[1][2][3] The Vlachs left mountainous homelands and settled in the Ottoman conquered territories, from which a large number of them moved to the Habsburg area in Croatia.
This process began in the second half of the 16th century with concentration in Upper Slavonia where they lived in accordance with their traditions which later became part of Statuta Valachorum.
[5][6] Military colonists were exempted from some obligations and granted small land tracts, and allowed to elect their own captains (vojvode) and magistrates (knezovi).
[7] In 1608, Austrian emperor Rudolf II instituted such a law, under which "Vlachs" of the Military Frontier, regardless of their faith, owed one tenth of their income to the Bishop of Zagreb, and 1/9th to the feudal lords whose land they occupied.
[12] This decision has been interpreted as a feudalization attempt, and in 1628, it was feared that if the Vlachs left the Frontier for Ottoman Slavonia, the military and economical strength of the Habsburg monarchy would be notably weakened and threatened; at an assembly of ca.
[17] The next year, the Croatian parliament tried once again to pass a law in which the refugee community be included into the jurisdiction of the Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia, however, without results.
[17] Based on the Grenzers' petitions[7] and the court statement, Emperor Ferdinand II issued the Statuta Valachorum on 5 October 1630, in effect in the Varaždin generalate, that is, the captaincies of Koprivnica, Križevci and Ivanec.
[21] Privileges of Grenzers (called as "Vlachs" or "Morlachs") on the northern and northwestern border of Bosnia in 1630 was confirmed by Ferdinand II in "Statuta Valachorum".
[23][24][25] During discussions of the Military Frontier administrative authorities of the Varaždin Generalate, it was established that among the Vlachs fugitives exist Slavonians whose ancestors were serfs who did not flied from the Ottomans and they are mixed among themselves.
[12] The goal of Statuta Valachorum was to bring the "Vlachs" under supervision of the imperial court, giving them an appearance of autonomy, despite the fact that the level of self-government they had prior had actually decreased.
[30] The warrior-tradition of the Serbs of Croatia, which includes the service to the Habsburg monarchy and the Statuta Valachorum, is an important part of the identity of the community still today.
They recognized formally the growing practice of awarding such refugee families a free grant of crown land to farm communally as their zad- ruga.
The further guarantees of religious freedom and of no feudal obligations made the Orthodox Serbs valuable allies for the monarchy in its seventeenth-century struggle ...This also explains why extremist Croat nationalism is both reflected and rooted in the attempted revision of history.
As Nicholas Miller explains, “the term Vlach became a weapon in the war to devalue Serbian claims to territory and history in Croatia.”