The name of "Bač" (Bács) town is of uncertain origin and its existence was recorded among Vlachs, Slavs and Hungarians in the Middle Ages.

[7][8][better source needed] Sometimes, the Hungarians used name Délvidék ("the southern or lower country") for a wider imprecisely defined geographical area, which, according to 19th century view also included Bačka.

Later, other Indo-European peoples, including Dacians, Celts, Sarmatians (Iazyges) and Gepids were recorded as inhabitants of Bačka.

[15] [verification needed] According to Hungarian authors, prefect Vid belonged to the Gutkeled genus,[16][17] but there is a possibility that he was a fictitious person.

[17] In 1169, canons from the knighthood Order of the Holy Sepulchre built a small church in Bács in the Romanesque style.

In the early 13th century Ugrin Csák, Archbishop of Kalocsa, founded a hospital in Bács, as the first such facility in this part of Europe.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century the town of Bács prospered during the rule of king Charles Robert I, who started building the modern fortress in 1338–42 at the site of the earlier hillfort.

After the victorious campaign the Ottoman army led by Suleiman I withdrew from Hungary through the Danube–Tisza Interfluve, leaving only smaller garrisons in the fortifications.

[18] In this chaotic period took place the revolt of the Rascians and Bačka became (from 1526 to 1527) the central region of an independent, short-lived Serbian pseudostate,[19] which existed in the territory of present-day Vojvodina.

The ruler of this state was the self-appointed Emperor Jovan Nenad (previously the stableman of the king John Zápolya) and his capital city was Subotica.

Bačka was part of the Sanjak of Segedin (Szeged), the region was sparsely populated with Serbs (who were in an absolute majority[20]) and Muslims.

During the Great Turkish War (1683–1699) on 11 September 1697, near Senta in the eastern Bačka took place one of the most decisive defeats in Ottoman history, the Battle of Zenta.

Christian forces of the Holy League (1684) led by Prince Eugene of Savoy in a surprise attack destroyed the Ottoman army crossing the river Tisza.

All the lands of the Kingdom of Hungary (except for Banat and a small chunk of Eastern Slavonia) conquered by the Ottomans in the previous 150 years were returned.

There were significant differences in the status of the inhabitants of the feudal county and the privileged newcome settlers of the Military Frontier, who composed mostly of ethnic Serbs.

The Grenz infantry of the Military Frontier was primarily formed to defend Austria against the Ottoman Turks, but impliedly it was intended to offset and control the Hungarian population.

The fightings were characterized by largely ethnically motivated, bloody atrocities on the civilians, mostly executed by the irregular Serb forces.

On 2 February the Serb forces overrun and conquered the city, resulting mass looting, arson and massacre of the Hungarian inhabitants.

[25][26] As the result of the uprising Bačka was proclaimed as part of the Serbian Voivodship, meant as a Serbian autonomous region within Austrian Empire, while between 1849 and 1860 it was part of the Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar, a separate Austrian crown land (the official languages of the voivodship were German and Illyrian, i.e. Serbo-Croatian).

[27][28] In early September 1914, several years before the end of the Austria-Hungary, in a town in the West Vojvodina Bačka region known as Zombor or Sombor of some 30,000 people, including 12,000 Serb-speakers, popular demonstrations demanded the removal of all shop signs in the Cyrillic alphabet.

When an angry mob chased one Serb-speaking shopkeeper to his home for refusing to remove his Cyrillic sign, he responded by shooting at the demonstrators.

[29] At the end of October 1918, Austria-Hungary gradually dissolved and, with the Armistice of Villa Giusti of 3 November, officially capitulated to the Triple Entente.

Following this capitulation, Slavs from Banat, Bačka and Baranja organized a new civil administration in these regions as well as their own military units known as People's Guard (Serbian: Narodna straža).

[citation needed] In 1941, Yugoslav Bačka was occupied by the Axis powers and attached to Horthy's Hungary (but was still internationally recognized as part of Yugoslavia).

The smaller part of the German population (several thousands of people) that did not leave the area (mostly women, children and the elderly) were sent to prison camps, where many of them died of malnutrition and disease.

After the war, members of the Yugoslav Partisan army also killed several tens of thousands of inhabitants of German, Hungarian and Serb ethnic origin (in whole of Vojvodina).

[33] Together with eastern Syrmia, western Banat, and northern Mačva, Yugoslav Bačka has been part of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina since 1945.

[citation needed] Most of the territory and a vast majority of the population of Bačka is part of Serbia's Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.

Novi Sad, the capital of Vojvodina, lies on the border between Bačka and Syrmia, on both banks of the river Danube.

Geographic or traditional subregions or regions overlapping with Serbian Bačka include Gornji Breg, Podunavlje, Potisje, Šajkaška, Telečka and Paorija.