Montenegro's history: a state voted away by an assembly and back by a ballot

Who ruled the Montenegrin lands before the Ottomans

Before Slavs arrived in the Balkans in the 6th and 7th centuries, the area now known as Montenegro was inhabited principally by Illyrians. Greek colonies were planted on the coast in the 6th and 7th centuries BC and Celts settled there in the 4th century BC. An Illyrian kingdom with its capital at Skadar, modern Shkodër, emerged in the 3rd century BC. The sources differ on when Rome finished it: Britannica dates the conquest to 9 CE, the Wikipedia history to the 2nd century BC. Both agree it ended inside the province of Illyricum.

The later division of the empire, and then of the Latin and Greek churches, ran along a line northward from Skadar straight through what is now Montenegro. Britannica reads the line as marking a region permanently on the margin between the Mediterranean and Slav worlds. By the 9th century three Slavic principalities shared the territory: Duklja in the south, Travunia in the west and Rascia in the north. In 1042 Stefan Vojislav defeated a Byzantine army near Bar and ended Byzantine control of Duklja. When the churches split in 1054, Duklja fell on the Catholic side, and in 1077 Pope Gregory VII recognised Vojislav's son Mihailo as king.

The Serbian Nemanjić dynasty took Duklja, by then usually called Zeta, in the late 12th century and held it as a crown land until about 1360. The Balšić family ruled Zeta from Skadar until their line died out in 1421. The Crnojević family then moved the centre of resistance inland, to Žabljak and finally to Cetinje, where Djuradj Crnojević founded a monastery and a bishopric and brought a printing press from Venice. It printed from 1494, and Britannica describes the Ostoih produced that year as believed to be the first book printed in Cyrillic from the South Slavic region. The name Crna Gora, Venetian monte negro, the Black Mountain, came into use under this family. The Ottomans took Zeta in 1496.

The coast went a different way. Venice held the Bay of Kotor and the littoral from 1420 to 1797 as part of Venetian Albania, and Kotor grew into an artistic and commercial centre with its own schools of masonry and icon painting. UNESCO records that four of its Romanesque churches and the town walls were badly damaged in the 1979 earthquake and later restored.

How prince-bishops kept Montenegro governing itself

Why an elected bishop replaced the dynasty

In 1516 the last of the Crnojević line, retired to Venice, conferred the succession on the bishops of Cetinje, and a bishop named Vavila was chosen by the clans. Britannica calls this the change that many historians credit with keeping Montenegro in being. Elsewhere in the Balkans, territory often passed to the Ottomans because local magnates lost the loyalty of their own subjects. A ruler who was also the head of the church had a claim on that loyalty that a chieftain lacked, a fixed rule of succession, and no room to make terms with the Ottomans.

The vladika was elective, chosen by the clans and the Patriarchate of Peć, until 1696. In that year Danilo Petrović was elected with the right to name his own successor. Orthodox bishops must be celibate, so the office passed from uncle to nephew within the Petrović-Njegoš family until 1852.

How the clans held the Ottoman frontier

The Ottomans made the territory a separate sanjak in 1514, with a converted Crnojević as its first governor, and they took Cetinje in 1623, 1687 and 1712. They never held the mountains. Britannica gives three reasons for that: the resistance of the population, the terrain, where it was said that "a small army is beaten, a large one dies of starvation", and Venetian diplomacy. The Wikipedia history puts about 1,500 Montenegrins against a camp of 10,000 Ottoman soldiers at Lješkopolje in 1604, and 4,000 against more than 40,000 under Arslan Pasha in 1613.

The Venetian patrician Mariano Bolizza, writing from Kotor in 1614, counted 8,027 men available for war across 93 villages. The territory was divided into five nahije, each made up of clans under a chief who judged disputes among his own people, and an assembly of the clans met every year on 12 July at Cetinje, open to any adult clansman.

Britannica treats religious identity in these centuries as fluid. It calls the "Montenegrin Vespers", a massacre of converts to Islam said to have happened on Christmas Eve 1702, apocryphal, and records contested evidence that lineages moved between Catholic and Muslim faiths and between Montenegrin and Albanian identity. Orthodoxy settled as the Ottoman tide receded. Russia replaced Venice as patron after Danilo visited Peter the Great in 1715, and in 1799 the Ottoman Porte formally recognised Montenegro as a state under the vladika Peter I. Russian support at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 still failed to win it a coast, although Montenegrins had helped take the Bay of Kotor from the French in 1806.

How Montenegro won recognition as a sovereign state

Peter II, who came to office in 1830 and is also the poet Njegoš, weakened the chieftains after putting down an uprising in 1847 and replaced the civil governor with a senate. His nephew Danilo was already betrothed when Peter died in 1851, so he could not become a bishop. In 1852 he took the title of prince instead, made it hereditary and separated the state from the see. A written legal code, the Danilo Code, followed in 1855. At Grahovac on 1 May 1858 an army of 7,500 under Danilo's brother Mirko defeated 15,000 Ottoman troops, and the Great Powers then demarcated a border between Montenegro and the Ottoman Empire.

Danilo was assassinated in Kotor in 1860 and his nephew Nicholas was proclaimed prince on 14 August. Nicholas joined Serbia's war against the Ottomans in 1876 and Russia joined in 1877. The Treaty of San Stefano of March 1878 was cut back at the Congress of Berlin the same year, and Montenegro still came out recognised as independent and roughly doubled, gaining 4,900 square kilometres and the ports of Bar and Ulcinj. Its borders were written into an international treaty for the first time. The same treaty closed Montenegrin waters to the warships of every nation, and placed the maritime and sanitary police of the coast with Austria.

The decades after Berlin brought tobacco and vines, a state bank, motor roads, a postal service, a first newspaper in 1871 and, in 1908, a railway from Bar to Virpazar on Lake Skadar, with much of the investment foreign and most of that Italian. Emigrants left for Serbia and the United States. Nicholas married his daughters into the courts of Europe: Zorka to Peter Karađorđević in 1883, Elena to the future Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in 1896 and two others to Russian grand dukes. He was forced to grant a constitution in 1905, survived a bomb plot in Cetinje in 1907 and proclaimed himself king on 28 August 1910.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 added territory on the Albanian border and in Kosovo and, through the division of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, gave Montenegro its first common border with Serbia. They also cost it Skadar. The Wikipedia history puts Montenegrin dead in the siege at 10,000, and the Great Powers then handed the town to the new state of Albania. Talks on union with Serbia began and were cut off by the war.

Why an assembly ended the Montenegrin kingdom

Montenegro declared war on Austria-Hungary on 6 August 1914. It fought a rearguard action at Mojkovac on 6 and 7 January 1916 to cover the Serbian army's retreat into Albania, and Austria-Hungary accepted its surrender on 25 January 1916. Britannica records that Nicholas concluded a separate peace that January and went into exile in Italy. His government moved to Bordeaux and the country stayed under occupation until October 1918.

When the Serbian army came back, an assembly met and decided the kingdom's end. On 26 November 1918 it deposed Nicholas in his absence, barred his return and voted for union with Serbia, which entered the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on 1 December 1918. The Wikipedia article on the kingdom describes the Podgorica Assembly as an elected body claiming to represent the Montenegrin people, acting "under heavy influence from pro-Serbian forces", and says the resolution passed unanimously and without a popular referendum. The sources do not agree on the details: the same article gives 28 November in one paragraph and 26 November in another, and Britannica places the assembly at Cetinje.

The decision divided Montenegrins into two camps whose names outlived the kingdom. The Whites, bjelaši, backed the union; the Greens, zelenaši, backed the crown. Royalist forces rose against the union in the Christmas Uprising of 7 January 1919 and were put down. Nicholas, who had earlier supported union with his own dynasty at the head of it, spent his last years opposing it and died at Antibes on 2 March 1921. Montenegro had been an internationally recognised state for forty years.

What Montenegro became inside royal and socialist Yugoslavia

In the new kingdom Montenegro was first the Oblast of Cetinje, from 1922, and from 1929 part of the Zeta Banovina, a larger unit that reached the Neretva. Britannica describes an interwar Montenegro that political patronage passed over: no new railway, no new mine, little road building and a port at Bar that one historian called "of very little importance" in 1938. Its chief export in the period, in Britannica's words, "was probably emigrants". The Communist Party drew support there on a scale comparable to the industrial centres of Zagreb and Belgrade.

Italy occupied Montenegro in April 1941 and planned a puppet kingdom. Prince Michael, a nephew of Queen Elena of Italy, refused the crown. The uprising of 13 July 1941 drew 32,000 men and women by 20 July, according to the main Wikipedia article, and freed most of the country except the coast and the main towns before a counter-offensive by 67,000 Italian troops put it down in August. The fighters then split. Partisans and Chetniks were at war with each other from 1942, and after Italy capitulated in September 1943 Germany took over the occupation. A Federal State of Montenegro was declared within the Yugoslav federation on 15 November 1943, and the Partisans took Podgorica on 19 December 1944.

From 1945 to 1992 Montenegro was one of six republics of socialist Yugoslavia. Britannica reads the grant of republic status as what secured Montenegrin loyalty to the regime. Many Montenegrins rose to high posts in the army and the party, and many sided with Stalin in the split of 1948 and went to prison for it, some to Goli Otok. The seat of the republic moved in 1947 from Cetinje to Podgorica, renamed Titograd. Federal funds for less developed regions paid for a railway from Titograd to Nikšić, an embankment across Lake Skadar to the rebuilt port of Bar, a steel mill in Nikšić and the Podgorica aluminium plant in 1969. A university followed in 1974, and Britannica dates the rise of the coast as a tourist area to the 1980s.

How Montenegro pulled away from Serbia after Yugoslavia

The Montenegrin branch of the Communist party renamed itself the Democratic Party of Socialists and won the first multi-party elections in December 1990. On 28 April 1992 Montenegro and Serbia formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A referendum that year returned 96% for staying in a federation with Serbia, on a turnout of 66%, after opposition and minority parties called a boycott. Montenegrin forces took part in the attacks on Dubrovnik, and the Montenegrin general Pavle Strugar was later convicted for his part in its bombing.

The federation's currency collapsed. The Central Bank of Montenegro records monthly inflation of 50% in February 1992 and inflation of 3,508,091,786,746% by the end of 1993. The National Bank of Montenegro had become a regional office of the bank in Belgrade. After the leadership split in 1997, one wing staying with Milošević and the other with Milo Đukanović, the government in Podgorica began to build a state of its own inside the federation. It made the Deutsche Mark a parallel currency on 2 November 1999 and the sole legal tender in January 2001, and moved to the euro in March 2002. When NATO bombed Yugoslavia in 1999, targets in Montenegro were hit on a limited scale.

The Belgrade Agreement of 2002 turned the federation into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro under a Constitutional Charter adopted on 4 February 2003. Its Article 60 allowed either member to leave by referendum after three years, and provided that whichever left first would give up any claim to be the union's successor. Montenegro would have to apply to the United Nations as a new state and Serbia would keep the old memberships.

Who set the terms of the independence referendum

How the threshold was agreed

The referendum law passed the Montenegrin parliament unanimously in March 2006 after negotiation between the two camps; the ODIHR dates it to 1 March and the Wikipedia article on the referendum to 2 March. The government had wanted a simple majority. The European Union envoy Miroslav Lajčák proposed that independence need 55% of valid votes on a turnout of at least 50%, the Council of the European Union endorsed it, and the government accepted. Some criticised the figure as a break with the two-thirds majorities used in earlier referendums in the former Yugoslavia. The ODIHR, which observed the vote, read the 55% rule as a way of ensuring the result could not be treated as foregone and of discouraging a boycott. A final challenge, arguing that Article 119 of the 1992 constitution required a two-thirds vote in parliament as well, was dismissed by the Constitutional Court shortly before the vote. The ballot asked voters whether the Republic of Montenegro should be "an independent state with full international and legal personality".

What the count in Montenegro showed

On 21 May 2006, 419,236 of 484,718 registered voters took part, a turnout of 86.5%. The ODIHR's final table records 230,711 votes for independence, 55.5% of valid votes, and 184,954 against. On those figures the yes vote cleared the bar by about 2,100 votes. The main Wikipedia article gives slightly different totals and cites the electoral commission for a margin of 2,300.

Cetinje, the old royal capital, voted with the Bosniak-majority Rožaje and the Albanian-majority Ulcinj. The municipalities bordering Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina voted against. In the 2003 census cited by the ODIHR, about 40% of the population declared itself Montenegrin, 30% Serb, 14% Bosniak or Muslim and 7% Albanian.

Why the pro-union bloc rejected the result

The ODIHR found the vote in line with international standards and polling "very good" or "good" in more than 96% of its observers' reports. It also recorded government involvement in the pro-independence campaign, pressure on employees and one conviction of pro-independence activists for vote-buying. The pro-union bloc lodged about 210 complaints after the preliminary results, and the referendum commission dismissed all of them on its chairman's casting vote. Unionist members refused to sign the minutes of 31 May, and unionist deputies stayed away when parliament declared independence on 3 June 2006. In 2007 Jovan Markuš and the unionist parties published a 1,290-page White Book of alleged irregularities.

What independent Montenegro has built on the result

Serbia declared itself the successor to the union and Montenegro was admitted to the United Nations on 28 June 2006. In August 2006 it abolished conscription. The constitution adopted on 19 October 2007 by a two-thirds vote opens by "stemming from" the decision "made in the referendum held on May 21, 2006", and names Montenegrins, Serbs, Bosniacs, Albanians, Muslims and Croats among the citizens committed to a civic state.

The history the pro-independence camp had campaigned on, recognition in 1878 and its loss in 1918, was taken up by the new state. A law of 12 July 2011 rehabilitated the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty deposed by the Podgorica Assembly and gave its descendants a limited symbolic role. Montenegrin prosecutors charged fourteen people, among them two Russian nationals and two opposition leaders, over a plot prepared for the election day of 16 October 2016. Montenegro joined NATO on 5 June 2017, a step the main Wikipedia history says about half the population had rejected. It opened the European Union chapter on economic and monetary policy on 25 June 2018 as a state already using the euro without belonging to the euro area.