Croatia: Between Europe and the Balkans

The Croats arrived in the Balkans in the seventh century along with other nomadic Slavic tribes and settled in parts of present-day Croatia. They established an independent kingdom located between the Drava river and the Adriatic coast, with its centre at the city of Knin. Mediaeval Croatia, like other European countries at the time, developed a feudal system dominated by a class of landlords who formed a privileged nobility giving allegiance to the Croatian king. Chroniclers of the Crusades, passing through the coastal city of Zadar, reported that the Croats celebrated mass in the Croatian language, a practice indicating a well-developed sense of national identity. At the end of the eleventh century Croatia came under the sway of its powerful neighbour, Hungary, and in 1102 agreed to be ruled by its Hungarian king, who also became king of Croatia. Although remaining an independent state, with her own feudal parliament or Sabor, from that time on the Croatian feudal nobility gave their allegiance to the Hungarian crown. ¹

From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries the Ottomans conquered large parts of Croatia. The high tide of the Ottoman conquest was reached in 1593 when an Austro-Croatian army defeated the Ottomans at Sisak. By the end of the seventeenth century the Ottomans has been driven out of Croatia with the aid of the Austrian Habsburg monarchs, who assumed the crown of both Hungary and Croatia. The inland part of Croatia remained under Hungarian dominion, while the coastal region of Dalmatia was ruled by the Venetians. Some of the nobility had adopted Protestantism, which was especially strong in northern Croatia in the late sixteenth century. But the Catholic Habsburgs suppressed

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