Great Migrations of the Serbs
The imperial forces, among whom Prince Eugene of Savoy was rapidly becoming prominent, followed up the victory with others, notably one near Mohács in 1687 and another at Zenta in 1697, and in January 1699, the sultan signed the treaty of Karlowitz by which he admitted the sovereign rights of the house of Habsburg over nearly the whole of Hungary (including Serbs in Vojvodina).
[7] In 1690 and 1691 Emperor Leopold I had conceived through a number of edicts (Privileges) the autonomy of Serbs in his Empire, which would last and develop for more than two centuries until its abolition in 1912.
In 1687, the Hungarian diet in Pressburg (now Bratislava) changed the constitution, the right of the Habsburgs to succeed to the throne without election was admitted and the emperor's elder son Joseph I was crowned hereditary king of Hungary.
The most important cities and places they settled are Szentendre, Buda, Mohács, Pécs, Szeged, Baja, Tokaj, Oradea, Debrecen, Kecskemét, Szatmár.
[14] In 1690, Emperor Leopold I allowed the refugees gathered on the banks of the Sava and Danube in Belgrade to cross the rivers and settle in the Habsburg Monarchy.
In 1694, Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor appointed Arsenije III Čarnojević as the head of the newly established Orthodox Church in the Monarchy.
[16] Serbs received privileges from the Emperor, which guaranteed them national and religious singularity, as well as a corpus of rights and freedoms in the Habsburg monarchy.
In 1737, at the very beginning of the war, Serbian Patriarch Arsenije IV Jovanović sided with Habsburgs and supported the rebellion of Serbs in the region of Raška against Ottomans.
[5] Sources provide different data regarding the number of people in the first migration, referring to the group led by Patriarch Arsenije III: Serbs from these migrations settled in the southern parts of Hungary (though as far in the north as the town of Szentendre, in which they formed the majority of the population in the 18th century, but to smaller extent also in the town of Komárom) and Croatia.
The great migrations from 1690 and 1737–1739 were the largest ones and were important reason for issuing the privileges that regulated the status of Serbs within Habsburg Monarchy.
[33] Frederick Anscombe further concludes that there is no evidence for this,[35] and that western and parts of central Kosovo were treated as Ottoman Albania before the Habsburg invasion in 1690.
[36] Malcolm and Elsie state that various migrations took place because of the War of the Holy League (1683–1699), when thousands of refugees found shelter on the new Habsburg border.
[43] Emil Saggau states that the modern adaptation and popularisation of the migration retrieves inspiration from Vuk Karadžić and Petar II Petrović-Njegoš's writings, and that prior to this, it had not yet become a component of Serb national identity.
[62] István Deák from the University of Columbia states that Serbs, who were somewhat better educated than the Albanians, were willing to move away in search of better economic opportunities, which helped demographic changes in the territory of Kosovo throughout the centuries.
