History of Croatia

When the land on which today's state of Croatia lies still had no name and hardly any inhabitants, it drew Illyrian tribes from the north to the Adriatic. In the 12th and 11th centuries before Christ the Dalmatae, Liburni, Histri and Iapodes set out to find a new homeland and settled in the regions that are still named after them millennia later. Trade was carried on with the new neighbours in Greece, who thereupon set up "branches" on the Croatian islands. But soon there were squabbles, which could be settled only by standing together against the Roman troops. From 33 BC the land was, despite all efforts, known under the name "Provincia Dalmatia" and was governed by Romans in Salona (Solin). Yet over time the occupation turned into a fruitful partnership: from today's Croatian territory alone came six Caesars of Rome. With Emperor Diocletian, likewise born here, and his magnificent retirement residence, the political centre shifted from Salona to the newly founded Split. It became the administrative city, while the capital was still a far distant metropolis - even if, after the division of the Roman Empire, no longer Rome but Constantinople. Since Croatia lay on the border between the Eastern and the Western Roman Empire, over time belonged now to the one, now to the other, and the imperial government attended to nearer problems, the region was relatively poorly secured. And so at the beginning of the 4th century it was easy for the Germanic peoples - above all Alaric with his Visigoths - to move through the Balkans plundering and robbing and to leave behind a trail of devastation. The residents did not feel safe and emigrated in droves to Rome or Constantinople; the Germanic peoples moved on and left behind an almost deserted stretch of land.

When in the seventh century the first Croats came into the region between the Adriatic and the Danube, relics of old cultures were indeed to be found everywhere, but mostly only ruins of them had been left behind. Only on the coast did a few villages hold out bravely and offer the newcomers the chance to settle as well. The Slavs assimilated quickly, took over the Christian faith and the Latin language and enjoyed the amenities of the bath houses, aqueducts and the infrastructure — though only after they had, as a precaution, destroyed everything and laboriously built it up again. They themselves brought the knowledge of animal husbandry and arable farming, of hunting and fishing, and the art of the smith into their new home. The loose association of nomadic families organised itself, when they settled here, into a clan with a hierarchical social structure and divided itself into Slovenes, Croats, Carantanians and Serbs. Meanwhile the land of Croatia took a delicate role in the balancing act between the great powers Constantinople and Venice: on the one hand the Eastern Roman empire naturally did not want to lose its access to the Adriatic, nor indeed the conquered land — on the other hand the Croatian fleet stood in direct competition with Venice, which it was trying to win as an ally. So Croatia, although its actual capital was Constantinople right into the High Middle Ages, was treated as though autonomous: only thus could Venice make common cause with Byzantium and at the same time make war on its province of Dalmatia. And so Venice presented itself as the “Adriatic police”. It was assigned to the Serenissima to combat piracy off the coasts of the Balkans, and Venice achieved this aim by promptly conquering the coastal strips and islands. The hinterland was of little interest. From there, around the millennium, the Bulgarian empire tried to force the territories of the Serbs and Bosnians under its sovereignty. The Slavs allied themselves with the Croatian king Tomislav and together they succeeded in showing the Bulgarians their limits. Indeed Tomislav's merits can hardly be rated highly enough: it was he who, with his elevation to king in the year 925, proclaimed the Croatian state — which was even recognised as such by the Vatican; he managed to stand well with Rome, Constantinople and Hungary as well as with France and Venice, and united the settlers of the Pannonian plain, of Dalmatia and of the Dinaric mountains into one nation: the Croats.

Since Croatia was recognised by the Pope as an independent country, the other countries of the Roman Empire also fell in with this view of the world. The new Croatia thus had no repressions whatsoever to fear from its former governing authority, Eastern Rome, and could concentrate entirely on its own politics. The descendants of the first king were automatically to inherit the throne; other families were made into princely houses and counties. This division into "Zupanija", which still determines the political system of today's Croatia, does not recall the German federal states by chance: from the Franks the principle of feudal lordship was copied, and the Croatian princes were even given a title derived from the name of Charlemagne: "kralj". Good political and trading relations contributed to the upswing of the young state: from the East people learned the newest fashions in art, jewellery making and architecture; the West supplied the nobility with high-quality weapons - without an approaching war having made this necessary. Yet as early as two centuries after the founding of the state, in 1102, the young royal house ran out of successors, and in the absence of a royal family of their own the nobility resolved to accept that of the Hungarians as their rulers too. From then on, and almost without interruption until the First World War, Croatia belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary.

Officially Venice did not buy the strip of land of Dalmatia until the year 1409, yet even before that it can hardly be seen as belonging to the Hungarian crown. At first several Dalmatian nobles refused to implement the decisions from Hungary and established themselves as rulers in their own land. Then Venice skilfully made use of the crusades passing through the region anyway and in these years conquered more and more of the Dalmatian coast, until by 1212 there was no power left in the Mediterranean that could have measured itself against the Doges' state. Venice's fleet used its trade monopoly and made western Croatia the transshipment point for furs and jewellery, slaves, gold and silver. At first the luxury goods sold briskly among the Croatian nobility - but since they and their countrymen were forbidden to trade, soon hardly anyone could afford the imported goods. Only in the interior, under Hungarian rule, did an economy of its own arise: craftsmen organised themselves into guilds, a lively exchange between the individual towns was to everyone's advantage, and the region would have looked forward to a golden age had it not been overrun by the Turks. But when in the 16th century the Ottoman army pressed westwards across Croatia with unexpected force and speed, it turned out that Venice was not prepared to give up its province in Dalmatia. Although the peak of power for the Serenissima is dated as early as the 14th century, it was still strong enough to beat and push back the intruders with the help of the Dalmatians. So Dalmatia remained a part of Venice until it had to be handed over to Napoleon in 1797.

At the end of the fifteenth century the Turkish troops conquer the territories around Senj and Bihać, in today's Bosnia. The two most powerful princely families of Croatia, the Frankopan and the Zrinski, see their power massively curtailed and try in vain to stand up to the Ottomans. Since the peasants of the princedoms are now wholly occupied with defending their property, the lords lack the necessary income. Thus neither sufficient provisions nor motivation can be bought in, and it is easy for the Turks, with a little patience, to turn the siege into a conquest. Since the local nobility could no longer protect its people, the Habsburgs intervened and dispossessed the Frankopans: their castles and ramparts were converted into a new "military frontier" and requisitioned by the Austrian army. Towards the end of the Turkish campaign of conquest, the once so wealthy family was left with barely a few buildings in Ribnik, Novigrad and Vinodol — but at least, from the end of the seventeenth century, it became increasingly regular to put the attackers to flight and to give the people back their old home. That concerned above all the refugee families from Bosnia, who by that time had already had to take shelter for several generations in the towns of western Croatia. These lived above all in the castles of the Zrinski family, which, unlike the Frankopans, had recognised early that they could hold their property only if it was also populated. And so the fled Slavs and Bosnians in Ozalj, Karlovac, between Rijeka and Bakar and in Međimurje served their new lords, who thereby rose quickly to become the richest family in Croatia. In the 1660s the influential Frankopan and the wealthy Zrinski joined in an alliance against the Habsburgs. With the threat from the Turks constantly right on the doorstep, they could not approve King Leopold I's resolve to obtain a truce at any price. They wanted to drive out the Turks and felt betrayed by the Austrian king's agreement to divide Hungary. However, the conspirators feared Vienna's power and searched Europe so eagerly for protecting powers and allies that their plan became known to Leopold I before they could carry it out. Leopold sent his troops to Čakovec, the seat of the Zrinski, and had the town completely destroyed. What the Turks had not managed, the Austrians now did themselves. In addition they took the heads of the Zrinski and Frankopan families prisoner in order to execute them in Vienna to public effect. The remaining members of the nobility were systematically pursued, tracked down and likewise executed. So Croatia had no representative of its own interests either when the peace negotiations at Karlowitz came about in 1699. The Habsburgs had, in those turbulent years, absorbed the Hungarian royal house and thereby held rule over Croatia as well. In order to reach agreement with Venice, it was necessary to cede the actually Croatian towns of Knin, Sinj and Vrlika and to draw Croatia's borders along the rivers Sava and Una and on the Adriatic outside Zadar. East of that the Ottoman empire now officially began, and neither Austrians nor Venetians felt themselves acutely enough threatened to see to it that the Bosnians should get their home territories back.

Meanwhile the Croats had learned from earlier failed conspiracies and now tried to determine their independence more by the carrot than by the stick: when the Habsburgs, in the absence of a male descendant, wanted to hand the crown to Maria Theresa and thereby met with reluctance among the Hungarians as well, the Croatian parliament without ceremony passed a law under which female successors to the throne are legitimate too. This clever move secured Austria's sympathy and set off the state of Croatia, which did not actually exist, from its former mother country Hungary. Visually too the country drew ever closer to its protectress Vienna: whereas previously the architecturally relevant buildings had throughout been noble palaces and fortifications, theatres were now built, representative districts with broad streets, and quite incidentally a new intellectual elite and a national consciousness were built up as well, one no longer feeding merely on distinction from others. To this it may have contributed that the Austrians and Hungarians discovered Adriatic tourism and that all at once the rulers were only seasonal guests in “their” country. And when the Hungarians tried to suppress Croatian culture so far that Hungarian was to become the language of school and office, the poets and revolutionaries between Dubrovnik and Zadar proclaimed in 1830 the “Illyrian Spring”: autonomy under the Hungarian-Croatian union, more libraries and theatres, and the Shtokavian dialect as the official language of the country were some of the aims. After some of the demands had been met, the Serbs tried by the same route to bring about a state of their own, independent of Croatia. That in doing so they also laid claim to Dalmatia met with fierce rejection among the Croats. The situation was additionally aggravated by Austria's withdrawing largely from the government of Croatia and leaving these tasks to the Hungarians: in view of the difficulties with Hungary that had arisen again and again in history, a slap in the face of the Croats. Before the question whether and how Croatia, or Serbia and Croatia, should become independent and which regions could be assigned to which country could be resolved, a Serbian nationalist and fighter for independence shot the heir to Austria's throne. The tense situation in the region meant that this assassination triggered the First World War — in which Croatia stood at the side of the very countries from which it actually wanted to break away.

Croatia, loser of the war, has to integrate into the Kingdom of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, to recognise the Serbian kings as rulers and to put its plans for independence on ice for the time being. So some Croats saw their chance in the invasion of German and Italian troops in 1941 to break away from the rest of the kingdom. People cooperated with the new occupiers more than was actually morally defensible, and Ante Pavelić became head of state. He had Jews and Serbs systematically persecuted and murdered, fought bitter civil wars with the communist partisan groups around Tito and governed his country mercilessly and brutally. In 1945, the year of the political reversal, Tito went from underground icon to head of state. He proclaimed the People's Republic of Yugoslavia, which included Zadar, Rijeka, Istria and the surroundings of Trieste and Gorizia. The state, conceived on the model of its big brother the USSR, broke away from the Soviet bloc as early as 1948 and celebrated its independence, among other things, through several conferences of the non-aligned states. That in this special position one could also count on economic aid from the USA made this step still more enticing and easier. Moreover Croatia rediscovered the lucrative source of money that is tourism. The dogmatic rules of communism were relaxed in the meantime, but tightened again in the “Croatian Spring” of 1971. After Tito's death in 1980 and up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the question of an independent Croatian state smouldered up again. In 1991 an imposing 93.2 % of Croats voted in a referendum for their independence from Belgrade. Leading here was above all the chairman of the Croatian nationalist party, Franjo Tuđman, who also became president of the new state. During his term of office 12,000 Serbs and Croats died in the Yugoslav war, which was meant to suppress the founding of a Serbian state and to push Croatia back into the Yugoslav state. In 1998 the war was ended under pressure from the UN with the compromise of returning eastern Slavonia to Croatia.

In spite of the long-desired peace, the Croats felt themselves to be in a crisis in 1999: the economy and international relations were damaged, whole towns destroyed, many families had lost their breadwinner and above all it was clear that the politics once found to be good had disappointed and failed across the board. The Croatian-nationalist party had been kept faith with long enough, and at the elections the people resolved on a change of government: Ivan Racan and his staff were to lead Croatia into a better future. To that end they decided, among other things, on an opening of the market, tax reforms and social and economic support for returning refugees. From 2000 onwards, the great goal of one day being admitted into the EU was approached markedly more closely through good cooperation with The Hague and the extradition of war criminals, as well as through the improving relations with the former enemy Serbia. And although life in Croatia has become better, it is by no means to be compared with that of Central Europe: the average annual income is about one sixth of Germany's; high unemployment and the still uncompleted clearing-up and resettlement work place an enormous burden on the country and its people. The new president Stipe Mesic too is doing his best to open Croatia up to the world (above all the western one) and is regarded by many Croats as the man who will make Croatia an equal member of the European Union.