History of the Serbs
[1] Serbs, a South Slavic people, traditionally live mainly in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and North Macedonia.
Slavs settled in the Balkans during the 6th and 7th centuries, where they encountered and partially absorbed the remaining local population (Illyrians, Thracians, Dacians, Celts, Scythians).
[3] According to De Administrando Imperio, a historiographical work compiled by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (d. 959), migration of Serbs from White Serbia to Balkans occurred sometime during the reign of emperor Heraclius I (610-641) when they arrived in an area near Thessaloniki, but shortly afterwards they left that area and settled lands between the Sava and the Dinaric Alps.
The account in DAI about the Serbs mentions that they requested from the Byzantine commander of present-day Belgrade to settle in the theme of Thessalonica, which was formed ca.
For the purposes of its narrative, the DAI formulates a mistaken etymology of the Serbian ethnonym which it derives from Latin servi (serfs).
[9] Historian Danijel Dzino considers that the story of the migration from White Serbia after the invitation of Heraclius as a means of explanation of the settlement of the Serbs is a form of rationalization of the social and cultural change which the Balkans had undergone via the misinterpretation of historical events placed in late antiquity.
[12][13] Early medieval Serbian areal was also attested by the Royal Frankish Annals, that note, under the entry for 822, that prince Ljudevit left his seat at Sisak and went to the Serbs.
[22] Between 1166 and 1371, Serbs were ruled by the Nemanjić dynasty, founded by grand prince Stefan Nemanja (1166-1196), who conquered several neighbouring territories, including Kosovo, Duklja, Travunija and Zahumlje.
[23] In the same time, Serbian Orthodox Church was organized as an autocephalous archbishopric in 1219,[24] through the efforts of Sava, who became the patron saint of Serbs.
[37] An uprising broke out in 1596, but the rebels were defeated at the field of Gacko in 1597, and were forced to capitulate due to the lack of foreign support.
[40] The large community of Serbs concentrated in Banat, southern Hungary and the Military Frontier included merchants and craftsmen in the cities, but mainly refugees that were peasants.
[43] When the Principality of Serbia gained independence from the Ottoman Empire, Orthodoxy became crucial in defining the national identity, instead of language which was shared by other South Slavs (Croats and Muslims).
In 1914, a young Bosnian Serb student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which directly contributed to the outbreak of World War I.
Despite being outnumbered, the Serbs subsequently defeated the Austro-Hungarians at the Battle of Cer, which marked the first Allied victory over the Central Powers in the war.
Serb forces spent the remaining years of the war fighting on the Salonika front in Greece, before liberating Serbia from Austro-Hungarian occupation in November 1918.
The Chetniks had the official support of the Allies until 1943, when Allied support shifted to the Communist Yugoslav Partisans, a multi-ethnic force, formed in 1941, which also had a large majority of Serbs in its ranks in the first two years of war, later, after the fall of Italy, September 1943. other ethnic groups joined Partisans in larger numbers.
The heaviest fighting occurred in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose Serb populations rebelled and sought unification with Serbia, which was then still part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
[54] The Serbian Revival refers to a period in the history of the Serbs between the 18th century and the de jure establishment of the Principality of Serbia (1878).
[58] According to Jelena Milojković-Djurić: "The first literary and learned society among the Slavs was Matica srpska, founded by the leaders of Serbian revival in Pest in 1826.
