader Korošec entered the government, thus lending the Slovene
support to the royal dictatorship. The first prime minister of the
new political era was, however, a non-party figure – General Petar
Živković. He did not enjoy a particularly high reputation within
the army nor among the politicians, and that was not necessarily
because of his widely rumoured homosexuality. Živković was seen
as the king’s lackey, and even a British diplomat sympathetic to
Aleksandar expressed serious reservations about the choice for the
prime minister.63
The army was seen as a key pillar of the royal dictatorship and
not surprisingly there were tensions between civilians and mil-
itary in non-Serb, especially Croat areas. However, there were
also exceptions. In the early 1930s, General Panta Draškić, a Serb
from Serbia and commander of the Varaždin garrison in north-
ern Croatia, clashed with a corrupt local administration, made up
of ethnic Croats who enjoyed General Živković’s support. As a
result, Draškić, who had been associated with the Black Hand and
was thus not part of Živković’s clique, was transferred to eastern
Serbia. He received a hero’s farewell from the local population
in Varaždin, both from pro-Yugoslav democratic opposition and
from those who might be considered Croat nationalists and sep-
aratists. (In one of many ironies of Serbian and Yugoslav history,
Draškić would briefly join the Serbian quisling government in
62
D. Djokić, ‘National Mobilization in the 1930s: The Emergence of the “Serb
Question” in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’, in Djokić and Ker-Lindsay (eds),
New Perspectives on Yugoslavia, 62–81.
63
The National Archives, Kew, FO 371/13706, Kennard to Chamberlain,
Belgrade, 14 January 1929.
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the early 1940s, at the time when Živković was with the Yugoslav
government-in-exile).64
King Aleksandar lacked time to carry through his project or per-
haps reform it. He was assassinated, together with Louis Barthou,
French Foreign Minister, in Marseille in October 1934, while on
a state visit to France, but there are indications that he had pon-
dered about his approach to Yugoslavia’s national question prior
to what turned out to be his last trip. The assassin was a member of
the Macedonian Internal Revolutionary Organization, the organ-
izers were Ustašas, an extremist Croatian group formed after the
introduction of the dictatorship, and the sponsor was Mussolini’s
Italy. During the 1930s, Italy and Hungary provided refuge and
military training for several hundred Croat Ustaša extremists.
In total, Yugoslavia had existed for some 70 years, but it was
only during the five years of Aleksandar’s dictatorship that the
state attempted to create the Yugoslav nation. Tragically, the king
never came as close to uniting the nation as in his death. His death
turned into a mass mourning across the country and, temporarily
at least, led to the rise of Yugoslav patriotism. The arrival of the
king’s dead body in the Croatian port of Split was witnessed by
thousands of people who came to pay their last respects. It is hard
to say to what extent the king was genuinely mourned and to what
extent his murder caused alarm and fear, not so much of Serb
retribution as of possible Italian invasion. Similar scenes took
place along the king’s last train journey from Split to Belgrade
(as a symbolic, performative act, this anticipated a train journey
carrying the dead body of President Tito across Yugoslavia 46
years later – see the next chapter; in both cases, the Yugoslav state
would not outlive its dictator by very long).
64
P. Draškić, Moji memoari, Belgrade, 1990; V. Huzjan, ‘Život generala
Kraljevine Jugoslavije u Hrvatskoj: Panta Draškić u Varaždinu’, Historia
Varasdiensis: Časopis za Varaždinsku povjesnicu, 2 (2012), 175–84. For
Živković’s later political career, see Djokić, Elusive Compromise, ch. 4.
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figure 6.6 King Aleksandar [Karadjordjević] (1888–1934) and Queen

Marie of Yugoslavia (1900–61) attend the unveiling of a sculpture on
Armistice Day in Belgrade, created as a tribute to France by sculptor Ivan
Meštrović, 11 November 1930. (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
Seen walking behind the royal couple is Prince Pavle (Paul), the future
Prince-Regent of Yugoslavia (1934–41)
With the act of 6 January 1929, Yugoslavia had joined a grow-

ing list of dictatorships and authoritarian countries in Europe.
However, the dictatorship in Yugoslavia was relaxed and partially
abandoned under a three-man regency led, and dominated, by
Prince Pavle (Paul), Aleksandar’s first cousin, who reigned in the
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name of 11-year-old King Petar II. By 1936, all Balkan countries

had turned into dictatorships, while Nazi Germany and Fascist
Italy were well on the way to establishing a political and economic
hegemony in southern and central Europe and north Africa. By
contrast, the second half of the 1930s saw a partial return to democ-
racy and a lively and pluralistic political debate, especially among
Serb parties and leaders. As the Spanish Civil War (in which, inci-
dentally, many Yugoslav volunteers took part on the Republican
side)65 announced a final confrontation between the conflicting
ideologies, Yugoslavia moved in a direction away from dictator-
ship, towards a partial restoration of democracy. Meanwhile, cen-
tral European Jews fleeing the growing antisemitism at home saw
Yugoslavia as an attractive refuge. Many moved to Belgrade fol-
lowing the Nazis’ coming to power in 1933; they stayed initially in
the city hotels until their money run out or until local Jews took
pity and helped them find jobs.66 Interwar Belgrade was a place of
contrasts, in which modern and Ottoman-era fashion, cultures and
values coexisted, while feminism, liberalism and socialism chal-
lenged traditional norms. It had also welcomed ‘White’ Russian
refugees and as the capital of Yugoslavia it attracted people from
all parts of the country. All this added new layers of identity and
cosmopolitanism the city has never completely lost.67
The partial democratization of domestic politics in the sec-
ond half of the 1930s may be explained by Yugoslavia’s origins,
and by Serbia’s pre-1918 liberal tradition. The departure from
the democratic promise of its early days, and, in foreign policy
65
V. Pavlaković, Yugoslav Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, Belgrade, 2016.
66
E. Pawel, Life in Dark Ages: A Memoir, New York, 1995; cf. I. Rochlitz,
Accident of Fate: A Personal Account, 1938–1945, Waterloo, ON, 2011.
67
J. Babović, Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugoslavia,
Pittsburgh, PA, 2018; R. Gašić, Beograd u hodu ka Evropi: Kulturni uticaji
Britanije i Nemačke na beogradsku elitu, 1918–1941, Belgrade, 2005;
M. Jovanović, Doseljavanje ruskih izbeglica u Kraljevinu SHS, 1919–1924,
Belgrade, 1995; R. Vučetić, Evropa na Kalemegdanu, Belgrade, 2003.
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a shift towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, meant that the
Yugoslav leaders were abandoning one of Yugoslavia’s two main
foundations, liberal democracy (the second was the national
self-determination of the South Slavs). The foreign policy change
had been overseen by Milan Stojadinović, Prime Minister and
Foreign Minister (1935–39) and leader of the Yugoslav Radical
Union (JRZ) – in fact a coalition of a Stojadinović-led faction of
the Radical Party, the Slovene People’s Party and the Yugoslav
Muslim Organization formed in summer 1935. In May that year,
formally banned political parties were allowed to take part in
elections and gave the government list a close run. The opposi-
tion received just over 1 million and the government 1.7 million
votes, which prompted the change of prime minister and opened
the doors for Stojadinović.
An economist by training, he stabilized the country’s cur-
rency (dinar) and reduced budget deficit; within a few years,
the government appeared to have revived the economy, which
had s uffered during the world financial crisis of the early 1930s.
In terms of foreign trade, like all other East-Central European
countries, most of Yugoslavia’s export and import in the second
half of the 1930s was with Germany; after the Anschluss of 1938,
these figures further increased, and Nazi Germany now bordered
Yugoslavia. Thus in 1939, 47.7 per cent of Yugoslavia’s imports
came from Germany (and Austria), while nearly 32 per cent
of its exports went the other way. By contrast, the same year,
10.6 per cent of exports and 11.7 per cent of imports were with
Fascist Italy, another one of Yugoslavia’s aggressive neighbours.
Meanwhile, trade figures between Yugoslavia and north-western
Europe were 21.6 per cent (exports) and 11.6 per cent (imports).
Around this time, Yugoslavia became an important player in the
international opium trade.68
68
Lampe, Yugoslavia, 182; V. Jovanović, Opijum na Balkanu: Proizvodnja i
promet opojnih droga 1918–1941, Zagreb, 2020.
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Stojadinović made a half-hearted and ultimately unsuccessful

attempt to bring Maček into the government. The Croat leader
had a better rapport with Prince Pavle, whose own relationship
with Stojadinović was an uneasy one. The prime minister had
adopted image of a fascist dictator and did not hide his admiration
for Mussolini. His supporters, young men wearing green shirts,
greeted him as ‘Vodja’ (Leader), but this practice was abandoned
when it emerged that opposition supporters would shout ‘Djavo’
(Devil), which when repeatedly said sounds identical to ‘Vodja’.
This was a simulation of fascism not uncommon in interwar East-
Central Europe. It was designed to manipulate and create popu-
lar support for an essentially conservative regime, thus thwarting
potential opposition, but these regime parties lacked the dyna-
mism of fascist movements.69
The main opposition to the government ‘coalition-party’
was a two-tier Serb–Croat opposition: the Peasant Democratic
Coalition, with its electoral base in Croat and Croatian Serb
areas, contested the elections of December 1938 together with
Serbia’s United Opposition, made up of Davidović’s Democrats,
the remaining leadership of Pašić’s Radical Party, and the Agrarian
Party, led by Jovan Jovanović, who had been Serbia’s minister
in Vienna in 1914. General Živković’s formerly government
Yugoslav National Party also joined the opposition. The Serbian
parties had their differences – the Radicals were conservative,
the Agrarians mostly social-democratic, while the Democrats
were a party of the liberal centre; to varying degrees, they had
all moved towards federalism. In early 1933, Davidović issued a
political manifesto that included a request for the federalization
69
D. Djokić, ‘“Leader” or “Devil”? Milan Stojadinović, Prime Minister of
Yugoslavia (1935–39), and his Ideology’, in M. Rady and R. Haynes (eds), In
the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe,
London, 2011, 153–68; cf. A. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World:
The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism, Stanford, CA,
2000, ch. 4.
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of Yugoslavia, with autonomies for Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and

‘a fourth [unit], between these communities, in the transitional
Serb-Croat zone’. Davidović did not spell it out, but he clearly
meant Bosnia.
Only a return to democracy and some sort of decentralization,
the Serb opposition parties believed, would solve the Croatian
question. The Independent Democrats, a de facto party of
Croatian Serbs, shared this belief. Davidović proposed, and the
others accepted, that Maček should lead the joint opposition list.
The Croat leader was received by enthusiastic crowds of Serbs in
Belgrade (perhaps around 100,000 people came to greet him) that
he visited during the election campaign in 1938. At the same time,
Stojadinović’s support among the Serbs had been weakened after
a clash, the previous year, with the Serbian Orthodox Church over
the signing of a Concordat with the Holy See. Designed to reg-
ulate the position of the Roman Catholic Church in Yugoslavia,
the text of the Concordat was almost identical to the one that
the Kingdom of Serbia had previously signed, but the Serbian
church now objected that the Yugoslav state favoured the Roman
Catholic church. When Patriarch Varnava (1930–37) died dur-
ing the demonstrations, (unfounded) rumours spread that he was
poisoned by the government. Violent clashes between the dem-
onstrators and the gendarmerie became known as the ‘Bloody
Procession’.
The opposition failed to win the December elections, but
it gave the government an even closer run than in 1935. The
Maček–Davidović list received 1.3 million votes, while the
Stojadinović–Korošec–Spaho list won only 300,000 more votes.
Another list was headed by Dimitrije Ljotić, Serbian fascist whose
support extended among some Croats and Slovenes, but it didn’t
win enough votes to earn a single seat in the parliament (it faired
similarly in 1935). The election results indicated that many ‘ordi-
nary’ people supported a return to democracy and a solution
to the ‘Croat question’ – the two main aims of the democratic
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opposition. Because of the government’s pressure on the elector-

ate to vote for its list, at a time when ballots were not secret, the
opposition’s success was considerable. At the same time, it was
similarly difficult to vote for the government in Croat majority
areas, where the Croatian Peasant Party activists, including the
paramilitary Peasant Guard, intimidated voters.
A mild- (some thought cold-) mannered, art-loving and
Oxford-educated Prince Pavle did not get on with Serb politi-
cians – in government and opposition alike. They thought he was
‘too English’, and to him they probably appeared ‘too Balkan’. If
Pavle was underestimated by his opponents, it was to their disad-
vantage. The prince-regent swiftly removed Stojadinović, follow-
ing the relatively poor election result, replacing him with Dragiša
Cvetković, an unremarkable former mayor of Niš, who neverthe-
less proved able to reach out to Maček.
Unbeknown to his Serb coalition partners, the Croat leader had
secretly kept contact with the Royal Court. This should not have
come as a surprise: like his predecessor Radić, Maček was inter-
ested in making a deal with whomever represented most Serbs;
if no political party was able to make such a claim, perhaps the
monarchy could? The Peasant Party leader believed that ‘Croat
question comes first and foremost … the question of dictatorship,
civil liberties and political freedoms comes second, even if it is of
the utmost importance.’ Moreover, Maček had never hidden his
respect for the prince-regent.
Cvetković and Maček, with Prince Pavle’s blessing, reached an
agreement in late August 1939 to create an autonomous Croatian
banovina within Yugoslavia. Cvetković remained prime minister
and Maček was appointed his deputy. The Serbian opposition felt
betrayed, and some of its voters turned towards a growing move-
ment for the creation of a ‘banovina of the Serb lands’ (basically
all of Yugoslavia apart from Croatia – in some scenarios without
its Serb-majority areas – and the Dravska banovina, or Slovenia).
This would have been de facto a Greater Serbia. Serb grievances
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in the late 1930s Yugoslavia were channelled through publica-

tions by the Serbian Cultural Club, an informal intellectual
group that came up with the slogan ‘Strong Serbdom for a strong
Yugoslavia’. However, many prominent Serbs rejected this idea
and were highly critical of the Serbian Cultural Club.
The Second World War: Partition, Resistance,

Collaboration
The Cvetković–Maček ‘compromise’ was reached just days before
the Second World War broke out, following Germany’s invasion
of Poland on 1 September 1939. Yugoslavia’s attempts to remain
neutral proved unsustainable after its main western ally France
was defeated in 1940. Britain, another ally, was unable to send
military support, although it encouraged Prince Pavle to refute
Berlin’s advances. By March 1941, the prince-regent and his
government felt they had no choice but to sign adherence to the
Tripartite Pact (concluded the previous year by Nazi Germany,
Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan).70 Keen to remove any obsta-
cles for a planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany
offered Yugoslavia a seemingly attractive deal. Unlike Rome,
Berlin did not have territorial claims against Yugoslavia at this
time. Mussolini had in the meanwhile declared war on Greece,
one of Yugoslavia’s only two friendly neighbours; the other one,
Romania, had been ideologically already in the Axis camp. Inside
the country, Maček was among those in favour of giving in to
Germany and Italy’s requests because he feared Croatia would
be most exposed to an Italian–German invasion, which seemed
inevitable unless the Yugoslavs backed down.
Prime Minister Cvetković and Foreign Minister Cincar
Marković travelled to Vienna on 25 March to sign Yugoslavia’s
70
P. Hadži-Jovančić, The Third Reich and Yugoslavia: An Economy of Fear,
1933–1941, London, 2020.
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adherence to the Pact. The signing ceremony took place at the

Belvedere Palace (the place where 27 years previously Franz
Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek began what turned out to be their
final journey, to Sarajevo). Two days later, after the news from
Vienna reached Yugoslavia, the regency and the government
were deposed by a group of Serbian officers of the Yugoslav
Airforce, amidst popular protests against the Tripartite Pact in
Belgrade and across Serbia (and elsewhere in Yugoslavia, includ-
ing Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje and Split). The British did not
organize the coup, as is sometimes believed, but they welcomed
the news. As seen, they had unsuccessfully tried to persuade
Anglophile Prince Pavle to join the British camp and they had
also financed several Serb groups and individuals known to be
opposed to the Axis, but who ultimately played no part in the coup.
The new government was formed by General Dušan Simović,
one of the Putchist officers and a non-party figure. After some
hesitation, Maček agreed to remain as deputy prime minister.
Cvetković was interned, while Prince Pavle was allowed to leave
for Greece; he would spend the war in Kenya and South Africa,
living under British surveillance. (Stojadinović would similarly
spend the war exiled on Mauritius, then under British admin-
istration). Seventy-two-year-old historian and jurist Slobodan
Jovanović, another non-party figure, was appointed as the sec-
ond deputy premier. The government was representative of all
the major political parties, except for the Serbian ‘section’ of
the JRZ. Its composition was meant to demonstrate the national
unity and show democratic credentials of the new cabinet; it con-
firmed its commitment to the 1939 Agreement. Despite rejecting
the Tripartite pact on 27 March, Yugoslavia did not declare its
allegiance to Britain – not that the British sent military aid to the
Yugoslavs either. Confusingly, the new government attempted
to reassure the Axis that it would honour all international com-
mitments, including the Vienna agreement, hoping perhaps to
buy some time until ‘traditional’ allies came to the rescue. With
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diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union established less than

a year earlier, a treaty of the Soviet–Yugoslav friendship was
signed on 5 April. None of this mattered anyway. Furious with
the events in Belgrade of 27 March, Hitler immediately decided
to attack and destroy Yugoslavia at the same time as Greece,
which Mussolini’s Italy had been unable to defeat following an
invasion the previous Autumn.71
In his order to the German military to begin the ‘Operation
Punishment’ – a land and air invasion of Yugoslavia, which began
in the early hours on 6 April 1941, with the Luftwaffe bombard-
ment of Belgrade – Hitler blamed the Serbs for the Belgrade coup
and for the 1914 Sarajevo assassination. They were to be pun-
ished not just for rejecting the Tripartite Pact but also for causing
the First World War, the outcome of which, not only in Hitler’s
mind, was responsible for Germany’s post-war predicament. The
Führer’s Austrian roots, and of his many officers and soldiers who
took part in the invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, meant
that it seemed as if 1941 became 1914 all over again; except that
in place of the Habsburg Monarchy stood Hitler’s Nazi Empire.72
Belgrade, previously proclaimed an ‘open city’, was bombarded
indiscriminately for three days; an estimated 5,000 people died
and 50 per cent of the city’s residential area was destroyed. The
870,000 invading Axis troops outnumbered the Yugoslav Army
(600,000 soldiers and officers). There were instances of heroic
resistance, especially in southern, eastern and northern parts of
the country, but poorly armed and hit by desertions, especially
in predominantly Croat regiments, the Yugoslav Army capitu-
lated on 17 April. Sources differ, but around 375,000 (perhaps
up to 400,000), Yugoslav officers and soldiers, mainly Serbs and
71
St. K. Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder: Yugoslavia in the Second World War,
London, 2020 (first publ. 2008), 12–17.
72
Ibid, 17–18; cf. B. Petranović, Srbija u Drugom svetskom ratu, 1939–1945,
Belgrade, 1992; J. Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945:
Occupation and Collaboration, Stanford, CA, 2001.
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Montenegrins, were imprisoned; many were taken to labour

camps in Germany and Italy.73
Two members of the cabinet – a Slovene leader and a minis-
ter from Montenegro – were killed during the short April war.
The rest of the government (apart from Maček, who resigned and
stayed in Croatia) and the king fled the country. By July, they
reached London, where other allied governments and heads of
state had also found exile. Maček rejected the Axis offer to lead a
quisling Croatian state, and issued a call to the Croatian people to
obey the new authorities. These were led by Ante Pavelić, leader
of a small, extreme nationalist and fascist Ustaša organization who
was installed by Berlin and Rome as Croatia’s Leader (Poglavnik).
This was on 10 April – a full week before the Yugoslav Army
capitulated. Maček spent much of the war under de facto house
arrest, as leader of a party that participated in the exiled Yugoslav
government, but many of whose members joined the new regime,
including the Ustaša extremists, and later also the Communist-
led resistance.
Satellite Croatia incorporated Bosnia-Herzegovina and
stretched into Vojvodina, including Zemun, just across the
Danube from Belgrade. Large parts of Dalmatia, however, went
to Italy. Within days, the Ustaša introduced racial laws targeting
Serbs, Jews and Roma, banned Serbian Cyrillic and the Orthodox
Church, and nationalized Serb and Jewish businesses. The Ustaša
regime rounded up Serbs (citing a law on the protection of the
state), Jews and Roma (in their cases citing racial laws) and sent
them to concentration camps, the largest and most notorious of
which was Jasenovac – the only camp in Europe solely adminis-
tered and ran by a native fascist regime. At least between 80,000
and 90,000 people (and possibly up to 130,000, but certainly not
73
Petranović, Srbija, 108–10; cf. Velimir Terzić, Slom kraljevine Jugoslavije 1941,
Belgrade/Ljubljana/Titograd [Podgorica], 2 vols, 1983, II, 472.
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figure 6.7 Hitler’s birthday present, 1941. Just three days after the
capitulation of Yugoslavia on 17 April 1941, Adolf Hitler celebrated his
52nd birthday, on board of train Amerika, stationed on the Vienna–Graz
railway, near the modern Slovenian–Austrian border. Among the birthday
presents was a commemorative plaque taken from Sarajevo, part of the
newly established Independent State of Croatia, which reads: ‘At this
historical spot Gavrilo Princip announced freedom on St Vitus Day 15
(28) June 1914’. The party guests included Count Ciano, Italy’s Foreign
Minister, Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy and Bulgaria’s King Boris III,
all of whom took part in the destruction and partition of Yugoslavia. The
photo was taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official photographer
(Bavarian State Library, Munich/Hoff-35336).74
700,000 as sometimes claimed), including thousands of children,

were killed at Jasenovac. The vast majority (63 per cent) of the vic-
tims were Serbs, followed by Roma and Jews (each group around
15 per cent) and anti-Ustaša Croats and Bosnian Muslims. While
most Jewish and Roma victims in satellite Croatia were killed at
74
M. Bazdulj, ‘Srećan rodjendan, gospodine Hitler: Priča o jednoj fotografiji’,
Vreme (Belgrade), 31 October 2013.
395
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Jasenovac, the majority of Serbs were killed elsewhere, in a series

of mass executions across Bosnia and Croatia.75
Serbia in roughly its pre-1912 borders and the agriculturally
rich Banat region were placed under direct German occupation
as the ‘Territory of the Military Commander, Serbia’. It was the
only part of invaded Yugoslavia that was placed under direct mil-
itary occupation. Its territory, according to German sources, was
around 51,100 square kilometres, and its population slightly over
3.8 million, the vast majority of whom were Serbs, with less than
150,000 ethnic Germans as the largest minority.76 The rest of
Yugoslavia was incorporated by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and
three Axis-allied neighbouring countries: Albania, Bulgaria and
Hungary. In August 1941, the German occupation authorities
formed a Government of National Salvation under General Milan
Nedić – a veteran of the First World War who had been sacked
from a pre-war government as minister of army and navy due to
his pro-German views. This was a local, quisling administration
without popular legitimacy and it enjoyed limited power. It was
75
D. Cvetković, ‘Koncentracijski logor Jasenovac i njegova uloga u uništavanju
naroda NDH – izračun mogućeg broja žrtava na temelju djelomično
revidiranog popisa iz 1964. godine’, in A. Benčić et al. (eds), Jasenovac:
manipulacije, kontroverze i povijesni revizionizam, Jasenovac, 2018, 171–220;
T. Dulić, ‘Mass Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945:
A Case for Comparative Research’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:3
(2006), 255–81; I. Goldstein, Jasenovac, Zaprešić, 2018; I. Mrkalj, ‘Jedan od
spašenih iz glinske crkve: Dvije izjave Paje Vorkapića iz 1945’, Ljetopis SKD
‘Prosvjeta’ (Zagreb), vol. 23, 2019, 192–214; M. Radanović, ‘Zločini 3. bojne
1. ustaškog obrambenog zdruga na području Stare Gradiške i Bosanske
Gradiške krajem 1943. i početkom 1944.’, Tragovi, 2:1 (2019), 123–96, and,
as editor, Pokatoličavanje Srba u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj, Zagreb, 2020;
Tomasevich, War and Revolution, ch. 9; R. Yeomans, Visions of Annihilation:
The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945,
Pittsburgh, PN, 2012, and, as editor, The Utopia of Terror: Life and Death in
Wartime Croatia, Rochester, NY, 2015.
76
Petranović, Srbija, 111n. The territory of pre-1912 Serbia was around 48,500
square kilometres.
396
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established partly to tackle resistance, but some of its German

masters were unconvinced by its usefulness; they hoped that
calling Nedić’s administration a ‘government’ would help him
command greater respect among the local population. The gen-
darmerie and a small military force under Nedić’s command were
largely ineffective in fighting the resistance and became increas-
ingly demoralized as the war went on. An influx of Serb refugees
from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo created additional problems and
added to a sense of powerlessness. The Serbian quislings blamed
the Communists, Jews and the Yugoslav government-in-exile for
what was quickly turning into a national catastrophe. The quisling
administration nominally recognized King Petar II, even though
he too was in exile with the government, and tried, but mostly
failed, to recruit support within the Serbian Orthodox Church,
which remained loyal to the exiled king and the government.
The First World War still fresh in memory, many Serbs har-
boured pro-French and pro-British sentiments; they now became
even more anti-‘Swabian’ (a common slang word for Austrians
and Germans), due to what was one of the most brutal occupa-
tion regimes anywhere in Hitler’s Europe. Several uncoordinated
resistance hotspots appeared on the map of occupied Yugoslavia
during summer 1941: in Serb-populated areas of Bosnia and
Croatia (i.e. the Ustaša-run satellite Croatia); in western Serbia
and in Montenegro. These were all areas with tradition of resist-
ance to occupation and places where in 1941 Orthodox popula-
tion was exposed to extreme violence.
The story of the resistance in Serbia, and more broadly
Yugoslavia, is complex and remains controversial. In short, two
movements, initially not always mutually easily distinguisha-
ble, emerged in western Serbia. One formed around a group of
army officers led by Colonel (later General) Dragoljub-Draža
Mihailović, while the other one was organized by the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia, whose leadership moved from Zagreb to
Belgrade at the beginning of the war. Mihailović’s men, better
397
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GERMANY
Maribor HUNGARY
Ljubljana Subotica
ITALY Zagreb
ROMANIA
Osijek
INDEPENDENT Novi Sad BANAT
STATE
Banja Luka
OF CROATIA Belgrade
Tuzla
Kragujevac
Zenica
Sarajevo TERRITORY OF THE MILITARY
Split COMMANDER IN SERBIA
ADRIATIC Mostar (German
Occupation) Niš
SEA
Podgorica
Priština
Annexed by Hungary Prizren
Skopje
Annexed by Germany
Occupied by Germany
Annexed by Bulgaria GREECE
ALBANIA
Annexed by or a
Protectorate of Italy
map 6.3 Axis occupation and partition of Yugoslavia in the Second World
War. Drawn by Joe LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/, based on a map
originally published in Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, London: Benn,
1971, p. 116
known as the Četniks, did not represent a coherent movement;

it is better, instead, to think of several, loosely connected, pre-
dominantly Serb armed groups, whose tactics sometimes differed
from region to region. They were broadly united in their desire
to restore the Yugoslav monarchy, ideally with an enlarged Serbia
within it. Initially at least, most Četniks were loyal to the cause of
Allies like Britain and France, and hostile to Germany. The Četniks
were also anti-Communist; that encouraged them to seek accom-
modation with the enemy to engage the Communist-led Partisans,
even though most of them initially were also Serbs. Various Četnik
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groups collaborated with Italians to fight the Croatian forces and

protect Serb civilians in the Independent State of Croatia. The
Italians and the Ustašas were nominally allies, but there was no
love lost between them; the former sometimes protected Serb vil-
lagers from Ustaša attacks and clandestinely armed Serb rebels,
who then used the weapons to fight the Partisans and massacre
non-Serb civilians (e.g. Muslims in eastern Bosnia), sometimes in
retaliation for massacres of Serb civilians.
Some Četnik commanders only formally recognized
Mihailović’s leadership, due to the legitimacy he provided as
minister in the London-based government-in-exile from January
1942. Sometimes collaboration took place against Mihailović’s
wishes, at other times with his tacit agreement (and, it should be
said, sometimes with the knowledge of the exiled government
and the British). Previously mentioned Zvonimir Vučković, one
of Mihailović’s most loyal commanders, witnessed the independ-
ence of Bosnian Četniks, who were mostly preoccupied with
local, ‘Bosnian’ affairs and challenged Mihailović’s authority.
Živko Topalović, leader of a small pre-war Socialist Party (and
briefly a member of the collective leadership of the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia following its foundation in 1919), who joined
Mihailović in late 1943, recalled how even in Serbia village com-
manders often acted independently.77
Like most guerrilla and resistance movements, the Partisans
were also initially decentralized, but they had a strong leader-
ship epitomized in Josip Broz Tito, the general secretary of the
Communist Party. Tito’s closest circle included Serbian commu-
nist Aleksandar Ranković and a revolutionary and writer from
77
St. K. Pavlowitch, ‘Reserve Infantry Lieutenant Rapotec’, in his
Unconventional Perceptions of Yugoslavia, 1940–45, Boulder, CO, 1985,
67–106; Ž. Topalović, Srbija pod Dražom, London, 1968, 34; cf. M.-J. Calic,
A History of Yugoslavia, West Lafayette, IN, 2019, 134; Z. Vučković, Sećanja
iz rata, London, 1980, 140.
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Montenegro Milovan Djilas. Together with Djilas, Ranković

and Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene communist theoretician, Tito
had prior to the war reorganized and revitalized a party that was
nearly extinguished in Stalinist purges and Yugoslav police raids.
The Partisans were well organized, disciplined and they appealed
to a broader spectrum of the society, including women, youth
and intellectuals who were critical of the old regime. Finally, they
were also more willing to fight – one might add regardless of the
consequences for the local civilian population – than the Četniks.
During the early months of the uprising in Serbia, both Četniks
and Partisans resembled nineteenth-century peasant militias,
focused on defending their homes, but the latter possessed an ide-
ologically driven leadership that quickly transformed the peasants
into revolutionaries. On 21 December 1941 (Stalin’s birthday),
the Partisans’ First Proletarian Brigade was formed in eastern
Bosnia. Its 1,200 soldiers came from Serbia and Montenegro; its
commander was Koča Popović (1908–92), an eminent surrealist
poet from Belgrade, the Communist Party member and a veteran
of the Spanish Civil War.78
While the Četniks were predominantly royalist, the Partisans,
or at least the communists among them, were opposed to the
pre-war political system and bourgeois society. At the same
time, they recalled the Serbian tradition of resistance against
the Ottomans, including the Kosovo Battle, and this was not
merely done to attract Serb recruits.79 The two groups initially
collaborated. Together, in Autumn 1941, they liberated parts of
western Serbia, including the town of Užice. The resistance was
78
Petranović, Srbija, 184; M. C. Wheeler, ‘Pariahs to Partisans to Power: The
Communist Party of Yugoslavia’, in T. Judt (ed.), Resistance and Revolution in
Mediterranean Europe 1939–1948, London, 1989, ch. 4; cf. J. Batinić, Women
and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance, Cambridge, 2015.
79
Vujačić, Nationalism, Myth and the State, 225; cf. M. Djilas, Wartime, transl.
by M. B. Petrovich, New York, 1977; R. Čolaković, Kazivanje o jednom
pokoljenju, 3 vols, Sarajevo, 1966.
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undoubtedly aided by the fact that the best German troops had
already departed for the Eastern Front, following the beginning
of the invasion of the Soviet Union in late June. Nevertheless, the
short-lived Partisan–Četnik cooperation, in Serbia and elsewhere
in occupied Yugoslavia, showed that the Yugoslav resistance
would have been even more effective if it could have remained
united.80
News of the resistance had in the meanwhile reached London.
The British and the Yugoslav government-in-exile sent William
Hudson, a South African-born engineer with first-hand knowl-
edge of pre-war Yugoslavia, and two Yugoslav Army officers to
establish contact with Mihailović. The mission submarine landed
at the Montenegrin coast, and Hudson and his companions
arrived in Užice in late October, by when the short-lived alli-
ance between the Četniks and the Partisans was almost over.81
Their ideologies were incompatible and so were their tactics.
Tito, convinced in a quick Soviet victory, wanted to continue
to actively engage the enemy and at the same time carry out a
Bolshevik-style revolution. Mihailović, on the other hand, pre-
ferred to maintain low-level resistance until the Allies landed in
the Balkans. Having witnessed enormous Serb sacrifices in the
First World War, he feared a national catastrophe amidst news
of mass murder of Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia by the Ustašas
and the brutality of the German occupation regime in Serbia.
On 21 October, German soldiers shot nearly 2,800 Serb, Jewish
and Roma civilians, including schoolboys, rounded up with the
help of local collaborators, in Kragujevac. Just a few days earlier,
around 2,250 civilians and hostages were executed in Kraljevo.
Sources differ, but at least 20,000 and perhaps as many as 35,000
80
Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder, 53-67; Petranović, Srbija, 228–44.
81
S. Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, 1941–42, London, 1998,
51–58; H. Williams, Parachutes, Patriots, and Partisans: The Special Operations
Executive in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, London, 2003, 56–65.
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people were executed in German reprisals in Serbia in October–

December 1941.82
The Holocaust in Occupied Serbia

Among those executed in Kragujevac were members of Filip
David’s family. Today, a well-known Serbian-Jewish writer, David
was born in the town in 1940 and together with his p arents and a
younger brother survived the war in a series of near-miraculous
escapes and help from non-Jews, including a friendly German
officer; a whole Serb village in Vojvodina hid David, his mother
and brother, while his father fought in the Partisans. However,
most of David’s extended family perished, including 45 relatives
murdered in Sarajevo by the Ustašas.83
A small number of Serbian Jews managed to flee before it
became too late. Jaša and Rašela Almuli, a brother and sister from
a prominent Belgrade Sephardim family left the city together with
their cousin Mirko Davičo and several friends on 6 April, fol-
lowing the first wave of the Luftwaffe bombardment. A journey
nearly 600 kilometres long, made mostly on foot, took them to a
small Montenegrin town in the Bay of Kotor. There they stayed
in a holiday resort for poor Jewish children that Jaša and Rašela’s
mother Sofija had been running. Soon the whole family was in
Montenegro – apart from Jaša’s older brother, who as officer of
the Yugoslav Army had been captured and sent to a camp for pris-
oners of war in Osnabrück, Germany. The Wehrmacht spared
82
W. Manoschek, Holokaust u Srbiji: Vojna okupaciona politika i uništavanje
Jevreja, 1941–1942, transl. from German by A. Eremija, A. Kovač, T. Kovač
and A. Mošić, Belgrade, 2007, 157–70.
83
David’s semi-autobiographical, award-winning novel The House of
Remembering and Forgetting, London, 2017 (transl. from Serbian by C.
Pribićević-Zorić, Introduction by D. Djokić) describes some of these events.
See also his testimony in J. Almuli, Živi i mrtvi: Razgovori sa Jevrejima,
Belgrade, 2002, 133–45.
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Jewish officers of enemy armies because they fell under the rel-
evant Geneva Convention concerning PoWs. Back in Italian-
occupied Montenegro, Jaša, Rašela and Mirko as members of
the Communist Party helped organize the resistance in July but
were later captured by Italians together with another 200 Jews.
Jaša believed that this may have saved their lives. After a short
period of time spent in a camp in Albania, they were transferred
to Ferramonti in southern Italy. Conditions were harsh but lax in
comparison to Nazi- or Ustaša-run camps. Inmates were allowed
to read, paint and move more or less freely. Being Jewish seemed
less dangerous than being a Communist. When Mirko was found
out as a prominent Yugoslav Party member, he was handed over
to the Ustašas. As Italy’s collapse approached in late summer 1943,
Jaša and Rašela escaped from the camp and fled to Palestine, via
Spain. Jaša returned to Yugoslavia the following year to rejoin the
Partisans, as a member of the Agitation and Propaganda unit run
by Djilas.84 Mirko’s brother Oskar, also a prominent communist,
was one of the most celebrated Serbian and Yugoslav poets.
The Holocaust in occupied Serbia sits on the margins of a vast
English-language literature on the Second World War, perhaps
because it does not fit into the pattern of the systematic killing
of Eastern European Jewry.85 It was the Wehrmacht, the regu-
lar German army, that carried out the majority of the killing of
Jews, and other civilians, in Serbia, not the SS Einsatzgruppen, as
was the case in occupied Poland and parts of the Soviet Union.
German army officers in Serbia were sometimes former Habsburg
84
Jaša Almuli’s testimony, in ‘Mi smo preživeli’: Jevreji o Holokaustu, 2, Belgrade,
2003, 356–69; cf. A. Alcalay, The Persistence of Hope: A True Story, Newark,
DE, 2007, 162–75; M. Ristović, U potrazi za utočištem: Jugoslovenski Jevreji u
bekstvu od holokausta 1941–1945, 2nd edn, Belgrade, 2016.
85
C. R. Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution,
New York, 1985; Manoschek, Holokaust, 171–86; cf. Ž. Lebl, Dnevnik jedne
Judite: Beograd, 1941, Gornji Milanovac, 1990; M. Pisarri, The Suffering of the
Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust, Belgrade, 2014.
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army personnel who had already fought against the Serbs in the
First World War. Their hostility towards the local population
therefore required little encouragement from Hitler, himself a
former Habsburg soldier, and the leadership in Berlin.86 Serbian
collaborators such as Dimitrije Ljotić shared National-Socialist
values, including antisemitism. They and their supporters were
complicit in the Holocaust. Serb quisling police helped identify
and round up local Jews, but it was the Germans, not the Serbs,
who carried out the arrests and the killing. At the same time, in
addition to many bystanders, there were ‘ordinary’ Serbs who
risked their lives to protect and shelter their Jewish neighbours.
The killing of Serb, Jewish and Roma hostages was carried out
as part of a policy of reprisals for acts of resistance. Most hostages
were Serbs, often peasants caught in areas where there was resist-
ance activity. Jews and Communists – sometimes there was no
distinction in the eyes of the occupier – were particularly targeted.
Serbs would sometimes survive when no Communist connection
could be established, but such escape routes rarely existed for the
Roma and certainly not for the Jews. Initially, Jews were used for
slave labour, but from August 1941, Jewish men aged 16–60 were
sent to the Topovske Šupe camp in Belgrade, where they were
executed in October and November together with Serb and Roma
hostages. Remaining Jews – women, children and the elderly –
were then sent to the nearby Sajmište (the pre-war Belgrade Fair,
technically in the territory of the Independent State of Croatia)
and executed, sometimes in a specially designed gas van, between
late March and early May 1942. Several other camps were estab-
lished throughout occupied Serbia, including in the Banjica dis-
trict of Belgrade, which in addition to Jews and Roma, held Serbs
suspected of being Communist or supportive of Mihailović and
the government-in-exile. The German occupation authorities in
86
B. H. Shepherd, Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare,
Harvard, MA, 2012; Manoschek, Holokaust.
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Serbia did not merely take part in the Final Solution – by car-
rying out a systematic murder of Jews independently of Berlin
they had anticipated it by several months. Believing – wrongly,
as it turned out – that all the Jews were exterminated, they pro-
claimed Serbia ‘free of Jews’ in May 1942. Between 11,000 and
13,600 out of perhaps 16,000 Jews in German-occupied Serbia
perished during the war, including over 1,000 Central European
Jews stranded in Yugoslavia when it was invaded. Out of 82,000
Yugoslav Jews, only 15,000 survived.87
Serb Civil War

By the end of summer 1941, three principal, mutually antago-
nistic ‘native’ groups emerged in German-occupied Serbia: the
Communist-led Partisans, the Četniks of Colonel Mihailović
and quislings loyal to Nedić, Ljotić and Kosta Pećanac. To make
things more confusing, Pećanac’s men were also called Četniks.
He was the leader of the First World War uprising in southern
Serbia who during the interwar period oversaw an organization
of Četnik veterans, former paramilitaries who fought against the
Ottomans and Habsburgs in the early twentieth century. Pećanac
fought against both the Partisans and Mihailović’s men and was
killed by the latter in 1944.
Following the collapse of resistance in western Serbia, Tito
and Mihailović both fled to Bosnia. Mihailović stayed in east-
ern Bosnia with his ‘illegal Četniks’, looking for an opportunity
to return to his original base. Some of his men joined Nedić’s
troops; these were the so-called ‘legalized Četniks’, apparently a
87
Browning, Fateful Months; D. Cvetković, Od Topovskih šupa do Sajmišta:
Kvantitativna analiza Holokausta u okupiranoj Srbiji, Belgrade, 2020;
M. Koljanin, Nemački logor na Beogradskom sajmištu, 1941–1944, Belgrade,
1992; M. Ristović, ‘Jews in Serbia during World War Two: Between “the
Final Solution to the Jewish question” and “the Righteous among Nations”’,
in M. Fogel et al., Serbia: Righteous among Nations, Zemun, 2010, 260–85.
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tactical move made to preserve men and arm them at the same
time. Četnik and Partisan groups also operated further south, in
Sandžak and Kosovo, where local Muslim and ethnic Albanian
collaborationist guerrillas formed. A brutal occupation regime
was in place in Bulgarian-occupied parts of eastern Serbia. In
Vojvodina, the resistance against German, Hungarian and Croat
occupation was mainly Serb and communist-led.88
During winter 1941/42, Tito led the Partisans’ retreat from
western Serbia to western Bosnia and the Croatian Krajina,
in the former Military Border. There the Partisans recruited
among local Serbs who had fled the Ustaša terror, although some
joined local Četniks. As a result, until the second half of 1943,
the Partisans were a predominantly Serb force, but their leader-
ship was multi-ethnic. Gradually, Tito’s resistance attracted large
numbers of Croats and Bosnian Muslims, while in Slovenia the
local Communists took over a multi-party resistance movement.
Another major difference between the Partisans and Četniks,
apart from their ideology and tactics, was that the Partisans were
able to attract followers among all Yugoslav groups. Unlike them,
the Četniks remained almost exclusively Serb.89
The Partisans considered Mihailović their most dangerous
‘internal’ enemy and in March 1943 proposed a ceasefire to the
Germans so that they could engage Četnik forces. The proposal
was rejected by Berlin.90 On 29 November 1943, the second ses-
sion of the Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of
Yugoslavia (AVNOJ, the Partisans’ revolutionary government
88
The complex situation in occupied Yugoslavia is best explained in
Pavlowitch, Hitler's New Disorder, and Petranović, Srbija, 117–309; for a
reassessment of the Bulgarian occupation of Serbia see G. Nikolić, ‘Pirotska
gimnazija i pirotske prilike, 1941–1944’, Pirotski zbornik, 43 (2018), 1–52.
89
M. J. Milazzo, The Chetnik Movement and the Yugoslav Resistance, Baltimore,
MD, 1975; Pavlowitch, Hitler’s New Disorder, 91–103.
90
Djilas, Wartime, 229–45; W. R. Roberts, Tito, Mihailović, and the Allies,
1941–1945, New Brunswick, NJ, 1973, 106–12.
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figure 6.8 The Partisan leadership, Jajce, Bosnia, November 1943. Left
to right: Ivo Lola Ribar, Aleksandar Ranković, Milovan Djilas, Tito, Sreten
Žujović, Andrija Hebrang, Moša Pijade and Edvard Kardelj (Keystone/
Getty Images)
and assembly) convened in Jajce, in liberated territory in central

Bosnia (and, the reader will recall, the last residence of medieval
Bosnian kings). The AVNOJ declared that post-war Yugoslavia
will be a federal republic, thereby denouncing the king and the
government-in-exile, whose war minister was Mihailović.
Mihailović answered with a congress convened in a western
Serbian village Ba on 27 January 1944 (St Sava’s Day). Previously
mentioned Socialist leader Topalović, who had recently joined
Mihailović, drafted a declaration that proposed a post-war
Yugoslav federation, consisting of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia,
under the Karadjordjević dynasty. It was too little too late. The
proposal was not likely to gain much support among non-Serbs –
not least because it was held on a date associated with the Serbian
history and church. Mihailović had previously sidelined his orig-
inal political advisors, Stevan Moljević, a lawyer involved with
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the Serbian Cultural Club before the war, and Dragiša Vasić,
once a left-wing republican writer who later also joined the SCC.
Moljević had proposed in summer 1941 the creation of an ethni-
cally homogenous Greater Serbia, in response to Ustaša massa-
cres of the Serbs. This was not the Četniks’ official programme,
but Mihailović’s thinking at the time appeared to be along similar
lines. In December 1941, shortly after the collapse of the uprising
in western Serbia, he told his commanders that they fought for a
‘Great Serbia within Great Yugoslavia’.91
In the short term, the Četniks’ main enemies were Croats and
Bosnian Muslims who were slaughtering Serbs in the Independent
State of Croatia, and Communist-led Partisans – Serbs and non-
Serbs alike. In medium term, the Četniks intended to engage
German, Italian and other foreign occupiers with the Allies’ help.
Četniks committed atrocities against non-Serb civilians, espe-
cially in Bosnia and Croatia, but also against Serb Communists
and civilians suspected of being pro-Partisan. They also engaged
in collaboration with the enemy, for different reasons as already
explained. The Četniks, if we can talk of a single movement, were
therefore not a resistance comparable to the Partisans, as their
apologists have argued. At the same time, Mihailović should not
be equated with Nedić and Ljotić, let alone Ustaša leader Pavelić.
Neither Mihailović nor other Četnik commanders adhered to a
racial ideology comparable to that of the Serb quislings and Nazi-
inspired Ustašas. Moreover, they lacked state structure to carry
out systematic and organized extermination of racially undesir-
able elements, like the Ustaša-run Croatian state did. Finally,
the Četniks were pro-Allied and favoured the restoration of
Yugoslavia after the war. In their vision, the Serbs would dominate
the post-war Yugoslav state as a reward for their sacrifices and as
91
Petranović, Srbija, 214–17; M. Vesović and K. Nikolić (eds), Ujedinjene
srpske zemlje: Ravnogorski nacionalni program, Belgrade, 1996, 46–47
(Mihailović’s directive), 190–95 (Moljević’s memorandum).
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figure 6.9 General Mihailović between two Allied officers, Colonel

Bailey (to Mihailović’s left) and Brigadier Armstrong, eastern Bosnia?,
c.1942–43 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
a security against future ‘treason’ by Croats and other non-Serbs.

The Ustašas meanwhile were an anti-Yugoslav and anti-Allies, as
well as anti-Serb, anti-Semitic, anti-Roma and anti-Communist
movement.92
By Spring 1944, Mihailović had been de facto abandoned by
his British allies, while the government-in-exile was hopelessly
divided and ineffective. Many in German-occupied Serbia prob-
ably remained loyal to the embattled general and the exiled king,
but during the summer, Mihailović’s predicament would rapidly
deteriorate. The allies fully switched their support to Tito, and
in September 1944, King Petar was forced to remove Mihailović
92
N. Bartulin, The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia: Origins
and Theory, Leiden, 2014; Djilas, The Contested Country, ch. 4; Vujačić,
Nationalism, Myth and the State, 218–20; Yeomans, Visions of Anihilation.
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from the government and call upon the Yugoslavs to join Tito’s
resistance. Meanwhile, Partisan units were making their way into
Serbia from the west, while the Soviet Red Army was advancing
from the east.
The Serb (and Montenegrin) civil war between royalists and
communists broke out in 1941 in occupied Serbia, Montenegro
and eastern Herzegovina. It then became in some ways a civil
war between the pro-Mihailović and pro-royalist Serbia and
mainly Croatian and Bosnian Serb Partisans, both of whom
also fought against local collaborators. The Serb participation
in the Partisan movement in satellite Croatia made the success
of the communist-led resistance there possible, but tensions
between the mainly Croat leadership and local Serb fighters
escalated in summer 1943. A group of prominent Croatian
Serb Partisans objected that revolutionary institutions had not
been representative enough of the Serbs, whose contribution
to the resistance and sacrifice had been disproportionately
high. They reached out to local Četniks to organize a joint Serb
resistance against the Ustaša and the Germans. Nothing came
out of this, but the ‘dissidents’ were later arrested and tried
by the Croatian Communist Party for treason. Five of them
were shot dead and several others received sentences of various
length following the so-called Kordun Trial.93 This incident
anticipated tensions between Croat and Serb communists in
socialist Croatia after the war.
The victory of the Partisan People’s Liberation Army in Serbia
was confirmed by the liberation of Belgrade, with the help from
the Red Army, on 21 October 1944, three years after the tempo-
rary liberation of Užice and the German reprisals against civilians
in western Serbia. Mihailović was not defeated yet, but his war
had been lost even if he was yet to realize it.
93
Č. Višnjić, Kordunaški proces: Fragmenti iz historije nestajanja, Zagreb, 1997.
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Box 6.1 Yugoslavia’s war deaths, 1941–45

The official figure in socialist Yugoslavia (1,709,000 war deaths) was
subsequently revised: 1,014,000 – according to Bogoljub Kočović;
1,027,000 – according to Vladimir Žerjavić; or between 890,000 and
1,200,000 – according to Srdjan Bogosavljević.94 Yugoslavia’s death
toll (c. 1 million in a country of some 16 million people in 1941) rep-
resents the highest loss relative to country population after the Soviet
Union and Poland. Around one half of all Yugoslav victims. were
Serbs, perhaps as high as 58 per cent, according to Bogosavljević.
Some 155,000 people perished during the war in the territory of what
would become Socialist Republic of Serbia. According to Tomislav
Dulić, between 15.9 and 20 per cent of all Bosnian and Croatian Serbs
were killed during the war in the Independent State of Croatia; by
comparison, 10 per cent of the Muslims, 5–6 per cent of the Croats,
and 76.5 per cent of the Jews perished in satellite Croatia (and possibly
a similarly high proportion of Roma). In Bosnia-Herzegovina alone
292,000–308,000 people were killed, of whom 216,000–229,000 were
Serbs (72.3 per cent of all victims). In addition, it is estimated that
around 200,000 Serbs were expelled, and a similar number was con-
verted to Roman Catholicism in the Independent State of Croatia.95
94
B. Kočović, Žrtve Drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji, London, 1985; V.
Žerjavić, Gubici stanovništva Jugoslavije u Drugom svjetskom ratu, Zagreb,
1989; S. Bogosavljević, ‘The Unresolved Genocide’, in N. Popov and D.
Gojković (eds), The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest,
2000 (first publ. in Serbian in 1996), 146–59.
95
Dulić, ‘Mass Killing’; cf. M. Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force:
Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community, Ithaca, NY, 2016;
Cvetković, ‘Koncentracijski logor Jasenovac’, and Od Topovskih šupa, 12;
R. M. Hayden, ‘Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia,1941–5
and 1992–5’, in D. Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, London, 2008,
487–516.
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7
Federation to Fragmentation (1945–1990)
u
Federal Serbia in Federal Yugoslavia

Like in 1918, the Yugoslavia of 1945 was created by the Yugoslavs
rather than the Great Powers; like in the aftermath of the First
World War, the post–Second World War Yugoslav state would
not have been possible without its acceptance by the victorious
Allies. The new government and its ideology were not imposed
by the Soviets, as was the case elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It
was, almost uniquely, a largely domestic affair, due to the victory
of the People’s Liberation Army, although the Soviet and Anglo-
American aid to the Partisans was significant.
The post-war establishment of the Communist-dominated (and
soon exclusively Communist) government was a complex process,
albeit one that was facilitated by the popularity of Tito and the
Partisans, and also by their control of the army and the police and
intimidation of political rivals.1 The question remained, however,
how to integrate Serbia and more broadly Serbs, many of whom
identified, or were identified with the interwar Yugoslav kingdom
and its wartime government-in-exile, which had included General
Mihailović as war minister. Finding an answer to it was part of a
complex post-war reconciliation process. New Yugoslavia was going
to be almost everything the old Serb-dominated Yugoslav state was
1
M. K. Bokovoy, C. Lilly and J. Irvine (eds), State-Society Relations in
Yugoslavia, 1945–1992, New York, 1997; M.-J. Calic, A History of Yugoslavia,
West Lafayette, IN, 2019, chs 10 & 11; M. Djilas, Rise and Fall, transl. by J.
Loud, San Diego, 1985; J. R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a
Country, Cambridge, 1996, chs 8 & 9.
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not; above all, it was to be a communist one-party state and a federal

republic rather than a centralized monarchy that experimented with
both liberal democracy and royal dictatorship, before reverting to a
quasi-democratic and quasi-federal system in its final years.
The outcome of the war represented for the Serbs both a vic-
tory and a defeat. On the one hand, the liberation and restoration
of Yugoslavia, in no small part due to the Serb (and Montenegrin)
contribution to the Partisan movement, was an outcome that most
Serbs welcomed. On the other hand, the end of the war also repre-
sented the defeat of Mihailović and the abolition of a monarchy and
political parties that had become synonymous with modern Serbia.
Deep ideological divisions among the Serbs created during the war
have not fully healed to this day.
Although the Serbs and more broadly South Slavs had fought
against each other in the First World War, and even though the
Central Powers’ occupation forces in Serbia committed mass
massacres of civilians, the civil war and occupation of Yugoslavia
in 1941–45 was more brutal, as discussed in the previous chapter.
At least 155,000 people died in the territory of newly established
federal Serbia, the majority in German-occupied Serbia and
Vojvodina, which had been effectively ‘partitioned’ by Croatia,
Hungary and Germany. It was also an ideologically fundamen-
tally different conflict due to the racial and genocidal nature of
violence in the 1940s. Proportionally, Yugoslav Jews and Roma
suffered most, but because of their size and role in the creation of
Yugoslavia, the Serb and Croat losses in what was the first Croat–
Serb war in history were arguably more significant when it came
to the region’s future (not forgetting proportionally comparable
losses suffered by Bosnian Muslims and even higher Montenegrin
losses). In other words, it was remarkable that in 1945, Yugoslavia
was restored after such a brutal inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic war
among the South Slavs, in particular in the Independent State of
Croatia. It is debatable whether this could have been achieved
without the victory of the Communist-led Partisans.
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A further obstacle to post-war reconstruction was posed by a

evastating material destruction. Three and a half million peo-
d
ple were left homeless by the war; tens of thousands in poorest,
mountainous areas such as the largely Serb-populated Krajina,
site of some of the worst ethnic violence during the war, faced
starvation. It did not help that road infrastructure and most motor
vehicles had been destroyed or damaged, making delivery of food
extremely difficult. Around 15 per cent of pre-war housing had
been destroyed, including nearly 290,000 peasant households.
Almost all of Yugoslavia’s mines, some 40 per cent of industrial
plants and over 50 per cent of livestock and agricultural equip-
ment had been either destroyed or damaged.2
The Party’s position on the ‘Serb question’ had been complex
already prior to the Second World War. On the one hand, the
Serbs’ historic role in creating Yugoslavia was unquestionable;
ditto Serbia’s socialist tradition, inbuilt into the foundations of
the Communist Party. Moreover, their geographically dispersed
position and numerical size made the Serbs central to Yugoslavia’s
stability and unity. At the same time, Serbia and the Serbs were
associated with the ‘imperialist Versailles peace treaty’, the inter-
war hegemony of their ‘bourgeoisie’, and with the exiled king and
government, not to mention Mihailović’s Četniks. Yugoslavia’s
new leadership had been aware of the difficulties and challenges
regarding the position of Serbia and the Serbs in new Yugoslavia.
It might be argued that this question was probably never fully
resolved. It certainly appeared that way in the 1980s, when the
country’s internal federal boundaries (see Map 7.1), including
their origin and their ‘fairness’, were at the centre of heated politi-
cal debates, especially in Serbia. The question of Serb borders was
also key to the wars of the 1990s, as discussed in the next chapter.
The borders of federal units were drawn on combination of his-
toric and ethnic criteria and political decision-making; while not
2
Figures are from Calic, A History of Yugoslavia, 171, and Lampe, Yugoslavia, 239.
414
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Hungarian, 1.9
Montenegrin, 2.5 Other, 3.9
Yugoslav, 5.4* Serb, 36.3
Macedonian, 7.7
Albanian, 7.7
Slovene, 7.8
HUNGARY Muslim, 8.9 Croat, 19.7

AUSTRIA
* Yugoslavs are persons who listed themselves as
such in the 1981 census. They are dispersed
Ljubljana across the country.
Zagreb
SLOVENIA
CROATIA Vojvodina
(autonomous ROMANIA
province)
BOSNIA
AND Belgrade
HERZEGOVINA
SERBIA
Sarajevo
ADRIATIC
SEA MONTE-
NEGRO Kosovo
ITALY (autonomous
province)
Albanian Montenegrin
Bulgarian Muslim
Croat Serb MACEDONIA
Hungarian Slovene
Macedonian No majority
based on municipality data from 1991 census ALBANIA GREECE
map 7.1 Administrative and ‘ethnic’ boundaries of Yugoslavia’s republics

and provinces, 1945–91. The ‘ethnic’ map is based on 1991 census data.
Drawn by Joe LeMonnier, https://mapartist.com/ based on a map from The
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas, Austin https://
maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/europe/yugoslav.jpg
ideal, they made more sense than their critics suggested. The new
republic of Slovenia gained additional territory in Istria, though not
the coveted port city of Trieste, which following a prolonged inter-
national crisis over its status went to Italy. Although the Slovenes
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pointed out that many of their compatriots remained outside the

borders of Yugoslavia (in Austria and Italy), they had good reasons
to be satisfied with the re-emergence of Yugoslavia. It was with the
creation of the Serb–Croat–Slovene kingdom in 1918 that Slovenes
were for the first time in history mentioned in a state name; moreo-
ver, for the first time, a university offering classes in Slovenian was
established in 1919. (The University of Ljubljana was called the
‘King Aleksandar University’ for most of the interwar period.) In
1945, for the first time in history, a political entity called Slovenia
had been established, bringing together most Slovenes.
Croatia also became a republic, albeit within the Yugoslav fed-
eration, for the first time in its history; thus, in some ways, Stjepan
Radić’s old demands – republicanism and federalism – were finally
met, albeit in a very different context. The borders of the Croatian
republic resembled those of the historic Kingdom of Croatia-
Slavonia and Dalmatia, which also meant that it was geographi-
cally smaller than both the Independent State of Croatia and the
1939 Croatian banovina. (Re-)integrating Croatia, the only quis-
ling state on the territory of occupied Yugoslavia, whose regime
was responsible for genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma, was
another major challenge.3 The authorities (correctly) emphasized
the Croats’ contribution to the Partisan victory and (also cor-
rectly) refused to blame the whole nation for the crimes of the
wartime Croatian state. Moreover, they (wrongly) equated Pavelić
and Nedić and introduced a false symmetry between the Ustašas
and Četniks. Tito understood that Serb support for the exiled
monarchy and Mihailović’s defeated ‘movement’ was not incon-
siderable and that while many Croats had rejected Pavelić, they
had not necessarily abandoned the idea of Croatian statehood.
New Yugoslavia needed to avoid the interwar Serb hegemony and
3
D. Jović, ‘Reassessing Socialist Yugoslavia, 1945–90: The Case of Croatia’, in
D. Djokić and J. Ker-Lindsay (eds), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia, London,
2011, 117–42.
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Croat separatism, so Serbs and Croats, as the two largest Yugoslav

nations, would be kept on a tight leash. This was to be achieved
in several ways, beginning with drawing boundaries of the two
republics in such a way that it would prevent them from dominat-
ing the others, or indeed each other.
The question ‘Where was Serbia?’ had been posed before, most
recently in 1939, following the Cvetković–Maček agreement. Tito’s
Partisan movement offered its answer at the second session of
the Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia
(AVNOJ) held in Jajce on 29 November 1943. By then, the contours
of the post-war Yugoslav federal borders had begun to emerge. In
the run up to the second AVNOJ session, Moša Pijade, a senior
member of the Party, who hailed from a Belgrade Jewish family, pro-
posed at a Central Committee meeting that Serb-populated areas in
Lika, Banija and Kordun be granted autonomy within Croatia after
the war. Pijade, whom Milovan Djilas thought of as the greatest
Serb patriot within the Party leadership, had even prepared maps
and statistics to illustrate his proposal. The meeting acknowledged
the key part played in the resistance by Croatian Serbs. What was
left unsaid, but was undoubtedly obvious to all, was that the Serbs
had also suffered enormously in the Ustaša-run Croatia and that
autonomy would be both a reward and a future protection against
Croat domination. Pijade’s suggestion was considered but quickly
rejected by Aleksandar Ranković, the leading Serb in the Party, who
thought there was no need to demarcate every municipality between
the two very close peoples. Tito, apparently relieved that he, as half-
Croat, did not have to reject Pijade’s proposal, agreed. He added
that future internal divisions in Yugoslavia will be purely adminis-
trative and not some ‘bourgeois borders’.4
4
M. Djilas, Wartime, transl. by M. B. Petrovich, New York, 1977, 356; B.
Petranović and M. Zečević (eds), Jugoslovenski federalizam: tematska zbirka
dokumenata, 2 vols, Belgrade, 1987, I, 796–77n & II, 164–65n.
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Another far-reaching decision was made at this time regarding

the future status of Bosnia-Herzegovina – again, an area where Serbs
were in a plurality and where they were the victims of the Ustaša
genocide. During the early stages of the war, according to Djilas,
it had been assumed within the Party leadership that Bosnia would
become an autonomous province within Serbia. If this had hap-
pened, Serbia’s old ambition, previously thwarted by the Ottoman
and Habsburg Empires, would have been finally realized, within the
Yugoslav framework. Gradually, however, the Party leaders, espe-
cially those from Bosnia, including Serbs, came to believe that mak-
ing Bosnia-Herzegovina a full republic within Yugoslavia would be
the best way of minimizing the Serb–Croat rivalry.5 (This echoed,
but was independent from Ljuba Davidović’s 1933 proposal). The
1943 AVNOJ congress declared that Yugoslavia would be a feder-
ation after the war, but no firm decisions had been made regarding
future federal borders. Djilas recalled Ranković informing Tito in
January 1944 that Bosnian comrades wanted a republic, and Tito
agreed that this would be for the best. Ironically, considering that
he would be perceived as a defender of Serb rights in socialist
Yugoslavia (as discussed in the following text), Ranković played an
important role in decision-making that Serb nationalists would later
consider as being to their detriment.
It was the other way around regarding Vojvodina, which was
initially envisaged as a separate Yugoslav republic after the war.
Ultimately, however, Serbian communists, including those from
Vojvodina, thought it should be constituted as an autonomous
province within Serbia.6 Some Croat Party members unsuccessfully
5
B. Petranović, Srbija u Drugom svetskom ratu, 1939–1945, Belgrade, 1992,
528–29.
6
V. Unkovski-Korica, ‘World War II and the National Question: The Origins of
the Autonomous Status of Vojvodina in Yugoslavia’, Europe-Asia Studies, 68:10
(2016), 1712–35; cf. V. Petsinis, National Identity in Serbia: The Vojvodina and a
Multi-Ethnic Community in the Balkans, London, 2020.
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argued that parts of Vojvodina included in the Independent State

of Croatia should remain within post-war Yugoslav Croatia.
Paradoxically, and in some ways resembling the developments
in interwar Yugoslavia, Serbia, unlike Croatia and Slovenia, was
without its own Communist Party branch and without its Anti-
Fascist Council (likely a direct transposition of the Soviet principle
that the largest nation does not need its own party or republic).
This changed at the end of the war when Tito effectively united
the Communist Party of Yugoslavia by creating the Serbian and
fully incorporating the Croat and Slovene branches. The Yugoslav
communists had for long time opposed Serb-dominated ‘Versailles
Yugoslavia’ – nobody more so perhaps than the Croatian com-
munists, as Andrija Hebrang, the Croatian Communist leader,
proudly told the founding congress of the Anti-Fascist Council of
the People’s Liberation of Serbia in Belgrade in November 1944.
‘Long live free democratic Serbia! Long live new Yugoslavia – a
fraternal union of equal peoples!’, Hebrang told the delegates.7
Meanwhile, Montenegro was established as a separate repub-
lic. However, by effectively reversing the late November 1918
Podgorica Assembly decision to unite with Serbia, the Communists
did not adopt the position of the original opponents of the union,
the so-called ‘Greens’. The supporters of King Nikola, who had
at the time identified as Serbs, objected to the way the union was
carried out, because it ended Montenegro’s statehood and abol-
ished its dynasty.8 During the Second World War, some ‘Greens’
advocated a separate Montenegrin nation and collaborated with
the Italians and even the Ustašas. The Yugoslav Communist posi-
tion on the ‘Montenegrin question’ was that Montenegrins and
7
Petranović, Srbija, 530–34, 688–707; D. S. Petrović, Konstituisanje federalne
Srbije, Belgrade, 1988, 202–203.
8
I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics, Ithaca,
NY, 1984, 270–91.
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Serbs shared history and ethnic roots, but, due to historical cir-
cumstances, the former had developed a distinct national iden-
tity. The historic ties between Serbia and Montenegro, and Serbs
and Montenegrins, were explicitly acknowledged by the two
republics sharing a flag – a red, blue, white tricolore of the old
kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro with the addition of a red
star in the middle. The other Yugoslav republics had their own,
distinct flags, while the Yugoslav state flag also differed from the
flags of the federal republics. By the time of the first popula-
tion census in post-war Yugoslavia, which now recorded nation-
hood (nacionalnost) rather than religion and language as was the
case in the interwar period, there were 426,000 Montenegrins,
the majority of whom (342,000) lived in Montenegro. In real-
ity, probably little changed: most Montenegrins likely continued
to have both Montenegrin and Serb identities, just like they did
before the war. Intelligentsia, army officers and veterans of the
Partisan struggle would have also felt a sense of a Yugoslav iden-
tity.9 On the other hand, most Macedonian Slavs never felt they
belonged to the Serbian nation. This was recognized by the new
Yugoslav government, which established a Macedonian republic
and recognized a separate – from both Serbs and Bulgarians –
Macedonian nation.
Serbia became a de facto federation within federation, with the
autonomous province of Vojvodina and autonomous region of
Kosovo and Metohija established within its new borders. The Serbs
also stood out as the nation most widely dispersed throughout the
country. In 1948, over 6.5 million people declared themselves as
Serbs (41.5 per cent of the total population of Yugoslavia), but
9
M. Djilas, ‘O crnogorskom nacionalnom pitanju’, Borba (Belgrade), 1 May
1945. Djilas later wrote invaluable historical works on Montenegro, notably:
Land without Justice, New York, 1958, and Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop,
New York, 1966 (both translated by M. B. Petrovich); the census figure:
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only slightly over 3.8 million lived in ‘inner’ Serbia – or what was
left of Serbia without the autonomous areas, a territory roughly
corresponding to the pre-1912 Serbian kingdom.10
To summarize, the new authorities reversed Serbia’s 1912–
13 territorial gains, either completely (Macedonia) or partially
(Kosovo), but Vojvodina was attached to Serbia as an autonomous
province. Montenegro, which entered Yugoslavia on 1 December
1918 in union with Serbia, was proclaimed a separate republic
and Montenegrins were declared a separate nation, albeit one
that shared historical and ethnic roots with the Serbs. The his-
toric Sandžak region was ‘divided’ by Serbia and Montenegro,
although plans for its autonomous status had been considered and
then abandoned.11
An additional challenge, from the new government’s point of
view, was posed by the status of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Patriarch Gavrilo had publicly supported the 27 March 1941
Belgrade coup, comparing the defiance and sacrifice of the Yugoslav
Army officers to the Serbian knights who fought the 1389 Kosovo
Battle; as we have seen, these were also the sentiments that were
shared by at least some Serb communists and their sympathizers.
The Patriarch was almost immediately arrested, then released,
by the German occupation authorities; he supported Mihailović
and King Petar II and refused to collaborate with General Nedić.
Gavrilo spent much of the war in incarceration at a monastery
near Belgrade, before being sent to Dachau, together with pre-
viously mentioned Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović. The Patriarch
returned to the liberated country, while Velimirović, who was a
controversial figure, due to allegations of antisemitism and links
with Ljotić, opted to remain in exile. (He was canonized by the
Serbian Orthodox Church in 2003.) Several Serbian bishops and
10
St. K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History behind the Name, London, 2002, 159.
11
K. Morrison and E. Williams, The Sandžak: A History, London, 2013, chs 10
& 11.
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many lower clergy were killed during the war, while hundreds
of churches and monasteries had been demolished or damaged,
especially in the Independent State of Croatia. Because its heroic
stand and its sacrifices in the war were undeniable, the Serbian
church could not be easily dismissed as ‘collaborationist’.12
The ‘restoration’ in 1945 of Serbia – albeit as a federal unit
within communist Yugoslavia – was significant symbolically.
Unlike Croatia, no Serbia had existed in interwar Yugoslavia,
which led to Serb complaints in the late 1930s. The future
republican borders had begun to emerge already during the war,
sometimes in form of liberated territories created around main
resistance centres (Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro), or in areas
populated by a single Yugoslav nation (Slovenia). The last one
to form in this sense was Serbia, where between late 1941 and
autumn 1944, there was relatively little Partisan activity. This did
not mean, however, that the Partisans were ignorant or hostile to
Serbian history. As previously mentioned, main events and figures
from Serbia’s past were recalled during and after the war, and not
only to attract popular support.
Just like in late 1918, a provisional Yugoslav government was
formed in 1945, with Tito as prime minister. Milan Grol (1876–
1952), Davidović’s successor as the Democratic Party leader and
formerly a minister in the government-in-exile, returned to the
liberated country to take up the post of a deputy prime minister. He
resigned within months, after being marginalized by Communist
and pro-Communist ministers. Grol attempted to revive politi-
cal pluralism in the country by forming an opposition coalition
between the Democrats and what was left of the old Radical Party.
In the end, due to intimidation by the authorities, he boycotted
12
R. Radić, Verom protiv vere: Država i verske zajednice u Srbiji 1945–1953,
Belgrade, 1995, and Život u vremenima: Patrijarh Gavrilo (Dožić): 1881–1950,
Belgrade, 2011; Djilas, Wartime, 427–28; cf. K. Buchenau, ‘The Serbian
Orthodox Church’, in L. N. Leustean (ed.), Eastern Christianity and Politics in
the Twenty-First Century, London, 2014, 67–92.
422
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(a) (b)
figure 7.1 (a) Coat of arms of Socialist Republic of Serbia (1947–92). (b) Coat of
arms of the Principality of Serbia (1835–82). (Wikipedia). Note that the traditional
‘Serbian cross’ was de facto preserved in the coat of arms of socialist Serbia,
as it is easy to visualize it between the four Cyrillic letters ‘C’ (S). These are
popularly believed to stand for Samo sloga Srbina spasava (‘Only unity saves the
Serbs’), a slogan attributed to St Sava, but in reality invented in the second half
of the nineteenth century (see Figure 3.1). The new coat of arms also preserved
the oak tree branch that featured in the nineteenth-century version, as a symbol
of Šumadija, an area that gave birth to modern Serbia. The symbolic link with
nineteenth-century Serbia is further emphasized by the years ‘1804’ and ‘1941’,
highlighting the importance of, and drawing direct parallels between, the First
Serbian Uprising and the uprising in German-occupied Serbia. Considering
that royalist Četniks had described their own rebellion in 1941 as the ‘Third
Serbian Uprising’, and hailed General Mihailović as new Karadjordje, the
symbols of socialist Serbia offer an example of the Yugoslav communists’ feel
for Serbia’s past, rather than their rejection of it, as it is popularly believed.
The references to Serbia’s historical symbols and events may be also said to
demonstrate the communist leadership’s aim to usurp the Karadjordjević
dynasty as ‘true’ representatives and leaders of the Serbian nation.
the November 1945 elections and soon withdrew from politics.

Dragoljub Jovanović, the interwar Agrarian leader accused by
the old Yugoslav regime of collaborating with the Communists
and a veteran Serbian Republican Jaša Prodanović were similarly
forced out of politics. Interwar political parties banned during the
423
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royalist dictatorship had been eventually allowed to resume their

activities and take part in the 1935 and 1938 elections. A dec-
ade later, no party was officially banned, but they were de facto
abolished by a combination of violence and intimidation.13 The
relaxation of the dictatorship – if not its abolition – in the second
half of the 1930s had been partly due to the ideological origins of
the post–World War I Yugoslav state. Similarly, the introduction
of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the mid-1940s was insep-
arably linked with the ideological foundations of new Yugoslavia.
Together with a small number of loyal followers, General
Mihailović remained at large at the end of the war. Hunted by
the Communist secret police, he was finally captured in March
1946. His show trial and execution during the summer was one
of a number of similar court proceedings of individuals accused
of collaboration and considered as potential opposition rivals of
the new government. Among them was elderly London-based
Professor Slobodan Jovanović, sentenced in absentia to 20 years of
hard labour as former prime minister of the government-in-exile
that had included both Mihailović and Grol.
Once again, the agrarian question became an important issue,
and once again it was closely connected with nation-building.
In the shadow of much better-known expulsion of millions of
ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland (two other
restored Slav countries), around 500,000 Yugoslav Germans
were ‘ethnically cleansed’ (the German community in neighbour-
ing Romania suffered the same fate).14 Their land in Vojvodina,
Yugoslavia’s agricultural hub, was distributed mainly to settlers
from Herzegovina and Montenegro. Thus, the old migratory
13
V. Koštunica and K. Čavoški, Party Pluralism or Monism: Social Movements and
the Political System in Yugoslavia, 1944–1949, Boulder, CO, 1985.
14
Z. Janjetović, ‘The Disappearance of the Germans from Yugoslavia:
Expulsion or Emigration?’, Tokovi istorije, 1–2 (2003), 73–89; cf.
C. Mezger, Forging Germans: Youth, Nation, and the National Socialist
Mobilization of Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1918–1944, Oxford, 2020.
424
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pattern, of Orthodox refugees from the Balkan hinterland settling

in the lower Danubian plain in aftermath of mass violence, was
repeated, albeit in a different context.
As a result, the 1948 population census registered 52 per cent
Serbs in Vojvodina – an increase of around 14 per cent when
compared to pre-war estimates.15 Vojvodina Hungarians were
as numerous as the departed Germans, but did not suffer the
same fate, even though members of the community were sim-
ilarly involved in brutal occupation. This was mainly because
a communist government was being established in Hungary,
Yugoslavia’s northern neighbour. In the south, ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo were spared for similar reasons, but perhaps up to
350,000 ethnic Italians from Istria and Dalmatia were forced to
move to Italy after the war. As in the aftermath of the First World
War, Italy and Yugoslavia disagreed over the border demarcation
in north-eastern Adriatic, and it took them a while to eventually
reach an agreement.16
The establishment of regional autonomies in Serbia’s north and
south therefore had been driven by both internal (keeping Serbia in
check) and external factors (good neighbourly relations with com-
munist Hungary and Albania). Moreover, Kosovo and formerly
Serbian Macedonia were established within Serbia and Yugoslavia,
respectively, as potential ‘bridges’ towards Albania and Bulgaria –
another neighbouring country with a communist government after
the war. The late nineteenth-century socialist plans for a Balkan
federation and Prince Mihailo’s Balkan alliances of the 1860s were
thus updated as Tito’s vision of a Yugoslav-led Balkan federation.
As the Greek communists continued to fight a civil war against roy-
alists (in Greece’s own version of the Partisans versus the Četniks
15
16
S. Mišić, Pomirenje na Jadranu: Jugoslavija i Italija na putu ka Osimskim
sporazumima iz 1975, Belgrade, 2018; cf. P. Ballinger, History in Exile:
Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, Princeton, NJ, 2003.
425
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conflict), there was a possibility that Greece too would join a future
Balkan federation. Greece’s communist stronghold was in north-
ern parts of the country, in ‘Slavophone’ Greek Macedonia, and
there appeared to be more than mere ideological links between the
Yugoslav and Greek communists.17
The Tito–Stalin Split and the Djilas Affair

Stalin initially encouraged Tito to absorb Albania, whose commu-
nist resistance had been organized by the Yugoslavs. At the same
time, the Soviet leader increasingly felt uneasy with Tito’s ambi-
tion and independence. The Yugoslav leader was unquestionably
a Stalin loyalist, but he saw himself – and just as importantly was
seen by others in Eastern Europe – as the most important com-
munist statesman after Stalin. Yugoslavia indeed stood apart from
the other communist regimes in the making because it possessed
a large, confident army and a party whose popularity was boosted
by the victory over both internal and external enemies during the
war. Tito’s Partisans, and not the Soviets, whose military sup-
port in the final stages of the war was important but arguably not
decisive, were the liberators of Yugoslavia. Keen to respect the
infamous October 1944 ‘percentages agreement’ with Churchill
about a shared Soviet–British influence in the Balkans, which
in Yugoslavia was to be 50-50 and in Greece 90-10 in Britain’s
favour, Stalin thought Tito was moving too fast.
Demonstrating a good knowledge of the recent Serbian and
Yugoslav history, and allegedly acting on behalf of the Soviet
Party Central Committee, Stalin sent a warning to Tito in a letter
dated 27 March 1948 – the seventh anniversary of the Belgrade
17
In addition to sending aid to their Greek comrades, the Yugoslavs sheltered
a large number of refugees. M. Ristović, Eksperiment Buljkes: Grčka utopija u
Jugoslaviji (1945–1949), Belgrade, 2007; cf. R. Clogg,
A Concise History of Greece, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002, 134–42.
426
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coup. When the following month the Soviets demanded that

their diplomats attend a trial of two Yugoslav party members, a
high-ranking Serbian communist official compared this to the
Austrian-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914. Continuing
with historical analogies, Moscow expelled Yugoslavia from the
Communist Information Bureau (Cominform, which de facto suc-
ceeded the Communist International, or Comintern) on 28 June
1948. The Kosovo Battle anniversary was of course also the anni-
versary of the Sarajevo assassination and of the Versailles Treaty.
The Yugoslavs were shocked at first. The Communist Party
of Yugoslavia was a founding member of the Cominform and
Belgrade the first seat of the organization (after the Soviet–
Yugoslav split, its headquarters moved to Bucharest). The con-
flict, despite some post factum interpretations encouraged by the
official Yugoslav historiography, was not ideological. It was essen-
tially a power struggle between Stalin and Tito, and geopolitical
interests were just as important. In the geopolitical context, when
the USA had a nuclear bomb and Soviets did not, and when Stalin
needed to consolidate his power in Eastern Europe’s ‘People’s
Democracies’, opening the Greek front was not in Moscow’s
interest. Yet, the confrontation with Belgrade took everyone by
surprise but Stalin and his closest circle. Western intelligence
agencies initially thought the whole thing was staged. Once it
became clear the split was real, it had profound consequences that
reached well beyond Yugoslavia.18
Stalin’s confidence that Yugoslav communists’ sense of loyalty
to him would bring down Tito proved to be misplaced. It proba-
bly saved Yugoslavia from a military invasion, because the Soviet
18
J. Perović, ‘The Tito–Stalin Split: A Reassessment in Light of New
Evidence’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 9:2 (2007), 32–63; St. K. Pavlowitch,
‘La crise Yougoslave et ses consequences sur L’Europe orientale’, in Coll.
[ectiff], L’Europe de l’Est et de l’Ouest dans la Guerre froide, 1948–1953, Paris,
2002, 83–97.
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leader did not think it would be needed. When he realized he

was wrong the momentum had gone and the timing was bad
anyhow. Stalin was not prepared for a confrontation with the
West an intervention in Yugoslavia would have likely provoked.
Yet, he was not completely wrong in his assessment of the situ-
ation, as it soon emerged that some Yugoslav communists sup-
ported the Cominform resolution. Support for Tito’s wartime
movement, especially among the Serbs and Montenegrins, had
in some cases merged with older pro-Russian sentiments. How
many of them genuinely supported Moscow in 1948 and how
many were innocent victims of Tito’s own Stalin-style purges
are hard to say, but Montenegrins and Serbs were disproportion-
ately represented among those arrested in Yugoslavia following
the Cominform resolution. Many were sent to Goli otok (Barren
Island), Yugoslavia’s gulag off the coast of Croatia. There were
some high-profile victims of the purges, including Hebrang and
Sreten Žujović, a leading Serb Party member; a senior army
general was shot while attempting to flee to Romania, while sev-
eral Croatian Serb communists were arrested, some perhaps as
belated victims of the Kordun Trial.19 The purge of domestic
enemies accused of collaboration had only just finished, and it
felt as this was the second round.
The political conflict with the Soviet Union, which could
have yet turned into a military confrontation, boosted the party
ranks as Yugoslav patriotic feelings grew. It was caused by a siege
mentality as four of Yugoslavia’s (and all of Serbia’s external)
neighbours – Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania – were
members of the Soviet bloc. The breakup with the Cominform
represented a serious economic blow: in 1948, nearly one half
of Yugoslavia’s imports came from the Bloc, the following year
the figure was down to 14 per cent and in 1950 no imports came
19
I. Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism,
Ithaca, NY, 1998.
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from the Soviet Union and its satellites; it was similar regarding
the country’s export. Western economic aid, however, eventually
arrived to provide a lifeline. Especially generous was the United
States, which, together with its allies, looked to support a country
whose conflict with Moscow exposed cracks in the Soviet bloc
that had until recently appeared monolithic.20
This was the main reason why the aid was not conditional
upon democratization (which would half a century later feature in
American and Western European dealings with post-communist
countries in transition to democracy, including Serbia). Between
1950 and 1953, the United States alone provided Yugoslavia with
grants and other aid worth $620 million, which amounted to
three-quarters of all western aid the country received during this
period. In addition, the United States sent military aid, including
weaponry, for an army that by 1951 had grown to 600,000 sol-
diers, or by as much as 50 per cent in just three years. Meanwhile,
Yugoslavia almost doubled its military budget, from 9.4 per cent
in 1948 to 16.7 per cent in 1950. Despite the Party leadership’s
attempts to diversify the officer corps, it became even more
dominated by Serbs and Montenegrins during this period. This
problem was ‘inherited’ from the interwar period, but the Second
World War recruitment patterns were even more critical. It would
be never fully resolved.21
Western aid stabilized the Yugoslav economy but did not reverse
a north–south divide that resembled that of Italy. Keeping in mind
regional disparities within the north and the south, the former included
Slovenia, north-western Croatia (and later, with the development of
tourism, Dalmatia), Vojvodina and most of ‘inner’ Serbia. The eco-
nomically less developed ‘south’ included Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
20
Lampe, Yugoslavia, 253–54.
21
Ibid, 257–60. For the army, see J. Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: The
Yugoslav Crisis, London, 1992; M. Hadžić, Sudbina partijske vojske, Belgrade,
2001.
429
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Croatian Krajina region (which had a Serb majority or plurality) and

parts of Dalmatia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia’s southern
regions, including Kosovo. Therefore, Yugoslavia’s economic dis-
parities of the 1950s developed neither along internal administrative
borders nor along boundaries between the main ethnic groups (to
the extent that these could be drawn).22
A constitutional law of 1951 introduced the workers’ self-
management and effectively superseded the Soviet-inspired 1946
Constitution.23 The dictatorship of the proletariat, which had ensured
that enemies of the people – both real and imagined – were removed
and the party rule firmly established, was declared over. The constitu-
tional reform set the Yugoslav communists on their own path to state
socialism, both in domestic and in foreign policies. To emphasize the
‘true faith’ of their ideology, and thus turn tables on the Soviets who
accused the Yugoslavs of betraying Marxism, the Communist Party
was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – an obvious
reference to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
The rapprochement with the Soviet Union became possi-
ble only after Stalin’s death in March 1953, but it did not mean
Yugoslavia’s break with the West. Yugoslavia entered a Balkan
pact with Greece and Turkey, though it would ultimately not
join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formed
in 1949, of which Greece and Turkey were members. The thaw
in relations with Moscow further strengthened Belgrade’s special
position internationally, which would come to the fore through
the Non-Aligned Movement, discussed in the following text.
New Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s historic visit to Belgrade
in late May 1955 – just days after the formation of the Warsaw
22
Lampe, Yugoslavia, 276–84, 336; Pavlowitch, Serbia, 168; cf. V. Unkovski-
Korica, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War
II to Non-Alignment, London, 2016.
23
D. Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948–1974, Berkeley, CA, 1977, 62–70;
Unkovski-Korica, The Economic Struggle, ch. 3; S. L. Woodward, Balkan
Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War, Washington, DC, 1995, ch. 2.
430
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Pact, the Eastern bloc’s answer to NATO – was symbolic of the

reconciliation between the two countries, although Yugoslavia
would not join the Warsaw Pact either. Khrushchev’s acknowl-
edgement that Stalin was wrong in 1948 was a major boost to
Tito’s and Yugoslavia’s international standing. The restoration of
trade with the Soviet bloc boosted Yugoslavia’s economy further,
while western aid, which in the words of one historian ‘kept Tito
afloat’, continued to arrive.24
By the early 1950s, Milovan Djilas gradually grew disillusioned
with the way Yugoslavia and other socialist states were develop-
ing. He published a series of articles calling for an end of the Party
monopoly and a move towards ‘democratic socialism’. The arti-
cles initially received support from both the party rank and file and
the public, but Djilas was accused of ‘revisionism’ by Tito and the
Party leadership in January 1954; only Mitra Mitrović, his ex-wife
and a high Serbian communist official, and Vladimir Dedijer, a
revolutionary and a historian, stood by Djilas. He was stripped of
all functions and the following year resigned from the Party. In
1957, while in prison, Djilas’ most important book, The New Class,
was published in the USA. This powerful critique of communist
bureaucracy made him the most significant communist dissident
in Eastern Europe. In total, he spent 12 years in prison: nine years
in socialist Yugoslavia and three years in interwar Yugoslavia, as a
member of the illegal Communist Party.25
Djilas was arrested after criticizing the (second) Soviet inter-
vention in Hungary in 1956. Yugoslavia initially condemned the
24
L. Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia and the Cold War,
University Park, PA, 2007; S. Rajak, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the Early
Cold War: Reconciliation, Comradeship, Confrontation, 1953–1957, London, 2013.
25
Djilas, Rise and Fall; S. Clissold, Djilas: The Progress of a Revolutionary,
Hounslow, 1983; V. Stanić, ‘Milovan Djilas, 1953–54: Izmedju revolucije
i slobode’, Tokovi istorije, 3–4 (2008), 251–78; cf. D. Djokić, ‘Britain and
Dissent in Tito’s Yugoslavia: The Djilas Affair, ca. 1956’, European History
Quarterly, 36:3 (2006), 371–95.
431
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figure 7.2 Jovanka Broz (née Budisavljević, 1924–2013), Tito and

President Nasser of Egypt, Belgrade, 1961 (Photo by Keystone-France/
Gamma-Rapho Getty Images). A Croatian Serb Partisan and a nurse whom
Tito had married discreetly in the early 1950s, Jovanka’s fashion sense
and striking looks had drawn comparisons to Jackie Kennedy, as Tito and
Jovanka mingled with world leaders and Hollywood celebrity.
Soviet invasion of its northern neighbour, but ultimately sup-

ported a major Soviet invasion in early November 1956, following
a revolution that temporarily brought down the communist gov-
ernment in Budapest. The Yugoslavs had briefly sheltered Imre
Nagy, Hungary’s reformist communist leader, in their embassy in
432
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.008
Budapest. Nagy was subsequently arrested, tried and executed by

his Moscow-chosen successors.
Non-alignment
In early September 1961, Belgrade hosted the founding con-
ference of non-aligned countries.26 The city was chosen as a
neutral venue, to avoid rivalry between Africa and Asia. Since
both world wars had broken out in Europe (and the spark for
the First World War was lit in the Balkans), it was, it might
be said, symbolic that foundations of a new movement seeking
to contribute to world peace should be laid at this continent,
and in Yugoslavia. Usually associated with the ‘Balkan wars’ of
the 1990s and worst violence ‘since the Second World War’,
Serbia’s capital city had just three decades earlier hosted a global
initiative to prevent another world war that the world seemed
to be facing. The Suez crisis and the Hungarian Revolution
had barely ended when the building of the Berlin Wall began
in August 1961. This triggered a partial mobilization of the US
army, which in turn was followed by the resumption of Soviet
nuclear testing, announced on the eve of the Belgrade summit.
The conference took place following a diplomatic ‘offensive’ by
Tito, which saw a series of meetings with leaders of Ghana, Egypt,
India and Indonesia, among others. The Yugoslav foreign ministry
was headed at this time by Koča Popović, the previously men-
tioned surrealist poet and veteran of the Spanish Civil War and of
the Yugoslav Partisan war. Yugoslavia’s engagement with the ‘Global
26
D. Bogetić and Lj. Dimić, Beogradska konferencija Nesvrstanih zemalja 1–6.
septembra 1961: Prilog istoriji Trećeg sveta, Belgrade, 2013; T. Jakovina, Treća
strana Hladnog rata, Zaprešić, 2011; N. Mišković et al. (eds), The Non-Aligned
Movement and the Cold War: Delhi-Bandung-Belgrade, London, 2014 cf., D.
Djokić, ‘Reframing Nonalignment: Tito, Sukarno and the 1961 Belgrade
Conference’, in M. Phillips and N. Shimazu (eds), Cold War Asia: A Visual
History of Global Diplomacy, Cambridge, forthcoming 2023.
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South’ dated back at least to the escalation of the Korean war in 1950,
which Belgrade feared may have anticipated a Soviet intervention
against Yugoslavia. Tito was received warmly on his travels to Africa
and Asia, as a fellow national-liberation leader and revolutionary.
Apart from Tito’s personal ambition as a world statesman, the
conflict with the Soviets forced the Yugoslav leadership to develop
a new set of policies and seek fresh alliances. These were shaped
by the notions of ‘workers’ self-management’ at home and ‘active
peaceful co-existence’ and ‘non-alignment’ abroad, which helped
Belgrade extend its influence globally. The Yugoslavs felt confi-
dent enough to send peace-keeping troops to the Middle East in
the 1950s and ‘60s – an opportunity to promote the Titoist version
of socialism and sell Yugoslavia’s military expertise and weapons.
But there was also a bona fide sense of solidarity and sympathy
with African and Asian countries that had recently emerged from
foreign imperial rule. This resonated in a country with a history
of resistance to the Ottoman, Habsburg and Venetian rules; more
recently, the Yugoslav communists fought Hitler’s Germany,
Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was in this con-
text that one should understand the rehabilitation in Yugoslavia
in the 1950s of the Black Hand and the Young Bosnians, which
had an additional benefit of discrediting late King Aleksandar and
Nikola Pašić, who played the key roles at the Salonica Trial. Also
important may have been the influence of Moša Pijade, once a
contributor to Pijemont, the Black Hand organ.27
The Belgrade conference represented the first large gathering
of mainly African and Asian leaders at an international summit in
Europe to discuss main global issues, rather than merely watching
the Powers decide their destiny. Similarly, Belgrade had never
hosted an event of such magnitude. The Yugoslavs felt empow-
ered that for once they were not mere spectators or marginal
27
D. Mackenzie, The Exoneration of the ‘Black Hand’, 1917–1953, Boulder, CO,
1998, 185–86.
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players at international congresses that have had profoundly

shaped their destinies.
Society and Culture

By the early 1950s, Serbia seemed content in Yugoslavia.
Economically, it was doing well, although Kosovo remained the
poorest part of the country. In 1953, the GDP of central Serbia
(i.e. without its provinces) was 91 (as a percentage of the Yugoslav
average) per capita, and of Vojvodina and Kosovo it was 94 and 43,
respectively. By comparison, Slovenia’s GDP that year was 175,
that of Croatia 122, Bosnia 83, Montenegro 77 and Macedonia
68. During the following 35 years, the GDP of central Serbia and
Vojvodina continued to rise and that of Kosovo to lag behind. The
figures for central Serbia, Vojvodina and Kosovo in 1971 and 1988
were 96/118/32 and 101/119/27, respectively. While Kosovo’s
GDP continued to decline, that of Vojvodina nearly caught up
with Croatia’s GDP in 1988 (127). Slovenia was well ahead of the
rest of the country, with 203 per capita GDP that year.28
Yugoslavia’s resistance to Stalin reminded some Serbs of acts of
defiance against more powerful enemies that characterized their
history, or at least the romantic interpretations of Serbia’s past.
An Anglo-Irish visitor to Yugoslavia in the early 1950s was told by
proud Yugoslavs that the world was divided into the east, west and
Yugoslavia.29 This was before the emergence of the Non-Aligned
Movement and was meant to suggest Yugoslavia’s independence
and a special place in global politics, a narrative that would reso-
nate among many in Serbia today. Yugoslavia’s, and Serbia’s, cap-
ital Belgrade and other urban centres were feeling the benefits of
industrialization and modernity, even if people still lived in poverty
28
29
H. Butler, ‘In Europe’s Debatable Lands’, Balkan Essays, ed. by C. and
J. Agee, Belfast, 2016.
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in parts of Serbia until at least the late 1960s. Serbia was home
to Yugoslavia’s car industry (Zastava Kragujevac, which from the
mid-1950s produced Fiat-licensed vehicles and from the late 1970s
Yugoslavia’s own car, Yugo), and in the 1950s and ‘60s Elektronska
industrija Niš began mass production of radio and TV sets. Western
influences in popular culture were also felt, while nascent consum-
erism was boosted by the opening of first supermarkets in Serbia
and Yugoslavia during the 1950s.30
New Belgrade, an entirely new town across the Sava River
from the old city, was built after the war. It was an excellent
example of a modern, functioning urban development, whose
brutalist architecture did not differ much in style from west-
ern modernist trends. Similar building developments sprang up
across the country. Meanwhile, from the late 1960s, a number
of monuments to the Second World War were unveiled across
Serbia and Yugoslavia, some of which represented the finest
achievements of the country’s modern architecture as well as
powerful visual tools of the official memory culture.31
A rich and diverse art scene formed as well, with modernist
tendencies challenging previously dominant socialist realism
already in the 1950s. Petar Lubarda and Mića and Vera Popović
belonged to Informel and Leonid Šejka and Olja Ivanjicki to
Mediala – Serbia-based groups of modernist artists.32 The fol-
lowing decade saw the emergence of an exceptionally talented
30
P. J. Marković, Beograd izmedju Istoka i Zapada, 1948–1965, Belgrade, 1996;
P. H. Patterson, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist
Yugoslavia, Ithaca, NY, 2012; R. Vučetić, Coca-Cola Socialism: Americanization
of the Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties, Budapest, 2018; cf. A. Simić, The Peasant
Urbanities: A Study of Rural-Urban Mobility in Serbia, New York, 1973.
31
M. Stierli, V. Kulić, et al., Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia,
1948–1980, New York, 2018; B. Le Normand, Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban
Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade, Pittsburgh, PA, 2014.
32
L. Merenik, Umetnost i vlast: srpsko slikarstvo, 1945–1968, Belgrade, 2010; M.
B. Protić, ‘Painting and Sculpture in the Twentieth Century’, in P. Ivić (ed.),
The History of Serbian Culture, 2nd edn, Belgrade, 1999, 295–320.
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group of conceptual and performance artists in Serbia, which

included Marina Abramović, Katalin Ladik, Era Milivojević,
Neša Paripović, Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević and Gera
Urkom, who achieved international recognition and, in the case
of Abramović, fame.
Around the same time, the New Yugoslav Film (better known
as the Black Wave cinema, initially called thus by its ideologi-
cal critics), which included Serbian directors Dušan Makavejev,
Živojin Pavlović, Aleksandar Petrović and Želimir Žilnik, gained
international fame. The Yugoslav authorities did not respond well
to the new film production that challenged the official aesthetic
and socialist values. The youngest of the ‘Black Wave’ directors,
Žilnik won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his debut film
Early Works (1969), starring Milja Vujanović (1945–2005), a former
Miss Serbia who gained critical acclaim for her role in the film, but
later became a well-known astrologist (see Figure 7.3). Žilnik was
born in 1942, in a Nazi concentration camp in Niš, then German-
occupied Serbia. His Serbian Communist mother had been taken
prisoner there and was executed when Želimir (whose name means
‘he who wants peace’) was just three months old; his Slovene
Partisan father was killed in 1944. Raised by his maternal grand-
parents, Žilnik’s survival may be said to had symbolized the victory
of a multinational, multicultural, anti-fascist Yugoslavia. However,
as an engaged intellectual, he clashed with the Yugoslav author-
ities in the 1960s and ‘70s. (He later became a prominent critic
of Serbian nationalism and the wars in former-Yugoslavia, while
his recent films deal with the ‘migrant crisis’ in Serbia and cen-
tral Europe). Makavejev’s W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971),
a surreal film about communism, sexuality and liberty, and about
Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian Jewish-American psychoanalyst (and
a member of the Communist Party of Germany in the 1930s), was
banned in Yugoslavia. Like other films by Makavejev, it achieved
critical acclaim abroad. Indeed, it may be said that the interna-
tional success of the Black Wave placed Yugoslavia on the map
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figure 7.3 Film director Želimir Žilnik and actress Milja Vujanović, the
Berlin film festival, 1969 (Getty Images)
of world cinema.33 For example, in 1967, Petrović’s film I Even

Met Happy Gypsies won the Cannes Festival Jury Prize. It starred
33
G. De Cuir, Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema in Socialist Yugoslavia
(1963–1972), Amsterdam, 2019; D. J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The
Yugoslav Experience, Bloomington, IN, 1985; P. Levi, Disintegration in Frames:
Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema, Stanford, CA,
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Bekim Fehmiu (1936–2010), a Sarajevo-born Kosovo Albanian

who studied and lived in Belgrade, together with his Croatian-
born Serb actress Branka Petrić (b. 1937) and their sons Uliks and
Hedon, who also became actors. Fehmiu was the first Yugoslav
to play in popular Hollywood productions and in Italian films
and series. The Albanian–Serb tensions and the war of the 1990s,
discussed later, left Fehmiu emotionally deeply injured, and may
have contributed to his suicide in 2010. Shortly before his death,
he published, in Serbian, a best-selling memoir – an insightful and
moving account by one of the country’s biggest film stars and a
member of a national minority whose elite at least identified with
Yugoslavia.34 Fehmiu paved way for other successful Belgrade-
based Kosovo Albanian actors, Faruk Begolli (1944–2007) and
Enver Petrovci (b. 1954). Both left Belgrade in the 1990s for
Priština/Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo.
The Return of the ‘National Question’

Discreet attempts by the Yugoslav leadership during the 1950s
to create a common Yugoslav identity through raising class con-
sciousness and solidarity among the ‘working people’ did not
take on. By the mid-1960s, the ‘national question’ – previously
thought to have been solved by the creation of federal Yugoslavia –
had re-emerged. This is not the place to analyse all its complex
facets; what follows is a brief discussion, focusing on Serbia and
the Serbs.35
2007; V. Sudar, Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident: The Life and Work of
Aleksandar Petrović, Chicago, 2013.
34
Blistavo i strašno, Belgrade, 2 vols, 2001–2010.
35
For more details, see P. Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National
Question, New York, 1968; Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, and Yugoslavia:
Oblique Insights and Observations (selected and ed. by G. Stokes), Pittsburgh,
PA, 2008; cf. S. P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia,
1962–1991, Bloomington, IN, 1992.
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The 1963 Constitution was socialist Yugoslavia’s third, if the

1951 Constitutional Law is taken into account. It was also the
country’s first Constitution that introduced a genuine federal
system. The political decentralization, however, made the dis-
parity between republican and ‘ethnic’ boundaries more obvi-
ous (see Map 7.1). By gaining greater powers, the republics
further divided those Yugoslav nations that lived in more than
one republic. As the largest and geographically most widely
dispersed of Yugoslavia’s constituent nations, the Serbs were
most obviously affected by the decentralization. Meanwhile,
the devolution of the previously centralized economy enabled
industrially most developed republics Slovenia and Croatia to
begin to introduce elements of market economy. Generally
speaking, by the mid-1960s, there emerged a conflict between
those in favour of decentralization, symbolized by the Slovene
party leadership, and Edvard Kardelj in particular, and those
who sought to keep a status quo, symbolized by Aleksandar
Ranković. Ranković was in charge of the federal interior min-
istry and secret police. Although he was not Serbia’s advocate
in the federation, the different political and economic options
represented by Kardelj and Ranković came to be perceived as
a conflict between Slovenia and Croatia on the one hand and
Serbia on the other.36 This was a simplistic and often retrospec-
tive reading of the conflict in Yugoslavia, but perceptions often
matter even when they are not grounded in facts.
Tito had turned 70 in 1962. On the occasion of his 60th birth-
day, he had told an American journalist that he did not consider
retirement because he had been given a mandate by the party
and the people and therefore had a duty towards them. Little
appeared to have changed 10 years later, although his main focus
36
Calic, A History of Yugoslavia, ch. 13; Lampe, Yugoslavia, 284–91; St. K.
Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, London, 1971, ch. 6; Ramet, Nationalism and
Federalism, ch. 6.
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now seemed to be the Non-Aligned Movement and world politics

more generally. The conflict at home came as a distraction and
after he appeared initially to side with the centralists, Tito ulti-
mately backed the decentralists. Ranković was dismissed in 1966,
under likely false accusations that the secret police had bugged
Tito’s home. Unlike Djilas, who after his dismissal continued to
criticize the regime through publications and interviews abroad
(which, as already mentioned, earned him a lengthy prison sen-
tence), Ranković would go quietly. Because he favoured a tighter
federation and the interior ministry under his leadership kept a
strict control over predominantly Albanian-populated Kosovo,
his fall from grace was perceived by many, both non-Serbs and
Serbs, as a defeat of Serb nationalism, even though there is no
evidence of Ranković being a Serb nationalist. Nevertheless, since
he came to be seen as standing up to the anti-centralists and came
to be associated with ‘the Serbian cause’, his funeral in 1983 was
attended by an estimated 100,000 people and represented a show
of Serb frustration with the direction Yugoslavia had taken.
Ranković’s fall coincided with a series of important develop-
ments. With the state and party support, but without the endorse-
ment of the Serbian Orthodox Church, a separate Macedonian
Orthodox Church was established in July 1967. It claimed legit-
imacy on two grounds: history and ethnicity. The Ohrid arch-
bishopric, the seat of the new church, was older than the Serb
archbishopric established in 1219 under St Sava, and its impor-
tance was acknowledged by the Serbian church. Ohrid had been
abolished by the Ottomans in 1767, but it was restored by, and
within, the new Serbian Orthodox Church in 1920, as one of its
key eparchies.
The declaration that proclaimed the Macedonian church
referred to a long struggle for independence of the Macedonian
nation, finally achieved in socialist Yugoslavia. This was a bitter
blow for the Serbian Orthodox Church that had been prepar-
ing to celebrate the 750th anniversary of its own autocephaly,
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and which in 1967 discreetly marked the 750th anniversary of the

establishment of the Nemanjić kingdom by Sava’s elder brother
Stefan the First Crowned, also a Serbian Orthodox saint. The
Serbian and other autocephalous Orthodox churches refused to rec-
ognize the Macedonian church (this changed in May 2022, as men-
tioned in Introduction), but a feeling persisted among some Serbs
that following a territorial fragmentation of the ‘Serb lands’ within
socialist Yugoslavia, the authorities now turned on the Serbian
church, as one of the defining markers of Serb national identity.
Following the purging of Montenegrin-Serb Djilas and Serb
Ranković, only Slovene Kardelj remained of Tito’s ‘three musket-
eers’. It was perhaps easy to forget that leading Serbian communists
retained the highest positions of power, and that Ranković’s fall
created space for younger and more liberal (by standards of a one-
party communist state) leadership in Serbia. At the time of Tito’s
conflict with Ranković, Koča Popović was appointed Yugoslavia’s
deputy president. He was succeeded as the country’s foreign min-
ister by Marko Nikezić (1921–90), another prominent Belgrade-
born communist politician, who came from a mixed Serb–French
family. In 1968, Nikezić was appointed the chairman of the League
of Communists of Serbia, while Latinka Perović (b. 1933), a young
communist from Kragujevac (and an eminent historian today),
became the General Secretary of the Serbian League of Communists.
Meanwhile, Mijalko Todorović (1913–1999), who hailed from a vil-
lage near Kragujevac, was a member of the very top leadership of the
League of Communists of Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and served as
president of the Yugoslav People’s Assembly in the early ‘70s.
The appointments of Nikezić and Perović coincided with
student demonstrations at the University of Belgrade in June
1968 and with the emergence of a younger group of neo-Marxist
philosophers, who demanded changes and criticized the party
bureaucracy for its inefficiency. These developments mir-
rored student protests across Europe and neo-Marxist political
trends more generally. Serbia’s ‘68-ers would play a prominent
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role in the politics of late- and post-Yugoslav Serbia, including

Dragoljub Mićunović (b. 1930), the first president of the renewed
Democratic Party in 1990.
Demonstrations had also broken out in Kosovo-Metohija.
Despite the state’s efforts to distribute its economic resources
fairly, the region remained the poorest part of Yugoslavia, with
the highest level of illiteracy. Demands there by the ethnic
Albanian majority crystalized into calls for elevating the region
into a republic, which in practice would have meant independ-
ence from Serbia within Yugoslavia. By November 1968, violent
clashes between demonstrators and the police broke out, amid
calls for the unification with Albania by some protesters. The
federal government responded by allowing import and distribu-
tion of school textbooks from Albania (published in a southern
Albanian dialect not spoken by Yugoslav Albanians). Moreover,
a university was established in Priština with classes in Albanian;
this made Kosovo Albanians a national minority with a uni-
versity in its own language, a rare if not unique case. Kosovo
Albanians were to be also allowed to fly the flag of Albania, con-
sidered by many to be the national flag of all Albanians. This
was a significant concession in a country where politics of sym-
bols mattered enormously. In further attempts to meet ethnic
Albanians’ demands, the Autonomous Region of Kosovo and
Metohija became the Autonomous Province of Kosovo. Kosovo
now enjoyed the same status within Serbia as Vojvodina and
received additional funds to boost its struggling economy. The
Serb-sounding Metohija (a Byzantine Greek word for monastic
estates) was dropped from the province’s name.
Ethnic Albanians were not the only minority in Yugoslavia, and
indeed Serbia, whose language, culture and tradition had been
acknowledged and protected. Ethnic Hungarians, most of whom
lived in Vojvodina, were guaranteed primary and secondary edu-
cation in Hungarian, and TV and radio news were broadcast daily
in the languages of the main minorities. Bilingual street names
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and road signs were introduced in areas with significant non-

South Slav population, in Vojvodina, Kosovo, as well as Dalmatia
and Istria, where members of the Italian minority lived.
During the 1970s, Serbs had been emigrating from Kosovo,
mostly to ‘inner Serbia’, as their numbers in the province continued
to shrink. By 1981, the Serbs and Montenegrins made up only 13.2
per cent of Kosovo’s population, down from 27 per cent just 20
years previously. This was due to a high birth rate among Kosovo
Albanians and Kosovo Serb emigration. The latter occurred for
a variety of reasons, not only because of Albanian oppression as
the Serbs argued, and not simply because of better economic
opportunities elsewhere, as Kosovo Albanians suggested.37 Either
way, Serbs from less developed parts of Bosnia and Croatia also
tended to migrate to ‘inner’ Serbia, as did many Montenegrins.
As a result, percentage of Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina declined
in the post-war period, from around 44 per cent in 1948 to 32
per cent in 1981. In the meanwhile, tens of thousands of Serbs
and other Yugoslavs went abroad in search of work, as part of a
growing Gastarbeiter community in western Europe.38
The revolutionary 1968 also saw student demonstrations in
Zagreb, as part of broader Croatian demands for greater cultural,
linguistic and political autonomy. The so-called Mass Movement
led to tensions between the majority Croat and minority local
37
M. Blagojević, ‘The Migrations of Serbs from Kosovo in the 1970s and
1980s’, in N. Popov and D. Gojković (eds), The Road to War in Serbia:
Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest, 2000 (first publ. in Serbian in 1996),
212–46.
38
Kosovo figures, Bosnian and Croatian Serb and Montenegrin emigration to
Serbia: Pavlowitch, Serbia, 181–82; Gastarbeiter: V. Ivanović, Geburtstag pišeš
normalno: Jugoslovenski gastarbajteri u SR Nemačkoj i Austriji 1965–1973,
Belgrade, 2012; B. Le Normand, ‘The Gastarbajteri as a Transnational Yugoslav
Working Class’, in R. Archer et al. (eds), Bringing Class Back In: The Dynamics of
Social Change in (Post) Yugoslavia, Aldershot, 2016, 38–57; cf. S. Bernard, Deutsch
Marks in the Head, Shovel in the Hands and Yugoslavia in the Heart: The Gastarbeiter
return to Yugoslavia (1965–1991), Wiesbaden, 2017.
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Serb population, still traumatized by their wartime suffering in the

Independent State of Croatia. Croatia’s own liberal party leadership
did not condone, but was ambivalent in its criticism of, Croat nation-
alist demands. They were eventually replaced by Tito, as he threat-
ened to send in the army against anyone who posed a danger to the
country’s unity and its ‘socialist order’. The Yugoslav People’s Army
(JNA) was thus tasked with defending both Yugoslavia’s borders and
territorial integrity and its Titoist socialist system. Tito’s thinking
should be understood in the broader international context, particu-
larly the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia
during summer 1968. Similarly, his decision to replace, in 1972,
Serbia’s liberal and non-nationalist leadership was an attempt to
restore a symmetry between the Serbs and Croats, for the greater
good of Yugoslavia’s stability, even if the political situations in Croatia
and Serbia differed at the time. This decision would have a profound
impact on the history of Serbia and Yugoslavia, as it weakened
moderate and reform-minded forces among Serbian communists.39
Tito at first rejected calls for greater decentralization, but then
a new, even more decentralizing Constitution followed in 1974. It
essentially completed the decentralization drive that had begun a
decade earlier and transformed Yugoslavia into a loose federation
of six – or perhaps eight, if Serbia’s provinces are counted – mini
party states. In 1981, around 4.9 million Serbs lived in ‘inner’
Serbia, but some 3.3 million lived outside it: 1.3 million in
Vojvodina and Kosovo and nearly 2 million in other Yugoslav
republics, mostly in Bosnia and Croatia. The decentralization of
Yugoslavia thus appeared to further separate different Serb com-
munities. The same process similarly separated Bosnian Croats
from Croatia. Nevertheless, strong links between the republics
39
S. Djukić, Slom srpskih liberala: Tehnologija političkih obračuna Josipa Broza,
Belgrade, 1990; cf. A. Batović, The Croatian Spring: Nationalism, Repression
and Foreign Policy Under Tito, London, 2017; H. Klasić, Jugoslavija i svijet
1968, Zagreb, 2012.
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remained and Yugoslavia continued to function as a unified state.

It is tempting to compare the opposition among Serbs to the
1974 Constitution, Yugoslavia’s last, as it turned out, to the Croat
resistance to Yugoslavia’s first, centralist Constitution of 1921.
However, Serbian party delegates would not be allowed to ‘boy-
cott’ the parliament. Crucially, Serbian cadres accepted the 1974
Constitution even as they later tried to revise it.40
Serb complaints about the political developments in
Yugoslavia had begun in the 1960s. Responding critically to
Albanian demands in Kosovo, and indirectly also to develop-
ments in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, Dobrica Ćosić (1921–
2014), a popular writer and a Partisan veteran, and historian
Jovan Marjanović (1922–81) were expelled from the Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia in May 1968.
Ćosić became a leading member of an informal group of critical
intellectuals who were both defenders of human rights and free
speech and of Serb ‘national’ rights in Yugoslavia, in particular
in Kosovo. This was an eclectic group of writers, philosophers,
poets, painters and film directors, whose ideas ranged from
neo-Marxism, liberalism, Yugoslav centralism and Serb nation-
alism. They signed petitions and published samizdat pamphlets.
Some of them kept contact with Yugoslavia’s leading dissidents
Milovan Djilas and Mihajlo Mihajlov (1934–2010), an academic
who had been arrested in 1965 for publishing a book deemed
by the Yugoslav regime as critical of the Soviet Union. Three
years after the Ćosić-Marjanović ‘affair’, Mihailo Djurić (1925–
2011), a prominent philosopher and a member of the Serbian
Academy, was sacked by Belgrade University and imprisoned
40
M. Jovičić, ‘Ustavnopravni položaj srpskog naroda u jugoslovenskoj federaciji’,
in A. Djilas (ed.), Srpsko pitanje, Belgrade, 1991, 117–30; D. Jović, Yugoslavia:
A State that Withered Away, West Lafayette, IN, 2009, ch. 3; V. Vujačić,
‘Institutional Origins of Contemporary Serbian Nationalism’, East European
Constitutional Review, 5:4 (1996), 51–61.
446
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for criticizing constitutional amendments and other government

policies he considered detrimental to the Serbs. The clampdown
on critical thinking continued after the fall of Serbia’s ‘liber-
als’. In 1973, young film director Lazar Stojanović was impris-
oned for his graduation film in which he apparently compared
Titoism to Stalinism and Nazism. Then a group of ‘morally
politically unsuitable’ philosophers of the Belgrade University –
Zagorka Golubović, Trivo Indjić, Mihailo Marković, Dragoljub
Mićunović, Nebojša Popov, Svetozar Stojanović, Ljubomir
Tadić and Miladin Životić – were suspended. They belonged
to Praxis, a Yugoslav Humanist Marxist group that emerged at
Zagreb University. The Praxis published academic journals and
organized summer schools at the Croatian island of Korčula,
which attracted such eminent international participants as Ernst
Bloch, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas,
Henri Lefevbre and Shlomo Avineri.41
The Serbian and Yugoslav dissidents’ work was closely followed
by the emigre journal Naša reč, published in London by Desimir
Tošić (1920–2008) and once young members of the pre-war
Democratic Party. They were joined by Aleksa Djilas (b. 1953),
Milovan’s son, who during the 1970s and ‘80s studied abroad. The
Serb democratic emigres, whose unofficial mentor was Božidar
Vlajić (1888–1974), one of the leading members of the pre-war
Democratic Party, campaigned for a democratic alternative to the
communist government in Yugoslavia, together with their Bosnian
(Adil Zulfikarpašić), Croat (Ilija Jukić, Branko Pešelj), Slovene
(Nace Čretnik, Ljubo Sirc) and ‘declared’ Yugoslav (Vane Ivanović)
colleagues. Their publications were smuggled into the country and
41
J. Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and
the Revival of Nationalism, London, 2002, ch. 1; Jović, Yugoslavia: A State that
Withered Away, 115–23; N. J. Miller, The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and
Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle, 1944–1991, Budapest, 2007.
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figure 7.4 Post-punk band Šarlo akrobata performing at the Student

ultural Centre, Belgrade, November 1980 (Photo by Goranka Matić)
C
illegally photocopied and distributed. Their impact on the Yugoslav

and Serb politics was modest, but symbolically important.42
An excessive focus on nationalism in the existing literature fails
to account for such a rich and heterogeneous intellectual scene
in Serbia and Yugoslavia and among democratic émigré circles.
Subsequent events in Serbia tend to overshadow the fact that
42
A. Djilas, Iz emigracije: Izabrani članci, intervjui i dokumenti, 1980–1990,
Belgrade, 2009; V. Ivanović, Demokratska Jugoslavija: Diskusija o jednom
nacrtu, London, 1970, and Yugoslav Democracy on Hold, Rijeka, 1996;
V. Ivanović and A. Djilas (eds), Demokratske reforme, London, 1982. Milovan
Djilas was among the contributors to the volume, one of rare instances he
was able to publish in his native language after 1954. In 1983, Aleksa Djilas
and Ivanović published in London the first book about human rights in
Serbo-Croat; cf. M. Galić, Politika u emigraciji: Demokratska alternativa,
Zagreb, 1990; G. Suhadolnik, Ključnih pet: Intervjui sa članovima Demokratske
alternative, Ljubljana, 1990; M. Lakićević, Desimir Tošić: Izmedju ekstrema,
foreword by L. Perović, Novi Sad, 2020; Nesentimentalni idealisti: Desimir
Tošić, Božidar Vlajić i uvodnici časopisa Naša reč (Paris-London, 1848–1990), ed.
and compiled by D. Djokić, Belgrade, 2013
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Belgrade was the centre of critical, liberal thinking in Yugoslavia in

the 1970s and early ‘80s. They can also easily distract from impor-
tant cultural developments in socialist Serbia. For example, Tito’s
death in 1980 coincided, and at the time largely overshadowed, the
emergence of an exceptionally rich music scene in Serbia, and across
Yugoslavia. While the Slovenian band Laibach eventually achieved
international fame, Belgrade was home to several hugely talented
and influential New Wave and post-punk bands mentioned in the
introduction.43
The Death of Tito – and After

When Kardelj died in 1979, Tito was 87; with Djilas and Ranković
long out of politics, the Yugoslav president appeared alone and
detached from the rest of the country, enjoying a demigod sta-
tus. Rumours circulated about Tito’s separation from his much
younger third wife Jovanka. Even though he had visibly aged, Tito
remained as active as ever, leading the Yugoslav delegation at the
Non-Aligned summit in Havana in summer 1979 and then mak-
ing a tour of Kosovo in the autumn. By January 1980, however, his
health deteriorated to the extent that he was sent to the Ljubljana
Clinical Centre for treatment of leg gangrene. He never left the
hospital. Tito’s death on Sunday, 4 May, was mourned by almost all
Yugoslavs and by much of the world; his funeral in Belgrade later
that month was attended by the largest number of world leaders in
history. The party proclaimed that after Tito there was to be nobody
but Tito, but since someone had to run the country, the president
for life had been replaced after his death by a collective, rotating
presidency of eight elderly representatives of the six republics and
Serbia’s two provinces. Serbia’s turn came in 1982–83, when Petar
43
J. Bousfield, ‘40 Years after the New Wave: The Story of the Music that
Changed Yugoslavia’, The Calvert Journal, 2 Feb 2021, www.calvertjournal
.com/features/show/12495/yugoslav-new-wave-1980s-music-40-years-on.
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Stambolić (1912–2007) served as the president of the presidency.

After Vojvodina’s representative, another Serb Radovan Vlajković
(1924–2001), came the turn of Kosovo. Sinan Hasani (1922–2010),
an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo, became president of Yugoslavia
in 1986–87. Previously, Cvijetin Mijatović (1913–93), a Serb from
Bosnia, had served as the president of the presidency (1980–81).
Used to Tito’s 35-year-long leadership, most Yugoslavs prob-
ably did not know the names of their rotating presidents during
the 1980s. In the years after Tito’s death, the Federal Executive
Council (government) assumed a greater prominence mainly due
to it having to deal with economic crisis in which the country
found itself. Between 1982 and 1986, the post of the federal prime
minister was held by Milka Planinc (1924–2010), an economist
born in Dalmatia into a mixed Croat–Serb family. She was the
only female prime minister in the history of Yugoslavia. Despite
introducing a programme of ‘economic stabilization’ (commu-
nist Yugoslavia’s term for austerity), Planinc was popular and
respected. Her strict and tough appearance, probably necessary in
a traditionally male-dominated establishment and society, earned
her the nickname of Yugoslavia’s Iron Lady, in reference to
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Planinc’s contempo-
rary. She secured western loans (including from the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank) and pushed through the
Yugoslav assembly a series of measures including the dinar
devaluation, tighter currency issues and interest rates’ rise. In
December 1981, before Planinc took over, the Yugoslav National
Bank had a debt of $19 billion. Although the foreign debt was
not reduced, the Planinc government managed to turn a deficit
on the country’s current account to a small surplus for 1983 and
secure further credits for 1984.44 However, tight repayment loans
put pressure on the government, whose economic policies were
increasingly challenged by republican leaderships. Planinc stood
44
Lampe, Yugoslavia, 325–27.
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down in 1986, to be replaced by Branko Mikulić, a Croat from

Herzegovina.
Serb critical intellectuals, such as those gathered around the
Writers’ Association of Serbia and the Praxis philosophers,
became increasingly active in the early 1980s. The regime began
to talk of ‘a united opposition’ in Serbia and attempted to curtail
it. In 1981, Serbian poet Gojko Djogo was arrested for publishing
a collection of poetry that metaphorically alluded to the author-
itarian nature of Titoism. Intimidation, arrests and publication
bans followed. In April 1984, the Serbian police raided an apart-
ment in Belgrade and arrested 28 intellectuals and dissident activ-
ists who attended a lecture by Milovan Djilas, organized as part of
an illegal ‘Flying University’. Six of those arrested were tried: four
former ’68-ers (Pavluško Imširović, Vladimir Mijanović-Vlada
Revolucija, Milan Nikolić and Dragomir Olujić-Oluja), journalist
Vladimir Milić-Mića Doktor and Gordan Jovanović, an art his-
tory student.45
Milovan Djilas was immediately released, but a renewed prop-
aganda campaign against him and his son Aleksa, who worked
closely with pro-democracy Serb and Yugoslav emigres in Britain,
followed.46 The internationally celebrated dissident was regularly
visited by western journalists, but lived under surveillance in his
apartment in downtown Belgrade, unable to publish in his home
country even when the clampdown on the opposition eased in the
second half of the decade.47 Other critical intellectuals managed to
publish their work despite censorship, and in some cases received
major national literary prizes. This was one of contradictions and
paradoxes of Yugoslavia’s socialism. Most historians were una-
ble, or unwilling, to challenge the official historiography, but
authors of historical fiction such as Ćosić, who wrote bestselling
novels about Serbia in the First World War, started to promote
45
Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours’, 53–63. 46 Djilas, Iz emigracije, 61–66, 291–96.
47
D. Doder, The Yugoslavs, New York, 1978, 177–95.
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non-communist interpretations of Serbian history. In 1984, Ćosić

founded the Committee for the Defence of Freedom of Thought
and Expression, which campaigned on behalf of dissidents across
Yugoslavia, not just Serbs.
As the decade went on, the significance of federal institutions
further decreased at the expense of the republics and provinces. An
important exception was the JNA, which was never federalized.
The army budget and its size had been cut because of economic
austerity, but it was still a powerful force with around 180,000
troops in the mid-1980s, two-thirds of whom were conscripts.
The remaining third was made up of career officers and non-
commissioned officers, almost all of whom were party members
and around 60 per cent of whom were Serbs (not counting 8 per
cent Montenegrins).48 Like the Partisans, out of whom the People’s
Army grew out, and like the interwar Yugoslav Army, the JNA
never managed to overcome the Serbs’ over-representation in its
membership. Non-Serbs were better represented among the high
officer corps, and ‘ethnic key’ was used in officer recruitment. The
Serbs’ and Montenegrins’ over-representation in the lower officer
corps and among soldiers could be explained by socio-economic
and historic factors, rather than by a deliberate policy. Tito and the
army leadership opposed introduction of ‘ethnic units’, even when
it was suggested that those might encourage officer recruitment
among under-represented nations and nationalities.
While Tito had been alive, it did not matter much that
Yugoslavia after 1974 had become a loose federation. Even prior
to his death arguments for the revision of the Constitution could
be heard among the Serbian leadership. They pointed out that
while representatives of Kosovo and Vojvodina could veto the
Serbian assembly decisions, the republic had no such powers vis-
à-vis the provincial assemblies. Moreover ‘inner’ Serbia had no
48
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parliament of its own.49 Already in 1977, the Serbian leadership

raised the issue with Tito and Kardelj.50 Four years later, Serbia’s
Constitutional Court put forward proposals for the restoration
of some sovereignty of the republic over the provinces, but the
Kosovo Albanian leadership thwarted such attempts. These
discussions were soon overshadowed by a crisis that broke out
in Serbia’s southern province in April 1981. What started as a
student demonstration at Priština University over poor quality
food at the university canteen quickly transformed into mass
demonstrations among ethnic Albanians who demanded republi-
can status for the province. Local Serbs felt threatened and were
probably only somewhat reassured when the police intervened to
brutally suppress the protests.
If Kosovo were to become a republic, this would have not
just deeply upset Serb sentiments, but it would have also effec-
tively reversed the post–World War II raison d’être of socialist
Yugoslavia as a South Slav federation. According to the 1974
Constitution, Yugoslavia was both a community based on the
Brotherhood and Unity of its ‘nations and nationalities’ and a
‘socialist federal community of working people’; but only the
constituent nations had the right to ‘their own republic’.51
Moreover, if the federal status quo was changed, the Albanians
of Macedonia and Serbs of Croatia could have opened the
question of their status within these two republics. As the
49
This was a constitutional paradox somewhat comparable to the contemporary
British case. There, Westminster is the UK parliament and no separate
legislature for England exists, unlike for Scotland and Wales.
50
For Serbia’s position in the late 1970s and ‘80s Yugoslavia, see Jović,
Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away, chs 5 & 6. See also his and
N. Vladisavljević’s chapters in M. Pavlović et al. (eds), Slobodan Milošević:
put ka vlasti, Belgrade, 2008, and N. Vladisavljević, Serbia’s Antibureaucratic
Revolution: Milošević, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization,
Basingstoke, 2008, ch. 2.
51
Ustav Socijalističke federativne republike Jugoslavije, Belgrade, 1974, Preamble, I.
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decade progressed, Serb–Albanian relations worsened, impact-

ing the whole country because the status of Kosovo within Serbia
became inseparable from the status of Serbia within Yugoslavia.
Meanwhile, Serb intellectuals and the Orthodox Church began
to voice their concerns over the status of Kosovo, home to
numerous medieval monasteries and churches, including the
seat of the Patriarchate of Peć.52
In May 1985, a group of academicians of the Serbian Academy
of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade began drafting a memorandum
on Serbia’s position in Yugoslavia. It was an unfinished document
leaked to the press in September 1986. It caused a sensation, and
not a little criticism, including from Serbia’s leadership. The
academicians protested that Serbia and more broadly Serbs were
disadvantaged in Yugoslavia that was dominated by an anti-Serb
coalition of republican elites (Slovenian, Croatian and so on),
who had a vested interest in a decentralized Yugoslavia. They
called upon the Serbs to unite to protect their status and rights.
The signatories represented a small percentage of the Academy’s
membership (and did not include Ćosić, contrary to the popular
belief), but the document generally resonated with intellectuals
dissatisfied with the Serb position in post-1974 Yugoslavia.53
52
E. Biberaj and St. K. Pavlowitch, The Albanian Problem in Yugoslavia: Two
Views, London, 1982; Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours’, ch. 3; N. Malcolm, Kosovo: A
Short History, London, 1998, chs 6 & 7; Pavlowitch, The Improbable Survivor:
Yugoslavia and Its Problems, 1918–1988, London, 1989, 78–93 ; cf. B. Horvat,
Kosovsko pitanje, Zagreb, 1988.
53
Eighty-eight-year-old academician Vaso Čubrilović, who had as a teenager
belonged to Young Bosnia, was among those who opposed the Memorandum.
For more on this document and its impact, see A. H. Budding, ‘Systemic Crisis
and National Mobilization: The Case of the “Memorandum of the Serbian
Academy”’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 22, (1998), 49–69; and Dragović-Soso,
‘Saviours’, 177–95; cf. K. Mihailović and V. Krestić, ‘Memorandum SANU’:
Odgovori na kritike, Belgrade, 1995. See also R. Halili, ‘We, Sons of the
Nation: Intellectuals as generators of Albanian and Serbian national ideas and
programs’, in A. Pavlović et al. (eds), Serbian-Albanian Relations: Figuring Out the
Enemy, London, 2019, ch. 8, and other contributions in this edited collection.
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In 1987, Slovenian intellectuals published a similarly nationalist

document in the journal Nova revija, which irritated the leadership
of the JNA. The Serb–Albanian contest would be overshadowed
for the time being by a conflict between Serbia and Slovenia, and
between Slovenia’s nationalist-liberal youth and the army top brass.
The Slovenes not only resisted Serbian calls for tightening up the
federation but sought to loosen it up further; calls for a reform of
the Titoist system and even the end of one-party state alarmed the
army generals. The People’s Army was the only centralist insti-
tution in the country; it was also increasingly looking like the last
bastion of Titoism. The breakdown of the Belgrade–Ljubljana axis,
which some scholars have argued had kept Yugoslavia together,
would have profound impact on the fate of the country.54
The mid-1980s saw the emergence of new, younger leaderships
across Yugoslavia. In Serbia, Ivan Stambolić (1936–2000), a tech-
nocrat who came from a powerful communist family, as a nephew
of previously mentioned Petar Stambolić, became the head of
the League of Communists in 1985. His rise, and that of his pro-
tégé Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006), took place during internal
party contests in which the new generation prevailed. In 1986,
Stambolić became Serbia’s president, while Milošević took over
the party leadership. Despite being critical of the Academy’s mem-
orandum, Stambolić had not been particularly popular among the
leaderships of the other federal units. He had been calling for
the modification of the 1974 Constitution, which he felt disad-
vantaged Serbia. He sought a dialogue, political negotiation and
compromise with other Yugoslav leaders; confrontation and radi-
calization were not on his agenda. When Milošević turned against
Stambolić in 1987, he was initially supported by other Yugoslav
leaders – not because Milošević was a liberal reformer as some
54
Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours’, ch. 4; Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism, chs 9
& 10; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy; cf. M. Zečević, Na istorijskoj prekretnici:
Slovenci u politici jugoslovenske države, 1918–1929, I, Belgrade/Ljubljana, 1985.
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western media initially perceived him, but because he was con-

sidered a more orthodox communist who would curtail both the
liberal and the nationalist intelligentsia. Milošević’s counterparts
across Yugoslavia soon found out, to their and everyone else’s loss,
that they had seriously underestimated him.
Milošević’s ‘Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution’

A law graduate from Belgrade University and a successful banker
prior to entering high politics in the mid-1980s, Milošević was
married to his childhood sweetheart Mirjana Marković (1942–
2019). He was not a typical Serbian politician, in that he was a
private, family man who appeared modest and disinterested in
acquiring personal wealth (unlike some members of his immedi-
ate circle). He was inseparable from his wife and had a soft spot for
his errand children. Sloba and Mira, as they became known in the
1990s, came from different social backgrounds, but were united by
family tragedies. His parents moved from Montenegro to Serbia
at the beginning of the Second World War; both worked as teach-
ers, and his mother was a member of the Communist Party. After
the war, they divorced, following which Milošević’s father, who
had a theology degree and taught Russian language, returned to
Montenegro. By contrast, Mira came from a well-known Serbian
Communist family. Both her parents were prominent Partisans.
Her father Moma Marković was a war hero and a member of
the Central Committees of the Serbian and Yugoslav commu-
nist parties after the war. Her uncle Dragoslav-Draža Marković
(1920–2005) was one of the leading Serbian and Yugoslav com-
munist politicians; he served as president of Serbia in the 1960s
and ‘70s, and was the chairman of the presidency of the League
of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1983–84. Mira’s mother died
during the war, under somewhat unclear circumstances. Sloba’s
parents committed suicide when he was an adult. Mira’s support
and ambition are often credited for Milošević’s political career,
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but without his close friendship with Ivan Stambolić, Milošević

might not have entered high politics.
In 1984, Milošević was elected the chairman of the Belgrade
party. As already mentioned, two years later, he was promoted
to the head of the Serbian party, following in the steps of his
mentor Stambolić, who became president of Serbia. The real
turning point in Milošević’s rise to prominence came during a
visit to Kosovo in April 1987, where local Serb representatives
had protested the majority Albanians’ discrimination. They
wanted to speak with Stambolić, but he sent his right-hand
man instead, even though there is no evidence that Milošević
had expressed much interest in the ‘Kosovo question’. Later
on, it emerged that Milošević had been manipulated by local
Kosovo Serb leaders, who demanded his protection from the
predominantly Albanian police. The police used excessive force
(as Yugoslavia’s police generally did), but Milošević was not
aware that Serb demonstrators had previously thrown stones at
the police to provoke a violent reaction. Milošević’s response –
‘Nobody should dare beat you!’ – was spontaneous and novel.
It was made as he was surrounded by an angry civilian mob that
claimed they were under attack by armed policemen. According
to eyewitnesses, only very few people could hear Milošević’s
historic words amidst all the noise and tension. The scene was
filmed and broadcast by the Serbian state television and across
Yugoslavia. By the time Milošević returned to Belgrade that
evening, the whole country was familiar with what he had said.
Almost instantly he became a Serb national hero. The event
would mark Milošević’s rise, which would cause the split within
Serbia’s League of Communists, the outcome of which was the
removal of Stambolić’s moderate faction.55
55
P. Ristanović, Kosovsko pitanje 1974–1989, Novi Sad, 2019, 470–72. There is
a fair amount of literature on Milošević, including L. J. Cohen, Serpent in the
Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević, Boulder, CO, 2001; A. Djilas, ‘A
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Milošević established control over the party at the Eighth

session of the League of Communists of Serbia in September
1987.56 The faction that went down with Stambolić included
Dragiša Pavlović (1943–96), who had succeeded Milošević as the
head of the Belgrade party, and a 39-year-old politician and his-
torian Ljubinka Trgovčević, who had previously received a prize
for a book on the role of Serbian intellectuals in the creation of
Yugoslavia in the early twentieth century (which remains a stand-
ard work on the subject).57 Milošević was perceived as a mod-
ern, energetic politician in touch with the people, but this was
not necessarily a generational conflict. His supporters included
Dušan Čkrebić (1927–2022), who had preceded Ivan Stambolić
as president of Serbia, and generals Nikola Ljubičić (1916–2005),
formerly a long-serving Yugoslav defence minister (1967–82) and
Serbian president (1982–84), and Petar Gračanin (1923–2004);
the latter replaced Stambolić as Serbia’s president (1987–89),
having previously retired from active service. Milošević secured
a majority support within the party in the late 1980s (and for a
period also enjoyed almost unanimous support from nationalist
intelligentsia and the church), but his political programme was
opposed by veteran communists Draža Marković (despite the
family connection) and Petar Stambolić. From early on, Milošević
was also opposed by liberal intellectuals and dissidents, but in the
late 1980s and early ‘90s, he enjoyed the overwhelming support of
the Serb (and Montenegrin) public.
Profile of Slobodan Milošević’, Foreign Affairs, 72:3 (1993), 81–96; S. Djukić,

Milošević and Marković: A Lust for Power, Montreal, 2001; A. LeBor, Milošević:
A Biography, London, 2003; V. Vujačić, ‘Slobodan Milošević: Charismatic
Leader or Plebiscitarian Demagogue?’, in V. Tismăneanu et al. (eds), World
Order after Leninism, Seattle, WA, 2006, 107–26; cf. L. Silber and A. Little,
The Death of Yugoslavia, London, 1995, ch. 2.
56
Pavlović, et al. (eds), Slobodan Milošević; S. Inić, Put u bespuće: odgovori Ivana
Stambolića na pitanja S. Inića, Belgrade, 1995.
57
Naučnici Srbije i stvaranje Jugoslavije, 1914–1920, Belgrade, 1987.
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Although they would occupy the same, liberal-democratic and

anti-nationalist political ground in the 1990s, the Stambolić fac-
tion was not, in the late 1980s, an ally of Serbia’s critical intel-
ligentsia and opposition politicians. The same may be said of
the Serbian communist ‘liberals’. The political conflicts of the
early 1970s and the late 1980s took place within the party and
among communists, although they had a profound impact on the
Serbian and Yugoslav society at large. Second, the Milošević–
Stambolić conflict in 1987 only subsequently came to be iden-
tified as a turning point. At the time it happened, it was seen as
just yet another intra-party conflict that were not uncommon in
Yugoslavia at the time.
Workers, once the main pillar of the self-management of
the working class, were being told in the late 1980s to join the
struggle for the ‘self-management’ of the Serb nation. National
grievances turned out to be an effective way of neutralizing dis-
content among workers protesting the rising cost of living. On
one occasion in October 1988, Milošević addressed a large rally of
workers who came to protest the deteriorating standard of living
but decided to return to work after hearing Milošević’s speech. In
the words of a Serbian journalist, ‘people arrived as workers and
left as Serbs’. Scholars continue to debate the extent to which the
workers were manipulated and to which extent they represented
active agents during this crucial period of nationalist mobilization
in Serbia.58
When Milošević returned to Kosovo, on the 600th anniversary
of the Kosovo Battle on 28 June 1989, he entered the Pantheon
of Serbian national heroes (at least for a period). Milošević flew
in a helicopter to deliver the second key speech of his career.
58
G. Musić, ‘“They Came as Workers and Left as Serbs”: The Role of
Rakovica’s Blue-Collar Workers in Serbian Social Mobilizations of the Late
1980s’, in R. Archer et al. (eds), Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav
Socialism, London, 2021, 132–54.
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figure 7.5 Slobodan Milošević (right) faces a crowd of cameramen

and photographers on 17 October 1988 in Belgrade prior to the opening
session of the party plenum meeting (AFP via Getty Images)
figure 7.6 Ethnic Albanians pray in front of coffin of a young man killed
during demonstrations on 2 February 1990 in Podujevo, Kosovo (Photo:
Michel Gangne/AFP, via Getty Images)
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Symbolically, he appeared to be the resurrected Prince Lazar,

descending from havens to lead his people at Kosovo again.
Indeed, Milošević made a direct comparison between 1389 and
1989. Addressing a crowd of several hundred thousand Serbs
and Montenegrins who gathered from all over the country and
the world, he proclaimed that 600 years after the Kosovo Battle
the Serbs again faced major battles. These were not armed bat-
tles yet, but such a scenario could not be discounted, he told
the excited crowd. Other Yugoslav leaders present at the event
watched uncomfortably from the sides.
Under the guise of the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution,
Milošević pushed his agenda to restore Serbia’s sovereignty over
the provinces, and to extend his influence in Montenegro, where
pro-Serb sentiments and solidarity with Kosovo Serbs were strong.
Milošević, whose family came from Montenegro, was hailed as
a national hero in Serbia’s ‘sister republic’. The leaderships of
Vojvodina and Montenegro resigned under popular pressure, but
Milošević organizationally supported their mass demonstrations.
Protests in Kosovo by ethnic Albanians were violently suppressed
by the police and the federal army. The Yugoslav federal system
now became an advantage, as Belgrade suddenly controlled four
out of eight votes in the collective presidency (Serbia, Vojvodina,
Kosovo and Montenegro).
As the French marked the 200th anniversary of the French
Revolution, the Serbs and Montenegrins celebrated the 600th
anniversary of the Kosovo Battle. East Europeans were about to
topple communism by a mix of liberalism and nationalism, but in
Serbia, Milošević had pre-empted and co-opted many of the social
grievances through his populist appeals. His ambition initially
seemed to become a new Tito, but since his popular appeal derived
from his partial espousal of the Serbian nationalist cause, his brand
of ‘Titoism’ was bound to be less attractive to conservative commu-
nist elites of other republics, notably Croatia. Ten years younger
than Gorbachev, 48-year-old Milošević successfully played on an
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image of a fresh, reform-minded politician who modernized the

country as the old, Partisan generation was leaving the scene. His
two Montenegrin protégés, Momir Bulatović (1956–2019) and
Milo Djukanović (b. 1962) belonged to an even younger genera-
tion. (The latter was still in power, as president of Montenegro, in
2022, having previously sidelined Bulatović and used Montenegrin
nationalism to cement his power and lead the small republic to
independence in 2006, as discussed in Chapter 8).
Yugoslavia’s international significance had diminished as the
end of the Cold War approached. The foreign aid had dried out,
and a series of economic stabilization packages could not prevent
high inflation and food shortages in the late 1980s. Then Ante
Marković, a Bosnian Croat technocrat who served as Yugoslavia’s
last prime minister, introduced economic reform that paved the
way to the establishment of a free market. Marković stabilized
the Yugoslav dinar and quickly improved the standard of living
of the Yugoslavs in 1989–90. However, his reformist govern-
ment was undermined by the three key republics: Serbia, Croatia
and Slovenia. When he contested republican elections in 1990
with his own party, Union of Reformist Forces of Yugoslavia,
Marković was defeated by nationalist parties even in Bosnia, his
native republic, where he had enjoyed more support than any-
where else in the country. He might have fared better at federal
democratic elections, but these were never held in the end. Much
has been said about the rise of Milošević and Serb domination of
Yugoslavia, but in addition to Marković, other Croats occupied
key positions in the country. Stipe Šuvar (1936–2004) was head
of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s,
while Budimir Lončar (b. 1924) served as Yugoslavia’s last for-
eign minister. However, pro-Yugoslav politicians were increas-
ingly marginalized not just by Milošević but across Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav state had become dependent on the survival of
socialism, and the party’s federalization had weakened the state
to the point of fragmentation. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the state
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could not survive for long the party’s collapse at its last congress
of January 1990 held in Belgrade. The exit of Slovenia’s dele-
gates, followed by those from Croatia, brought the congress, and
the party, to an end. The simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal
forces that pulled the country’s federal units in different direc-
tions soon caused rupture and fragmentation.
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8
Ruin and Recovery (after 1990)
u
Serbia in Transition
In late September 1990, a new Constitution was promulgated in
the Serbian parliament. Calls by opposition for elections for a
constituent assembly before a new, democratic constitution could
be agreed were ignored by the ruling party in a bid to cement
the changes that had taken place during the ‘anti-bureaucratic
revolution’ of 1988–89. The autonomies of Vojvodina and
Kosovo and Metohija (the full name of the southern province
had been restored) became largely symbolic. This was ostensibly
in response to the Serbian people’s demand to ‘reunite’ Serbia.
Parallel to this, there was increasingly a sense that not just Serbia
but all Serbs within Yugoslavia should unite, especially if the
federation were to disintegrate. As cries of ‘We are one people’
could be heard across Germany, which was on the way to reuni-
fication, similar sentiments were expressed by many Serbs at the
same time across increasingly disunited Yugoslavia. ‘Hey Serbia
of three parts, once again you shall be one’, was a popular slogan
at the time.1
There was a confusion, not only among the Serbs, whether the
complex 1974 Yugoslav Constitution provided for the right to
self-determination of the constituent nations or republics or perhaps
both. The Serbian leadership appeared also to be confusing ethnic
nationalism, Yugoslav socialism and the opposition’s demands for
western-style democracy to which the society apparently was to
1
In original:Oj Srbijo iz tri dela, ponovo ćeš biti cela.
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transition.2 The 1990 Constitution defined the Republic of Serbia

as a ‘democratic state (država) of all its citizens, based on free-
doms and rights of men and citizens, on rule of law and social jus-
tice’. The description of a federal unit as a ‘state’ was presumably
meant to emphasize Serbia’s renewed ‘sovereignty’. However, as
mentioned previously, the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution already had
defined ‘the socialist republic’, the core unit of federal Yugoslavia,
as a ‘state based on the sovereignty of the people and government
of and self-management by the working class and all working peo-
ples’.3 The prefix ‘socialist’ was now dropped, though not yet the red
star and other communist-era symbols. The League of Communists
of Serbia became, in July 1990, the Socialist Party of Serbia (signif-
icantly, not the Serbian Socialist Party). Members of the 250-seat
National Assembly and president of the republic were to be elected
for a mandate of 4 years in free, democratic elections. The country’s
government was to be directly responsible to the parliament.
The definition of Serbia as a civic, rather than ethnic, state was
appropriate, since less than two-thirds of its citizens (counting
Vojvodina and Kosovo) identified as Serbs in 1991. According to
the last Yugoslav population census held that year, around 8.5
million Serbs lived in Yugoslavia, which amounted to 36.2 per
cent of the country’s 23.5 million people. Serbia’s population was
just under 9.8 million people, out of which there were 6.4 mil-
lion Serbs (over 5 million in ‘inner’ Serbia, around 1.15 million
in Vojvodina and some 200,000 in Kosovo); there were also 1.68
million ethnic Albanians, living mostly in Kosovo, 345,000 ethnic
Hungarians and 107,000 Croats in Vojvodina, around 237,000
Muslims, who lived mostly in the Sandžak region (which the
2
A. H. Budding, ‘Nation/People/Republic: Self-determination in Socialist
Yugoslavia’, in L. J. Cohen and J. Dragović-Soso (eds), State Collapse in
South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration, West
Lafayette, IN, 2007, 91–130; R. M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided:
The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts, Ann Arbor, MI, 2000, Part 1.
3
Ustav Republike Srbije, Belgrade, 1990, Article 1; Ustav Socijalističke federativne
republike Jugoslavije, 1974, Article 3. My emphasis.
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Serbs increasingly referred to by its old name Raška) and 140,000

Montenegrins, about half of whom lived in ‘inner’ Serbia.
There were also 318,000 self-declared Yugoslavs. At the same
time, around 2.1 million Serbs lived outside of the Republic of
Serbia, mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1.37 million) and Croatia
(580,000). In Montenegro, less than 60,000 declared as Serbs, but
it is safe to assume that a considerable number among around
half a million declared Montenegrins across Yugoslavia (380,000
of whom lived in Montenegro) also espoused a Serb identity.
Finally, another 91,000 Serbs lived in Slovenia (47,000) and
Macedonia (44,000). More people than ever before – 700,000 –
declared as ‘Yugoslavs’ in the last Yugoslav population census. In
addition to over 300,000 in Serbia, there were significant numbers
of Yugoslavs in Bosnia (240,000) and Croatia (105,000) as well.4
Many were urban elites, children of mixed marriages, but quite a
few would have been of Serb origin or had had a Serb identity as
well as a Yugoslav one.
At the same time, as the largest and also the most geograph-
ically dispersed Yugoslav group, the Serbs believed they stood
most to lose from a disintegration of Yugoslavia, especially if
it were to be carried out along the internal borders of socialist
republics. The discrepancy between these borders and the geo-
graphical dispersal of Serbs across several republics contributed
to their national homogenization. Serbia was increasingly defined
as a Serbian nation state – perhaps especially among prospective
Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia.
4
R. Petrović, ‘The National Composition of Yugoslavia’s Population, 1991’,
Yugoslav Survey (Belgrade), 33:1 (1992), 3–24. (See also Map 7.1). Figures for
ethnic Albanians are an estimate, since many of them boycotted the census.
Ironically, the number of people who declared as Yugoslavs, and who as such
were officially counted as ‘nationally undeclared’, had never been as high as
on the eve of the break-up of the Yugoslav state; there were more Yugoslavs
than Montenegrins, one of the official Yugoslav nations.
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Apart from Milošević’s Socialists, and not counting a plethora of

small parties and ‘groups of citizens’, two other main political par-
ties contested the Serbian elections in December 1990 – the first
multi-party elections since the quasi-democratic Yugoslav elections
of 1938, and first in Serbia since 1912, when Nikola Pašić’s People’s
Radical Party won 84 out of 160 seats in the National Assembly.5
The Serbian Renewal Movement stood on an anti-communist
platform; Milošević and the Socialists were perceived by many
in Yugoslavia as poorly disguised communists. It campaigned for
democracy, restoration of the Karadjordjević monarchy and reha-
bilitation of Mihailović and his wartime movement. The party
leader Vuk Drašković (b. 1946) was a charismatic former commu-
nist journalist-turned-writer of best-selling historical novels that
portrayed the Serbs’ past in romantic-nationalist tones. Drašković
would soon moderate his views and he would speak against war, but
in 1990, as Slovenia and Croatia seemed set on leaving the feder-
ation, he called for the reorganization of Yugoslavia into separate,
possibly loosely connected nation states. In such a scenario, Serbia
would incorporate the ‘Serb lands’ across Yugoslavia. Further to the
right of Drašković were several marginal, extreme right, militant
groups, including the Serbian Četnik Movement of Vojislav Šešelj
(b. 1954). Sarajevo-born Šešelj once held a lectureship in politics at
the university there, before he was expelled from the Communist
Party and imprisoned in the mid-1980s for his nationalist writings.
He moved to Belgrade later on, and transformed his ‘movement’
into the Serbian Radical Party, one of Serbia’s largest political par-
ties during the 1990s.
The centre ground was occupied by the Democratic Party. Its
leader was Dragoljub Mićunović (b. 1930), a philosophy professor
5
All election results in Serbia since 1990 cited in this chapter are taken
from the Dokumentacioni centar Vreme, Belgrade, www.vreme.com/vreme/
kako-smo-birali/; cf. R. Thomas, Serbia under Milošević: Politics in the 1990s,
London, 1999.
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whom the reader will recall took part in the 1968 demonstrations
at Belgrade University, and who was a moderate and respected
veteran of Serbia’s dissident scene of the 1970s and ‘80s.
Surrounding Mićunović was the crème de la crème of Serbia’s
liberal-democratic intellectuals, politicians and activists. Such a
concentration of strong-minded individuals with different views
on the ‘Serb question’ would lead to the departure of key founding
members during the 1990s and the creation of several new polit-
ical parties. In a society apparently set on reversing the wrongs
of the communist era, the Democrats were the only major politi-
cal organization that claimed a continuity with an interwar party:
the Democratic Party of Ljuba Davidović and Milan Grol. Such
claims were not unfounded. Apart from championing democracy
and dialogue with the other Yugoslav nations, values that resem-
bled those of the original Democrats, a direct link was provided
by Desimir Tošić, who had been in the late 1930s president of the
Democratic Party youth section. As mentioned previously, Tošić
had together with much older Božidar Vlajić (during the inter-
war period a close associate of Davidović and Grol), campaigned
for the democratization of Serbia and Yugoslavia with other emi-
nent, pro-democracy Serb and Yugoslav emigres: Vane Ivanović,
Branko Pešelj, Adil Zulfikarpašić and later Aleksa Djilas, the son
of dissident Milovan Djilas. Tošić returned to the country from
London in 1990, aged 70. Although he served as a vice president
of the Democratic Party and a deputy in the parliament of Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro) during the 1990s,
Tošić was above all a public intellectual who provided a critical
voice for democracy until his death in 2008.6 Another eminent
6
A. Djilas, ‘Patriotski antinacionalizam Desimira Tošića’, foreword to Tošić,
Snaga i nemoć: Naš komunizam, 1945–1990, Belgrade, 1998; D. Tošić,
Stvarnost protiv zabluda: Srpsko nacionalno pitanje, ed. by A. Djilas, foreword
by St. K. Pavlowitch, Belgrade, 1997; M. Lakićević, Desimir Tošić: Izmedju
ekstrema, foreword by L. Perović, Novi Sad, 2020.
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Democrat, and another returnee from London, was Borislav

Pekić (1930–92). One of Serbia’s most celebrated modern writers,
Pekić had as a teenager joined Grol’s Democrats after the Second
World War, before the party was de facto banned, but died pre-
maturely not long after returning to Belgrade.
The Democrats offered a liberal-democratic and a pro-Yugoslav
platform but, perhaps worried that they would be left behind by
their main rivals, they too stated that if some nations were to leave
Yugoslavia, the Serbs should seek ways to keep as many of their
co-nationals as possible in a united state. Ideologically close to the
Democrats, or in some cases further to the left of them, were sev-
eral small anti-war, civic parties and individuals. They included
the United Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (UJDI) and the
Serbian branch of the Alliance of Reformists, led by former prime
minister Ante Marković. The ‘left’, however, was dominated by
Milošević’s Socialist Party, which appealed to old communists,
new nationalists and ‘ordinary’ people who believed Milošević
sought peace and the preservation of Yugoslavia or at least the
protection of Serbs across Yugoslavia.
Unlike western journalists, who travelled to Belgrade to inter-
view him, not many in Serbia and Yugoslavia seemed to remem-
ber or to want to be publicly associated with Milovan Djilas.
Approaching 80, he was probably too old to return to politics full
time, and it is unlikely he would have wanted to. However, Djilas’
political experience and wisdom, not to mention democratic cre-
dentials abroad, would have been invaluable for the young and
confused Serbian democracy. One of rare public figures who
appreciated Djilas was Tošić, but he too was a marginal voice,
even within his own party.7
The parliamentary and presidential elections were held simulta-
neously in early December 1990. The turnout was high, with almost
7
M. Djilas, Raspad i rat: Dnevnik, 1989–1995, Belgrade, 2022; Lakićević,
Desimir Tošić, 686–738.
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71.5 per cent of the nearly 8 million registered voters taking part.
However, the majority of Kosovo Albanians boycotted the elections.
The Socialist Party, which controlled the media and possessed supe-
rior resources, won convincingly, receiving over 2.32 million votes
(slightly over 46 per cent of all votes cast, and nearly 33 per cent of
eligible voters), which amounted to 194 seats in the 250-seat par-
liament. Drašković’s Renewal Movement came second with slightly
under 800,000 votes (19 seats), while the Democrats were third with
nearly 375,000 votes (seven seats – one seat less than several ‘groups
of citizens’ received together).
Slobodan Milošević did even better than his party in the presi-
dential elections, which were held simultaneously, receiving over
3,285 million votes (more than 65 per cent of the vote). Drašković
came distant second again, with just under 825,000 votes (16.4 per
cent). Ivan Djurić, an international authority on Byzantine his-
tory and a prominent anti-nationalist intellectual, stood as a joint
candidate for Marković’s Reformists and the UJDI. Although he
received just 277,000 votes (5.52 per cent of the vote), this was
enough for a third place.
Like the rest of Yugoslavia, Serbia was a secular republic, but
the Serbian Orthodox Church, previously semi-visible during
the Titoist era, had around this time emerged as a de facto ‘state
church’. Almost in parallel with the parliamentary and presiden-
tial elections in late 1990, the Serbian Orthodox Church elected
its new spiritual leader.8 On 1 December 1990 (co-incidentally,
the almost forgotten anniversary of the formation of Yugoslavia
in 1918), ailing Patriarch German (1958–90) was succeeded by
Patriarch Pavle (1990–2009). At the time the Bishop of Raška
and Prizren, a symbolically important eparchy that includes
Kosovo, Pavle’s election was nevertheless unexpected. Several
other senior bishops had come to prominence for their vocal
8
According to the Serbian Orthodox Church tradition, its patriarch is chosen
by the Holy Spirit, from a short list drawn following the bishops’ vote.
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championing of ‘Serb rights’ in Yugoslavia; following an initial

support for Milošević, they called on their flock to vote against
him and the Socialist Party, whom the church saw as poorly dis-
guised communists. Senior bishops supported nationalist Serb
leaders across Yugoslavia (and would continue to do so during
the war), but the new patriarch was considered a moderate. He
spoke at the anti-government pro-democracy demonstrations in
1991 and again in 1996/97. During the 1990s, the church played
an important political role. It backed the creation of a united
Serb state on the territory of former-Yugoslavia, but it was more
heterogenous internally than is usually believed.9
Milošević would remain in office – first as president of Serbia,
then of Yugoslavia, 1997–2000 – for nearly nine more years,
but he would never again enjoy such support. He had come to
power during Yugoslavia’s institutional crisis of the late 1980s,
on the strength of Serbian nationalism, to which he never sub-
scribed, as witnessed by his repeated refusal to make any symbolic
concessions to the wartime Četnik movement or the monarchy.
He reluctantly abandoned the communist platform and only
Montenegro, ruled by his cronies, allowed multi-party elections
as late as Serbia. Slovenia led the way, with democratic elections
there taking place in early April, shortly followed by Croatia.
A mix of former communists and democratic opposition took
power in Ljubljana, where Milan Kučan, a reformed Communist
became the first president of independent Slovenia. In Croatia,
the elections were won by the nationalist Croatian Democratic
Union. Franjo Tudjman, the CDU leader, became Croatia’s first
9
M. Djordjević, Kišobran patrijarha Pavla: Kritika palanačkog uma, Belgrade,
2010; R. Radić and M. Vukomanović, ‘Religion and Democracy in Serbia
since 1989: The Case of the Serbian Orthodox Church’, in S. P. Ramet (ed.),
Religion and Politics in Post-Socialist Central and Southeastern Europe: Challenges
since 1989, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2014, 180–211; M. Tomanić, Srpska
crkva u ratu i ratovi u njoj, Belgrade, 2001; V. Perica, Balkan Idols: Religion and
Nationalism in Yugoslav States, Oxford, 2011.
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non-communist president. This former army general turned

nationalist dissident was infamous for his controversial publica-
tions that relativized and minimized the Ustaša violence against
the Serbs, Jews and Roma.
The Socialist Party of Serbia was the successor to the old
League of Communists, but it was also in some ways a new party
that emerged from the ‘anti-bureaucratic’ revolution with a fresh
membership, attracted by the party’s blend of quasi-communism
and Serb nationalism. Milošević was neither a charismatic leader
nor a dictator, but an autocrat who manipulated the Serbian pol-
itics to establish a hybrid regime that was never fully democratic,
yet it was not openly dictatorial either. His Socialist Party domi-
nated Serbian politics throughout the 1990s together with several
allied parties, one of which was formed by Milošević’s wife Mirjana
Marković, a sociology professor who remained true to her Marxist
roots. Some described the political system in Milošević’s Serbia
as a ‘multi-party dictatorship’, or a ‘demokratura’ (a hybrid word
combining demokratija and diktatura).10 The opposition and free
speech were tolerated so long as they did not seriously threaten
the ruling party and its allies. Thus, Drašković was beaten up by
police and arrested, while free press was frequently under attack
from the government.
On 9 March 1991, several hundred thousand people came out
on the streets of Belgrade to demand independent state media,
a greater freedom of speech and more democracy (Figure 8.1).
Such a large group of protesters unsurprisingly included people
with different political views. When it became clear that the police
could not control the demonstrators, who included Drašković,
the Democratic Party leaders, students, intellectuals and work-
ers, the Serbian president sought support from the federal army,
10
N. Popov, ‘Zbrka oko opozicije’, Republika (Belgrade), No. 197, 16–30
September 1998.
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figure 8.1 Anti-government protests, Belgrade, 9 March 1991 (Photo by

Goranka Matić)
which sent tanks to central Belgrade against unarmed demon-

strators. The protests were put down and there were two casu-
alties. This was the first, but unfortunately, not the last time the
Yugoslav People’s Army intervened against civilians during the
final Yugoslav crisis (the Army had been previously deployed
against Kosovo Albanian demonstrators in the 1980s). Protests
were revived on 28 June, this time boosted by parents concerned
for their sons serving in Slovenia, where the war had just broken
out, but the regime held on. Further major protests would break
out a year later, in summer 1992.
Ironically, perhaps, the last days of Yugoslavia were also marked
by the country’s sporting success. For the first time, one of its foot-
ball teams – Red Star Belgrade – became a European champion,
after defeating Olympique de Marseille, the champions of France,
in a game played in the Italian town of Bari in May 1991; Red Star
then went on to defeat Colo-Colo of Chile, the champion of South
America, in Tokyo in December, becoming officially the world’s
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top soccer team. Despite the club’s communist origins, symbolized

by its name, and although its best players included a Montenegrin, a
Croat, a Macedonian, a Bosnian Muslim and a Romanian Serb, the
Red Star success was hailed by its supporters as a victory for Serbia.
The previous year, a Dinamo Zagreb–Red Star Belgrade game was
interrupted due to fan violence. Subsequently, it has been described
as the symbolic beginning of the Yugoslav war. The ‘takeover’ of
the club’s militant fans, known as the ‘Delije’ (see Chapter 3), by
Željko Ražnatović Arkan, a gangster and formerly an assassin for
the Yugoslav secret services, was significant for two reasons. Arkan
managed to turn the fans’ opposition to ‘communist’ Milošević
(and their support for opposition leader Drašković), into their
championing of the ‘Serb cause’ in Yugoslavia. Second, he later
recruited members of a paramilitary unit, which carried a campaign
of terror in Croatia and Bosnia, from among football hooligans.
(Croat paramilitaries too were recruited among militant football
fans).11 Somewhat overshadowed by all this was a similarly impres-
sive basketball success. In late June 1991, as the war in Slovenia
broke out, the Yugoslav men’s team won the European champion-
ship played in Italy. The same group, consisting mostly of Croat
and Serb players, had won the basketball World Cup in Argentina
the previous year. The post-game celebrations were marred when
a Serbian player threw away a Croatian World War II–era flag
brought onto the court by a member of Argentina’s Croat dias-
pora. Then in April 1992, Red Star’s major rival, Partizan Belgrade,
became the European basketball club champion. Because of the
war in Yugoslavia, Partizan played its ‘home games’ in a suburb of
Madrid. After UN sanctions (see the following text) were lifted in
1995, Serbia (which together with Montenegro made up a ‘small’
Yugoslavia), continued to have success in basketball, volleyball and
11
R. Mills, The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State,
London, 2018.
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water polo, winning gold medals at Olympic, World and European

tournaments.
The Serbs and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia

In 1991, there existed significant support in Serbia and among the
Serbs for the Yugoslav People’s Army and the war ‘for Yugoslavia’,
or perhaps for the ‘Serbian people across Yugoslavia’, or for a
‘Greater Serbia’, even if nobody seemed to really understand what
it all meant. The mobilizing power of the Serbian nationalism
remained strong in the early 1990s, but it was a nationalism that
lacked a clearly formulated programme. At least some Serbian
volunteers going to fight, sometimes on weekends, in Croatia and
Bosnia were driven by the prospect of looting and pillaging non-
Serbs’ property. It is therefore hardly surprising that most Serbs
were not sure who and what they were fighting for, or indeed
whether Serbia was even involved in a war.12
At the same time, small, but culturally influential pockets of
resistance to war and nationalism formed in Belgrade and other
urban centres. They included organizations such as the Belgrade
Circle and the Women in Black (Figure 8.2), while rock musi-
cians held concerts for peace across the country. As the war in
Croatia escalated in Autumn 1991, many young Serbs sought
to avoid being mobilized. In Belgrade alone it is estimated that
tens of thousands of men dodged draft or deserted. Pockets of
cosmopolitanism, tolerance of minorities (ethnic, religious, sex-
ual) and resistance to nationalism survived across Serbia, and
12
J. Dragović-Soso, ‘Rethinking Yugoslavia: Serbian Intellectuals and the
“National Question” in Historical Perspective’, Contemporary European
History, 13(2) (2004), 170–84; A. Pavković, ‘The Serb National Idea: A Revival
1986–92’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 72:3 (1994), 440–55, and
‘From Yugoslavism to Serbism: The Serb National Idea 1986–1996’, Nations
and Nationalism, 4:4 (1998), 511–28; M. Todorova, ‘Is There Weak Nationalism
and Is It a Useful Category?’, Nations and Nationalism, 21:4 (2015), 681–99.
475
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figure 8.2 Women in Black, anti-war demonstrations, Belgrade, 1992

(Photo by Goranka Matić)
former-Yugoslavia.13 Intercommunal relations deteriorated during

the 1990s, and there were periodic violent incidents and intimida-
tion of ethnic Albanians in central Serbia, the Muslims of Sandžak
and the Croats of Vojvodina, including forced expulsion and even
murder. However, large-scale ethnic cleansing and mass murder
of non-Serbs were carried out in contested territories, which were
13
V. P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, Ithaca,
NY, 2004; R. Lučić, ‘Dead Heroes and Living Deserters: The Yugoslav
People’s Army in Valjevo, Serbia at Outbreak of War 1991’, Nationalities
Papers, 43:5 (2015), 735–52; A. Milićević, ‘Joining Serbia’s Wars: Volunteers
and Draft-dodgers, 1991–95’, PhD dissertation, University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), 2004; B. Bilić, We Were Gasping for Air: [Post-]
Yugoslav Anti-War Activism and Its Legacy, Baden-Baden, 2012; S. Jansen,
Antinacionalizam: Entografija otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu, transl. from English
by A. Bajazetov-Bučen, Belgrade, 2005; A. Mimica (ed.), Druga Srbija: deset
godina posle, 1992–2002, Belgrade, 2002. See also the issues of now defunct
periodical Republika (1989–2015) and publications of the Helsinki Committee
for Human Rights in Serbia, www.helsinki.org.rs/publications.html.
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either outside the internationally recognized borders of Serbia

(e.g. eastern Bosnia) or where a strong secessionist movement,
with potential for international support, existed (Kosovo).14
The break-up of Yugoslavia was a complex process, and it can
be best understood if approached as a multifaceted phenom-
enon. To many it seemed as if in the late 1980s and early ‘90s
the Second World War had broken out all over again – though
this time without a multinational countervailing force like the
Partisans, as Milovan Djilas noted. At the same time, the leg-
acy of history, especially of the Second World War, the crea-
tion of Yugoslavia and the 1912–18 wars, played an important,
although not sufficiently studied, part in the shaping of the final
Yugoslav crisis in general and the Serbian politics in particu-
lar.15 This book has pointed at some of these long- and medium-
term factors, but at the same time it is important to bear in mind
that even during the greatest levels of national homogenization
in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, no unified Serb opinion existed.
A combination of internal factors – the ideological development
of socialist Yugoslavia, the economic crisis, the rise of exclusivist
nationalisms and of populist leaders – and external changes – the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet and East European
14
See J. Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, Berkeley,
CA, 2003.
15
Interview with Djilas in Radio TV Revija (Belgrade), January 1993, www
.yugopapir.com/2016/04/milovan-ilas-u-jugoslaviji-se-u-stvari.html. See
also B. Denich, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the
Symbolic Revival of Genocide’, American Ethnologist, 21:2 (1994), 367–90; J.
Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the
Revival of Nationalism, London, 2002, 100–14; R. M. Hayden, ‘Recounting
the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in late-
and post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in R. S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History and
Opposition Under State Socialism, Santa Fe, NM, 1994, 167–84; W. Höpken,
‘War, Memory and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of
Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Societies, 13:1 (1999), 190–227.
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Communist regimes – contributed to the end of Yugoslavia.16

Initially disinterested, and sometimes poorly informed ‘interna-
tional community’, preoccupied with the end of the Cold War,
stumbled from one ad hoc ‘solution’ to another, without a clear
end goal in mind.17
The 1990s war brought ruin to Serbia and to Serbs across for-
mer Yugoslavia from which they are yet to recover. In total, some
35,000 Serbs, out of around 130,000 people who died during
the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 2001, lost their lives. Only
Bosniaks (as Bosnian Muslims have been usually known since 1993)
with c. 65,000 dead suffered a greater number of casualties (see the
following text). Serbia’s economy was devastated, and its regional
and international reputation has similarly been damaged. Not to
mention a slow and painful transition to democracy that during the
first decade of this century seemed to be going in the right direc-
tion, only to suffer a major setback at the beginning of the second
decade, following the 2012 elections, as discussed later on.
The ‘unification’ of Serbia under Milošević in the late 1980s and
the extension of his influence in Montenegro only partly allayed
the Serbs’ fears about the fragmentation of their nation. Around
25 per cent of all Serbs in Yugoslavia lived in Bosnia and Croatia,
many of them survivors or descendants of survivors of the Ustaša
genocide. As the reader will recall, around 300,000 Serbs were
killed in the Independent State of Croatia during the 1941–45
16
The literature is vast, but good places to start are: J. Dragović-Soso, ‘Why
Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? An Overview of Contending Explanations’,
in Cohen and Dragović-Soso (eds), State Collapse, 1–39; Hayden, Blueprints;
D. Jović, ‘The Disintegration of Yugoslavia: A Critical Review of Explanatory
Approaches’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4:1 (2001), 101–20, and
Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy.
17
St. K. Pavlowitch, ‘Who Is “Balkanizing” Whom? The Misunderstandings
between the Debris of Yugoslavia and an Unprepared West’, Daedalus, 123:4
(1994), 203–23; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, chs 6 and 9; cf. J. Glaurdić, The Hour
of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia, New Haven, CT, 2011.
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period; over 200,000 of those had lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina,

which was part of satellite Croatia. While at the Yugoslav level
Serbs and Bosnian Muslims suffered proportionally similar losses
(around 8 per cent each), in the Independent State of Croatia,
approximately every sixth Serb died. During the late 1980s and
throughout the ‘90s, Serbian propaganda repeated stories of the
Serbs’ suffering endlessly, in the process inflating an already high
number of casualties, a phenomenon the Serbian painter Mića
Popović described as pogibeljomanija (fascination with high casual-
ties of one’s own nation).
The War in Slovenia, 1991

Croatia and Slovenia both declared independence from Yugoslavia
on 25 June 1991. While in Croatia things initially remained rela-
tively quiet, an armed conflict between the Yugoslav People’s Army
and Slovenia’s Territorial Defence over the control of border posts
broke out immediately. The ‘Ten-day war’ shook Yugoslavia and
sent shockwaves across the world. Not long previously, Yugoslavia
had been hailed globally as a model of multinational and multi-
religious coexistence, even when after Tito’s death the country
was plunged into a political and economic crisis.
In comparison to what came later, in Croatia, Kosovo and espe-
cially Bosnia, the Slovenian war was both short and relatively
bloodless, although both sides suffered casualties: 44 Yugoslav
Army soldiers and officers and 18 Slovene territorials died.18 The
18
See: C. Baker, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, London, 2015; M.-J. Calic,
A History of Yugoslavia, West Lafayette, IN, 2019, 297–317, and ‘Yugoslavia’s
Wars of Succession, 1991–1999’, in J. R. Lampe and U. Brunnbauer (eds),
The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European History, London,
2020, 514–20; Lampe, Yugoslavia, 369–81, 406–15; S. L. Burg and P.
S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International
Intervention, Armonk, NY, 1999; T. Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge,
New Haven, CT, 2000.
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real tragedy of the Slovenian war was that it made the preserva-
tion of a Yugoslav state or its peaceful dissolution highly improb-
able. After the collapse of the Yugoslav League of Communists
in January 1990, the People’s Army remained the last Yugoslav
institution; it was also the only institution that had not been fed-
eralized following a move towards greater decentralization in
the mid-1960s.19 Although a number of senior Slovenian officers
remained in the Army for a little longer, within a short period of
time, the Yugoslav People’s Army would cease being Yugoslav. By
early 1992, it was a de facto Serb army.
The Slovenian war also marked the beginning of the interna-
tional involvement in the Yugoslav crisis; international presence
in parts of former-Yugoslavia continues to this day. A troika of the
European Community ministers met with leaders of the Yugoslav
republics and the army at the Croatian island of Brioni/Brijuni,
Tito’s former residence, on 7 July 1991. They successfully negoti-
ated a three-month ceasefire in Slovenia.20 How many noted that
the meeting was held on the 50th anniversary of the official begin-
ning of the Partisan uprising in occupied Serbia and Yugoslavia?
According to terms of the ceasefire, the Slovene Territorials
would lift siege of army barracks and other military posts, and
restore electricity, water and food supplies. Remaining Slovene
officers and conscripts were free to leave the army if they wished
so. Some officers had previously changed sides, and a number of
Slovene conscripts managed to escape from their barracks, but
many remained in the army through the Slovenian war. All army
units were to return to and remain inside the barracks. However,
19
J. Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: The Yugoslav Crisis, London, 1992;
M. Hadžić, Sudbina partijske vojske, Belgrade, 2001; cf. V. Kadijević, Moje
vidjenje raspada: Vojska bez države, Belgrade, 1993; K. Kolšek, Prvi pucnji u
SFRJ: Sećanja na početak oružanih sukoba u Sloveniji i Hrvatskoj, Belgrade, 2005.
20
‘Brionska deklaracija (7.7.1991)’, K. Nikolić and V. Petrović, Rat u Sloveniji:
Dokumenta predsedništva SFRJ 1991, II (June–July 1991), Belgrade, 2012,
133–35.
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soon after the military began withdrawing from Slovenia, mostly

to garrisons in Bosnia and Serbia.21 The army withdrawal, not
envisaged by the July agreement, was a clear sign that Slovenia
was to be allowed to leave by the federal authorities, where Serbia
by now had a decisive influence. Subsequently, it emerged that the
Serbian leadership had decided to give up Slovenia and Croatia.
The Croatian Krajina and Eastern Slavonia regions, however,
with their large Serb communities were to remain in a Serb-
dominated smaller Yugoslav federation.22 In theory, such a feder-
ation might have included Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia,
but the Serbian leadership had by now fully focused on prioritiz-
ing that Serbs would live in one state rather than as minorities
in Yugoslav successor states. The Serbian leadership, including
Milošević, did not call for the creation of a ‘Greater Serbia’. Their
preference was for a state framework that would continue to be
called Yugoslavia and that would remain home for most Serbs. In
reality, however, it became clear that such a state would eventually
be a de facto extended Serbia. In a phone conversation on 1 July
1991, while the war in Slovenia was still going on, Milošević told
Radovan Karadžić (b. 1945), the Bosnian Serb representative in
Bosnia’s collective presidency, that the Slovenes should be allowed
to ‘leave immediately, and as for the others [they too can leave]
once we demarcate the borders’, in a way that would ‘suit us’.
Karadžić replied that in three months things will be clearer in
Bosnia, but Milošević urged him to ‘radicalize things’ and ‘finish
21
‘Odluka predsedništva SFRJ o dislociranju jedinica i ustanova JNA iz R.
Slovenije (18.7.1991)’ and ‘Naredba Sekretara SSNO [Veljka Kadijevića] o
premeštanju snaga i sredstava sa teritorije R. Slovenije (18.7.1991)’, in ibid,
282–84; cf. S. Mesić, Kako smo srušili Jugoslaviju: Politički memoari posljednjeg
Predsjednika Predsjedništva SFRJ, Zagreb, 1992, 123–24.
22
B. Jović, Poslednji dani SFRJ: Izvodi iz dnevnika, Belgrade, 1995, 262. See also
Jović’s statement at the trial of Slobodan Milošević, International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia The Hague, 18 Nov 2003, https://www
.icty.org/en/content/borisav-jović.
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everything in three weeks’, to capitalize on the Europeans’ desire

to maintain peace.23
The dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the reasoning of the Serbian
leadership in 1991, should be understood in the context in which
it happened. Yet, the dilemma the Serbian leaders faced was not
a new one. King Aleksandar had allegedly briefly considered, but
then rejected as impractical, an ‘amputation’ of Croatia minus
Serb-majority areas in the late 1920s. A decade later, after the cre-
ation of autonomous Croatia within Yugoslavia, a debate started
among Serb politicians and intellectuals where to draw borders of
a Serb banovina. The Yugoslav and Serb communists then created
a federal Serbia after much discussion and contemplation. In fact,
the question where was Serbia? had long predated Yugoslavia, as
discussed earlier in the book, and it was also central to the crea-
tion of Yugoslavia in 1918. Yugoslavia was an ideal, but it was also
a practical and pragmatic choice in 1918 and in 1945, because it
brought together most Serbs in one state. In both cases, it also
required imagination of key South Slav leaders and intellectuals,
something that was mostly lacking in 1991. If Serb, Croat and
Slovene leaders created Yugoslavia in 1918, then Serb, Croat and
Slovene leaders abandoned it by summer 1991. Those who had
imagination and good will in the early 1990s (Ante Marković,
the Bosnian and Macedonian leaderships, Serb democrats and
pro-Yugoslav intellectuals such as those gathered around the
UJDI and the emigre Democratic Alternative) did not enjoy real
power and had little popular support.24
23
‘Telefonski razgovor izmedju Karadžića i Miloševića (1.7.1991)’, in Nikolić
and Petrović, Rat u Sloveniji, 106–108.
24
M. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, London, 1992; D.
Jović, ‘The Slovenian-Croatian Confederal Proposal: A Tactical Move or an
Ultimate Solution?’, in Cohen and Dragović-Soso (eds), State Collapse, 249–
80; D. Tošić, ‘The Democratic Alternative’ and B. Horvat, ‘The Association
for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative’, in D. Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories
of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992, London, 2003, 286–97, 298–303.
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The Croat–Serb War, 1991–95

As tensions grew in Croatia and first armed clashes broke out
in August 1990, the Yugoslav People’s Army appeared to act as
a peacekeeper between Croat and Serb militias. This proved to
be an impossible task and the army ultimately took the Serb side.
Croatian Serbs, unlike the Croat government, saw the army as
‘their army’, opposed to Croatia’s independence and initially at
least also to the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. The army officer
corps – if not its senior leadership – was predominantly Serb and
Montenegrin and this certainly played a role, but it was not the
only reason for the impossibility of the army remaining a neutral
peacekeeper. The new Croat government rejected the ideology on
which the People’s Army rested: Titoist communism, combined
with the tradition of Partisan resistance in the Second World
War. While he never officially rehabilitated the Ustaša regime,
Tudjman was obsessed with the idea of a Croat national homog-
enization through ideological reconciliation between the Croat
Partisans and Ustašas. At the same time, the Second World War
was still in the living memory in summer 1991, and it is not hard to
understand why the Croatian Serbs viewed the Yugoslav People’s
Army with considerably more sympathy than the new Croatian
government.
Despite the rise of nationalism among Croatia’s Serbs, many of
them clearly still identified with socialist Yugoslavia. In the first
multi-party elections in Croatia, held in April 1990, the major-
ity of Croatian Serbs voted for the Social Democratic Party of
Croatia, the renamed Croatian Communists. However, even the
Serb vote did not help the former communists who lost the elec-
tion to the nationalist, right-leaning Croatian Democratic Union.
The Serbian Democratic Party of Jovan Rašković (1929–92) came
second among Croatian Serbs. By contrast, most Bosnian Serbs
voted later that year for Radovan Karadžić’s Serbian Democratic
Party. This could be perhaps explained by more than six months
483
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between the two elections – an eternity at time when political

situation changed rapidly – but it also suggests an often-neglected
plurality of Serb politics. Similarly, the Croatian Serbs were less
of an instrument of Belgrade at the beginning of the Yugoslav
conflict than it is usually assumed.25
The conflict in Croatia did not escalate to a full-blown war until
September 1991, but armed clashes had already taken place in
summer 1990 and spring 1991. Croatia was the scene of the first
truly destructive Yugoslav war. It was also the only real Croat–
Serb war, because in Bosnia the Croats and the Serbs did not fight
each other very much; both sides, but especially the Serbs, would
be primarily engaged in a conflict against the Bosnian Muslims.
Unlike in Slovenia, where the army’s response was largely that
of self-restraint, a major offensive was launched against Croatian
troops, sometimes with little regard for the loss of civilian lives
and property, in response to attacks on army posts. The fiercest
fighting took place in Eastern Slavonia. The town of Vukovar,
whose pre-war population was around 55 per cent Croat and
45 per cent Serb, suffered almost total destruction by the time
the army (which at this point still included Bosnian Muslim and
Macedonian officers and soldiers) and Serb paramilitaries ‘liber-
ated’ it on 18 November. At least 200 Croatian prisoners were
shot at the Ovčara camp by army reservists and Serb paramilitar-
ies. (The perpetrators were tried in Belgrade in 2009 and received
lengthy prison sentences; in 2021, a Belgrade court ruled that
families of victims were to be compensated). Croat prisoners of
war were sent to camps in Serbia, where they were exposed to ill
treatment and torture. In autumn 1991, remnants of the Yugoslav
People’s Army and Montenegrin reservists and volunteers shelled
Dubrovnik, whose beauty and long history had attracted visitors
25
See M. Dragojević, Amoral Communities: Collective Crimes in Time of War,
Ithaca, NY, 2019; H. Hayball, ‘Serbia and the Serbian Rebellion in Croatia
(1990–1991)’, PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015.
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from all over the world. If the Serb and Montenegrin leaderships
had been concerned about their international reputation, they did
not show it; their actions also destroyed any hope that some sort
of a unified Yugoslav state might be preserved.
In December 1991, Germany and Austria pressed for interna-
tional recognition of Croatia and Slovenia. In response, the Serbs
proclaimed the ‘Republic of Serb Krajina’ (RSK). This was done
with Serbia’s backing, but Belgrade never formally recognized
the Serb breakaway statelets in Croatia and Bosnia. In January
1992, the European Community recognized the independence of
Croatia and Slovenia; the United States followed suit in April. The
Croatian war ended, for the time being at least. Roughly one-third
of the republic came under the control of Croatian Serbs, includ-
ing Lika, Banija, Kordun and the Dalmatian hinterland and large
parts of Slavonia. Much of this territory had been once part of
the Habsburg Military Border (Vojna Krajina). Although some of
these areas were predominantly Serb, overall the population was
mixed. Sources differ, but prior to the war, around 280,000 Serbs,
180,000 Croats and 57,000 Yugoslavs and ‘Others’ lived in areas
that came under the Croatian Serb control. By 1993–94, less than
20,000 Croats remained, as the majority were ethnically cleansed,
many moving into homes of Serbs who had for similar reasons
left areas under the Croatian government control. Indeed, within
weeks from the escalation of the war in September, nearly 80,000
Croatian Serbs fled to Serbia, with around 10,000 Serbian Croats,
mostly from Vojvodina, fleeing the other way.26 Serbs continued
to depart, initially mainly for Serbia, from Zagreb, Sisak, Split,
26
Calic, ‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 515; Humanitarian Law Centre (Belgrade),
‘Crimes against Croats in Vojvodina’, 29 October 2021, www.hlc-rdc
.org/?p=38198&lang=de; Hayball, 356; ‘Podaci o prognanicima i
izbjeglicama u Domovinskom ratu’, Hrvatski vojnik (Zagreb), no. 559,
24 August 2018, https://hrvatski-vojnik.hr/podaci-o-prognanicima-i-
izbjeglicama-u-domovinskom-ratu/; cf. J. Gow, The Serbian Project and Its
Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes, London, 2003, ch. 6.
485
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Zadar, Šibenik, Osijek and other urban centres in what might be

termed a silent ethnic cleansing, because it went largely unre-
ported by international media. In 1991, around 88,000 Serbs lived
in Zagreb, Split, Rijeka and Osijek; in 2011, their number was just
over 35,000.27
Those Serbs who remained risked being expelled from their
homes, beaten up or even murdered, as was the case with the Zec
family killed by members of a special unit of the Croatian police
in their Zagreb apartment in early December 1991. Moderate
Croats faced similar risks. On 1 July 1991, before the escalation of
the conflict, Josip Reihl-Kir, the Osijek police chief, was killed by
Croat nationalists for advocating a compromise with local Serbs.
Despite all that, a small, brave group of Serb intellectuals and pol-
iticians, including Milorad Pupovac (b. 1955), a professor of social
linguistics at Zagreb University and one of the founders of UJDI,
remained in Croatia throughout the war. They campaigned for
peace, rule of law and democratization, and publicly criticized
both the Croatian government and the Krajina Serbs. Moderate
Serbs such as Pupovac were supported by similarly brave anti-
war Croats, ‘Yugoslavs’, ‘Serbo-Croats’, Jews and ‘others’ – that is
those from mixed marriages and members of minorities who did
not easily fit into the dominant and mutually competing ‘Croat’
and ‘Serb’ labels.
The Croatian Serb (and more generally Serbian and Yugoslav)
politics, however, should not be viewed as a ‘moderate urbanites’
versus ‘radical mountaineers’ dichotomy. While extremists on
both sides lived in towns, not everyone in the countryside sup-
ported the war. Situated just outside the Krajina statelet, the Serb
village of Donje Dubrave was surrounded by Croat villages, but
armed conflict was avoided thanks to moderate local leaders. They
included Čedomir Višnjić, a native of Donje Dubrave, who was
27
T. Opačić, ‘Otpis stanovništva: Olujna pustinja’, Novosti (Zagreb), 6 August
2021.
486
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figure 8.3 Serb reservists return from the Croatian front, December
1991 (Photo by Goranka Matić)
chosen as a village representative presumably on account of having

earned a degree in politics from the University of Zagreb. After the
war, Višnjić moved to Zagreb, where he was active in the Croatian
Serb cultural activities and Croatian politics, having served as an
assistant minister for culture in several Croatian governments
supported by Pupovac’s Independent Serbian Democratic Party.
Similar local arrangements designed to avoid war existed in Gorski
kotar, an area in north-western Croatia with a historically large
Serb population.
The end of Yugoslavia was experienced as a major traumatic
event by most Yugoslavs. The Serbs lamented the break-up of a
country for which they suffered enormous losses in the twentieth
century. Austria and Germany were blamed, not only by Serbs,
for supporting the independence of the two north-western
former-Yugoslav republics; to some this smacked of hypocrisy, a
historical injustice in which the losers in the two World Wars got
their revenge against the victors. This was explained sometimes
487
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through conspiracy theories in which the Vatican had been some-

how implicated as well. Thus, for example, General Kadijević, fed-
eral defence minister and chief of staff of the Yugoslav Army, and
himself of mixed Croat–Serb background, conveyed these senti-
ments in communication with US diplomats, who must have been
shocked to hear Kadijević describe the new Germany as a Fourth
Reich.28 Such interpretations and conspiracies are not grounded in
fact and must be rejected. Moreover, the recognition of the seces-
sionist republics came after enormous destruction caused by the
federal armed forces, especially in Croatia. If Yugoslavia should
have been kept by force only, could have the international com-
munity continued to support its preservation? Nevertheless, the
precedent created by the reunification of Germany in 1990 meant
that post-1945 borders in Europe were no longer inviolable, and
this had an impact on developments elsewhere. Ironically, Tito’s
Yugoslavia had once played a role in the rapprochement between
the two Germanies.29 In 1992–93, the European Community
was to transform into the European Union. For many Serbs, and
some outside observers, the irony was not lost that while both
Germany and (western) Europe was uniting, Yugoslavia, and the
Serbian nation with it, was fragmenting.30
Croatia’s independence initially came with a bitter pill for Zagreb.
The United Nations peace keepers arrived in January to preserve a
peace agreement achieved through international mediation. While
many people felt relieved the fighting had stopped, the Croatian
government did not control approximately one-third of its territory.
There were fears that the UN peacekeepers effectively consolidated
Croatian Serb gains. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, which had
28
Ž. Kovačević, Amerika i raspad Jugoslavije, Belgrade, 2007, 26; cf. Kadijević,
Moje vidjenje raspada.
29
M.-J. Calic, Tito: Vječni partizan, Zaprešić, 2022, 327; T. Jakovina, Budimir
Lončar: Od Preka do vrha svijeta, Belgrade, 2021, 287–88.
30
‘Introduction’ in R. M. Hayden, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans:
Studies of a European Disunion, 1991–2011, Leiden, 2013.
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begun by the declaration of independence by Croatia and Slovenia

in late June 1991, had thus also resulted in the (temporary) disin-
tegration of Croatia, and similarly led to a temporary break-up of
Bosnia. As for the Krajina Serbs, while they were able to keep the
territory they controlled, for first time since the end of the Second
World War, they no longer lived in the same state with Serbia, even
if informal links with Belgrade remained close.
The second phase of the war in Croatia came in 1995, after the
leadership of Croatia’s Serbs rejected an internationally backed
peace plan that would have provided Serb-majority areas a wide
autonomy and a peaceful integration into Croatia over a five-year
period. The rejection was much to the chagrin of Belgrade, which
supported the plan. Unofficially aided by the United States, the
Croatian military carried out two successful offensives in May
and August against the breakaway Serb statelet, which had been
largely abandoned by Serbia. In just a few days in early August,
some 200,000 Croatian Serbs fled their centuries-old settle-
ments, to the Serb-held parts of Bosnia and to Serbia; around
1,000 Serb civilians, mostly elderly, were killed. During this
period, over 5,000 ethnic Croats fled from Vojvodina to Croatia.
In November, the United Nations mediated an agreement that
eventually saw a peaceful reintegration of Eastern Slavonia,
including the town of Vukovar, into Croatia. This rare peace-
ful resolution to a conflict in former-Yugoslavia remains largely
ignored, possibly because it does not fit nationalist narratives
about a perennial Serb–Croat conflict.31
The death toll for the 1991–95 Croatian war is estimated at
around 22,000, or at between 18,000 and 23,000 soldiers and civil-
ians. Various sources seem to agree that approximately two-thirds
of those who died were Croats and one-third Serbs. According to
31
See D. Jović, Rat i mit: Politika identiteta u suvremenoj Hrvatskoj, Zagreb,
2017; cf. Humanitarian Law Centre (Belgrade), ‘Crimes against Croats in
Vojvodina’, 29 October 2021, www.hlc-rdc.org/?p=38198&lang=de.
489
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one report, 7,134 Serbs have been identified as killed or missing

during the war in Croatia.32
The Bosnian Wars, 1992–95

Between the two ‘halves’ of the Croatian war, an even more brutal
and destructive conflict raged on in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which
was in a sense a microcosm of the disintegrating Yugoslavia.
While the Serbs had formed the largest ‘minority’ in Yugoslavia
with slightly over 36 per cent of the country’s 23.5 million pop-
ulation in 1991, the Muslims made up around 43.5 per cent of
Bosnia’s 4.37 million people. They were followed by Serbs (31.2
per cent) and Croats (17.4 per cent). There were also 5.5 per
cent ‘Yugoslavs’ (some of whom would have been Serbs) and 2.4
per cent of other nationalities, including a tiny, but historically
important Jewish community, living mostly in Sarajevo.33
In the November 1990 elections, the vast majority of Bosnian
Muslims voted for the Party of Democratic Action, led by Alija
Izetbegović. In his youth a radical Muslim activist, he had become
a more moderate, if anti-communist champion of Bosnian Muslim
rights. Izetbegović became the party leader following a deal with
Fikret Abdić, a more popular socialist-era businessman from Velika
Kladuša, who had been involved in a corruption scandal in the
1980s but maintained strong support in his native north-western
Bosnia. The Bosnian Serbs mostly voted for the Serbian
32
‘Srpske žrtve rata i poraća na području Hrvatske i bivše RSK 1990–1998’,
Dokumentaciono-informacioni centar Veritas, www.veritas.org.rs/srpske-
zrtve-rata-i-poraca-na-podrucju-hrvatske-i-bivse-rsk-1990-1998-godine; cf.
E. Zebić, ‘Ljudski gubici u ratu u Hrvatskoj: 22.211 osoba’, Radio Slobodna
Evropa, 15 January 2018, www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/hrvatska-ljutski-
gubici/28976312.html; Ratni zločini nad Srbima u Hrvatskoj 91–95, SNV
Bulletin, no. 16, Zagreb, 2018, https://snv.hr/publikacije/snv-bulletin-16/.
33
The figures are from Calic, ‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 516.
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Democratic Party. The party leader Karadžić, a Montenegro-

born psychiatrist and poet, was close to Serbia’s nationalist intel-
lectuals and with his Croatian Serb counterparts. The Bosnian
Croats in turn mainly voted for Bosnia’s branch of the Croatian
Democratic Union. All three main Bosnian parties claimed to be
democratic, but they championed rights of their respective ethnic
groups, rather than civic values in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. The for-
mer Communists transformed into Social Democrats but, some
regional exceptions notwithstanding, they fared poorly in the first
multi-party elections. Ante Marković’s pro- Yugoslav, moderate
Reformists did not do well either, despite enjoying more support
in Bosnia than in any other Yugoslav republic.
The three main parties initially shared power in Bosnia in
an uneasy alliance that faced an uncertain future as the war in
neighbouring Croatia escalated in autumn 1991. In October, the
Bosnian Muslims and Croats pushed in the Sarajevo assembly for
a resolution on independence, a move unsurprisingly rejected by
the Serbs. Nevertheless, the pro-independence parties secured
support from the European Community in late December. In
response, the Bosnian Serbs proclaimed in early January 1992 a
‘Serb Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (later the Serb Republic,
or Republika Srpska). Therefore, just as the war in Croatia halted,
tensions boiled over in Bosnia.
On 29 February and 1 March 1992, the independence referen-
dum went ahead, despite Serb protests. The turnout was 63.4
per cent and nearly 100 per cent of voters who turned out voted
for independence. However, most Serbs boycotted the referen-
dum, and it also became clear that many Bosnian Croats had voted
against staying in a union with Belgrade rather than for an inde-
pendent Bosnia. Already in November 1991 they had proclaimed
‘Herceg-Bosna’, a Croat statelet in western Herzegovina. On
1 March, the second day of the referendum, a Serb wedding pro-
cession in central Sarajevo came under attack; a Bosnian Muslim
paramilitary shot dead one of the guests – a man called Nikola
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Gardović, who is thus considered the first victim of the Bosnian

war – and wounded a Serbian priest. In response, members of
Karadžić’s Serbian Democratic Party set roadblocks throughout
the city and accused Izetbegović’s Party of Democratic Action for
instigating the violence. The roadblocks were removed two days
later, but the incident anticipated the blockade of much of the
city by Bosnian Serbs that soon began. Bosnian Muslims declared
independence of Bosnia on 3 March, but the conflict escalated on
6 April 1992, following the international recognition of an inde-
pendent Bosnian state. By an unfortunate coincidence, this was
the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s bombardment of Belgrade in
1941, which marked the beginning of the first, even more violent
destruction of Yugoslavia, in which the Bosnian Serbs suffered
more than any other South Slav group. On 7 April, the Bosnian
Serbs proclaimed the independence of their ‘Serb Republic’.
Armed clashes had already begun in eastern Bosnia between local
Muslims and Serbs, who were aided by the army, police and Serb
paramilitaries.34
The Yugoslav People’s Army – whose barracks in Sarajevo and
several other towns were encircled and in some cases attacked
by Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces – withdrew into Serbia and
Montenegro, but its Bosnian-born Serb officer corps and soldiers
remained to form the Bosnian Serb Army. The Sarajevo gov-
ernment controlled the predominantly Muslim Army of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, while Bosnian Croats formed their own armed
forces, the Croatian Defence Council. The once proud Tito’s army
thus formally ceased to exist. Its Serbia-Montenegro-based core,
consisting almost exclusively of officers born in these two repub-
lics and conscripts recruited there, was renamed into the Army
of Yugoslavia, to mimic the name of the Serbian-Montenegrin
34
Burg and Shoup, 128–39; Calic, ‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 516; Carmichael, A
Concise History of Bosnia, ch. 6; G. Toal and C. T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade:
Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal, Oxford, 2011, 114–16.
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federation that in late April 1992 became Federal Republic of

Yugoslavia (minus the prefix ‘Socialist’ and minus the four other
members of the original federation).35
Dobrica Ćosić, the previously mentioned nationalist-
dissident writer, and Milan Panić (b. 1929), an American-Serb
businessman, were appointed, respectively, the first president
and prime minister of new Yugoslavia. The real power rested
with Serbia’s President Milošević, who hoped that Ćosić and
Panić would neutralize the nationalist opposition at home and
improve Belgrade’s standing abroad, as Yugoslavia was con-
demned for its support of the Bosnian Serbs. In 1993 Milošević
removed both men, due to ideological and political differences.
Ćosić stepped down without resistance, but Panić stood as a
united opposition candidate in the December 1992 Serbian
presidential elections. His 1,5 million votes were not enough
to defeat victorious Milošević, who received 2,5 million ballots,
but had Kosovo Albanians not boycotted the elections Panić
might have won.
Meanwhile, possessing a superior weaponry and expertise inherited
from the former-Yugoslav People’s Army, the Bosnian Serbs quickly
overran eastern Bosnia and eastern Herzegovina, the north-western
Posavina corridor and the western parts of the country – the Bosnian
Krajina that bordered the Croatian Serb Krajina. Serbs formed a
majority in some of these territories, but where they did not every
attempt was made to ethnically cleanse non-Serbs, mainly Muslims,
with the help of paramilitaries from Serbia. By the summer, the
Bosnian Serbs controlled approximately 75 per cent of Bosnia. The
territory under their control included eastern districts of Sarajevo,
but most of the Bosnian capital, including the city centre and the
airport, was under the Bosnian government control. Bosnian Serb
forces, who enjoyed the support of the local rural Serb population
35
M. A. Hoare, How Bosnia Armed, London, 2004.
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bombarded the city and kept its population, which included thou-
sands of Serbs, under siege for three and a half years.36
The majority of the violence in Bosnia was carried out during
summer 1992, as local Serb forces were joined by paramilitaries
from Serbia who crossed the border to loot, murder and gener-
ally help ethnically cleanse the Muslim population. The total fig-
ure for all Bosnian casualties during the 1992–95 war is estimated
at 95,940 people. With several thousand still missing, it is likely
higher, though it is fortunately considerably lower than previously
widely circulated figures of over 200,000 killed. Of the total num-
ber of dead, 62,013, or 64.64 per cent, are Bosnian Muslims (from
1993 known as Bosniaks); 24,953, or 26 per cent, are Bosnian Serbs;
and 8,403, or 8.76 per cent, are Bosnian Croats. Nearly half of all
Bosniaks and Serbs were killed in 1992, during the first few months
of the war. The majority of those killed were men; in the Bosniak
case, nearly half of the men killed were civilians, while the majority
of Bosnian Serbs who died were soldiers. Around 7,000 Bosniak and
just over 1,500 Bosnian Serb women killed do not tell the full story
of their suffering. Bosniak women in particular were systematically
raped in Serb-run prisons and camps. The trial of some perpetra-
tors, mostly at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, has gone some way towards
addressing justice, but can it help heal the survivors’ trauma? Rape
and other forms of sexual violence perpetrated by men against other
men during the Yugoslav wars was investigated at the ICTY, but it
remains arguably the last taboo, as men are even less prepared to
talk about their ordeal for fear of being stigmatized.37
36
Calic, ‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 516; cf. Gow, The Serbian Project, ch. 7. For a
first-hand account of life in Sarajevo during the war, see Z. Filipović, Zlata’s
Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, intro. by J. di Giovanni, transl. into English
by C. Pribićević, London, 1993.
37
The Bosnian war death toll: M. Tokača, Bosanska knjiga mrtvih: Ljudski gubici
u Bosni i Hercegovini, 1991–1995, Sarajevo, 2012, 4 vols, I, 125–34. Victims
of sexual violence: K. Campbell, ‘The Trauma of Justice: Sexual Violence,
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Some two million people, nearly half of Bosnia’s pre-war pop-

ulation, were displaced during the war. Many are still to return
to their homes, especially in areas where refugees from another
part of former-Yugoslavia have replaced them. The forced pop-
ulation movements have led to a greater ethnic homogenization.
By the end of the war, almost 82 per cent of all non-Serbs had
been driven out of the Republika Srpska. At the same time, the
number of non-Serbs in the Bosniak-Croat federation grew by
over 41 per cent.38 News of massacres of Muslim civilians and
Serb-run detention camps horrified the international public and
put pressure on the international community to act. Because of
Belgrade’s support for the Bosnian Serbs, the United Nations
imposed an economic embargo on Serbia-Montenegro in May
1992. The embargo was fully lifted only in November 1996, a
year after the Bosnian war ended.
While the West focused on the Serbs, Tudjman, who had alleg-
edly discussed with Milošević a division of Bosnia between Serbia
and Croatia, sent troops into the neighbouring state in late 1992.
Seeking to expand territory they controlled and eventually join
Croatia, Bosnian Croat troops committed atrocities against Bosnian
Muslim civilians in central Bosnia, and indiscriminately bombarded
Bosniak positions in Mostar, destroying a sixteenth-century bridge
that had been the symbol of the city and its Ottoman legacy. The
bridge has since been rebuilt, but Mostar remains divided, as the
Bosniaks and Croats control different banks of the river Neretva,
which flows through the city. It is now almost forgotten that Mostar
Crimes against Humanity and the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia’, Social & Legal Studies, 13:3 (2004), 329–50; Z. Djelilović,
‘Male Rape Victims Confront the Bosnian War’s Last Taboo’, Balkan
Transitional Justice, Sarajevo, 24 April 2020, https://balkaninsight
.com/2020/04/24/male-rape-victims-confront-the-bosnian-wars-last-taboo/;
D. Žarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity and Gender in the Break-up of
Yugoslavia, Durham, NC, 2007.
38
Calic, ‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 518.
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had been once home to a large and prosperous Serb community,

too. Historically, Mostar Serbs included prominent intellectuals
such as poet Aleksa Šantić (1868–1924) and previously mentioned
Dimitrije Mitrinović, but the majority of their descendants left at
the beginning of the Bosnian war. In the early stages of the con-
flict, the city had been shelled by the Yugoslav People’s Army from
nearby hills.
Another Bosnian war was fought between the Sarajevo govern-
ment and the Muslims of the Cazin region, loyal to previously men-
tioned Fikret Abdić. Abdić allied himself with the Serbs and later
the Croats and established in 1993 the ‘Autonomous Province of
Western Bosnia’ from his headquarters in Velika Kladuša. Despite
all, the Bosniak-dominated government survived, partly thanks
to international humanitarian aid and political support, sporadic
UN military interventions against Bosnian Serbs, and UN sanc-
tions and political pressure on Serbia. Officially, Sarajevo fought
for a united, multinational Bosnia, but in reality, as the violence
escalated, it too sought to homogenize areas under its control; it
used similar methods its enemies employed, albeit on a smaller
scale. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNCHR), between
1991 and mid-1994, the Serb population decreased significantly
in Bosniak- and Croat-controlled parts of Bosnia. The most dras-
tic examples include western Herzegovina, where the number
of Serbs fell from 43,595 to 5,000, the Zenica area (from 79,355
down to 20,000), the Tuzla region (from 82,235 to 23,000), and
Bihać and the surrounding area (from 29,398 to just 1,609).39
39
Ibid. Many Sarajevan Serbs lived in parts of the city under the Bosnian
government control, where they sometimes found themselves under double
fire. At least several hundred Serbs were killed by Bosniak paramilitaries
in the besieged city. The suffering of Bosnian Serb civilians and crimes
committed against them by Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats remains an under-
researched topic. See N. Moll, ‘Sarajevska najpoznatija javna tajna’: Suočavanje
sa Cacom, Kazanima, i zločinima počinjenim nad Srbima u opkoljenom Sarajevu,
od rata do 2015, Sarajevo, 2015, https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/
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During and especially following the end of the war, the majority
of over 150,000 Sarajevo Serbs left the city. (Milošević did little
to prevent the migration of Serbs from Sarajevo during the 1995
Dayton peace talks, discussed in the following text).
In early 1993 Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance, the EU and US peace
envoys, respectively, proposed a peace plan that Belgrade supported,
even though it required the Bosnian Serbs to give up a substan-
tial territory under their control. Under pressure from Milošević
and the ‘Contact Group’ (USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy and
Russia), Karadžić reluctantly accepted, but sought approval from the
Bosnian Serb assembly, which convened in early May in Pale, a sub-
urb of Sarajevo. Constantine Mitsotakis, prime minister of Greece
(and head of the EU presidency at the time), Milošević, Ćosić and
Montenegro’s president all attended, to ensure the Bosnian Serbs
accepted the plan. A dramatic, last minute intervention by General
Ratko Mladić (b. 1943), the Bosnian Serb military commander who
was also in attendance, swayed the deputies who voted against the
proposal. An opportunity to end war, and save countless lives, was
thus wasted. Contrary to popular opinion, Milošević did not fully
control the Bosnian (nor indeed Croatian) Serbs.
The failure of the EU-UN diplomacy led to a more direct US
involvement. In March 1994, under pressure from the United
States, the Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks ceased hostilities to form
a ‘Muslim–Croat Federation’. At the same time, NATO carried
out air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions around Goražde,
in order to prevent the Serb takeover of the town. This was the
first foreign military intervention in the Yugoslav War (not count-
ing foreign mercenaries who joined all sides in the conflict). It
sarajevo/12972.pdf; M. S. Milanović, Slow Dying: The Bosnian War Prison

Camp at Visoko: Diary and Testimonies, Richmond, VA, 2012. Most members
of Sarajevo’s small Jewish community were evacuated to Israel, via Belgrade,
but many returned after the war ended in 1995. J. Rock, Intergenerational
Memory and Language of the Sarajevo Sephardim, Cham, 2019, 96–97.
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anticipated a full-blown bombing campaign against Serbia by

NATO five years later. Together with Bihać, Sarajevo, Srebrenica,
Tuzla and Žepa, Goražde had been declared a ‘safe haven’ by the
UN Security Council.
Feeling the consequences of international isolation, which crip-
pled its economy, Serbia largely abandoned the Bosnian Serbs in
summer 1994. Nevertheless, links between the Yugoslav and the
Bosnian Serb militaries remained. According to some estimates,
around 2,000 Yugoslav Army soldiers and officers fought along-
side the Bosnian Serb Army during the war, in addition to special
police units and paramilitary groups. Weapons and petrol were
also provided from Serbia, as was medical and other humanitar-
ian aid for the Serb population of Bosnia. As a result, the UN
embargo on Belgrade was tightened and extended to cultural
exchange, leaving the population of Serbia, including its critical
and opposition-minded intelligentsia and students, more isolated
than ever.
In July 1995, General Mladić launched an offensive against
Bosniak positions in eastern Bosnia. The historic town of Srebrenica,
a UN-protected ‘safe area’, was overrun, and over 8,000 Bosniak men
were shot dead during the next few days; the women, children and
elderly men were expelled from the area. The massacre, largest in
Europe since the Second World War, was later declared genocide by
the ICTY.40 It provoked a limited UN military intervention, which
40
For first-hand accounts of Srebrenica survivors, see H. Nuhanović, The
Last Refuge: A True Story of War, Survival and Life under Siege in Srebrenica,
London, 2019 and E. Suljagić, Postcards from the Grave, London, 2005 cf.
I. Djikić, Beara, Zagreb, 2016. Jasmila Žbanić’s award-winning film Quo
Vadis, Aida (2021) is inspired by Nuhanović’s account. Mladić infamously
described the takeover of Srebrenica by his troops as an overdue revenge
against the ‘Turks’, comparing his war to the 1804 ‘rebellion against the
dahis’, discussed earlier in the book. How many noted that Eastern Bosnian
Muslims killed during the 1990s war likely included distant descendants of
nineteenth-century Serbian Muslim refugees?
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figure 8.4 Croatian Serb refugees wait for a train in Bijeljina, north-east
Bosnia, August 1995. (Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty
Images). The town had been ethnically cleansed of its Muslim population
by Serb paramilitaries three years previously
in turn encouraged a joint Bosniak–Croat offensive and coincided

with the Croatian attack on the ‘Republic of Serbian Krajina’ and
Serb positions in western Bosnia. Facing a total military defeat in
Bosnia, having witnessed the fall of the RSK, with tens of thousands
of Serb civilians ethnically cleansed, the Bosnian Serbs, represented
by Milošević, agreed to a US-backed peace plan in November 1995.
Several weeks of difficult negotiations between Milošević, Tudjman
and Izetbegović, with Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of
State, and his aide Richard Holbrooke, in Dayton, Ohio, resulted in
a peace agreement.
Bosnia survived as a country but was de facto partitioned.
Republika Srpska, reduced from over 70 to 49 per cent of
Bosnia’s territory, became one of two highly autonomous enti-
ties. The other was the Croat–Muslim Federation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, informally also divided along the ethnic lines. A
UN high representative, whose powers have been compared to
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a British colonial viceroy, was placed in charge of overseeing the

implementation of the peace. Some 60,000 UN peacekeeping
troops moved in as well.41
Serbia’s Society and Economy in the 1990s

Serbia’s was a ruined society where grey economy prospered, iron-
ically largely thanks to UN sanctions that encouraged illegal smug-
gling of petrol and goods from neighbouring states. There was
widespread crime and corruption, while criminal gangs and former
paramilitaries – often it was hard to distinguish between them –
seemed untouchable by the country’s legal institutions. Serbia
became a closed, paranoid society, with widespread conspiracy
theories and highly improbable interpretations about the nation’s
past. When an actor and impersonator put on Tito’s Marshal’s uni-
form and walked streets of Belgrade, people came to him to either
lament good old times or to blame ‘him’ for their ills. This was like
some collective therapy session, in which fiction mixed with reality,
revealing a highly traumatized and isolated, insular society border-
ing on psychosis. The trauma caused by the break-up of Yugoslavia,
lack of adequate medical aid due to international sanctions and
poor and inadequate diet contributed to a jump in mortality rate
in Serbia by over 10 per cent between 1990 and 1993. (This high
trend continued after the war, into the early twenty-first century,
as a little researched legacy of the Yugoslav Wars.) Meanwhile, the
suicide rate in Serbia and Montenegro in 1991–95 was over 11 per
cent higher than during the 1986–90 period.42
41
S. Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention,
London, 2002; X. Bougarel, G. Duijzings and E. Helms (eds), The New
Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Postwar Society,
Aldershot, 2007; Burg and Shoup, ch. 7; D. Chandler, Bosnia: Faking
Democracy after Dayton, London, 1999.
42
J. Byford, Teorija Zavere: Srbija Protiv ‘Novog Svetskog Poretka’, Belgrade, 2006;
R. Radić, Srbi pre Adama i posle njega, Belgrade, 2005; M. Živković, Serbian
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It is no exaggeration to say that the break-up of Yugoslavia

ruined Serbia’s economy. Even though the Yugoslav market was
never fully unified, its collapse in 1991 hit hard all the Yugoslav
republics. In addition, the war in Croatia and Bosnia (and later
Kosovo) drained Serbia’s resources, as did UN economic sanc-
tions. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) fell by nearly 28 per cent
in 1992 and by another almost 31 per cent the following year. The
industry practically collapsed – by late 1993 less than 25 per cent
of Serbia’s industry functioned. Unemployment figures were in
reality much higher than official records showed, as people were
forced to resort to grey economy, smuggling in petrol and other
in-demand products from neighbouring countries, or emigrating.
The GDP per head in rump Yugoslavia fell from USD 2,200 in
1990 to USD 950 in 1993. Prices of food and other products nec-
essary for daily life rose sharply, as inflation grew from 9.23 per
cent in 1992 to 116.5 trillion per cent in 1993. In January 1994,
daily rate of inflation in FR Yugoslavia reached 60 per cent – an
equivalent of 313 million per cent per month; in the Bosnian Serb
Republic, whose economy was linked to Serbia’s, the estimated
monthly inflation in January 1994 was slightly lower at 297 mil-
lion per cent. As one Serbian author put it,
In December 1993, an average Serbian citizen (whose children were

dreaming about emigrating abroad at any cost while he, out of neces-
sity, became a small time smuggler, someone who did two or three jobs
illegally, or turned to agriculture or piracy [i.e. dealing with counterfeit
Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević, Bloomington, IN,

2011; Tito impersonator: Tito po drugi put medju Srbima (dir. Želimir Žilnik,
1994); mortality and suicide rates: B. Radović, ‘“Oni” su ih hteli, a “on” nije:
O kontekstu, organizaciji i sprovodjenju prinudne mobilizacije izbeglica u
Srbiji 1995. godine’, in G. Opačić et al. (eds), Posledice prinudne mobilizacije
izbeglica 1995. godine, Belgrade, 2006, 11–42, 14–15.
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items]) earned 13,775,000,000 dinars, or 25,90 German marks, enough

to pay for 11 per cent of the monthly consumer basket (in total 65 basic
food items necessary to feed a four-member family). A single egg cost
205,650,000 dinars, while a kilogram of potatoes was 613,020,000 dinars,
which meant that an average salary could buy the ‘last supper’ consisting
of 66,98 eggs or 22,47 kilos of potatoes!
It was at the time the second highest inflation rate in history,

after the 1945–46 inflation in Hungary. Then in early 1994,
the National Bank stopped printing money uncontrollably and
appointed as its new governor Dragoslav Avramović, a retired
Serbian employee of the World Bank. Under Avramović, the
dinar was stabilized, and the inflation rate drastically reduced by
the end of the year. (In the meanwhile, Zimbabwe jumped ahead
of Milošević’s Yugoslavia on the historical hyperinflation table in
November 2008. Weimar Germany in 1923 and Greece in 1944–
45 occupied the next two places, respectively).43
Even before the end of the Bosnian war, Milošević was hailed
by some in the West as a factor of peace and stability in the
region. Despite this, the international community kept pressure
on Belgrade, only partially lifting the sanctions. In that context,
the opposition victory at local elections in Autumn 1996 was even
more remarkable. In November, a three-party coalition consisting
of Drašković’s Renewal Movement, the Democratic Party (now
under the leadership of Zoran Djindjić) and a small Civic Alliance
led by Vesna Pešić, an anti-war activist and a sociology profes-
sor, won local elections in 13 largest cities and towns in Serbia,
including Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš and Kragujevac. Milošević’s
43
M. Uvalić, Tranzicija u Srbiji: Ka boljoj budućnosti, Belgrade, 2012
(translated from English by V. and M. Gligorijević), 75–79, 83–85. World
hyperinflation figures: S. H. Hanke and N. Krus, World Hyperinflations,
Baltimore, MD, 2012, 12–14, www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/
workingpaper-8_1.pdf. Quotation: Radović, op. cit., 14; cf. M. Dinkić,
Ekonomija destrukcije: Velika pljačka naroda, Belgrade, 1996.
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figure 8.5 Citizens of Belgrade queue for free bread distributed by the
state, 6 January 1994 (the Orthodox Christmas Eve) (STR/AFP via
Getty Images)
refusal to accept the defeat triggered mass protests across the

country that lasted three months. Undeterred by cold weather,
demonstrators, who included university students, persisted until
the regime eventually backed down. For the first time, there was a
democratic change of government in post-Yugoslav Serbia, albeit
at local level.
Meanwhile, Milošević’s influence in Montenegro weakened,
due to a conflict between his two main allies there, Momir
Bulatović and Milo Djukanović, the president and prime minis-
ter of the small republic, respectively. The latter turned against
Bulatović and Milošević. Supported by the West, and initially
also by Serbia’s opposition, Djukanović over the following dec-
ade gradually removed Montenegro from the union with Serbia.
Although his popular support in Serbia also continued to erode,
Milošević and his key allies exercised control over police and
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media. This enabled them to marginalize alternative political

and cultural narratives and remain in power.44 Unable to stand
for president of Serbia again, Milošević was appointed presi-
dent of rump Yugoslavia in July 1997. Later that year, his can-
didate won presidential elections with nearly 2.2 million votes.
Vojislav Šešelj came second with almost 1.38 million votes, while
Drašković received less than 590,000 and did not make it to the
second round.
Milošević’s political survival was undoubtedly helped by the
emergence in the early 1990s of the extreme right-wing Serbian
Radical Party, led by Šešelj. During the 1990s, he shifted from
hard opposition to, in Milošević’s words, the president’s ‘favour-
ite opposition politician’. Šešelj served as a reminder to both the
West and the Serbian electorate that there were worse alterna-
tives to Milošević. In March 1998, however, the Radicals entered
the coalition government with the Socialist Party and Mira
Marković’s small, but influential United Yugoslav Left party. The
regime’s clampdown on independent media was led by the new
information minister, a 28-year-old Radical Party member called
Aleksandar Vučić – the future prime minister and president of
Serbia (see the following text).
The Battle for Kosovo, 1998–99

On 12 November 1998, Javier Solana, the Secretary General of
NATO, gave a speech in the German town of Münster on the
occasion of the 350th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia,
which ended the Thirty Years’ War (discussed in Chapter 3). The
peace became synonymous in international relations with the
principles of inviolability of state borders and non-interference in
internal affairs of sovereign states. Solana, however, proclaimed
44
E. D. Gordy, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of
Alternatives, University Park, PA, 1999.
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that ‘humanity and democracy – two principles essentially irrele-

vant to the original Westphalian order – can serve as guideposts
in crafting a new international order, better adapted to the secu-
rity realities, and challenges, of today’s Europe’.45 He almost
certainly had in mind the conflict in Kosovo, where the Serbian
government forces and the ethnic Albanian guerrillas, the self-
titled Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), had been fighting for
nearly a year, causing thousands of civilians, mainly, though not
exclusively, ethnic Albanians, to flee their homes.
This was the culmination of a decade-long rule by force over
Serbia’s southern province, during which ethnic Albanians were
treated as de facto second-class citizens and many were victims
of brutality, imprisonment and even murder (although the vast
majority of murders occurred during the 1999 war with NATO).
Meanwhile, under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova (1944–2006),
Kosovo Albanians organized peaceful, political opposition not
just to Milošević but to Belgrade’s rule in general (a major reason
why no joint opposition front between the Serbian opposition and
Rugova materialized). Parallel institutions, including schools, were
set up throughout the province, as the two societies not so much
co-existed as they lived apart. As intercommunal tensions contin-
ued to grow, disillusioned with Rugova’s pacifist approach, the KLA
emerged. One of its leaders was Hashim Thaçi (b. 1968), the future
prime minister (2008–14) and president (2016–20) of Kosovo.46
45
J. Solana, ‘Securing Peace in Europe’, speech delivered at the Symposium
on the Political Relevance of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, Münster, 12
November 1998, www.nato.int/docu/speech/1998/s981112a.htm.
46
G. Duijzings, et al. (eds), Kosovo–Kosova: Confrontation or Coexistence,
Nijmegen, 1997; J. Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War,
Berkeley, CA, 1999; D. Kostovicova, Kosovo: The Politics of Identity and Space,
London, 2005; cf. W. Buckley (ed.), Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan
Interventions, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000; O. Daddow and M. Webber (eds),
The War over Kosovo: Ten Years On, special issue, International Affairs, 85:3
(2009).
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Milošević’s rise had begun with the crisis in Kosovo, and the
military conflict between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs also marked
the beginning of the end of his regime. Hitherto Serbia had
avoided war on its territory, but by early 1999 it had become clear
that the Kosovo conflict could not be resolved by US-sponsored
negotiations at the Rambouillet Château near Paris. Some com-
mentators argued that the peace proposal had been designed to be
rejected by Belgrade. At the beginning of the year, Vuk Drašković
had been appointed Yugoslav foreign minister, apparently in an
attempt by Milošević to benefit from his erstwhile rival’s dem-
ocratic credentials in the West. After a massacre of a group of
Albanian villagers by Serbian forces in January, NATO decided
to intervene militarily against Milošević’s Yugoslavia. The offi-
cial explanation for the intervention was the suffering of Kosovo
Albanians. However, Western fears of having to deal with ‘another
Bosnia’, or perhaps a feeling of guilt for not dealing effectively
with Bosnia, and the wish to see a regime change in Belgrade were
important other factors behind the intervention.
Air strikes against Yugoslavia were launched on 24 March 1999,
with the KLA de facto used by NATO as its ground troops. This
was NATO’s first war ever, fought against a sovereign state with-
out the approval of the UN Security Council (China and Russia
would have vetoed it). It was also the first time since the Second
World War that Germany and Italy took part in a military inter-
vention. Ironically, it was against Serbia, where Nazi Germany’s
occupation had been particularly brutal, as we have seen, and
Montenegro, which had been occupied by Fascist Italy. This, and
the fact that Britain and the Unites States, the Serbs’ allies in the
two World Wars, led the campaign that completed the violent dis-
integration of Yugoslavia, persuaded many Serbs that the whole
world was against them and that their sacrifices in the twentieth
century had been essentially in vain.
Despite, or perhaps because of the intervention, the Yugoslav
Army, Serbian police and special units and paramilitaries intensified
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the war against the KLA, burning and looting Albanian villages
in the process with apparently little regard for the lives of ethnic
Albanian civilians. The air strikes were meant to last a few days and
to stop the violence against Kosovo Albanians. Instead, it quickly
became clear that Milošević would not surrender after the first
bombs were dropped and that the violence only worsened with the
start of the NATO intervention. Over 800,000 Kosovo Albanians
fled into Albania and Macedonia, and many were internally dis-
placed within the province or killed. Thousands of Serb civilians
also left their homes, moving into Serbia ‘proper’ and Montenegro;
many were also killed by Albanian guerrillas and NATO bombs.
The NATO intervention did not seriously degrade the Yugoslav
military, but it brought damage to the country’s infrastructure
and eventually affected the population’s morale. Pro-western
opposition found itself in a particularly difficult predicament.
They had for years risked their livelihoods, even lives, to speak
out against war and the need to introduce western-style democ-
racy, only to find the conduct of those same western democra-
cies increasingly disagreeable.47 The NATO air strikes gave the
regime an excuse to close down independent news outlets. Slavko
Ćuruvija, a newspaper editor and a prominent critic of Milošević
and Mira Marković, was murdered days after the bombing began.
His Croatian-born partner and an eminent intellectual historian
Branka Prpa was next to him when he was shot by masked assas-
sins. The verdict on the Ćuruvija case was finally delivered in
December 2021; a former chief of the Serbian security services
and three assassins (one of whom was hiding abroad) were given
lengthy prison sentences. Unfortunately, Ćuruvija was not the
only journalist killed during the Milošević era and its aftermath.
Dada Vujasinović and Milan Pantić were murdered in 1994
47
J. Dragović-Soso, ‘Parting of Ways: Public Reckoning with the Recent Past
in Post-Milošević Serbia’, in T. Waters (ed.), The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy,
Oxford, 2014, 398–408.
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and 2001 for reporting on the Bosnian and Croatian wars and
political corruption in central Serbia, respectively. These cases
remained unresolved as of late 2022.
More than 1,000 people, braving NATO bombs and Milošević’s
police, attended Ćuruvija’s funeral in Belgrade on 14 April.
Among them was Jasmina Tešanović, a prominent feminist writer
and anti-war activist. Ten days earlier, she wrote in her diary:
The wire is finally visible around our cage. We’re bad, wild Serbs from
the fourteenth century, disguised in jeans, speaking English, but still
aliens.… This NATO viewpoint is completely in line with the local
nationalists, who said that when the maternity hospital shook from
nearby bombing, the babies didn’t even cry because they were Serb
babies. Well, I cried like a baby yesterday when I heard thousands of
people on the Square of the Republic singing ‘Tamo daleko’ (‘There,
far away is Serbia …’) during the daily concert. It’s a beautiful old song
which Serbian soldiers sang in the First World War on their way to
Thessalonika. Only a few came back, and my grandfather was one of
them. He used to sing it to me when I was a child, and I always sang it
when people abroad asked me for a Serbian song. It always makes people
cry. But I couldn’t sing yesterday — it’s not my song anymore, it’s not
my Serbia. I am in exile in my own country.
Tešanović’s diary entries for 19 and 20 April 1999 read:
There is an increasingly strong feeling here among ordinary people that

nobody really wants us [Serbs] anywhere, not even here. Writers and
commentators from all over the world now refer to the Serbs as being
accomplices in the atrocities, and they mean all Serbs. I won’t name
names, but some were people I admired, even friends. I forgive them, but
I don’t read them. Just as with our local nationalistic writers some years
ago; for me they don’t exist. […] Which cross should I bear – NATO
bombs or Serbian killings? Between compulsive patriotism and compul-
sive guilt, I guess there is no way out.48
48
J. Tešanović, Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade, Introduction
by T. Judah, San Francisco, 2001, 60, 72. For a Kosovo Serb experience of
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As the bombing campaign continued into its second month, it

became clear that NATO’s bombs failed to prevent suffering
of ethnic Albanians or to inflict much damage on ‘Milošević’s
war machine’, which, as NATO spokesmen argued, included
the Serbian state TV. The TV building in downtown Belgrade
was bombed on 23 April, causing death of 16 employees, but
the state television resumed broadcasting from another location
the following day. The ‘collateral damage’, an awful term for
unintended, civilian casualties (Albanian, Serb and Roma alike),
became increasingly frequent. There was some hope that grow-
ing international opposition to war among peace activists and
left-leaning opinion would place pressure on NATO to halt air
strikes. Instead, the bombing intensified, as it seemed clear that
Serbia’s capacity to resist the most powerful military alliance in
history had been underestimated.
Serbia’s predicament became increasingly difficult however,
as even Russia, while condemning NATO strikes, put pressure
on Belgrade to accept a peace deal. On 3 June, Milošević finally
backed down, to the relief of the population of Yugoslavia, and of
the leaders of NATO countries, some of whom had to deal with
strong opposition to the war at home. The UN Security Council
Resolution 1244, adopted on 10 June 1999, provided for an
interim UN administration in Kosovo, and a UN peacekeeping
force under NATO command also arrived soon. A peace agree-
ment was signed the following day at a run-down cafe ‘Evropa’,
owned by an ethnic Albanian from Kumanovo, near the Serbia/
Kosovo-North Macedonia border.
the war and its aftermath, see M. Karan, Isključivo lično: Kosovo posle svega,
Belgrade, 2001. The memoir of the London Times Balkans correspondent
Eve-Ann Prentice (One Woman’s War, London, 2000) offers further insight
into how the NATO war impacted daily lives of ordinary Serbs. See also
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia (London, 2005, transl.
from Norwegian by S. Kartvedt), by Åsne Seierstad, the author of the
bestselling The Bookseller of Kabul (2002).
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The Resolution 1244 stipulated ‘The safe and free return of all
refugees and displaced persons and unimpeded access to Kosovo
by humanitarian aid organizations’. It also called for ‘[a] political
process towards the establishment of an interim political frame-
work agreement providing for a substantial self-government for
Kosovo, taking full account of the Rambouillet accords and the
principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia and the other countries of the region,
and the demilitarization of the KLA.’ The Resolution thus iron-
ically referred to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the
Serb-Montenegrin federation, but it was not clear how it would
be compatible with the promise of the self- government for
49
Kosovo.
The Yugoslav Army and the Serbian police were to withdraw,
but ‘an agreed number of Yugoslav and Serbian personnel will
be permitted to return to help with the implementation of peace’
(this had not yet happened as of 2022). Finally, the Resolution
talked of ‘Safe and free return of all refugees and displaced per-
sons under the supervision of the Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and unimpeded
access to Kosovo by humanitarian aid organizations.’ This pro-
vision was largely fulfilled only as far as ethnic Albanian refugees
were concerned. More than half of the pre-war Serbian popula-
tion of Kosovo – estimated at around 300,000 – fled the province,
and, just like Serb refugees from Croatia and to a lesser degree
Bosnia, not many have returned or are likely to return to their
homes. According to the UNHCR, in 2017, around 72,000 refu-
gees from Kosovo lived in Serbia, but this figure does not take into
account those who emigrated to the west. Thousands of Roma,
Gorani and other non-Albanians also fled to Serbia ‘proper’.
49
‘United Nations Resolution 1244’, 10 June 1999, the UN Mission in Kosovo,
https://unmik.unmissions.org/united-nations-resolution-1244; cf. Calic,
‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 520.
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During the 1990s, Serbia received nearly 800,000 refugees

(c. 10 per cent of its population) from Bosnia and Croatia, not
counting 210,000 internally displaced persons from Kosovo.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands – many of them young and edu-
cated – permanently left Serbia during the 1990s seeking better
opportunities, usually in Western Europe and North America.
This trend continued after the war, as discussed in Introduction.
According to one study, between 1990 and 2017, over 700,000
citizens of Serbia emigrated, nearly 80 per cent of them to EU
countries.50 The impact of this ‘brain drain’ on Serbia’s society
and economy is considerable, but the consequences the emigra-
tion had on those left behind, notably parents, must not be for-
gotten either.51 Many of those who left did so in order to avoid
being drafted in the Yugoslav/Serbian armed forces. Thousands
of Serb men from Bosnia and Croatia fled to Serbia for similar
reasons, but they were sometimes forcibly mobilized and sent
back to the frontline. During the 1990s, Serbia’s authorities
failed to settle Bosnian and Croatian Serb refugees in Kosovo in
a poorly planned and even worse executed attempt to change the
ethnic structure of the predominantly ethnic Albanian province.
During the Kosovo war, nearly 10,000 people were killed and
another 3,500 (c.2,500 Kosovo Albanians) were still missing in
2015. Those whose death has been confirmed include around
8,350 Kosovo Albanians, 1,370 Serbs, 150 Roma and others. In
addition, three Chinese nationals died, employees of the embassy
50
Displaced People from Kosovo* in the Region – A Re-assessment of Interest to
Return, October 2017, www.unhcr.org/see/wp-content/uploads/sites/
57/2018/11/UNHCR_KOS_Needs-Assessment-Report_NA_English-1
.pdf; ‘Kosovo: Serbs’, Minority Rights Group, minorityrights.org/minorities/
serbs-3/; ‘UNHCR: Serbia’, www.unhcr.org/see/where-we-work/serbia#_
ftn1; O. Radonjić and M. Bobić, ‘Brain Drain Loses: A Case Study of Serbia’,
International Migration, 59:1 (2021), 5–20, 6.
51
I. Bajić-Hajduković, ‘Can You Run Away from Sorrow?’: Mothers Left Behind in
1990s Belgrade, Bloomington, IN, 2020.
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of China in Belgrade that was bombed by NATO, apparently due

to the most sophisticated military alliance in history using out-
dated maps. Two NATO soldiers/personnel were also killed. Of
around 7,120 ethnic Albanian civilian casualties, the vast majority
were killed by or died as a result of activities of Serbian/Yugoslav
forces and paramilitaries; in some cases, their bodies were buried in
mass graves near Belgrade, discovered after the war. The Serbian
casualties included 535 civilians killed by the KLA or as ‘collat-
eral damage’ of NATO air strikes (over 250 Albanian civilians also
died in NATO air raids); the rest were members of the Yugoslav
Army or Serbian police killed by the KLA or by NATO bombs.52
NATO’s war against Serbia has had major regional (Kosovo inde-
pendence) and global consequences, as humanitarian concerns
were placed above state sovereignty and international law, antic-
ipating the US-led military interventions in the Middle East and
Asia. Moreover, it seriously damaged the Russian-Western rela-
tions and enabled the rise of Vladimir Putin.
The Fall of Milošević

President Milošević survived the war more isolated than ever but
still firmly in power. During the Kosovo war, the ICTY indicted
him for genocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia and Kosovo.
Despite being in power in Serbia’s largest cities, the pro-Western
opposition was weakened due to internal divisions; its credibil-
ity was further damaged by the NATO intervention. However,
the growing social discontent – already during the war citizens of
some southern Serbian towns demonstrated against the war when
caskets of dead Serb soldiers began to arrive from Kosovo – and
financial support by the West provided the opposition with a badly
52
The figures are provided by the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade and
the Humanitarian Law Centre of Kosovo (www.hlc-rdc.org/?p=34890; www
.hlc-rdc.org/?p=28185).
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needed lifeline. There were rumours in the run up to September

2000 Yugoslav presidential elections that Ivan Stambolić, out of
politics since Milošević had ousted him in the late 1980s, would
be chosen by newly formed Democratic Opposition of Serbia as
their candidate. In August, Stambolić disappeared while jogging
in a Belgrade park; his body was found several years later. Many
feared Milošević would introduce a dictatorship, but contrary to
most predictions, he lost power in elections he had organized pre-
maturely in the hope that he would win. After initially refusing to
concede defeat, Milošević backed down when tens of thousands
of demonstrators stormed the federal parliament in Belgrade in
early October and the police and army refused to intervene.
Despite the authoritarianism of the Milošević era, the regime
had been repeatedly pressured and forced to grant conces-
sions – most notably in 1997 – and finally to concede defeat
in 2000.53 No other ‘competitive authoritarian regime’, out of
around 40 such governments around the world identified by
political scientists since the end of the Cold War, experienced as
frequent and as massive protests as did Serbia under Milošević.
Was Serbia’s democratic potential underestimated by polit-
ical analysts? Similarly, has the ability of the post-Milošević
democratic leadership to introduce long-lasting reforms been
overestimated?54
53
F. Bieber, ‘Popular Mobilization in the 1990s: Nationalism, Democracy and
the Slow Decline of the Milošević Regime’, in D. Djokić and J. Ker-Lindsay
(eds), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia, London, 2011, 161–75; D. Bujošević
and I. Radovanović, The Fall of Milošević: The October 5th Revolution, London,
2003; Thomas, Serbia under Milošević; N. Vladisavljević, ‘Competitive
Authoritarianism and Popular Protest: Evidence from Serbia under
Milošević’, International Political Science Review, 37:1 (2016), 36–50.
54
Vladisavljević, ‘Competitive Authoritarianism’, 37, ‘Media Discourse and the
Quality of Democracy in Serbia after Milošević’, Europe-Asia Studies, 72:1
(2020), 8–32, and Uspon i pad demokratije posle Petog oktobra, Belgrade, 2019;
cf. D. Pavlović (ed.), Razvoj demokratskih ustanova u Srbiji: Deset godina kasnije,
Belgrade, 2010.
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Hope and Disillusionment, 2000–2012

Milošević’s successor was Vojislav Koštunica (b. 1944), the can-
didate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, a broad coali-
tion consisting of 18 political parties (but without Drašković’s
Serbian Renewal Movement, which had anyway lost much of its
previously considerable support). Koštunica defeated Milošević
because he appealed to both conservative and liberal voters. He
also won because the election campaign was run by Zoran Djindjić
(1952–2003), a dynamic, able organizer and highly pragmatic pol-
itician, who had taken over the Democratic Party several years
earlier. Djindjić’s rise within the party followed Koštunica’s depar-
ture in 1992 to form a more conservative Democratic Party of
Serbia. Djindjić then successfully marginalized and took over from
Mićunović, the first president of the renewed Democratic Party.
Djindjić, as the newly appointed prime minister of Serbia,
and Koštunica as president of rump Yugoslavia (but with little
influence in Montenegro, let alone in NATO-occupied Kosovo)
soon clashed over the speed of reforms and the cooperation with
Western institutions, including the ICTY. The Djindjić govern-
ment extradited Milošević to the Tribunal on 28 June 2001 (the
reader will need no reminding why this was ironic) without much
protest from supporters of the former president. However, was a
chance to make a more radical break with the past after the fall of
Milošević missed due to Koštunica’s preference for gradual and
legal measures at time when revolutionary changes were needed?
‘The Serbian revolution of 5 October 2000 lasted three hours.
“Three glorious hours” needed to be “Three glorious days” (à la
28–30 June 1830 France), to complete the break with the Ancien
Régime’, historian Andrej Mitrović wrote somewhat propheti-
cally shortly after Serbia’s October revolution.55
55
‘Preseci, prekidi, prevrati i preokreti: Beleška o istoriji Srbije povodom 5.
oktobra 2000’, Nova Srpska politička misao. Posebno izdanje 1: Srbija posle
Miloševića, Belgrade, 2001, 207–16.
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figure 8.6 Vojislav Koštunica (left) and Zoran Djindjić, celebrating

election victory, Belgrade, 27 September 2000. (Photo by SHONE/
Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, veterans of the officially disbanded KLA remained

active in Serbia’s Preševo valley, a mainly Albanian-populated
region bordering Kosovo. An insurgency broke out, but the fight-
ing never escalated, because the number of ethnic Albanians in
the valley was much smaller than in Kosovo (around 70,000),
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because they lacked international support, and because this time

Belgrade showed restraint and willingness to negotiate and allow
external arbitration. Sporadic conflict continued for nearly two
years, claiming around 100 lives on both sides. Most of 12,500
displaced civilians returned to their homes following the end of
the conflict in summer 2001, when ethnic Albanians surrendered
weapons. Despite continued tensions, the peace has been main-
tained in what was a rare successful case of conflict resolution.56
Several months earlier, ethnic Albanian guerrillas, including
former KLA members, rebelled in (now North) Macedonia.
They demanded a greater autonomy, if not independence for
mainly Albanian-populated western parts of this former-Yugoslav
republic. Armed conflict broke out, claiming over 200 lives and
temporarily displacing around 100,000 people. An EU–US
brokered peace agreement, granting Macedonia’s Albanians a
greater autonomy, was signed in Ohrid in August 2001.57 Amidst
the Serb–Albanian and Macedonian–Albanian conflicts, hardly
anyone noticed that Serbia and North Macedonia enjoyed cor-
dial neighbourly relations, which further improved in May 2022
following the resolution of the dispute over the status of the
Macedonian Orthodox Church. The reader will also recall that
present-day North Macedonia became part of Serbia following
the 1912–13 Balkan wars; unlike Kosovo, however, it had been
fully detached from Serbia during the restoration of Yugoslavia as
a socialist federation at the end of the Second World War.
Then Zoran Djindjić was assassinated in March 2003. Behind
the prime minister’s assassination was a former officer in the
Special Operations Unit of the Serbian interior ministry, who had
also once been a member of the French Foreign Legion and who
kept close links to one of Serbia’s most powerful criminal gangs.
56
J. Baćević et al., The Conflict and Its Aftermath in South Serbia: Social and Ethnic
Relations, Agency and Belonging in Preševo and Bujanovac, Belgrade, 2011.
57
Calic, ‘Yugoslavia’s Wars’, 520.
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Djindjić’s reformist agenda was opposed by his conservative polit-

ical opponents, but he had been especially perceived as a threat
by members of organized crime and suspected war criminals. (In
some cases, lines between these groups were blurred.)58 During a
clampdown on those suspected of being involved in the assassina-
tion, information about the fate of Stambolić was finally obtained
and his dead body recovered in a forest north of Belgrade. It
transpired he had been murdered by the same people involved in
Djindjić’s assassination.
Post-Djindjić Serbia faced an uncertain future, but democratic
institutions survived. Boris Tadić (b. 1958), Djindjić’s full-time suc-
cessor as the leader of the Democratic Party, became Serbia’s new
president in June 2004. He narrowly defeated Tomislav Nikolić
(b. 1952), who had taken over the Radical Party as caretaker after
Šešelj had the previous year voluntarily surrendered himself to
the ICTY, which had indicted him for inciting nationalist hatred
towards non-Serbs and for the role of his paramilitaries in the
wars in Croatia and Bosnia. In December 2003, Koštunica had
been elected the prime minister of Serbia. His coalition govern-
ment, which included the Serbian Renewal Movement and two
smaller parties, was in constant conflict with the Democratic
Party. It survived with support from Milošević’s Socialists, who had
re-emerged under the leadership of Ivica Dačić (b. 1966). Although
critics focused on the political instability, in retrospect this period
showed a reasonable degree of democratic resilience and plurality.
A conservative-centrist prime minister and a liberal, democratic
president represented two strongest political options at the time,
which was reminiscent of some west European countries.
In the meanwhile, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been
renamed Serbia and Montenegro in February 2003, but the loose
union did not survive for long. Montenegro declared independence
58
M. Vasić, Atentat na Zorana, Belgrade, 2005.
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in May 2006, despite a strong unionist vote. Serbia thus became

an independent country because all the other republics left the
former-Yugoslav federation. Later that year, Belgrade joined the
Partnership for Peace with NATO. Then in February 2008, Kosovo
unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, with the support
from the most powerful western countries. Serbia refused to rec-
ognize the secession of Kosovo, which in 2022 awaited recognition
from a number of other countries, including Russia, China and five
EU member states. Although Kosovo has been able to join some
international organizations and for all intents and purposes it is an
independent country, it still awaited membership in the UN at the
time this book was completed.59
The secession of Kosovo did not seem to undermine the
pro-western Democratic Party, which in May 2008 won parliamen-
tary elections with 102 mandates, ahead of the Radicals (78 seats)
and Koštunica’s party, which fell to just 30 seats. The Democrats
formed a coalition government with the Socialists, who, together
with two small, populist parties, secured 20 seats in the new parlia-
ment. This represented a remarkable comeback for Milošević’s for-
mer party, which never formally distanced itself from its founder.
The only federal republic of Tito’s Yugoslavia that had been
federalized, Serbia is thus also the sole Yugoslav successor state
that has experienced an internationally recognized secession of a
part of its territory. Many Serbs believe they have been victims of
an unfair and biased international community that has penalized
them for refusing to toe the line.60 Apart from Milošević, several
59
J. Ker-Lindsay, Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans, London,
2009; G. Visoka, Acting Like a State: Kosovo and the Everyday Making of
Statehood, London, 2021.
60
M. Milanović, ‘The Impact of the ICTY on the Former Yugoslavia: An
Anticipatory Post-Mortem’, American Journal of International Law, 110:2
(April 2016), 233–59. A special court dealing with crimes committed against
Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo was established at the Hague
in 2016.
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other Serb leaders and generals have ended up at the ICTY,

including, most notably, former Bosnian Serb president Karadžić,
who was arrested and extradited to the ICTY in July 2008, after
more than a decade in hiding; and General Mladić, who was at
last apprehended in May 2011, after which he too had been extra-
dited to the Hague. Serbia’s democratic government played a key
role in these arrests and extraditions. Both men were convicted of
genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Bosnia and
both will spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Later that year, the European Commission recommended
that Serbia’s bid to join the European Union be accelerated. On
1 March 2012, the country received a full EU candidate status,
three years after submitting an application to join the Union, but
there was a sense that the prospects of actually joining remained
remote.
Serbia in a Populist World, 2012–22

Despite considerable improvements in the standard of living, a
large number of people still lived on the edge of poverty as Serbia
entered the second post-Milošević decade. Lack of EU prospects,
in addition to problematic privatization and accusations of cor-
ruption, were the other key reasons for the electorate’s rejection
of Boris Tadić and the Democratic Party in presidential and par-
liamentary elections of April–May 2012. In what was effectively
a reversed election result, Nikolić narrowly defeated Tadić in the
second round of presidential elections. He won as the leader of a
more moderate Serbian Progressive Party, the mainstream of the
Radical Party that had previously broken away under Nikolić’s
leadership. Several other former Radicals, including, after ini-
tial hesitation, former information minister Aleksandar Vučić
(b. 1970), joined the Progressives, as did many Radical voters.
However, the decisive vote may have come from Tadić’s disil-
lusioned supporters who either cast a protest vote for Nikolić or
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boycotted the elections. The Progressives emerged as the strong-

est party with 73 mandates, to the Democrats’ 67. The Socialists,
who won 44 seats, enabled the Progressives to form a coalition
government. Their award was the premiership for Dačić.
It soon became clear that Vučić as deputy prime minister
imposed himself as Serbia’s dominant political figure. Initially
underestimated by his rivals, within several years he marginalized
Dačić and sent Nikolić to political retirement. In 2014, Vučić was
elected prime minister, and three years later he moved to the posi-
tion of president of Serbia. His chosen successor as prime minis-
ter was Ana Brnabić (b. 1975) – the first female premier of Serbia
and an ethnic Croat is also the first openly gay major politician
in the country’s history. At the time a non-party figure, Brnabić
became a senior member of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party.
The parliamentary and local elections of June 2020, organized
amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, witnessed a de facto return to a
single-party system in Serbia, following a resounding victory by
the Progressives. Most democratic opposition leaders boycotted
the elections. The only real opposition in the National Assembly
was represented by a small ethnic-Albanian party from the Preševo
valley, whose three deputies entered the parliament thanks to an
electoral law that guarantees representation of ethnic minorities.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party continued with internal bick-
ering and divisions. Tadić left to form yet another Democrats’
‘successor party’. One of his successors, Dragan Djilas (b. 1967),
subsequently left the party to focus on business, but then returned
to politics to, so far, unsuccessfully unite opposition through his
new centre-left party. As of late 2022, the Democratic Party,
once the strongest pro-democracy force in Serbia, was on the
edge of political irrelevance. The same could be said for Serbia’s
opposition scene in general. Several grassroot initiatives by cit-
izens concerned about the government’s disregard for the envi-
ronment and urban planning offered arguably the best chance
for the opposition. They were supported by both the main
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opposition parties and prominent non-party individuals, includ-

ing Bishop Grigorije (b. 1967; since 2018 head of the Serbian
Orthodox Church eparchy in Germany), whose public criticism
of the regime and progressive views led to speculations that he
might be a suitable candidate to lead the opposition against Vučić.
President Vučić suffered his first significant domestic defeat just
months before presidential elections of April 2022. In December
2021, tens of thousands of demonstrators blocked major roads
forcing the government to put on hold a controversial plan to
allow Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian mining company, to extract
lithium in western Serbia, which would have had a devastating
effect on the environment. Defeating the powerful president will
not be easy though. The opposition groups arguably stood a bet-
ter chance at local level, but many Serbian towns remained under
control of corrupt politicians with links to the ruling party and
frequently also to organized crime.
The year 2012 thus marked a turn for the worse, after a dec-
ade of democratic promise. Despite all the setbacks, including the
assassination of the prime minister, the 2001–12 period was one
of important changes for the better. During the subsequent dec-
ade, however, Serbia returned to a form of populist authoritari-
anism reminiscent in some ways of neighbouring Hungary. The
difference this time was that unlike Milošević, Vučić has broadly
enjoyed international support, mainly, it would seem, because he
is seen as someone who has stabilized a potentially volatile region;
any democratic deficiencies of his regime (and of other regimes in
the region) are of secondary importance from the western point
of view.61 As of late 2022, numerous political scandals, accusations
of corruption and media control and censorship did not seem to
have significantly weakened the Serbian regime.
Another reason for the support that Vučić apparently enjoys in
the west, it is frequently speculated, could be due to promises he
61
F. Bieber, The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans, London, 2020.
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may have made regarding the ongoing dispute over Kosovo (but
which he had apparently managed to avoid or perhaps postpone
fulfilling). Some sort of normalization will be necessary and benefi-
cial to both peoples and to the whole region. Quite apart from any-
thing else, it would be beneficial to the local population, Albanian
and Serb alike, as the impasse has led to high levels of crime and
corruption. In January 2018, Oliver Ivanović, a moderate Kosovo
Serb leader unpopular in Belgrade and among Kosovo Albanian
and Serb criminals and extremists, was assassinated; the murder
remained unresolved in late 2022. While neither side appeared
ready to compromise, Serb and Albanian political leaders will have
to talk eventually and it remains to be seen whether a rapproche-
ment will be reached. Any plans that Vučić and Thaçi may have
had for reconciliation through border alteration seemed dead in
late 2022. Which is not to say that similar plans may not yet reap-
pear, and not least because Kosovo’s prime minister Albin Kurti
(b. 1975) has been on the record as being in favour of the unifica-
tion of Kosovo with Albania.
One of the main differences between Milošević and Vučić is,
therefore, that the latter has reached his political zenith in a more
favourable international climate for populist politicians. Milošević
was in power in the years of democratic hope across Europe that
followed the end of the Cold War. His promotion of violent eth-
nic nationalism and apparent unwillingness to fully abandon his old
communist ideology did much harm to Serbia and the region. Even
though Milošević too had emerged during revolutionary changes of
the late 1980s, Serbia’s 1989 took place in historically specific cir-
cumstances – including that Yugoslavia was not in the Soviet bloc.
By contrast, even the EU and, between 2016 and 2020, the US, have
shown in recent years that they are not immune to populism and
authoritarianism, and so Vučić’s regime fits more easily within the
modern global political trends. The key difference is, however, the
absence of war. For all its political and economic problems, Serbia is
no longer at war or bent on starting one.
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The legacy of the recent past and denial – by no means universal

but widespread – in Serbia and among Serbs that terrible crimes
had been committed by their co-nationals remain serious obsta-
cles to Serbian society moving forward. How should reckoning
with the past be done, whether foreign models can be imported,
should Serbia be singled out as a society that refuses to come to
terms with its past and can anything be done while the country
remains unlikely to join the EU in a near future are questions that
await answers, despite a growing body of literature on transitional
justice and reconciliation.62
It might be helpful, to begin with, to study Serbia’s pre-1991
past in order to understand its current predicament. This must be
done, however, through scholarly debate and critical discussion,
which is unfortunately largely lacking. Recent years saw in Serbia
attempts, frequently supported by the state, to further romanti-
cize the nation’s history (in the process of moving away from the
Yugoslav and communist pasts) and to create new official narra-
tives through school textbooks, TV documentaries, series, films,
newly built monuments and museum exhibitions.
Controversies and heated arguments surrounding events in
occupied Serbia and Yugoslavia during the Second World War
62
See, for example, L. David, The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating
Memory in the Name of Human Rights, Cambridge, 2020; J. Dragović-
Soso, ‘Justice and Apology in the Aftermath of War and Mass Crime:
Contemporary Serbia and the German Model’, History & Memory, 34:1
(2022), 69–99; F. Ejdus, Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety
over Kosovo’s Secession, London, 2020; E. D. Gordy, Guilt, Responsibility, and
Denial: The Past at Stake in Post-Milošević Serbia, Philadelphia, PA, 2013; J.
Obradović-Wochnik, Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans: Narratives
of Denial in Post-Conflict Serbia, London, 2013; St. K. Pavlowitch, ‘Letter to
the organisers of the conference’, in Duijzings et al. (eds), Kosovo-Kosova, op.
cit., 213–15; V. Perica, ‘All Victims Matter. Reconciliation of the Balkan
Faiths and Peoples: An Assessment of Recent Progress’, Occasional Papers on
Religion in Eastern Europe, 40:10 (2020), https://digitalcommons.georgefox
.edu/ree/vol40/iss10/2; J. Subotić, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the
Balkans, Ithaca, NY, 2009.
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continue among scholars (not all of whom are historians) and in

the former-Yugoslav public space. Revisionism, a necessary pre-
condition for historical scholarship, has become a byword for
misuse of history by authors seemingly seeking to challenge old
official narratives, but in reality offering apologias for collabora-
tors and war criminals. Paradoxically, although not surprisingly,
the tendency is to rehabilitate ‘our side’, but to continue to essen-
tially employ the old historiographical interpretations concern-
ing ‘others’. In Serbia, a recent trend has been to rehabilitate or
call for the rehabilitation of various anti-communist figures from
the Second World War era, from members of the royal family
and General Mihailović to open collaborators such as Nedić and
Ljotić; these attempts have received plenty of media attention but
have had a mixed success. Unlike elsewhere in Eastern Europe,
these were not necessarily state-led, well-planned and coordi-
nated projects but rather came as a result of a confusing mix of
ad hoc politics, individual initiatives by amateur and professional
historians, political activists and circles close to the Orthodox
Church.63 A much needed response by scholars opposed to this
unfortunate trend has been sometimes undermined by their own
often uncritical reading of old historiography. Similar problems
emerged in relation to reinterpreting the First World War during
the centenary commemorations, with presentist concerns under-
mining in some cases the work of even best historians – across
former-Yugoslavia and abroad. The history debates were not
limited to academic circles. For example, three plays dealing with
63
J. Djureinović, The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary
Serbia: Collaboration, Resistance and Retribution, London, 2020; cf. M.
Samardžić et al. (eds), Politička upotreba prošlosti: O istorijskom revizionizmu
na postjugoslovenskom prostoru, Novi Sad, 2013; T. Pavasović Trošt, ‘Ruptures
and Continuities in Nationhood Narratives: Reconstructing the Nation
through History Textbooks in Serbia and Croatia’, Nations and Nationalism,
24:3 (2018), 716–40.
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the Sarajevo assassination from different ideological angles were

staged in Belgrade in 2014.64
As already discussed, Serbia, like the rest of the Balkans, is
experiencing alarmingly high levels of emigration, mostly to the
West, often of young and well-educated. This has been going on
since 1991, but has intensified in recent years, as visa liberaliza-
tion has made it easier to travel and work abroad – at least prior
to the Covid-19 pandemic. The arrival of Middle Eastern and
African refugees in 2015–16, who seek to reach western Europe
through the ‘Balkan route’, presented Serbia with an opportunity
to encourage at least some to stay and settle, for example, in its
almost depopulated villages. Most wanted to continue for more
prosperous countries of the European Union, but it is possible
that some might remain. Much will depend on whether anti-
migrant incidents organized by far-right groups prevail after an
initial, surprisingly warm reception of migrants by Serbia. As this
book has shown, Serbia is a society created by migrations and
through constant reinvention of its identity through the move-
ment of people. It is, therefore, in its tradition to receive migrants
and give them every opportunity to settle, should they wish so.
Even after the secession of Kosovo, Serbia remains one of
the most multinational and multicultural states in the region.
Slightly over 80 per cent of its population declares as Serb, but
there remain large ethnic Hungarian, Bosniak/Muslim, Croat and
Albanian minorities, not to mention Roma, Vlachs and small, but
historically established Jewish, Slovak and Ruthenian communi-
ties. It is to be hoped that in a near future such diversity will be
recognized and celebrated more broadly. Current signs, as Serbia
64
T. S. Andersen and I. Dedović, ‘Answering Back to Presumed Accusations:
Serbian First World War Memories and the Question of Historical
Responsibility’, in T. S. Andersen and B. Törnquist-Plewa (eds.), The Twentieth
Century in European Memory: Transcultural Mediation and Reception, Leiden, 2017,
83–103; V. Zorić, ‘A Wandering Bullet: Staging the Sarajevo Assassination’,
Transcultural Studies, 11:2 (2016), 183–96.
525
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figure 8.7 President Aleksandar Vučić walks in front of a 23-metre-tall

statue to Grand Župan Stefan Nemanja unveiled in Belgrade on 27 January
2021 (St Sava Day) (Andrej Isakovic/AFP via Getty Images). Seen in the
background is the former train station, a late nineteenth-century building
symbolic of the emergence of the modern Serbian nation state. It was initially
meant to be turned into a museum of Serbian medieval history, but when
it became clear that there were not enough artefacts to fill the building,
ad ecision was made to move the Museum of Nikola Tesla there instead.
Stefan Nemanja probably never visited Belgrade – his twelfth-century realm
did not extend as far north. Tesla, a Serbian-American scientist and inventor
born in the Habsburg Croatian Military Border, had at least visited the city
once, in June 1892, when he arrived by train from Budapest
under Vučić searches to redefine its identity through a highly

romanticized and frequently nationalist-kitschy interpretations of
its past, are not encouraging. However, this could well change in
future, as Serbia emerges from the world currently shaped by the
pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 that Serbia was first
hit by revelations of sexual abuse in its film industry. Similar rev-
elations were then made against prominent politicians of abuse of
young and in some cases teenage women in exchange of securing
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employment and expensive gifts. Traditionally a patriarchal soci-

ety, Serbia has thus experienced its own ‘#MeToo’ moment not
long after it had first started in the United States and other west-
ern societies. It remains to be seen whether the position of women
will improve because of a greater awareness in the public space of
the abuse of women by men in positions of power. Sadly, in Serbia
and the Balkans, like everywhere else it would seem, the long peri-
ods of lockdown in 2020–21 have led to an increase in domestic
violence and abuse, with girls and women being the principal vic-
tims. Also mirroring developments elsewhere, according to a UN
report of late 2020, employed women in Serbia were more likely
to lose their jobs than men because of the pandemic.65
Most Croatian Serb refugees have not returned to Croatia,
which in 2013 became the last (as of 2022) country to join the
EU. By 2011, around 133,000 Serbs formally returned to Croatia,
but less than one half actually chose to stay. According to the
2021 population census, less than 124,000 Serbs lived in Croatia
(3.2 per cent of the total population, down from 580,000/12.2 per
cent in 1991).66 Conciliatory gestures by Pupovac and his sup-
porters have been frequently undermined by nationalist rhetoric
and unofficial rehabilitation of convicted war criminals from the
1990s war by both Belgrade and Zagreb.
Bosnia remains fragile. Nationalist parties continue to enjoy
the majority support among all three ethnic groups there. In
some ways, the Republika Srpska has replaced Serbia as the main
Balkan pariah. Karadžić’s wartime opponent and once a moder-
ate social-democrat and a member of Ante Marković’s Reformist
Party, Milorad Dodik (b. 1959) has been in power in the Bosnian
65
‘Employed women in Serbia more likely to have lost jobs than men during
the coronavirus pandemic, new study reveals’, 24 November 2020, https://
eeca.unfpa.org/en/news/employed-women-serbia-more-likely-have-lost-
jobs-men-during-coronavirus-pandemic-new-study.
66
Opačić, ‘Otpis stanovništva’ and ‘Još manje manjina’, Novosti (Zagreb), 30
Sept 2022.
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Serb entity almost continuously since the end of the war. Dodik’s
pro-western credentials had once facilitated his political rise, but
nationalism and charges of corruption have come to characterize
his leadership. Dodik, an ally of Vladimir Putin, has repeatedly
threatened to secede the Serb part from Bosnia, especially should
Sarajevo push for the centralization through a revision of the
Dayton agreement, which led in early 2022 to US-imposed sanc-
tions on him and his closest associates. The Bosniak leadership on
the other hand is probably aware of the instability a centralization
would bring when opposed by a large number of people. Having
become in 2013 for the first time since censuses are held the major-
ity population in Bosnia (with just over 50 per cent), the Bosniaks
may find it hard to resist trying to establish a more unitary state.
It remains to be seen whether this would stabilize or, as appears
more likely, destabilize the country, especially as both the Serbs
and the Croats would almost certainly oppose such development.
In late 2019, Montenegrin president Djukanović (in power, de
jure or de facto since the late 1980s) attempted to nationalize
religious sites belonging to the Serbian Orthodox Church. This
led to tens of thousands of Montenegrins, including those who
do not necessarily identify as Serbs, joining anti-government
protests. The conflict between the state and church, which in its
essence is about the question whether Montenegrins are in fact
Serbs or not, and more broadly is part of a state–church disagree-
ment (both in Serbia and in Montenegro) on how the Kosovo
issue should be resolved, may not be over even after the pro-
church opposition coalition won parliamentary elections in late
August 2020. The new government was apparently comprised of
a majority of politicians with a Montenegrin Serb identity, but
internal divisions nevertheless existed over the level of coop-
eration with Belgrade. This took place before the death from
Covid-19 of Metropolitan Amfilohije, a long-serving leader of
the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro and an important
political player as well.
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In Spring 2021, in relative terms, Serbia was behind only the

UK in number of people who had been vaccinated against the
Covid-19 virus. Serbia was also among the first countries to begin
the vaccination of its nearly 5,000 ‘migrant’ population. This was
thanks to Belgrade receiving large quantities of the Chinese vac-
cine, as one of the first European countries, alongside Hungary,
to be on the Chinese ‘health silk road’. Around this time, it was
announced that Serbia will start manufacturing the Russian vac-
cine as well. Most Covid-related restrictions were lifted and,
unlike in many other European countries, sport and music events
were held in front of live audiences. Ever the populist, Vučić
placed himself at the centre of the country’s ‘vaccess’, to coin a
term, while conveniently ignoring the fact that rates of infection
and death from Covid-19 remained high, relatively speaking,
and continued to rise in late 2021 and early 2022. Belgrade took
advantage of its almost uniquely good relations with both China
and Russia and key EU member states such as Germany (Serbia’s
main economic partner, with nearly €5,3 billion worth of trade
between the two countries in 2021, ahead of China (€3,6 bn), Italy
(€3,4bn) and Russia (€1,9bn)), to secure large quantities of the
vaccine. In March 2021, the Serbian authorities opened the coun-
try’s borders and offered free vaccines to citizens of neighbouring
countries. Tens of thousands of Bosnians, Croats, Macedonians,
Montenegrins and even a few Albanians (from Albania, not
Kosovo, that refused the offer of help) travelled to Serbia to get
vaccinated. Although the scheme has been funded by Serbian tax-
payers, there have been remarkably few complaints about such an
act of generosity. This might be partly because of the authoritar-
ian nature of the regime, which allows little space for opposition,
but it appears that most people seemed genuinely happy to have
been able to host and help their neighbours. It is not unusual for
human societies to experience a rise in solidarity during extraordi-
nary times such has been the pandemic. Similar levels of regional
empathy and support had been on display during devastating
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floods in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia in 2014 and following a series

of earthquakes that hit Croatia in 2020.
Following the early days of the vaccine enthusiasm, things
changed. As 2021 ended, less than 50 per cent of Serbia’s popu-
lation was vaccinated (which was still higher than in most neigh-
bouring countries). Many seemed unconvinced in benefits of the
vaccination and, like elsewhere, conspiracy theories about Covid-
19 spread. After initially implementing tough lockdown meas-
ures, the authorities completely mismanaged the situation, and
so by late 2021, no clear Covid-related measures were in place or
were observed at any rate. The decision by the Australian author-
ities to cancel Novak Djoković’s visa and deport him – apparently
not so much because he was not vaccinated against Covid-19, but
because his potential participation in the Australian Open ten-
nis tournament (where he was a nine-times defending champion)
might give a boost to an ‘anti-vaccination lobby’ – dominated
international news in early January 2022. The whole controversy
presented in a nutshell Serbia’s recent international predicament
and how many Serbs understand it. It brought back the narrative,
promoted by Djoković’s family and mainstream media and politi-
cians, of Serbs being punished by the West for choosing freedom
and refusing to toe the line. A narrative that largely ignored that
Djoković was, by his own admission, in breach of self-isolation
rules in Serbia following his infection from Covid-19. Not that
the Australian government and much of western media covered
themselves in glory. The decision over Djoković was likely polit-
ically motivated, and the whole fiasco revealed to the world a
harsh and sometimes inhumane treatment of refugees trying to
enter the country, which major media outlets largely ignored.
Moreover, nobody seemed to notice that even if Djoković had
been vaccinated by a Chinese or Russian vaccine – as many of his
compatriots – he would still likely be treated the same way; these
vaccines are accepted by the World Health Organization, but not
by most western countries.
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figure 8.8 Festival goers leave after day three of the Exit Festival at the
Petrovaradin Fortress, Novi Sad, 11 July 2021 (Photo: Srdjan Stevanović/
Getty Images)
As this book was going to production, Russia invaded Ukraine.

In short term, this posed both an opportunity and a serious chal-
lenge for President Vučić and his government. Domestically, the
war in Ukraine probably helped Vučić, who was able to marginal-
ize a growing opposition over the Rio Tinto controversy, by pre-
senting himself as a sole leader who could keep the country safe.
He won 58.6 per cent of the vote in presidential elections of early
April 2022 to secure a second term in office (the main opposi-
tion candidate received 18.4 per cent of the vote). In the parlia-
mentary elections, held at the same time, the government list also
won convincingly, securing 44 per cent of the vote, or 120 out of
250 seats. In the aftermath of the elections, it seemed as if Vučić
might seek new coalition partners among pro-western opposi-
tion parties, at least in Belgrade, where local election results were
inconclusive at the time of writing. Should this happen, it would
mean, for the time being at least, an end of Vučić’s cohabitation
with the pro-Russian Socialist Party and would likely signal a shift
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in foreign policy. Despite formally professing neutrality, Serbia

joined the condemnation of Russia’s aggression in the UN. At the
time of writing, Belgrade was under increasing pressure by the EU
and the USA to introduce sanctions against Russia. Air Serbia (for-
merly the Yugoslav Airlines) was one of the few remaining airlines
that continued to fly to Russia. By late November 2022, perhaps
as many as 100,000 Russians, including opponents of President
Putin, and nearly 23,000 Ukrainians, moved to Serbia; over 1,000
Russian-owned companies were registered in Serbia after the war
broke out. Even if Serbia formally joins the anti-Russian camp,
informal contacts with Russia would probably remain and in any
case, Belgrade will likely maintain its close ties with China. In
terms of foreign policy, Vučić faced the most difficult period yet,
as he sought ways to maintain a difficult balancing act between the
West and Russia/East.67
Any sanctions by Serbia against Russia would be largely sym-
bolic, in the sense that they would not harm Russia’s economy,
but in politics symbols matter. Russia has been Serbia’s main ally
in the ongoing international dispute over the status of Kosovo,
as well as its main energy supplier. Under President Biden, the
United States took a more active role in the Kosovo–Serbia dis-
pute; the Russian invasion of Ukraine intensified Washington’s
efforts to bring Belgrade and Priština back to the negotiating
table, and in the process neutralize Russia’s influence in the
region. (The US sanctions on Dodik and his associates in the
Republika Srpska should be understood in this context as well.)
67
On 26 April, Vučić received Karen Donfried, the US Assistant Secretary
of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, before hosting, later that day,
Leonid Slutsky, the Chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on
International Affairs. Serbian media reported that Donfried, whose tour of
the Balkans was a clear sign of a renewed US diplomatic engagement with
the region, offered financial incentives and support in Serbia’s quest for
EU membership in exchange for Belgrade introducing sanctions on Russia.
Slutsky and Vučić reportedly discussed the Kremlin’s view of the war as well
as the continuation of Russian gas supplies to Serbia.
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Meanwhile, the EU signalled to Serbia in no uncertain terms that

it needed to demonstrate a commitment to European values if
it wanted to join the Union. However, so long as the prospect
of EU membership remained distant, any changes in Belgrade’s
foreign policy would be carried out under external pressure and
would likely strengthen anti-western sentiments in the country.
With the war in Ukraine, the (symbolic) borders of Europe have
shifted further east. While a speedy accession of Ukraine into
the EU appears unrealistic, the Union could in theory admit
Serbia and the other remaining non-EU Balkan countries,
though at the time of writing it seemed unlikely Brussels would
initiate such a move. Either way, Serbia remains an integral part
of wider European history, at the crossroads of regions, empires
and ideologies – a borderland forged through migration, where
the East-West dichotomy gets unsettled and redefined in differ-
ent ways.
It has been said that after ‘corona’, nothing will be the same
again, and the new Cold War has further transformed the world
in which we live. Could Serbia’s search for a new identity, after
Yugoslavia, dictatorship, communism and the twentieth-century
wars, take a positive turn following the early twenty-first century
challenges? Will the country be able to revive the democratic
potential of the early century or will the slide to illiberalism and
ethnic nationalism continue? Is it too much to hope for a genu-
ine normalization and reconciliation within Serbia and between
Serbia and its neighbours and the West? There was little reason
in 2022 to approach any of these questions with much optimism,
but as always only time will tell. As this book has shown, Serbia’s
history has been anything but predictable.
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FURTHER READING
Most sources I have consulted while researching and writing

this book are referred to in the footnotes. What follows is
a personal, brief list of works in English intended for read-
ers who may wish to explore Serbia’s distant and recent his-
tory further, in some cases in interpretations that differ from
my own.
General Works
Calic, M.-J, A History of Yugoslavia, transl. from German by
D. Geyer, West Lafayette, IN, 2019
Calic, M.-J, The Great Cauldron: A History of Southeastern Europe,
transl. from German by E. Janik, Cambridge, MA, 2019
Ćirković, S. M, The Serbs, transl. from Serbian by V. Tošić, Oxford,
2004
Connelly, J, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe,
Princeton, NJ, 2020
Djokić, D. (ed.), Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992,
London, 2003
Djokić, D. and J. Ker-Lindsay (eds), New Perspectives on Yugoslavia:
Key Issues and Controversies, London, 2011
Lampe, J. R, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country,
Cambridge, 1996
Lampe J. R. and U. Brunnbauer (eds), The Routledge Handbook of
Balkan and Southeast European History, London, 2020
Pavlowitch, St. K, A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945, London, 1999
Pavlowitch, St. K, Serbia: The History behind the Name, London, 2002
Petrovich, M. B, A History of Modern Serbia, 1804–1918, 2 vols,
New York, 1976
534
Further Reading
Stavrianos, L. S, The Balkans since 1453, London, 2000 (first publ.

1958)
Stoianovich, T, Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe, Armonk,
NY, 1994
Vujačić, V, Reexamining the ‘Serbian Exceptionalism’ Thesis, Berkeley,
CA, 2004, https://iseees.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2004_03-
vuja.pdf
Culture
Ivić, P. (ed.), The History of Serbian Culture, 2nd edn, Belgrade, 1999
Marko the Prince: Serbo-Croat Heroic Songs, transl. by
A. Pennington and P. Levi, with introduction and notes by
S. Koljević, London, 1984
Milojković-Djurić, J, Tradition and Avant-Garde: The Arts in Serbian
Culture between the Two World Wars, Boulder, CO, 1984
Milutinović, Z, Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Ser-
bian Culture, Amsterdam, 2011
Norris, D. A, Haunted Serbia: Representations of History and War in the
Literary Imagination, Abingdon, 2016
The Serbian Epic Ballads: An Anthology, transl. by G. N. W. Locke,
with a foreword by M. Heppell, London, 2002
Simić, C. (ed./transl.), The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian
Poetry, Saint Paul, MN, 1992
Sudar, V, Portrait of the Artist as a Political Dissident: The Life and Work
of Aleksandar Petrović, Chicago, 2013
Thompson, M, Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kiš, Ithaca, NY, 2013
Wachtel, A. B, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and
Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford, CA, 1998
Memoirs and Personal Accounts

Djilas, M, Memoir of a Revolutionary, transl. by D. Willen, New York,
1973
Djilas, M, Wartime, transl. by M. B. Petrovich, New York, 1977
535
Further Reading
Djilas, M, Rise and Fall, transl. by J. Loud, San Diego, 1985

Goldsworthy, V, Chernobyl Strawberries, London, 2005
Seierstad, Å, With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia,
transl. by S. Kartvedt, London, 2005
Tešanović, J, Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade, intro-
duction by T. Judah, San Francisco, 2001
Medieval History (up to 1459)

Curta, F, Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages (500–1300), 2 vols, Leiden,
2019
Emmert, T. A, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389, Boulder, CO, 1990
Fine Jr, J. V. A, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the
Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century, Ann Arbor, MI, 1991
Fine Jr, J. V. A, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the
Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest, Ann Arbor, MI, 1994
Obolensky, D, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–
1453, London, 1971
Obolensky, D, ‘Sava of Serbia’, Six Byzantine Portraits, Oxford, 1988,
115–72
Ostrogorsky, G, History of the Byzantine State, transl. from German
by J. Hussey, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1968
Stanković, V (ed.), The Balkans and the Byzantine World before and after
the Captures of Constantinople, 1204 and 1453, Lanham, MD, 2016
Early Modern Period (up to c.1800)

Amedoski, D, S. Aslantaş and S. Rudić (eds), Belgrade, 1521–1867,
Belgrade, 2018
Aslantaş, S. and S. Rudić (eds), State and Society in the Balkans before
and after [the] Establishment of Ottoman Rule, Belgrade, 2017
Kitromilides, P. M. (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion in the Orthodox
World, Oxford, 2016
Krstić, T, Contested Conversion to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change
in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Stanford, CA, 2011
536
Further Reading
Long Nineteenth Century (c.1788–1914)

Armour, I. D, Apple of Discord: The ‘Hungarian Factor’ in Austro-
Serbian Relations, 1867–1881, West Lafayette, IN, 2014
Mackenzie, D, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, 1875–1878, Ithaca,
NY, 1967
MacLellan, W. D, Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Social-
ism, Princeton, NJ, 1964
Palairet, M, The Balkan Economies, c. 1800–1914: Evolution without
Development, Cambridge, 1997
Pavlowitch, St. K, ‘Society in Serbia, 1791–1830’, in R. Clogg (ed.),
Balkan Society in the Age of Greek Independence, London, 1981, 137–56
Stoianovich, T, ‘The Pattern of Serbian Intellectual Evolution,
1830–1880’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1:3 (1959),
242–72
Stokes, G, Legitimacy through Liberalism: Vladimir Jovanović and the
Transformation of Serbian Politics, Seattle, WA, 1975
Stokes, G, Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in
Nineteenth-Century Serbia, Durham, NC, 1990
Wilson, D, Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 1787–1864: Lit-
eracy, Literature and National Independence in Serbia, Oxford, 1970
The First World War

Cornwall, M, ‘Serbia’, in K. Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914,
London, 1995, 55–96
Dedijer, V, The Road to Sarajevo, New York, 1966
Gumz, J. E, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia,
1914–1918, Cambridge, 2009
Mitrović, A, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–1918, London, 2007
Interwar Period
Banac, I, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics,
Ithaca, NY, 1984
537
Further Reading
Babović, J, Metropolitan Belgrade: Culture and Class in Interwar Yugo-

slavia, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018
Djilas, A, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revo-
lution, 1919–1953, Cambridge, MA, 1991
Djokić, D, Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia, Lon-
don, 2007
Djokić, D, Nikola Pašić and Ante Trumbić: The Kingdom of Serbs, Cro-
ats and Slovenes, London, 2010
Hadži-Jovančić, P, The Third Reich and Yugoslavia: An Economy of
Fear, 1933–1941, London, 2020
Hoptner, J. B, Yugoslavia in Crisis, 1934–1941, New York, 1962
Nielsen, C. A, Making Yugoslavs: Identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugosla-
via, Toronto, 2014
Troch, P, Nationalism and Yugoslavia: Education, Yugoslavism and the
Balkans before World War II, London, 2015
The Second World War

Browning, C. R, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final
Solution, New York, 1985
Pavlowitch, St. K, Hitler’s New Disorder: Yugoslavia in the Second
World War, London, 2020 (first publ. 2008)
Pisarri, M, The Suffering of the Roma in Serbia during the Holocaust,
Belgrade, 2014
Shepherd, B. H, Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan
Warfare, Harvard, MA, 2012
Tomasevich, J, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupa-
tion and Collaboration, Stanford, CA, 2001
Trew, S, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, 1941–42, London, 1998
Williams, H, Parachutes, Patriots, and Partisans: The Special Operations
Executive in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, London, 2003
Post-war Period (1945–90)

Dragović-Soso, J, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposi-
tion and the Revival of Nationalism, London, 2002
538
Further Reading
Halpern, J. M, A Serbian Village: Social and Cultural Change in a Yugo-

slav Community, 2nd, revised edn, New York, 1967
Jović, D, Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away, West Lafayette, IN,
2009
Le Normand, B, Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism,
and Socialism in Belgrade, Pittsburgh, PA, 2014
Mills, R, The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the
State, London, 2018
Perica, V, Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States,
Oxford, 2011
Rusinow, D, The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948–1974, Berkeley, CA, 1977
Shoup, P, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, New York,
1968
Simić, A, The Peasant Urbanites: A Study of Rural-Urban Mobility in
Serbia, New York, 1973
Unkovski-Korica, V, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugosla-
via: From World War II to Non-Alignment, London, 2016
Vladisavljević, N, Serbia’s Antibureaucratic Revolution: Milošević,
the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization, Basingstoke,
2008
Vujačić, V, Nationalism, Myth and the State in Russia and Serbia:
Antecedents of the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,
Cambridge, 2015
Break-up of Yugoslavia, the Wars

of the 1990s, and After
Baker, C, The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, London, 2015
Cohen, L. J, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan
Milošević, Boulder, CO, 2001
Gagnon, V. P, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the
1990s, Ithaca, NY, 2004
Gordy, E. D, The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the
Destruction of Alternatives, University Park, PA, 1999
Hayden, R. M, Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic
of the Yugoslav Conflicts, Ann Arbor, MI, 2000
539
Further Reading
Obradović-Wochnik, J, Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans:

Narratives of Denial in Post-Conflict Serbia, London, 2013
Popov, N. and D. Gojković (eds), The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma
and Catharsis, Budapest, 2000
Silber, L. and A. Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, London, 1995
Uvalić, M, Serbia in Transition: Towards a Better Future, Basingstoke,
2010
Woodward, S. L, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold
War, Washington, DC, 1995
Živković, M, Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of
Milošević, Bloomington, IN, 2011
All internet links in the text were last accessed on 27 November 2022.
540
INDEX
Abdić, Fikret, 490, 496 Antić, Radomir, 30

Abdülaziz (Sultan), 277, 282 Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s
Abdülhamid II (Sultan), 277 Liberation of Yugoslavia
Abramović, Marina, 26, 437 (AVNOJ), 406–407, 417–18
Aganli-Bayraktar, 213–14 anti-Ottoman wars, 18
Agrarian Party, 339, 388–89 anti-semitism. See Holocaust
agrarian revolution, of Obrenović, Antonić, Vojislav, 22
Miloš, 246 Archbishop of Ohrid, 109
agricultural development, in Serbia Arkan, Željko Ražnatović, 23, 474
‘Eastern Crisis’ and, 306 Árpád dynasty, 78
during Revolutionary era, 263–64 Arsenije II (Patriarch), 171
Albahari, David, 26, 154 Arsenije III (Patriarch), 178–81, 184–88,
Albanians, in Kosovo 197
demonstrations by, 443–44, 460 Arsenije IV (Patriarch), 197, 200
emigration of, 6 Arsenijević, Stefan, 28
Alexander I (Tsar), 231 Austrian Empire
Alexios III Angelos (Emperor), 91 emigration to, 250
Alfonso V of Aragon (King), 124–25 rivalry with Hungary, Habsburgs’
Ali, Marashli (Pasha), 239 involvement in, 193–94
Alı Rızâ Pasha, 277, 282 War of the Austrian Succession,
Alkalai, Yehuda, 154 193–94
Almuli, Jaša and Rašela, 402–403 Austrian–Ottoman Long War, 175
alphabets, in writing systems Austrian–Ottoman War, 195–97
Cyrillic alphabet, 237–38 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 283–91
for Slavs annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
creation of, 76 325–26
Glagolitic alphabet, 76 Dual Monarchy and, 325–26, 341,
Altomanović, Nikola (Župan), 119, 344–45, 370–71
121–22 ‘Eastern Crisis’ and, 303–304, 306–307
Amfilohije, Metropolitan, 67, 528 during Great War, war crimes by,
Andjelković, Koča, 205, 208–209, 224 345–47
Andjelović, Mahmud Pasha, 139, Avars, migration of, 53–60
158–59, 180 as semi-nomadic, 54–55
Andjelović, Mihailo, 137, 158 Slavs and, 55–56
Andrássy (Count), 284–86 Avineri, Shlomo, 447
Andrić, Ivo, 26, 289, 332, 334, 373 AVNOJ. See Anti-Fascist Council
Andronikos II (Emperor), 101, 104–106 of the People’s Liberation
Andronikos III Palaiologos (Emperor), of Yugoslavia
107 Avramović, Dragoslav, 502
541
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Bajac, Vladislav, 26 Great Migration of 1690 and, 184

Bajramović, Šaban, 31 Holy Archangel Orthodox Church, 40
Balašević, Djordje, 24 during Interwar period, 386–87
Balkan Wars, 2, 18, 290, 330–31, nationalist movements in, 39–40
337–39 Belgrade Circle, 475
Balkans region. See also specific countries Belgrade International Theatre Festival
depopulation of, 6 (BITEF), 21–22
ethnic cleansing in, 6, 330–31 Belgrade Peace of 1739, 197
Ottoman Empire in, conquest of, Belgrādi, Munīrī. See ibn Iskandar,
140–45 Ibrahim
Hungary and, resistance against, Berlin Wall, 433
143 Biden, Joseph, 532
Mohács, 144–45 Bijelić, Jovan, 374
Peć Patriarchate, 144–45 Biković, Miloš, 28
Serbian alliances in, 283–91 bin Sefer, Hüseyin, 159
in Austro-Hungarian Empire, von Bismarck, Otto (Chancellor), 283
283–91 BITEF. See Belgrade International
Bulgarian Legion, 284 Theatre Festival
Europeanisation of Serbia as result Black George. See Petrović, Djordje
of, 291–94 Black Hand, 336–37, 355, 383, 434
United Serbian Youth, 286–87 Blaznavac, Milivoje, 290–91
‘Banović Strahinja’, 168 Bloch, Ernst, 447
Bantoux, Paul Eugène, 310 Bodin, Konstantin (King), 81–82, 85
Baptized Serbia, 71, 73, 78–82 Bodiroga, Dejan, 29
Barbarossa, Frederick, 88–90 Bogdani, Pjetër, 181
Barilli, Milena Pavlović, 375–76 Bogdanich, Walt, 27
Barthou, Louis, 384 Bogdanovich, Peter, 28
Basara, Svetislav, 26 Bogomils, during Serbian Empire,
Basil I (Emperor), 76 114–15
Basil II (Emperor), 78–79, 84 Bogosavljević, Srdjan, 411
basketball, 29–30. See also specific players Boris III (King), 395
Battle for Kosovo (1998–1999), 504–512 Boris (Khan), 69
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Bosnia, 435. See also specific topics
and, 506–509, 511–12 annexation crisis of 1908–1909,
Resolution 1244, 510 323–24
Battle of Kaimaki, 356 unification with Montenegro, 301
Battle of Kosovo, 18, 125–27, 301 unification with Serbia, 301
134–35 Young Bosnia, 333–34, 336–37
Battle of Rovine, 128 Bosnia region. See also ‘Eastern Crisis’
Bayezid I (Sultan), 128 Ban Tvrtko as ruler of, 121–25
Béla III (King), 84 Ottoman invasion of, 138–39
Belgrade, Serbia, 6–7, 355–57. See also Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2, 325–26
specific topics Austro-Hungarian Empire annexation
anti-government protests in, 472–73, of, 325–26
475 Independent State of Croatia and, 16
Covid-19 pandemic and, 19 during Second World War, 15–16
as cultural centre, 27 Serbian Orthodox Church in, 7–8
542
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Serbians in, 8, 444 Catholicism. See Roman Catholicism

wars in, Serbian involvement in, Ceca, Svetlana Ražnatović, 23
15–16 Çelebi, Evliya, 146–48, 160
Bosnian Wars (1992–1995), 490–500 Çelebi, Tuği, 159
displaced populations as result of, 495 Četniks, 397–99, 405–406, 408–10
ethnic cleansing during, 495, 499 Charles VI (Emperor), 191–92, 196
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Chernishevsky, Nikolay, 294
and, 497–98 Chotek, Sophie (Duchess), 392
Yugoslav People’s Army, 492–94 Christianity, 74–78, 207
Boué, Ami, 217–18, 264 churches. See Macedonian Orthodox
Božičković-Popović, Vera, 436 Church; Orthodox Church;
Brandt, Josef, 252 Serbian Orthodox Church
Branković, Djordje (Count), 190–91, Churchill, Winston, 342, 426
201 Ćirilo of Hopovo, 184
Branković, Djuradj (Despot), 131–34, Ćirilov, Jovan, 21
135–36, 187, 190 Ćirković, Sima M., 44–45
Branković, Katarina, 132, 161–62 civil wars
Branković, Mara, 132, 161–62 insurrectionary nationalism and,
Branković, Vuk, 119, 121, 123, 126–27, 35–36
128, 131, 152, 168, 301, 317 in Serbia, 405–411
Brašovan, Dragiša, 376 Četnik forces, 406–410
Bregović, Goran, 25, 39–40 partisan leadership during, 406–410
The Bridge on the Drina (Andrić), 334 within Serbian empire, 97
brigands, 169–71, 222 Čkrebić, Dušan, 458
Brkić, Slobodan, 25–26 Čolić, Zdravko, 40
Brnabić, Ana, 32, 520 collective trauma, in Serbia, 17–18
Broquière, Bertrandon de la, 133–34 communism, in Serbia, 14
Broz, Jovanka, 432 Communist Manifesto (Marx), 430
Budak, Mile, 351 Communist Party of Yugoslavia, 298–99,
Bulatović, Momir, 462, 503 363–64, 427. See also League of
Bulgaria Communists of Yugoslavia
chalga music in, 23 Congress of Berlin, 264–65, 304–307
Dual Monarchy and, 325–26 Congress of Vienna, 281–82
in EU, 3 Constantine VII (Emperor), 47, 52, 63,
Plovdiv coup, 312 65, 68, 69
Russian influences in, 325–26 Constantine XI (Emperor), 136–37, 161
Serbian-Bulgarian Pact, 326–27 Constantinople, 52–53, 55–56, 64, 75,
Bulgarian Empire, 88–90 78, 83–84, 91, 96–97, 106,
Bulgarian Legion, 284 109–10, 112, 126, 129, 136,
Byzantine Empire, 91–101. See also 169
specific regions; specific topics Constitutional Law, Yugoslavia (1951),
Byzantium, 75–76 440
Crusaders as threat to, 96–97 Constitutionalists, (Defenders of the
Constitution), 253–57
Časlav of the Serbs, 70, 78–80 civil law and, 255–56
Catherine II (Catherine the Great) domestic reforms by, 254–55
(Empress), 198–200 trade regulation and, 256
543
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Ćopić, Branko, 26 Third Crusade, 88–90

Corfu Declaration, 353–55, 357–58 Csáky, Imre, 191
corruption, under Obrenović, Miloš, Čubrilović, Vaso, 454
244 culture and society, in Serbia, 435–39
Ćosić, Dobrica, 26, 446, 451–52, 454, discrimination against women as part
493, 497 of, 31
Council of Constance, 130–31 film and television, 27–28, 437–39
Covid-19 pandemic, 19, 525–30 Black Wave cinema, 437–39
Cretan War, 194 Prague School of directors, 27–28
Crnjanski, Miloš, 26, 194, 382 food traditions, 41–43
Croatia, 3, 435 high culture, 21–22
Croat–Serb War, 487, 483–90 homophobia as embedded in, 31–32
establishment as republic, 416–17 turbofolk music and, 32
international recognition of, 485 international influences on, 19
Mass Movement and, 444–45 media in, 21
political compromises with Belgrade, under Milošević, 23–24
376–91 music and theatre, 21–26
population of, during 19th century, The Exit Music Festival, 25, 531
248, 247 neo-folk music, 23
refugees from, 527 turbofolk music, 23, 32
relationship with Serbia, 376–91 underground movement in, 23–24
during Second World War, 15–16 Western influences on, 448
Serbian Orthodox Church in, 7–8 nationalism in, 32–33
Slovenian War and, 479–82 notable artists, 26–27
Social Democratic Party of Croatia, Ottoman influences on, 20
483 publishing and, state funding of,
Tudjman and, 471–72 21–22
Ustašas and, 16, 416–18, 478–79 sports, 28–30
wars in, Serbian involvement in, Yugoslav school of basketball,
15–16 29–30
Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, anti-Western nationalism in, 32–33
283 Western consumer influences on, 19
Croatian People’s Peasant Party, Ćurčić, Danica, 28
359–60, 377–78 Ćuruvija, Slavko, 507–508
Croats, as people. See also Serb–Croat– Cyril, 75–77
Slovene kingdom Cyrillic alphabet, 237–38
Hungary and, association with, 74 Czartoryski, Adam (Prince), 220, 257–58
language development among,
235–36, 238 dahis regime, 212–15, 218–20
origins of, 62, 66 Dalmatia, 194–95
as Roman Catholics, 77–78 Damat Rüstem (Pasha), 173
in Serbia, 9 Dandolo, Anna, 95–96
Croat-Serb War (1991–1995), 483–90 Dandolo, Enrico, 95–96
Crusaders Danilo, Metropolitan, 195
Byzantium threatened by, 96–97 Danilović, Kalina, 1–2
Fourth Crusade, 96–97 Davičo, Mirko, 402, 403
Second Crusade, 86–87 Davičo, Oskar, 26, 403
544
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
David, Filip, 26, 402 Drašković, Vuk, 467, 470, 472, 474, 502,
Davidović, Dimitrije, 251, 388–90 504, 506, 514
Davidović, Ljuba, 339, 376–78, 388, 468 Dravić, Milena, 28
De Administrando Imperio (Constantine Dual Monarchy, 325–26, 341, 344–45,
VII), 47, 63, 65, 69 370–71
delije (light cavalry), 153 Dubrovnik region, during Serbian
Dejan (Despot and Sebastocrator), empire, 133–34
113–14, 119 Duchy of Serbia, 191, See also
Democratic Opposition of Serbia, 513 Vojvodina
Democratic Party, in Yugoslavia, 299, Dučić, Jovan, 381–82
467–69 Duklja/Zeta, 79–82
Dernschwam, Hans, 146–48 Dylan, Bob, 24
devşirme practice, 154, 157 Džajić, Dragan, 30
Diaspora, Serbian, 7–8, 33
Dimitrije Zvonimir (King), 74 early settlements. See settlements
Dimitrijević-Apis, Dragutin, 319, 336 ‘Eastern Crisis,’ 298–307
Diocletian (Emperor), 51–52 agrarian question and, 306
discrimination, against women, in Austro-Hungarian Empire and,
Serbian culture, 31 303–304, 306–307
Divac, Vlade, 29 Congress of Berlin and, 264–65,
Djilas, Aleksa, 447, 451, 468–69 304–307
Djilas, Dragan, 520 Habsburgs and, 306–307
Djilas, Milovan, 26–27, 399–400, intellectuals in, role of, 300–301
431–33, 446–48, 451 Montenegro and, role in, 302–304
return to politics, 469 Russia and, 303–304
Djindjić, Zoran, 514–17 ‘Eastern plague,’ 248–250
assassination of, 516 Eberhardt, Johann August, 199
Djogo, Gojko, 451 economy, of Serbia
Djoković, Novak, 28, 30, 530 in 1990s, 500–504
Djordjević, Aleksandar, 29 break-up of Yugoslavia as influence
Djukanović, Milo, 462, 503, 528 on, 501–502
Djuradj Branković (Despot), See inflation rates, 502
Branković, Djuradj within Ottoman Empire, from
Djuradj I Balšić of Zeta, 119, 121 1450–1800, 162–69
Djuradj II Balšić, 126–27 during Serbian empire, 133–35
Djurić, Ivan, 470 start-up tech industry, 22
Djurić, Stefan, 25 1804 Uprising, 42
Djuričić, Jasna, 28 1838 Constitution, suspension of, 291
Dobrović, Petar, 359, 374 1848 Revolution, 265–70
Dobrovský, Josef, 234 elections. See parliamentary elections
Dodik, Milorad, 527–28, 532 Elizabeth (Empress), 193–94
Donfried, Karen, 532 Emin, Kıbrıslı Mehmed (Pasha), 260
Doukas, Alexios V (Emperor), 95–96 the Enlightenment, Serbian borderlands
Dragaš, Konstantin Dejanović, 128, 136 during, 198–203
Dragović, Radovan, 321 formation of national Serb identity,
Dragojević, Srdjan, 28 202–203
Draškić, Panta, 383–84 ethnarchs, 7
545
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
ethnic cleansing Gardović, Nikola, 491–92

in Balkans region, 6, 330–31 Gavrilo (Patriarch), 178
during Bosnian Wars, 495, 499 genocide. See also ethnic cleansing;
EU. See European Union Holocaust
Eugen of Savoy, 189 by Ustašas, 16, 416–18, 478–79
European Union (EU), 3, 12 in Yugoslavia, 416–18
Europeanisation of Serbia, 291–94 Geography (Ptolemy), 62
Evans, Arthur, 352 Georgi Terter I (Tsar), 105
The Exit Music Festival, 25, 531 German Romanticism, 234
von Gieslingen, Giesl (Baron), 342–43
Fazıl Mustafa Köprülü (Pasha), 187 Glagolitic alphabet, 76
Federal Serbia, 412–26 Glavaš, Stanoje, 215–16, 239
borders of, 414–16 Gligorić, Svetozar, 30
coat of arms for, 423 Gligorijević, Hadži-Prodan, 239
establishment of, 420–21 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 232–33
as restoration of Serbia, 422 Gojnik, 69
Serbian Orthodox Church in, 421–22 Goldsworthy, Vesna, 27
Federer, Roger, 30 von Gomirje, Alexander Musulin, 343
Fehmiu, Bekim, 28 government structures, in Serbia,
Felix Romuliana site, 52 centralization of, 20–21
Ferdinand II (Emperor), 175–76 Gračanin, Petar, 458
Filipović, Stevan, 28 grand župans, 47. See also Nemanja
film and television, 27–28. See also specific of Raška; Stefan Uroš I;
artists Tihomir
Prague School of directors, 27–28 Great Migration of 1690 (Velika Seoba),
First Serbian Uprising, 211–31, 423 18, 178–91
Foça-oğlu, Mehmed, 213 from Belgrade, 184
food traditions, 41–43 of Orthodox Christians, 183
Fourth Crusade, 96–97 of Orthodox Slavs, 185–86
Frankish Annals, 60–61 during Vienna War, 178–80
Franks, 75 damages to Orthodox churches and
Franz Ferdinand (Archduke), 220, 392 monasteries, 181–83
assassination of, 332–47 Great War (World War I)
Austro-Hungarian Empire response Austro-Hungarian Empire during,
to, 340–47 war crimes by, 345–47
Montenegro response to, 339–40 London Treaty after, 349–50
Free Masons, 336–37 military losses during, 346
French Revolution, 229, 234 Serbia during, 345–47
Fromm, Erich, 447 Greek War of Independence, 233
Gregory XI (Pope), 141
Gábor, Bethlen (Prince), 146 Grein, Richard, 353
Gaj, Ljudevit, 268 Grey, Edward, 342
Galaksija computer, 22 Grimm, Jacob, 232
Garašanin, Ilija, 254, 257–59, 270–72, Grol, Milan, 422–24, 468–69
278–80, 307–308 Grujić, Jevrem, 271, 286–87
Garašanin, Milutin, 307–308 Gutkind, Erich, 332
546
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Habermas, Jürgen, 447 Hudson, William, 401

Habsburg–Ottoman border, as military Hungarian Revolution, 433
border, 148–50 Hungarians
Habsburgs Maygars, 78
‘Eastern Crisis’ and, 306–307 in Serbia, 9
Habsburg–Ottoman War (1788– Hungary
1791), 207, 209–10 Árpád dynasty, 78
invasion of Serbia, 350–51 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 283–91
in Serbian borderlands, 191–95 Croats and, 74
in Austrian–Hungary rivalry, independence for, 283
involvement with, 193–94 Ottoman’s attempt to conquer, 143
in Dalmatia, 194–95 Serb population in, 247–48
Russian influences on, 194 Hunyadi, János, 135–36
Serb and European wars against, Husrev, Deli (Pasha), 157
187–88
Haji Mustafa Pasha, 211–13 ibn Iskandar, Ibrahim (Munīrī Belgrādi),
Hanım, Melek, 260 159–60, 164–65
Hans Holbein the Younger, 145–46 Ičko, Petar, 214, 221
Hasani, Sinan, 450 ICTY. See International Criminal
Hebrang, Andrija, 419, 428 Tribunal for the Former
Henry VIII (King), 170 Yugoslavia
Heraclius (Emperor), 63–65 Ilinčić, Roksanda, 26
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 235 Imre (King), 96
Herzegovina. See Bosnia–Herzegovina; Independent Radical Party, 321
‘Eastern Crisis’ Independent State of Croatia, 16,
Herzl, Theodor, 154 394–96
high culture, 21–22 Inglis, Elsie, 352
history, of Serbia, conceptual Innocent III (Pope), 95
approaches to, 34–43 Innocent VI (Pope), 141
civil wars as influence on, 35 insurrectionary nationalism, 35–36
methodological approach to, 43–49 International Criminal Tribunal for the
national ideologies, 34–35 Former Yugoslavia (ICTY),
national resistance as element of, 494, 498, 512, 514, 517–19
35–36 Isaac II (Emperor), 90–91
Ottoman influences on, 35–36 Islam, conversion to, in Serbian
religious orthodoxy as influence on, borderlands, 154–62
35–36 devşirme practice, 154, 157
temporal approach to, 43–49 Muslim converts as traitors, 157
History of the Serbian People, 45 Ottoman influences on, 155–57,
Hitler, Adolf, 393, 395, 404 160–62
Hoffman, Malvina, 353 of Southern Slavs, 158–60
Holocaust, in occupied Serbia, 402–405 Israel, relationship with Serbia, 36
Holy Archangel Orthodox Church, 40 István II (King), 86
homophobia, 31–32 István V (King), 101
Honorius III (Pope), 97 Ivančević, Slava, 2
Horeum Margi site, 52 Ivanović, Ana, 28–29
547
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Index
Ivanović, Oliver, 522 Kantakouzene, Irene, 132–33

Ivanović, Vane, 447, 468 Karadjordje (Djordje Petrović, Black
Ivkov, Borislav, 30 George), 42, 188, 210, 215–31,
Ivković, Dušan, 29 238–42, 245, 251, 254, 264,
Izetbegović, Alija, 490–91 273
Karadjordjević, Aleksandar (Prince),
Jahić, Fahreta. See Lepa Brena 254, 260, 261, 267, 270–72,
Jakšić, Djura, 268 276, 290, 302
Janković, Jelena, 28–29 Karadjordjević, Aleksandar (Regent,
Jelačić, Josip, 268 King), 337, 341, 352, 355, 360,
Jenkins, R. H. J., 65 361, 379–88
Jewish community, in Serbia, 9, 328–30 abolition of political parties, 383
Holocaust and, 402–405 Yugoslavism, of, naming of
during Revolutionary era, 256 Yugoslavia, 380–83
emancipation of Jews, 264–65 Karadjordjević, Djordje (Prince), 272
in Serbian borderlands, 163–64 Karadjordjević, Persida (Princess),
JNA. See Yugoslav People’s Army 260–61
Joanikije (Patriarch), 109 Karadjordjević, Petar I (King), 302,
Joannikios III (Patriarch), 197 319–20
John I Sigismund (King), 126, 130–31 Karadjordjević, Petar II (King), 386,
John II Sigismund (King), 172–73 397, 421
John of Capistrano, 133–34 Karadžić, Radovan, 18, 481–83, 491–92,
John V Palaiologos (Emperor), 107–108 497, 518, 527
John VI Kantakouzenos (Emperor), 111 Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović, 201–202,
John VIII Palaiologos (Emperor), 218–19, 225–26, 231–34,
132–33 237, 271
Jokić, Nikola, 28, 30 Karanović, Mirjana, 28
Joseph I (Emperor), 185 Karanović, Srdjan, 28
Joseph II (Emperor), 200, 209–10 Kardelj, Edvard, 400, 407, 440, 442,
Jovanović, Dragoljub, 423 449, 453
Jovanović, Gordan, 451 Karleuša, Jelena, 23
Jovanović, Jovan, 338–42, 388 Katić, Branka, 28
Jovanović, Paja, 185 Kautsky, Karl, 321
Jovanović, Slobodan, 45, 257, 287 Keshko, Natalie, See Obrenović, Natalie
Jovanović, Vladimir, 271, 286–87 (Natalija, Queen)
Jovanović-Čupa, Ljubomir, 336 Khrushchev, Nikita, 430–31
Jovan Nenad, 169–70 Kićanović, Dragan, 29
Jovan Vladimir, 79–80 kinship traditions, in Serbian
Jovovich, Milla, 28 borderlands, 168
Jugović, Vladimir, 30 kirjalis, 219–220
July Crisis, 332–47 Kiš, Danilo, 26
Justin I (Emperor), 54 knezes (village leaders), 151–53, 211
Kočović, Bogoljub, 411
Kaclerović, Triša, 321 Kon, Geca, 21
Kállay, Benjámin, 285–86 Konjović, Milan, 376
Kamberi, Meti, 31 Konrad Grünenberg of Constance, 148
Kanitz, Felix, 275–78 Konstantinović, Anka, 277, 290
548
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Index
Konstantinović, Katarina, 290 Latas, Omer Pasha, 288–89

Kopitar, Jernej, 232–34 Lazar Hrebeljanović (Prince), 119–23,
Korać, Radivoj, 29 125–29, 168
Kordun Trial, 410, 428 Lazarević, Milunka, 29
Korošec, Anton, 379 League of Communists of Serbia,
Kosovo, 435. See also Battle of Kosovo 458–59
Albanians in League of Communists of Yugoslavia,
demonstrations by, 460 430, 455–57
emigration of, 6, 443–44 Lefevbre, Henri, 447
autonomous provinces in, 20–21, 464 Leonardis, Francesco de, 177
declaration of independence by, 1–2, Leopold I (Emperor), 183
39 Lepa Brena (Fahreta Jahić), 23
international recognition of, 1 Licinius (Emperor), 52
lack of recognition of, by Serbian light cavalry. See delije
government, 1 Lissitzky, El, 373–74
Yugoslav war for, 16 Liutewid (Duke), 60
ethnic Albanians in, emigration of, 6 Ljočić, Draga, 295–96, 299
incorporation by Serbia, 2 Ljotić, Dimitrije, 389, 404, 405
NATO in, 16 Ljubičić, Nikola, 458
Serbian Orthodox Church in, 7–8 Ljubojević, Ljubomir, 29
Serbians in, 8 Lončar, Budimir, 462
Kosovo Battle, 315–17, 351, 364 London Treaty, 349–50
Kossuth, Lajos, 268 Lubarda, Petar, 436
Koštunica, Vojislav, 514–17 Lukarević, Miho, 134
Kovač, Mirko, 26
Kovačević, Dušan, 28 Macedonia, 435
Kovačević, Ljubomir, 317 incorporation by Serbia, 2
Kropotkin, Peter, 334 Macedonian Internal Revolutionary
Küçük-Ali, 213 Organisation, 324–25
Kusturica, Emir, 28, 39 Orthodox Church in, 15
Samuilo of Bulgaria and, 79–80
labor demonstrations, socialist separation from Serbia, 14
movement and, 297–98 uprising in, against Ottoman rule,
Ladik, Katalin, 437 324–25
Lajkó, Félix, 25 trench warfare in, 357
Lajos II (King), 144 Macedonian Internal Revolutionary
Lampe, John, 368 Organisation (VMRO),
language development, in Serbia, during 324–25, 384
Revolutionary era, 231–38 Macedonian Orthodox Church, 15,
alphabet development, 232 441–42, 516
Croats and, 235–36, 238 Maček, Vladko, 380, 388–92, 394
Cyrillic alphabet, 237–38 Mahmud I (Sultan), 206
Karadžić, Vuk, and, influence on, Mahmud II (Sultan), 242–44
231–34 Makarije (Patriarch), 173
Serb intellectuals and, role in, 235–36 Makavejev, Dušan, 27, 437
štokavski dialect, 234–36 Maksim (Patriarch), 178
Lapčević, Dragiša, 321–22 Maksimović, Desanka, 27
549
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Index
Maksimović, Dragan, 31 Mehmed II the Conqueror (Sultan),

Malden, Karl, 28 136–37, 141, 155, 161
Maljković, Božidar, 29 Mehmed Pasha Sokollu (Sokolović),
Manuel I (Patriarch), 98 144–45, 157, 159, 172–73
Manuel I Komnenos (Emperor), 83–84, Mehmedbašić, Muhamed, 335
87–88 Meštrović, Ivan, 320–21, 348–49, 353,
Manuel II Palaiologos (Emperor), 119, 373, 385
129 Methodius, 75–77
Mara (Empress), See Branković, Mara Metohija, autonomy of, 464
Maravich, Pete, 29 Michael the Brave (Voivod), 170
Marcuse, Herbert, 447 Michael III (Emperor), 75
Marić, Alisa, 29 Michael VIII (Emperor), 101
Marić, Milan, 28 Micić, Ljubomir, 373
Marić, Nenad, 26 Mićunović, Dragoljub, 443, 447,
Marie of Yugoslavia (Queen), 385 467–69, 514
Maria Theresa (Empress), succession migration
of, 193 of Avars, 53–60
Marjanović, Jovan, 446 as semi-nomadic, 54–55
Marko, Kraljević, 111, 151, 168, Slavs and, 55–56
217–18 to Constantinople, 52–53
Marković, Ante, 469, 482, 527–28 Great Migration of 1690, 18
Marković, Boban, 25 during prehistory, 50–53
Marković, Dragoslav-Draža, 456–57 climate changes as influence on,
Marković, Goran, 28 50–51
Marković, Milena, 27 Neolithic Vinča culture, 51
Marković, Mirjana-Mira, 456–57, 472, during Roman conquest, 51–52
504, 507–508 during Stone Age, 50–51
Marković, Sima, 363 of Slavs, 53–60
Marković, Svetozar, 294–97, 311, as agrarian society, 60
321–22 Avars and, 55–56
Marx, Karl, 430 in Byzantium, 56–57
Mašin, Draga (Queen), 318–19 cultural and religious traditions for,
Mass Movement, 444–45 58–59
Matić, Dušan, 373 by Middle Ages, 59–60
Matica srpska, 227, 235 Roman influences on, 58
Matoš, Antun Gustav, 320 Mihailo of Duklja, 74, 80
Maygars, 78 Mihailo of Zahumlje, 72, 79
media, 21. See also film and television; Mihailović, Dragoljub-Draža, 397–99,
publishing industry 405–410
medieval era, Serbian empire during, Četniks, 397
114–18 Mihailović, Konstantin, 155, 156, 158
dualist religious movement, 114–15 Mihailović, Stefan-Stevča, 249, 273
economy of, 133–35 Mihajlov, Mihajlo, 446
ethnic belonging in, 115–16 Mihaljević, Mihailo, 209
history of sexuality in, laws and, Mijatović, Čedomilj, 307–309, 315
116–18 Mijatović, Cvijetin, 450
social belonging in, 115–16 Milanović, Branko, 27
550
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Milenković, Stefan, 21 Mladenović, Branko (Sebastocrator),

Miletić, Petko, 364 113–14
Miletić, Svetozar, 267, 286–87 Mladić, Ratko, 18, 498, 518–19
military borders, from 1450–1800, Milićević, Marko, 26
148–54 Moesia Prima, 51–52
delije, 153 Mohács, 144–45
Habsburg–Ottoman border, 148–50 Mohammed II (Sultan), 133–34
Orthodox soldiers at, 149–51 Moljević, Stevan, 407–408
Ottoman cultural influences at, Mongols, Serbian kingdom invaded by,
151–53 100
Roman Catholic soldiers at, 149–51 Montenegro, 2, 3, 435
sipahis, 152–53 declaration of independence by, 2–3,
timars, 152–53 14–15, 461–62, 517–18
Milivojević, Era, 437 as federal republic in Yugoslavia,
Miljanić, Miljan, 30 419–20
Mill, John Stuart, 321 ‘Eastern Crisis’ and, role in, 302–304
millets system, in Ottoman Empire, nationalism in, 461–62
142–43, 277–78 Romania and, 327–28
Miloš, Maja, 28 Serbian Orthodox Church in, 7–8,
Miloševa, Smiljana, 185 14–15
Milošević, Raša, 295, 299 Serbs in, 8
Milošević, Slobodan, 455–63. See also connection with Serbian culture,
Bosnian Wars; Croat-Serb War 14–15
anti-bureaucratic revolution of, 461–63 unification with Herzegovina, 301
Battle for Kosovo (1998–1999), unification with Serbia, 288–90
504–12 Mucha, Alphonse, 113
culture and society under, 23–24 Murad I (Sultan), 127
economy of Serbia under, 500–504 Murad II (Sultan), 161
break-up of Yugoslavia as influence music and theatre, 21–26. See also specific
on, 501–502 artists
inflation rates, 502 The Exit Music Festival, 25, 531
fall of, 512–13 neo-folk music, 23
in Kosovo, 459–61 turbofolk music, 23, 32
League of Communists of Serbia underground culture in, 23–24
under, 458–59 Muslims
liberal intellectuals under, treatment in Serbia
of, 458–59 departure of, after Ottoman
as president, 471–75 Empire, 281–82
presidential elections and, 470 during Revolutionary era, 260–62
rise to power, 457 Slavs as, 9
Serbian Orthodox Church and, Yugoslav Muslim Organization,
470–71 376–77, 387
unification of Serbia under, 478–79 Mustafa, Lala Kara (Pasha), 157
wife of, 456–57, 472, 504 Mutimir, 69, 73
Mitić, Gojko, 28
Mitrinović, Dimitrije, 332–34, 348, 496 Nadal, Rafael, 30
Mitrović, Andrej, 45, 514 Nagy, Imre, 433
551
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Index
Naissus site, 52 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 36

Napoleon III, 272, 278, 284 New Belgrade, 436
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 432 The New Class (Djilas), 431
National Council of Slovenes, Croats Nicea, 97–98
and Serbs, 357–61 Nicholas (Patriarch), 78
nationalist movements Nikezić, Marko, 442
in Belgrade, 39–40 Nikola (Petrović Njegoš, Prince and
culture and society influenced by, King), 284, 288, 298, 301, 315,
32–33 344, 360, 419
insurrectionary, 35–36 Nikolić, Aleksandar, 29
in Montenegro, 461–62 Nikolić, Dragan, 28
Obrenović, Mihailo, and, as liberal- Nikolić, Tomislav, 517, 519–20
nationalist, 285–86 Ninković, Anka, 297
under Obrenović, Miloš, and, 278–81 Ninković, Milica, 297
in Serbia, 2–3, 278–81, 314–18 Ninković, Nićifor, 243–44
militarization of, 280–81 Njegoš, Petar I Petrović (Prince-
Western anti-nationalism, in Serbia, Bishop), 214–15
32–33 Njegoš, Petar II Petrović (Prince-
NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Bishop), 187–88, 237–38
Organization Njegoš, Danilo I Petrović (Prince-
Nazi Germany Bishop), 187–88
Holocaust and, in occupied Serbia, Non-Aligned Movement, 17, 430–31,
402–405 433–36, 440–41
Tripartite Pact and, 372, 391 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Yugoslavia and (NATO), 16, 430–431,
capitulation to Nazi Germany, 395 497–98, 506–509, 511–12
economic trade with, 387–88 North Macedonia, 3
Nedić, Milan, 396–97, 405, 408, 416, Novak, Starina, 170–71, 175
421, 524 Novaković, Stojan, 307
Nekrasov, Nikolay, 294–95 Novković, Oleg, 28
Nemanja of Raška (Grand Župan),
83–91, 93–95, 109–111 Obilić, Miloš, 168, 188
geographic territory for, 85 Obradović, Dositej, 199–200, 225–26,
Manuel I Komnenos and, 83–84, 87–88 236
monastic life for, 93–94 Obradović, Željko, 29
re-emergence of, 90–91 Obreht, Téa, 27
Serbia and, 85–86 Obrenović, Aleksandar (King), 314, 315,
Nemanjić dynastic state, 83–91, 95, 318, 336
109–11, 118–25, 137. See also Obrenović, Jevrem, 253–54
under Stefan for individual Obrenović, Mihailo (Prince), 253–54,
Nemanjić kings and emperors 278–80, 283–91
under Milutin’s reign, 102–107 Balkan programme, 288–90
Roman Catholicism in, 102–104 creation of South Slav state, 283–91
Nemenikuće village, 204–11 as liberal-nationalist, 285–86
Nenadović, Aleksa, 214, 218 suspension of 1838 Constitution, 291
Neolithic Vinča culture, 51 Obrenović, Milan (King), 290, 302,
Nesiba, Bula, 262–63 307–14
552
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Index
Obrenović, Miloš Teodorović (Prince), in Bosnia region, invasion of, 138–39

224, 237–53, 272–74 departure from Serbia, 275–82
abolition of (serfdom under), 246, 251 departure of Muslims, 281–82
agrarian revolution of, 246 militarization after, 280–81
autonomy under, 242–50 fall of Smederevo, 137–39
corruption under, 244 fragmentation of Serbian empire
‘Eastern plague,’ 248–50 influenced by, 140–42
emigration of Muslims, 247 Habsburg–Ottoman War (1788–1791),
exile of, 253 207, 209–10
fall of, 250–53 millets system in, 142–43, 277–78
nationalist movements under, 278–81 Ottoman–Venetian War, 162
People’s Office, 243 Russian–Ottoman War, 244
rebellion against, 250–53 in Serbian borderlands, 140–45
Russian support of, 252–53 Hungary and, resistance against
Obrenović, Natalie (Natalija, Queen), Ottoman incursions, 143
301, 313 Mohács, 144–45
Ognjenović, Vida, 27 Serbian culture and society influenced
Old Church Slavonic (old Slav by, 20
alphabet), 76 vassals in, 140–41
On Liberty (Mill), 321 yearly tributes in, 140–41
Orage, Alfred, 348 Ottoman–Venetian War, 162
Orfelin, Zaharije, 198–99, 202
Orthodox Christians, Great Migration Pajsije (Patriarch), 177, 178
of 1690 and, 183 Palaiologina, Maria (Queen), 106, 113
Orthodox Church. See also Macedonian Pantić, Milan, 507–508
Orthodox Church; Serbian Pardoe, Julia, 148, 249
Orthodox Church Paripović, Neša, 437
Holy Archangel Orthodox Church, 40 Paris Peace Treaty (1856), 270
in Macedonia, 15 parliamentary elections, 308–309,
in Serbian borderlands, Ottoman 311–12, 469–70
tolerance of, 160–62 Partisan War, 433–34
during Serbian empire, 91–101 Party of Democratic Action, 490–92
monasteries for, 108 Pašić, Nikola, 16, 298, 308–309, 321,
soldiers in, 149–51 342, 347
during Vienna War, damages to, coalition government formed by,
181–83 347–49
Osman II (Sultan), 159 in early Yugoslavia, 362
Ottoman Empire. See also Serbian expansion of Serbia’s territory, 352
borderlands People’s Radical Party, 37–38, 308,
anti-Ottoman wars, 18 313, 467
Austrian–Ottoman Long War, 175 Paskaljević, Goran, 28
Austrian–Ottoman War, 195–97 Pasvanoğlu Osman Pasha, 212–13
in Balkans region, conquest of, Pavelić, Ante, 394, 408, 416
140–45 Pavić, Milorad, 26
Hungary in, resistance against, 143 Pavle (Prince), 385–86, 376–91
Mohács, 144–45 Pavlović, Dragiša, 458
Peć Patriarchate, 144–45 Pavlović, Živojin, 27, 437
553
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Index
Pavlovich, Konstantin (Grand Duke), political parties, 307–14

205 Agrarian Party, 339, 388–89
Pavlowitch, Stevan K., 45, 253 Communist Party of Yugoslavia,
Peasant–Democratic Coalition, 378 298–99, 363–64, 427
peasants, in central Serbia, 318 Croatian People’s Peasant Party,
Peć Patriarchate 359–60, 377–78
abolition of, 195–98 Democratic Opposition of Serbia, 513
jurisdiction of, 175 Democratic Party, in Yugoslavia, 299,
and Mehmed Pasha Sokollu, 172–73 467–69
Ottoman conquest of, 144–45 foreign policy and, 309–11
restoration of, 171–75, 177 Independent Radical Party, 321
Pećanac, Kosta, 356, 405 League of Communists of Serbia,
Peçevi, Ibrahim, 159 458–59
Pekić, Borislav, 26, 469 League of Communists of Yugoslavia,
People’s Office, under Obrenović, 430, 455–57
Miloš, 243 parliamentary elections, 308–309,
People’s Radical Party, 37–38, 308, 313, 311–12
467 Party of Democratic Action, 490–91
Perović, Latinka, 442 Peasant-Democratic Coalition, 378
Pešelj, Branko, 447, 468 People’s Radical Party, 37–38, 308,
Pešić, Svetislav, 29 313, 467
Pešić, Vesna, 502 Slovene People’s Party, 376–77, 387
Petar, the first Christian ruler of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia,
Serbs, 73, 76 483–84
Petőfi, Sándor (Alexander Petrovics), Socialist Party of Serbia, 472
268 Socialist-Democratic Party, 298, 321
Petronijević, Avram, 254 Yugoslav Radical Union, 387
Petrović, Aleksandar, 27, 437 Politika, 1–2
Petrović, Djordje (Black George), See Poljanski, Branko Ve, 373
Karadjordje polygamy, 224
Petrović, Hajduk Veljko, 222 Popa, Vasko, 26
Petrović, Radmila, 27 Poplat, Donji, 332
Petrovich, Michael, 45 Popović, Branko, 374
Petrovics, Alexander. See Petőfi, Sándor Popović, Koča, 400, 433, 442
Petrovics, Peter, 172 Popović, Mića, 26, 436, 479
Pheraios, Rigas, 212 Popović, Nedeljko, 212–13
Philiki Etairia, 231 Popović, Zoran, 437
Pigafetta, Marc’Antonio, 145–46, 158 Popovich, Gregg, 29
Pijade, Moša, 417, 434 populism, in twenty-first century, Serbia
Pijavice (Albahari), 154 and, 519–33
Piłsudski, Marshal, 379 Porfirije (Patriarch), 197
Pius II (Pope), 138 Prague School, of directors, 27–28
Planinc, Milka, 450 prehistory, migration during, 50–53
Pliny the Elder, 62 climate changes as influence on, 50–51
Plovdiv coup, 312 Neolithic Vinča culture, 51
Poland, insurrectionary nationalism and, during Roman conquest, 51–52
35–36 during Stone Age, 50–51
554
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Index
Pribićević, Svetozar, 377–79 Rastko, Serbian Orthodox Church and,

Princip, Gavrilo, 43, 334–35 94. See also St Sava
prostitution, during Revolutionary era, Rastislav of Moravia, 75
state response to, 262–63 Rattigan, Terence, 314
Protić, Stojan, 342 Reihl-Kir, Josip, 486
Ptolemy, 62 religious traditions. See Christianity;
publishing industry, state funding of, Roman Catholicism; specific
21–22 churches
Pupin, Mihajlo, 22, 349, 353 Remesiana site, 52
Pupovac, Milorad, 486, 487, 527 Resolution 1244, 510
Pušić, Antonije. See Rambo Amadeus Revolutionary era (1788–1858). See also
Putnik, Radomir, 341, 343 Obrenović, Miloš
Putin, Vladimir, 512, 528, 532 Russia and, 231
Treaty of Belgrade and, 231
Rački, Franjo, 283 Treaty of Bucharest and, 229–31
Radić, Stjepan, 359–60, 377–79, Catherine the Great and, 205
416–17 Congress of Berlin and, 264–65
radical movements, 294–99 Constitutionalists during, 253–57
Independent Radical Party, 321 civil law and, 255–56
People’s Radical Party, 37–38, domestic reforms by, 254–55
298–99, 308, 313, 467 trade regulation and, 256
Young Bosnia, 333–34, 336–37 from 1804–1813, 211–31
Yugoslav Radical Union, 387 dahis regime, 212–15, 218–20
Radulović, Milena, 28 kirjalis, 219–220
Radulović, Nemanja, 21 Ottoman–Serb government during,
Rajačić, Josif (Patriarch), 265, 268 establishment of, 223–24
Rajić, Jovan, 200–201 provincial instability, 212–13
Rajović, Cvetko, 270–71 1848 Revolution, 265–70
Rajović, Mojsije (Patriarch), 189 nationalist activists in, 266–68
Rakovski, Georgi, 284 emigration of Christians during, 207
Ramadanovski, Džej, 31 French Revolution as influence on,
Rambo Amadeus, 23 229
Ranke, Leopold, 45, 221, 233, 304–305 Garašanin and, 254, 257–59, 270–72
Ranković, Aleksandar, 399–400, 440 Habsburg–Ottoman War (1788–
Ras (medieval town), 69–70 1791), 207, 209–10
Rašić, Ivana, 25 Janissaries and, 206–208, 212
Raška. See Nemanja of Raška Joseph II and, 205
Raška, 95–96, 121 Karadjordje, 215–19, 221–22, 225–26,
monasteries during, 108 230–31
Nemanja of Raška, 83–91, 95, language development in, 231–38
109–11 alphabet development, 232
geographic territory for, 85 Croats and, 235–36, 238
Manuel I Komnenos and, 83–84, Cyrillic alphabet, 237–38
87–88 Karadžić, Vuk, and, influence on,
monastic life for, 93–94 231–34
re–emergence of, 90–91 Serb intellectuals and, role in, 235–36
Serbia and, 85–86 štokavski dialect, 234–36
555
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Index
Revolutionary era (cont.) Samardžić, Ljubiša, 28

Nemenikuće village and, 204–11 Samo, 65
population of Serbia during, 248, Samuilo of Bulgaria, 79–80
247 Sandžak region, incorporation by
Second Uprising (1815-1830), 238–42 Serbia, 2
Serbian Jews during, 256 Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, 332–47
emancipation of, 264–65 Satellite Croatia, 394–96. See also
‘the Serbian question,’ 228–230 Independent State of Croatia
societal transformation during, Šćekić, Stanj, 217
259–65 Second Crusade, and Serbian state,
agricultural development, 263–64 86–87
for Muslims, 260–62 Second Serbian Uprising (1815–1830),
response to prostitution, 262–63 238–42
Roma people and, treatment of, 265 Second World War. See also Nazi
Serbian Jews and, emancipation of, Germany
264–65 Bosnia-Herzegovina during, 15–16
St. Andrews Assembly, 270–74 Croatia during, 15–16
Treaty of Svishtov, 210 Holocaust and, in occupied Serbia,
Ristić, Jovan, 271, 280, 286, 290–91, 402–405
294, 301, 304–305, 307–309, Satellite Croatia, 394–96
313 Serbia during, 391–402
Ristić, Marko, 373 Tripartite Pact, 372, 391
Robbins, Howard C, 353 Yugoslavia during, 391–402
Rodofinikin, Konstantin, 222–23 capitulation of, to Nazi Germany,
Roma people, in Serbia, 9 395, 398
Holocaust and, 404 partition of, 398
during Revolutionary era, 265 war deaths in, 411
Roman Catholicism Šekularac, Dragoslav, 30
among Croats, 77–78 Sekulić, Isidora, 27
in Nemanjić dynastic state, 102–104 Seleš, Monika, 28
soldiers in, 149–51 Šelić, Marko, 25
Romania Selim III (Sultan), 209–10
in EU, 3 Selimović, Mehmed-Meša, 26
in Serb–Greek–Montenegrin alliance, Serb–Croat–Slovene kingdom, 357–67,
327–28 414–16
Rosandić, Toma, 374 Corfu Declaration and, 357–58
Rugova, Ibrahim, 505 National Council of Slovenes and,
Runciman, Steven, 90 357–58, 361–62
Russia population of, 367
‘Eastern Crisis’ and, 303–304 as successor state, 365–66
Habsburgs influenced by, 194 Treaty of London and, 359
rebellion against Obrenović, Miloš, Šerbedžija, Rade, 28
support for, 252–53 Serbia. See also Belgrade; Kosovo;
Russian–Ottoman War, 244 Milošević, Slobodan; specific
topics
Šafárik, Pavel, 226, 234 as civic state, definition of, 465–66
Salonica, 355–57 climate of, 11
556
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
declaration of independence for, Serb and European wars against,

517–18 187–88
Diaspora for, 7–8 Islam and, conversion to, 154–62
cultural and political differences devşirme practice, 154
within, 33 Muslim converts as traitors, 157
flora and fauna of, 11–12 Ottoman influences on, 155–57,
geographic boundaries of, 1–5, 11 160–62
territorial expansion of, 329, 352 of Southern Slavs, 158–60
golden age of democracy in, 321 new migrations from/to, 195–98
during Great War, 345–47 Orthodox Church and, Ottoman
military losses for, 346 tolerance of, 160–62
historical development of, 1–3, 12–18 Ottoman conquest of, 140–45
collective trauma as part of, 17–18 Hungary and, resistance against,
communist influences on, 14 143
cultural influences on, 13–14 Mohács, 144–45
EU membership and, 12 Peć Patriarchate, 144–45
incorporation of Balkan regions, 2 Peć Patriarchate
invasions and incursions, 17–18 abolition of, 195–98
during medieval period, 36–37 jurisdiction of, 175
main cities in, 6–7 under Mehmed Pasha Sokullo,
multiethnic populations in, 3, 8–9, 172–73
40–41, 465–66 Ottoman conquest of, 144–45
political parties in, 467–69 restoration of, 171–75, 177
population of, 5, 328 rebels in, 169–71
populism and, 519–33 Serb and European wars, 175–78
topography of, 10–11 Austrian–Ottoman Long War, 175
unification with Bosnia, 301 against Habsburgs, 187–88
unification with Herzegovina, 301 Thirty Years War, 176–78
unification with Montenegro, 288–90 society in, 162–69
in Yugoslavia framework, 1–3 Jewish presence in, 163–64
Serbian borderlands kinship traditions, 168
with Ottoman Empire, from 1450– multicultural elements in, 164–66
1800 (See also Great Migration in villages and communities,
of 1690; military borders) 167–69
brigands in, 169–71 Vlachs and, 165–66
Cretan War, 194–95 Vlachs and, privileges of, 175–76
economy of, 162–69 in Western imagination, 145–48
during Enlightenment, 198–203 Serbian medieval state (1170–1459),
during Enlightenment, national 113, 121
Serb identity, formation of, Battle of Kosovo, 125–27, 134–35
202–203 Battle of Rovine, 128
Habsburgs and, 191–95 Bogomils, 114–15
Habsburgs and, in Austrian– Bulgarian Empire and, 88–90
Hungary rivalry, involvement Byzantine Empire as influence on,
with, 193–94 102–108
in Dalmatia, 194–95 civil war in, 97
Russian influences on, 194 as confederation of three realms, 101
557
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Serbian medieval state (cont.) ethnarchs, 7

despotate in, 128 in Federal Serbia, 421–22
Dubrovnik during, 133–34 Milošević, Slobodan, and, 470–71
expansion of, 108 Rastko as founder of, 94–95
fall of Smederevo, 135–39 ‘the Serbian question,’ 228–30
under Ottomans, 137–39 Serbian Renewal Movement, 517
fragmentation of, 140–42 Serbian–Bulgarian Pact, 326–27
Greeks and, consolidation of empires, Die Serbische Revolution (Ranke), 233–34
108–11 Serboi tribe, 62
Skopje as new capital location, Serbs, as people
108–11 Avars and, 65
during medieval period, 114–18 Baptized Serbia and, 71
dualist religious movement, 114–15 decline of, 78–82
economy during, 133–35 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 8, 444
ethnic belonging, 115–16 Christianity for, introduction of,
history of sexuality, laws and, 74–78
116–18 Diaspora for, 7–8
social belonging, 115–16 Duklja/Zeta and, 79–82
Mongol invasion of, 100 in Hungary, population in 19th
under Nemanja of Raška, 83–91, 95, century, 247–48
109–11 migration of, 63–64
geographic territory for, 85 origins of, 60–66
Manuel I Komnenos and, 83–84, in Frankish Annals, 60–61
87–88 geographic region for, 64–66
monastic life for, 93–94 Serboi tribe and, 62
re-emergence of, 90–91 White Serbia, 64–66
Serbia and, 85–86 settlements for, 71–73
Nemanjić dynastic state, 83–91, 95, Slavs and, 66–78
109–11, 118–25, 137 adoption of Christianity by, 74–78
under Milutin reign, 102–107 in Bosnia region, 69–71
Roman Catholicism in, 102–104 in Byzantium, 75–76
Orthodox Church during, 91–101 political consolidation between,
monasteries for, 108 early formation of, 66–74
Raška dynasty in, 83–91, 95–96, 121 settlements for, 71–73
monasteries during, 108 serfdom, under Obrenović, Miloš
Roman Catholicism and, 91–104 Teodorović, 244
rulers during, history of, 98–101 Šerifović, Marija, 32
during Second Crusade, 86–87 Šešelj, Vojislav, 467, 504, 517
under Stefan Dušan, 97–98, 106–11, Seton-Watson, R. W., 352
113–14 settlements, early, 71–73
fragmentation of empire under, 140 Simeon of Bulgaria, 78
Law of the Pious Emperor Stefan, Simić, Charles, 27
112 Simić, Pavle, 270
under Tihomir, 87 Simović, Dušan, 392
Serbian Orthodox Church, 7–8, 67, Singidunum site, 52
367–68, 441–42. See also Peć sipahis (owners of timars), 152–53
Patriarchate Sirmium site, 52
558
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Slavs students as part of, 297

Cyril and, 77–78 women’s rights as part of, 295–97
early writing systems for, 76 Socialist Party of Serbia, 472
first alphabet for South Slav state, creation of, 283–91
creation of, 76 Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and, conflict
Glagolitic, 76 with, 426–33
in Great Migration of 1690, 185–86 Spiridon I (Patriarch), 126
Islam among, 158–60 sports, 28–30
Methodius and, 77–78 Yugoslav school of basketball, 29
migration of, 53–60 Srbljanović, Biljana, 27
as agrarian society, 60 Sremac, Stevan, 293
Avars and, 55–56 Sremski Karlovci, 201
in Byzantium, 56–57 St Andrews Assembly, 270–74
cultural and religious traditions for, St Sava, 94–95, 97–100, 124, 151, 156,
58–59 157, 168, 175. See also Rastko
by Middle Ages, 59–60 (Nemanjić)
Roman influences on, 58 Stalin, Josef, 426–33
Mihailo and, 81 Stambolić, Ivan, 455–57, 513
multiethnic origins for, 67–68 Stambolić, Petar, 449–50, 455, 458
Northwestern Slavs, 68 Stanić, Kata, 28
as Muslims, in Serbia, 9 Stanković, Bora, 293
as Orthodox Christians, 185–86 Stanković, Borislav, 29
religious traditions for, 77–78 Stanković, Dejan, 30
Serbs and Stanković, Filip, 273
adoption of Christianity influenced Stanojević, Veljko, 374
by, 74–78 start-up tech industry, 22
in Bosnia region, 69–71 Stefan Dečanski Nemanjić (King), 104,
in Byzantium, 75–76 106, 113
political consolidation between, Stefan Dragutin Nemanjić (King), 101,
early formation of, 66–74 107, 112, 143
settlements for, 71–73 Stefan Dušan Nemanjić (King and
Slavs, Serbs and, 66–78 Emperor), 48, 85–86, 89,
The Sleeping Prince (Rattigan), 314 97–98, 106–15, 118, 126, 171,
Slovaks, in Serbia, 9 181, 258, 294
Slovene People’s Party, 376–77, 387 fragmentation of empire under, 140
Slovenia, 435. See also Serb–Croat– Law of the Pious Emperor Stefan, 112
Slovene kingdom Stefan the First Crowned Nemanjić
international recognition of, 485 (King), 91–92, 95–98, 100,
Slovenian War and, 479–82 178, 442
Smederevo, fall of, 135–39 Stefan Lazarević (Despot), 128–32, 143
socialist movement, 294–99 Stefan Milutin Nemanjić (King), 101–108
‘Eastern Crisis’ and, 298–99 Stefan Radoslav Nemanjić (King), 99
journals and magazines in, 295–97 Stefan Nemanja. See Nemanja
labor demonstrations as part of, Stefan Uroš I Nemanjić (King), 95,
297–98 100–101, 103
Socialist Party of Serbia, 472 Stefan Uroš IV Nemanjić (Emperor),
Socialist-Democratic Party, 321–22 110, 113, 118–20
559
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Stefan Vladislav Nemanjić (King), 67, Todosijević, Raša, 437

99–100, 157 Tomislav (King), 74
Stefanović, Danilo, 297 Topalović, Živko, 399
Stoianovich, Traian, 45 Tošić, Desimir, 299, 447, 448
Stojadinović, Milan, 387–88 Tošić, Duško, 23
Stojaković, Predrag, 29 Toulouse, Raymond de, 81–82
Stojanović, Miloš, 25 Trailović, Mira, 21
Stojković, Dragan, 30 Treaty of Adrianople, 244
štokavski dialect, 234–36 Treaty of Karlowitz, 189
Stone Age, migration during, 50–51 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, 198, 206
Stroimir, 69 Treaty of London, 359
students, in socialist movement, 297 Treaty of Passarowitz, 196
Subotić, Savka, 267–69 Treaty of Svishtov, 210
Suleiman I (The Magnificent, Sultan), Treaty of Westphalia, 176
143, 145 Trgovčević, Ljubinka, 458
Sundhaussen, Holm, 45 tributes, yearly, in Ottoman Empire,
Supilo, Frano, 349 140–41
Šuvar, Stipe, 462 Tričković, Radmila, 189
Tripartite Pact, 372, 391
Tābıt, 160 Trumbić, Ante, 323, 348–49, 359–60
Tadić, Boris, 517, 519 Tucović, Dimitrije, 298, 321–22
Tankosić, Vojin, 337 Tudjman, Franjo, 471–72
Taylor, A. J. P., 338 Turajlić, Mila, 28
Tekelija, Sava Popović, 226–28 turbofolk music, 23, 32
Tenka, Stefan Stefanović, 270–71, 297 Tvrtko (Ban, King), 121–26, 137, 139
Territory of the German Military Tzara, Tristan, 373
Commander, Serbia, 1
Tešanović, Jasmina, 508 Uglješa Mrnjavčević (Despot), 119–20,
Tesla, Nikola, 353 180
Thaçi, Hashim, 505 UJDI. See Yugoslav Democratic
Thatcher, Margaret, 450 Initiative
Theodore I Laskaris (Emperor), 98 Ujević, Tin, 320
Theodosius I (Emperor), 52 United Serbian Youth, 286–87
Third Crusade, 88–90 United States (U.S.), military aid to
Third Serbian Uprising, 423 Yugoslavia, 429–30
Thirty Years War, 176–78 Urkom, Gera, 437
Tihomir (Grand Župan), 87 Uroš I (Grand Župan), 86
timars, 152–53 Uroš II (Grand Župan), 86
Tišma, Aleksandar, 26–27 Uroš, Simeon, 113–14
Tito, Josip Broz, 399–400, 432, 445–46 U.S. See United States
censorship of critical voices, 447 Ustaša genocide, 16, 416–18, 478–79
death of, 449–56 Utješenović, Juraj, 172–73
Non-Aligned Movement and, 433–35, Užičawī, Ğārī Çalabi, 159–60
440–41
Stalin and, split from, 426–33 Vallance, Holly, 28
Todorović, Mijalko, 442 Vasić, Dragiša, 408
Todorović, Pera, 298, 308–309 Vasilije (Metropolitan), 188
560
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Vasović, Velibor, 30 Warsaw Pact, 430–31

vassals, in Ottoman Empire, 140–41 White Serbia, 64–66
Velika Seoba. See Great Migration of 1690 Wilhelm I (Kaiser), 283
Velikić, Dragan, 26 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 332
Velimirović, Nikolaj (Bishop), 352, 421 women. See also women’s rights
Vidaković, Milovan, 204, 208, 226–27 discrimination against, 31
Vidaković, Stefan, 204 Women in Black, 475–76
Vidić, Nemanja, 30 women’s rights, socialist movement for,
Vienna War, 145–46, 178–83 295–97
village leaders. See knezes World War I. See Great War
Viminacium site, 52 writing systems, alphabets in
Višeslav, the first Serb ruler known by Cyrillic alphabet, 237–38
name, 68 Glagolitic alphabet, 76
Višnjić, Čedomir, 486–87 for Slavs, 76
Višnjić, Filip, 233
Vittorio Emanuelle II (King), 283 Young Bosnia, 38, 43, 333, 336, 348,
Vlachs, 9, 165–66, 175–76 434, 454
Vlajić, Božidar, 299, 447, 468 Young Italy, 333
Vlajković, Radovan, 450 Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (UJDI),
Vlastimir, 68, 69, 76–77 469, 470, 482, 486
VMRO. See Macedonian Internal Yugoslav Muslim Organization, 376–77,
Revolutionary Organisation 387
Vojislav of Duklja, 80 Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), 452,
Vojvodina province 455, 475
Duchy of Serbia and, 191 during Bosnian Wars, 492–94
establishment of, 191 Yugoslav Radical Union, 387
political autonomy of, 20–21, 464 Yugoslav Wars, 478
Vonko, 115 Yugoslavia. See also Milošević, Slobodan;
Vučić, Aleksandar, 14, 36, 504, 519–22, Serb-Croat-Slovene kingdom;
526, 529, 531–32 specific nations; specific regions
Vučić Perišić, Toma, 253–54, 257, administrative division in, 381
270–72 Andjelković as folk hero in, 209
Vučković, Zvonimir, 372, 399 Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s
Vujanović, Milja, 438 Liberation of Yugoslavia, 417
Vujasinović, Dada, 507–508 common national identity within,
Vujić, Joakim, 227 development of, 439–49
Vukan, ruler of Raška, 85–86 Communist Party of Yugoslavia,
Vukan (Nemanjić), 87, 91, 95–97 298–99, 363–64, 427
Vukašin Mrnjavčević (King), 119–20, constitutional laws in, 430
126 1951 Constitutional Law, 440
Vukčić-Kosača, Stefan (Duke), 124–25 1974 Constitution, 464–65
Vuković, Vlatko (Vojvoda), 126, 127 1990 Constitution, 465
Vunjak-Novaković, Gordana, 27 creation of, 288, 361
Vysocky, Vladimir, 24 decentralisation of government in,
445–46
War of the Austrian Succession, 193–94 Democratic Party in, 299
wars. See specific wars as dictatorship, 385–86
561
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010
Index
Yugoslavia (cont.) capitulation of, to Nazi Germany,

disintegration of, 475–79 395, 398
economic trade with Nazi Germany, partition of, 398
387–88 war deaths in, 411
establishment as republic Soviet Union and, conflicts with,
administrative boundaries, 424 426–33
ethnic boundaries, 424 sporting success for, 473–75
through provisional government, Tripartite Pact, 372, 391
422–25 U.S. military aid to, 429–30
genocide in, 416–18 Yusuf, Mülla, 213
land redistribution in, 369
League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Zach, František, 258, 269, 280
430, 455–57 Zapolya, John (King), 170
liberal democratic intellectuals in, Žebeljan, Isidora, 21
447–49, 451–52 Žefarović, Hristifor, 200
military losses during Great War, 346 Žerajić, Bogdan, 334
Muslims in, 376–77 Žeravica, Ranko, 29
Non-Aligned Movement and, 17, Žerjavić, Vladimir, 411
430–31, 435–36 Žilnik, Želimir, 27, 437–38, 501
Tito and, 433–35, 440–41 Zionism, 36, 154
Partisan War, 433–34 Živadinović-Vane Bor, Stevan, 373
Peasant–Democratic Coalition, 378 Živković, Petar, 383
political alliances and rivalries in, 377 Živković, Zoran, 27
political compromises with Croatia, Živojinović, Velimir-Bata, 28
376–91 Zmaj, Jovan Jovanović, 268, 286
political compromises with Serbia, Žujović, Sreten, 407, 428
376–91 Zulfikarpašić, Adil, 447, 468
post-Tito era, 449–56 Županič, Niko, 320
during Second World War, 391–402 Zweig, Stefan, 339
562
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139236140.010

(Cambridge Concise Histories) Dejan Djokić - A Concise History of Serbia-Cambridge University Press (2023)

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(Cambridge Concise Histories) Dejan Djokić - A Concise History of Serbia-Cambridge University Press (2023)

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A CO NC ISE HISTORY OF SER B I A

This accessible and engaging book covers the full span of

Dejan Djokić is Professor of History at Goldsmiths,

This is a series of illustrated ‘concise histories’ of selected

A full list of titles in the series can be found at:

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Figures page viii

Further Reading 534

1.1 Remnants of the medieval town of Ras,

5.4 Young girls dressed as soldiers in the Serbian army at

7.5 Slobodan Milošević faces a crowd of cameramen

0.1 Serbia and its neighbours in 2022page 4

4.1 Population of Serbia, 1815–1874 page 241

2.1 Raška or Serbia? page 85

I would not have written this book without Elizabeth Friend-

book I had yet to begin writing at, respectively, Department of

Center, ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv; Angelika

DAI Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando

newspaper of record, reported that Kalina Danilović, a house-

self-destructive force that, unlike the nationalisms of the Serbs’

M. Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’,

Mostar A Novi Pazar Niš

A Republika Srpska GREECE

exist as de facto western protectorates, it may be possible to

Kosovo’s predominantly Albanian population had fought for

of Serbia’s citizens declare themselves as Serbs; the majority,

R. Radić and M. Vukomanović, ‘Religion and Democracy in Serbia since 1989:

abroad’, and, in smaller numbers, across the globe, because of

were the largest minority, who made up between 15 and 20 per

They see Serbia as a meeting place between East and West,

level) to the Balkan Dinaric Mountain chain in the south-west of

relatively peacefully.12 Serbia, on the other hand, sought to reaf-

the Dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, Cambridge, 2015.

half of them Serbs. The 1940s war was a complex, multi-layered

canonically unrecognized Montenegrin Orthodox Church was

D. Jović, ‘Fear of Becoming Minority as a Motivator of Conflict in the

Former Yugoslavia’, Balkanologie, 1–2 (2001), https://journals

Yugoslavia; they believed in a strong state – whether unitary and

In a further twist of historical irony, Prime Minister Pašić received Austria-

Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 while having lunch

and their neighbours’ clearly distinguished ethno-religious iden-

of the 1990s, Serbs have suffered enormously historically. During

Culture and Society

Contemporary Serbia is a society of sharp contrasts and con-

R. Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2002, 4.

despite a high degree of centralism, key political decisions con-

Yugoslav Drama Theatre, founded in Belgrade in 1947, and the

households have internet. ‘Godišnje istraživanje o upotrebi informaciono-

Serbia might be described as at once a conservative, patriar-

and economic crises, wars and international isolation. Yugoslav

Economics graduate and a former advisor to late Prime Minister

Meanwhile, Belgrade-born Zoran Živković is a widely translated

limelight in the late 1970s and early ‘80s (Srdjan Karanović,

1 female tennis players in the world coincided with Djoković’s

Yugoslav School of Basketball, 1968–2000’, Nationalities Papers, 29:2 (2001),

success of Serbian football teams Red Star and Partizan Belgrade

In common with other patriarchal societies in South-Eastern

T. Ignjatović, ‘Numbers Speak: Violence against Women in Serbia’,

Heinrich Böll Stiftung/Gunda Werner Institute, 2017, www.gwi-boell.de/

committed by right-wing groups and football hooligans, result-

C. Baker, ‘The Molitva Factor: Eurovision and Performing National

Identity in World Politics’, in A. Dubin et al. (eds), Eurovision as a Cultural

the Serbs as perennially associated with violence, as a nation of

How Unique Is Serbian History?

0.1 Serbia and its neighbours in 2022page 4

4.1 Population of Serbia, 1815–1874 page 241

2.1 Raška or Serbia? page 85