Serbia's history: the one republic that never left Yugoslavia

How a Serbian state formed and became an empire

Where the earliest principalities came from

The Vlastimirović dynasty established a Serbian principality around 780, and Frankish annalists recorded in 822 that the Serbs were "said to be holding the large part of Dalmatia". Britannica dates the first state to which Serbs attach a political identity later, to Vlastimir around 850, centred on Raška. The ethnic identity of the populations involved remains disputed among historians.

Society was organised in the zadruga, the extended household, several of which were grouped under a župan. A veliki župan who could hold a group of them together might rule a substantial territory and style himself king, which made such a state as easy to lose as to assemble. Bulgaria annexed Serbia in 924, Časlav re-established the principality after Simeon I died in 927, and Byzantium held the region for a century after 997, until a revolt in the maritime region of Duklja in 1040. The Vukanović dynasty founded the Grand Principality at Raška in 1091.

What outlasted all of those states was an alphabet. The Byzantine emperor Michael III sent Cyril and Methodius to preach to the Slavs in their own language in the ninth century, and the script they devised, Glagolitic first and then Cyrillic, became the clearest cultural line between Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians and Montenegrins on one side and Croats and Slovenes on the other. The official form of the country's name is still written in it, as Србија.

What the Nemanjić dynasty built

Stefan Nemanja took the throne of Raška in the 1160s, dated to 1166 in one standard account and to 1168 in another. He abdicated in 1196 in favour of his son Stefan, called the First-Crowned, who obtained the title of king of Serbia, Dalmatia and Bosnia from Pope Honorius III in 1217. Nemanja's youngest son Rastko, canonised as St Sava, secured an autocephalous Serbian church in 1219 and wrote the oldest known Serbian constitution. The archbishopric later moved south to Peć and was raised to a patriarchate in 1375 over an anathema from Constantinople.

Under Stefan Dušan, who ruled from 1331 to 1355, the state took in Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, all of modern Albania and Montenegro and Serbia as far north as the Danube. He was crowned emperor at Skopje in 1346 and promulgated the Zakonik in 1349, a code fusing the law of Constantinople with Serb folk custom. Gold, silver, copper and tin had been mined here since Roman times, and output rose to pay for the court and its armies.

The buildings are the part still standing. UNESCO lists Stari Ras and Sopoćani as a serial property of four components covering 199 hectares: the Sopoćani monastery, whose frescoes date from about 1270 to 1276; Djurdjevi Stupovi, founded in 1170 or 1171; St Peter's Church, put up in the tenth century on a sixth-century baptistery and the oldest surviving Christian church in the Balkans; and the remains of Ras itself, the first capital of the Serbian state from 1159.

Why Kosovo became the centre of Serbian memory

The Ottoman Empire gained a foothold on the European mainland in 1354, and Dušan died the year after. A brief reunion of the quarrelling clans under Vukašin and his brother John Uglješa ended at the Battle of the Maritsa River in 1371, where both men were killed. The Bulgarian tsar Ivan Shishman then accepted Ottoman suzerainty, which left Murad I free to turn west.

On St Vitus's Day, 28 June 1389, at Kosovo Polje, an army of Serbs, Albanians and Hungarians under the Serb knez Lazar Hrebeljanović was defeated. The battle left the Serbian state standing as a vassal despotate for another seventy years, and what it produced was the ballads: the vision of Lazar on the eve of the fighting, the alleged betrayal by Vuk Branković, the killing of Murad by Miloš Obilić. Britannica records that Kosovo became, especially during the nineteenth century, "the Jerusalem of the Serbs".

The date kept working long after the battle. Gavrilo Princip shot the Austrian heir at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, and an estimated one million people gathered at Gazimestan on 28 June 1989 for the six hundredth anniversary. What ended the medieval state was slower and is far less commemorated: the despots ruled a diminished Raška from Belgrade and then Smederevo, Smederevo fell in 1459, Belgrade fell in 1521, and modern Vojvodina was consolidated inside the Ottoman Empire by 1541.

How Serbs lived under Ottoman rule

Two centuries of fighting had emptied large tracts of the former Serb lands, and other populations moved in to till them for the spahis, the dispersed levy of armed horsemen the Ottoman system rested on.

Islam was generally not spread by the sword here. Ottoman administration recognised five non-Muslim religious communities, or millets, each under its own religious head, and the Serbs as Orthodox came under the patriarch of Constantinople before acquiring their own patriarchate at Peć. Churchmen administered justice, collected taxes and provided what schooling there was. Authority at village level ran through the knez, a Christian headman who negotiated taxation and organised labour obligations, and by the late eighteenth century that office had become a focus of Christian resistance. Advancement inside the empire required conversion: the devşirme took Christian boys aged between ten and twenty to Constantinople and trained them for administration or for the Janissary corps.

From the fourteenth century Serbs moved north into what is now Vojvodina, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, whose kings hired them as soldiers and border guards. After the Ottomans destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács on 29 August 1526, the leader of the Serbian mercenaries in Hungary, Jovan Nenad, set up a short-lived state with Subotica as its capital, and King John of Hungary defeated him in 1527. A pattern then held for two centuries: Austria incited Serbs to rise, Austria withdrew, and the reprisals stayed behind. It ran that way in the war of 1593 to 1606, after which Murad III burned the relics of St Sava; in the war of 1683 to 1690, after which Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević led Serbs north into Hungarian territory; and in the wars of 1716 to 1718 and 1788 to 1791.

How the uprisings turned a province into a kingdom

Serbia took its autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in two risings, the first in 1804 under Đorđe Petrović, called Karađorđe, and the second in 1815 under Miloš Obrenović. The Principality of Serbia was granted de facto independence in 1817, though Ottoman troops garrisoned Belgrade until 1867. The revolution was social as well as national: peasants acquired land and Belgrade became the political and cultural centre, alongside continued deep poverty and a widening distance between the modernising towns and the countryside. Officials in Vienna lobbied the Porte to approve Serbia's liberal constitution of 1869, calculating that a liberal Serbia would stir less nationalist trouble among its neighbours.

North of the Danube, the Serbs of the Austrian Empire proclaimed an autonomous Serbian Vojvodina during the revolutions of 1848. The emperor converted it into a crown land in November 1849 and abolished it in 1860 against the wishes of its Serbs.

Full international recognition came at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and the principality became a kingdom in 1882. The May Coup of 1903 put Karađorđe's grandson on the throne as Peter I, who had translated John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and who gave the country a democratic constitution. Austria annexed Bosnia in 1908. Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria then formed the Balkan League and drove the Ottoman Empire out of almost all of the Balkans in 1912 and 1913, and Serbia acquired Novi Pazar and part of Macedonia. Access to the sea was the one thing the wars failed to deliver: Austria helped bring Albania into being in 1912 to close off the Adriatic, Bulgaria stood between Serbia and the Aegean, and the country is landlocked to this day.

What the First World War cost Serbia

Serbia entered the war with a population of 4.6 million, 350,000 men called to arms and 185,000 of them in combat units, depleted by the Balkan Wars and dependent on France for supplies. Gavrilo Princip of Young Bosnia shot the Austrian heir at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Austria-Hungary allowed forty-eight hours for a reply to its ultimatum and declared war on 28 July, three days after Serbia had accepted nearly all of its demands. Habsburg forces took Belgrade on 2 December 1914 and the Serbian army retook it on 15 December.

Then came typhus. An estimated 27,000 men, many of them already wounded, died of it in the first months of 1915, and more than 100,000 people were affected; the country had 360 doctors and medical staff of its own, and fifteen foreign medical missions with 364 members were working there in March 1915. That autumn German command brought Austrian and Bulgarian forces into a third offensive, and the army retreated across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic. The Allies evacuated 153,000 soldiers and recruits to Corfu and Bizerte, and a further 4,847 died on Corfu between 23 January and 23 March 1916. Some 13,000 people followed Kosta Vojinović into the Toplica uprising from October 1916 to the end of March 1917, and 26,000 enemy troops were engaged in putting it down.

What the war cost is recorded in two accountings that measure different things, and both are worth printing. One totals 1,264,000 casualties for 1914 to 1918, put at 28% of the population and 58% of the male population. The other, compiled by Mile Bjelajac for the 1914-1918 online encyclopedia, gives some 63,000 killed in combat, 35,000 dead of disease or exhaustion and some 79,000 who never returned from captivity, states that civilian casualties have never been fully established, and reads the censuses of 1911 and 1921 for Serbia proper as showing a fall in the male population of between 17.43 and 29.5% from county to county.

Why the royal Yugoslav state came apart

The war aim was declared by the government in August 1914 and endorsed by parliament on 7 December 1914, and the Yugoslav Committee of émigrés from Austria-Hungary joined the Serbian government in the Corfu Declaration of July 1917. The assembly at Novi Sad voted Vojvodina into Serbia on 25 November 1918, the Montenegrin assembly voted for union on 29 November, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was proclaimed on 1 December 1918. The Kingdom of Serbia stopped existing that day, and eighty-eight years passed before a Serbian state existed again.

The most influential Croatian politicians opposed the new state from the start. Nikola Pašić's governments used police pressure on voters and minorities, confiscation of opposition pamphlets and election rigging to hold the Croatian Peasant Party and its allies to a parliamentary minority, on the view that power should be concentrated in Belgrade. In 1928 a Serb deputy opened fire on the opposition benches, killing two men outright and mortally wounding the Croatian Peasant Party leader, Stjepan Radić. King Alexander I answered the crisis in 1929 by banning national political parties, taking executive power and renaming the country Yugoslavia. He was assassinated at Marseille in 1934 by a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization acting with the Ustaše, and Vladko Maček extracted a Croatian banovina in 1939.

Prince Regent Paul signed a treaty with Hitler and was sent into exile after a coup two days later. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded on 6 April 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade for three days and killed 17,000 people, and the royal army surrendered unconditionally on 17 April.

How the war was fought inside Serbia

The occupiers divided the country up. The western lands together with Bosnia and Herzegovina became the Independent State of Croatia under the Ustaše; most of the territory of modern Serbia came under the German Military Administration, governed alongside it by administrations under Milan Aćimović and then the Serbian army general Milan Nedić; Hungary annexed the north, Bulgaria the east and the south, and Albania under Italian sponsorship took most of Kosovo and Metohija.

Camps were built for Jews, for communist Partisans and for royalist Chetniks. Banjica and Sajmište near Belgrade account on the most conservative estimates for around 40,000 Jewish dead, and about 90% of the Serbian Jewish population perished in the camps altogether. Hungarian authorities killed Serbs and Jews in a raid in the Bačka region in 1942.

Resistance ran along two lines that also fought each other. The Partisans, raised by the Communist Party under Josip Broz Tito, drew recruits from the Ustaše campaign against Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-Ustaše Croats. During the war and after it they killed civilians who withheld support, and tried the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović before a politically motivated court.

The Red Army liberated Belgrade on 20 October 1944 and German control of Serbia ended before the year was out. Yugoslavia's war dead are put at 1,700,000, or 10.8% of the population, and the damage at 9.1 billion United States dollars at the prices of the period.

How Tito's federation governed the Serbian republic

Socialist Yugoslavia was built as a federation of six republics with two autonomous regions inside Serbia, Vojvodina and Kosovo. It copied the Soviet model at first, broke with Moscow in 1948, and took a leading part in the Non-Aligned Movement. The constitution of 1974 loosened the federation and raised the autonomy of the republics along with that of Serbia's two provinces.

Tito died on 4 May 1980 and was succeeded by a presidency rotating annually among the six republics and the two autonomous regions. In the spring of 1981 protests spread from the University of Priština into several Kosovo cities, demanding that the autonomous region be raised to a full republic; the police suppressed them with many deaths, and a state of emergency was declared. The SANU Memorandum, drawn up by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and published in September 1986 by Večernje novosti, claimed that Serbs were suffering a genocide at the hands of the Kosovo Albanian majority.

Slobodan Milošević, leader of the League of Communists of Serbia from May 1986, told Serbs who had clashed with the police at Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987 that no one had the right to beat them, and defeated the Serbian president Ivan Stambolić at the televised eighth session of the party central committee on 25 September 1987. His supporters took control of Vojvodina on 6 October 1988, of Kosovo on 17 November 1988 and of Montenegro on 11 January 1989. The federal assembly granted Serbia the right to change its constitution on 25 November 1988, and the change of March 1989 removed the autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo.

The League of Communists of Yugoslavia gave up its monopoly on political power on 23 January 1990 and ceased to function as a national party the same day, when the Slovenian delegation walked out. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, North Macedonia left peacefully on 25 September 1991, and Bosnia and Herzegovina declared on 5 March 1992. The Yugoslav People's Army failed to prevent the first two and was formally dissolved on 20 May 1992.

How Serbia became a state again

The two remaining republics formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on 28 April 1992. NATO conducted an aerial bombing campaign against it from 24 March to 10 June 1999, following a violent crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo; after the Kumanovo Agreement and the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops, Kosovo became a United Nations protectorate under UNMIK. Milošević conceded defeat on 5 October 2000 after days of mass protests, and Serbia entered the United Nations on 1 November 2000 and the Council of Europe on 3 April 2003.

The federation was then renamed instead of repaired. Both republics ratified a Constitutional Charter in February 2003, most federal functions devolved to the republic level, and the country became Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian prime minister Zoran Đinđić was assassinated on 12 March 2003, and the government declared a state of emergency and arrested more than 4,000 people in the crackdown that followed.

Montenegro voted for independence on 21 May 2006, with 55.4% in favour and 44.6% against, and declared it on 3 June. Serbia's decision of 5 June 2006 assumed the jurisdiction of the departed union and completed its dissolution. A referendum on 28 and 29 October 2006 approved a new constitution, the first Serbia had adopted as an independent state since the Kingdom of Serbia's constitution of 1903.

Two years later the process ran in the other direction. Representatives of Kosovo Albanians declared independence on 17 February 2008, in terms Serbia's constitution of 2006 makes no room for. The United Nations General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice on 8 October 2008 whether the declaration accorded with international law, and the Court answered on 22 July 2010 that "the declaration of independence of Kosovo adopted on 17 February 2008 did not violate international law", having held first that it was under no obligation to decide whether international law gave Kosovo an entitlement to declare one. This catalogue records that the dispute exists, takes no position on it, and gives Kosovo a page of its own.

A Stabilisation and Association Agreement was signed in 2008 and entered into force on 1 September 2013, and Serbia applied for European Union membership on 22 December 2009. Talks with Priština under the Brussels Agreement of 2013 stalled in November 2018 when Kosovo imposed a 100% tax on Serbian goods, and resumed after the tax was withdrawn on 1 April 2020.