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    History Crotia

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    Virat Gadhvi
    The document provides a history of Croatia from ancient times to the 19th century. It discusses how Croatia existed at the crossroads of Eastern and Western influences and confronted expansion of Muslim rule. As part of Yugoslavia in the 20th century, Croatia struggled within a Serbian-dominated state. The territory of Croatia shifted over centuries due to Venetian and Ottoman conquests. A Croatian national identity consolidated among Catholics in Dalmatia and Bosnia. In the 19th century, the Illyrian movement sought to defend Croatian interests and facilitate unification of South Slavs through a single literary language.

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    History Crotia

    Uploaded by

    Virat Gadhvi
    45 views3 pages
    The document provides a history of Croatia from ancient times to the 19th century. It discusses how Croatia existed at the crossroads of Eastern and Western influences and confronted expansion of Muslim rule. As part of Yugoslavia in the 20th century, Croatia struggled within a Serbian-dominated state. The territory of Croatia shifted over centuries due to Venetian and Ottoman conquests. A Croatian national identity consolidated among Catholics in Dalmatia and Bosnia. In the 19th century, the Illyrian movement sought to defend Croatian interests and facilitate unification of South Slavs through a single literary language.

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    History crotia

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    The document provides a history of Croatia from ancient times to the 19th century. It discusses how Croatia existed at the crossroads of Eastern and Western influences and confronted expansion of Muslim rule. As part of Yugoslavia in the 20th century, Croatia struggled within a Serbian-dominated state. The territory of Croatia shifted over centuries due to Venetian and Ottoman conquests. A Croatian national identity consolidated among Catholics in Dalmatia and Bosnia. In the 19th century, the Illyrian movement sought to defend Croatian interests and facilitate unification of South Slavs through a single literary language.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    45 views3 pages

    History Crotia

    Uploaded by

    Virat Gadhvi
    The document provides a history of Croatia from ancient times to the 19th century. It discusses how Croatia existed at the crossroads of Eastern and Western influences and confronted expansion of Muslim rule. As part of Yugoslavia in the 20th century, Croatia struggled within a Serbian-dominated state. The territory of Croatia shifted over centuries due to Venetian and Ottoman conquests. A Croatian national identity consolidated among Catholics in Dalmatia and Bosnia. In the 19th century, the Illyrian movement sought to defend Croatian interests and facilitate unification of South Slavs through a single literary language.

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    History 

    of Croatia
    The territory of Croatia bridges the central European and Mediterranean worlds, and
    its history has been marked by this position as a borderland. It lay near the division
    between the two halves of the Roman Empire and between
    their Byzantine and Frankish successors. The Eastern and Western churches
    competed for influence there, and, as the frontier of Christendom, it confronted the
    limits of Muslim expansion into Europe. As a part of Yugoslavia after both World
    Wars, it struggled within the Serbian-dominated state of the interwar years and
    emerged from World War II as a separate republic in the communist federation that
    navigated between the Soviet and Western blocs. All these competing interests have
    had an influence on Croatia’s development.
    Croatia to the Ottoman conquests
    The lands where the Croats would settle and establish their state lay just within the
    borders of the Western Roman Empire. In the 6th and 7th centuries CE, Slavs arrived
    in the western Balkans, settling on Byzantine territory along the Adriatic and in the
    hinterland and gradually merging with the indigenous Latinized population.
    Eventually they accepted the Roman Catholic Church, though preserving
    a Slavonic liturgy. In the 9th century an independent Croatian state developed with
    its centre in northern Dalmatia, later incorporating Croatia proper and Slavonia as
    well. This state grew into a powerful military force under King Tomislav (reigned c.
    910–928). Croatia retained its independence under native kings until 1102, when the
    crown passed into the hands of the Hungarian dynasty. The precise terms of this
    relationship later became a matter of dispute. Nonetheless, even under dynastic
    union with Hungary, institutions of separate Croatian statehood were maintained
    through the Sabor (an assembly of Croatian nobles) and the ban (viceroy). In
    addition, the Croatian nobles retained their lands and titles.

    Over the following centuries, the area associated with the name Croatia shifted
    gradually north and west as its territory was eroded, first with the loss of Dalmatia
    to Venice by 1420 and then as a result of Ottoman conquests in the 16th century. The
    Croatian nobility maintained their claims to lands occupied by the Ottomans, hoping
    to repossess them once liberated. A Croatian national tradition also survived within
    these territories, as well as in lands under Venetian rule. A broader Croatian ethnic
    identity would be further consolidated among the Catholics of Dalmatia and
    of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the nationalist movements of the 19th century.

    The Austrian Habsburgs, elected to the throne of Croatia in 1527 after the death of


    King Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács, defended the “remnant of the
    remnants” of Croatia by establishing the Military Frontier (German: Militärgrenze;
    Serbo-Croatian: Vojna Krajina), a defensive zone along the border with the Ottoman-
    controlled lands. Because it was ruled directly by the Habsburg war council, the
    Military Frontier further reduced the amount of land under the control of Croatian
    nobles, the Sabor, and the ban. Furthermore, its military units and their land rights
    attracted not only some Croatian peasants but also a larger Orthodox inflow from the
    Ottoman-conquered territories. Such was the origin of Croatia’s
    minority Serb population.
    Under the pressures caused by the Ottoman invasions and increased obligations to
    landlords, the position of the Croatian peasantry deteriorated, leading to a number of
    rebellions—most notably in 1573. The nobility, too, was under pressure from
    Habsburg absolutism. An anti-Habsburg conspiracy of Croatian and Hungarian
    nobles was unsuccessful, and its leaders, including Petar Zrinski, ban of Croatia, were
    executed in 1671. Their extensive properties in Croatia were confiscated by the
    Habsburg crown.
    Ragusa and the Croat Renaissance in Dalmatia
    The Adriatic port of Ragusa had been founded by Latinized colonists, but by the 14th
    century it had been largely Slavicized and had acquired its alternate name
    of Dubrovnik. The largely Croat republic of Ragusa maintained a
    precarious autonomy under the suzerainty of Venice, Hungary, and (after 1397) the
    Ottoman Empire. Its wealth as a trading power was based on its role as an
    intermediary between East and West, and it nurtured a flourishing cultural life. In
    the 16th and 17th centuries, Ragusa and other Dalmatian cities under the rule of
    Venice became the centre of the Croat Renaissance, which produced, in addition to
    works of art and science, an extensive and powerful literature that had a lasting
    influence on the development of the Croatian literary language. As a mercantile
    power, however, Ragusa eventually entered a decline parallel to that of Venice, so
    that by the 18th century it had become little more than an economic backwater.
    Ragusa retained its autonomy as a city-state until 1806, when it was occupied
    by Napoleon I’s armies. During the French occupation of all of Dalmatia, which
    lasted until 1813, the region was designated as part of the Illyrian Provinces, where
    education and publications in South Slav languages were allowed.

    Croatian national revival


    From the end of the 17th century, the Habsburgs began to regain Croatian crown
    lands, first from the Ottomans (with the treaties of Carlowitz in 1699
    and Passarowitz in 1718) and then from Venice after the Napoleonic Wars (confirmed
    by the Congress of Vienna in 1815). For the most part these territories were not
    rejoined to Croatia but were either incorporated into the Military Frontier or
    organized as separate provinces—as in the case of Austrian Habsburg Dalmatia.
    Much of the land was distributed to German or Hungarian magnates and military
    dignitaries.

    The Croat nobility was impoverished, often culturally assimilated, and too weak to
    withstand the Habsburg centralization and Germanization that began in the 18th
    century under the Austrian archduchess and Holy Roman empress Maria
    Theresa and continued under her son, the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II. As the
    best defense of their rights and privileges, the Croats turned to cooperation with the
    Hungarians, but this choice would later expose them to the rising force of
    Hungarian nationalism. When Hungarian, rather than Latin, was imposed as the
    official language in Hungary and Croatia, Croatian resistance took shape in
    the Illyrian movement of the 1830s and ’40s. The Illyrianists—primarily intellectuals,
    professionals, clergymen, and gentry led by the linguistic reformer Ljudevit Gaj—
    strove to defend Croatian interests by calling for the unification of all the South Slavs,
    to be facilitated through the adoption of a single literary language. Though the
    Illyrianists failed to win over the other South Slavs, they did succeed
    in integrating the linguistically and administratively divided Croats within one
    national movement.

    Zagreb: Ban Josip Jelačić Square

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