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The Slovakia Historic Collections Exhibition

Driwancybermuseum’s Blog

                 

                           WELCOME COLLECTORS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

                          SELAMAT DATANG KOLEKTOR INDONESIA DAN ASIAN

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SHOWCASE :

The Slovakia Historic Collections Exhibition

*the Bratislav ,capital of slovakia,gudence book 1977.

FRAME ONE : Dr IWAN VINTAGE BOOK PICTURES ILLUSTRATION OF OLD BRATISLAV ,CAPITAL OF SLOVAKIA MONUMENT STATUE AND BUILDING. (complete info only for premiuj member)

History of Slovakia
This article is part of a series
Samo’s Empire
Principality of Nitra
Great Moravia
Kingdom of Hungary (10th century-1918)
Slovak Uprising (1848-1849)
History of Czechoslovakia
Slovaks in Czechoslovakia (1918–1938)
Slovak People’s Republic (1919)
Slovak Soviet Republic (1919)
Slovak Republic (1939–1945)
Slovak National Uprising (1944)
Slovaks in Czechoslovakia (1960–1990)
Slovak Socialist Republic (1969–1990)
Velvet Revolution (1989)
Slovak Republic
Slovakia Portal  v • d • e

This article discusses the history of the territory of Slovakia.

Contents   1 Prehistory 1.1 Palaeolithic 1.2 Neolithic 1.3 Bronze Age 1.4 Iron Age and the Roman era 1.5 The great invasions of the 4-7th centuries 2 The Slavs 2.1 Early history 2.2 The empire of King Samo 2.3 The rising of Slavic polities 2.4 The era of Great Moravia 3 The settlement of Hungarians in the 10th century 4 Within the Kingdom of Hungary 4.1 Tercia pars regni or Principality of Nitra? – 11th century 4.2 Developing counties and towns – the 12-13th centuries 4.3 The period of the oligarchs – 1290-1321 4.4 The Golden Age of the Kingdom – 14-15th centuries 4.5 The Ottoman incursion 4.6 Slovak National Movement 5 Czechoslovakia 5.1 The formation of Czechoslovakia 5.2 Towards autonomy of Slovakia, 1938 – 1939 6 World War II 7 Czechoslovakia after World War II 8 Independent Slovakia 9 See also 10 References 11 External links

Prehistory

Palaeolithic

Radiocarbon dating puts the oldest surviving archaeological artifacts from Slovakia – found near Nové Mesto nad Váhom – at 270,000 BCE, in the Early Paleolithic era. These ancient tools, made by the Clactonian technique, bear witness to the ancient habitation of Slovakia.

Other stone tools from the Middle Paleolithic era (200,000 – 80,000 BCE) come from the Prepost cave (Prepoštská jaskyňa) near Bojnice and from other nearby sites. The most important discovery from that era is a Neanderthal cranium (c. 200,000 BCE), discovered near Gánovce, a village in northern Slovakia.

Archaeologists have found prehistoric Homo sapiens skeletons in the region, as well as numerous objects and vestiges of the Gravettian culture, principally in the river valleys of Nitra, Hron, Ipeľ, Váh and as far as the city of Žilina, and near the foot of the Vihorlat, Inovec, and Tribeč mountains, as well as in the Myjava Mountains. The most well-known finds include the oldest female statue made of mammoth-bone (22 800 BCE), the famous Venus of Moravany. The figurine was found in the 1940s in Moravany nad Váhom near Piešťany. Numerous necklaces made of shells from Cypraca thermophile gastropods of the Tertiary period have come from the sites of Moravany-Žákovská, Podkovice, Hubina and Radošina. These findings provide the most ancient evidence of commercial exchanges carried out between the Mediterranean and Central Europe.

Neolithic

Discovery of tools and pottery in several archaeological digs and burial places scattered across Slovakia, surprisingly including northern regions at relatively high altitudes, gives evidence of human habitation in the Neolithic period. The pottery found in Želiezovce, Gemer, and the Bukové hory massif is characterized by remarkable modeling and delicate linear decoration. It also reveals the first attempts at coloring. This deliberate adornment shows a developed aesthetic sense of the Neolithic craftsmen.

Important archaeological discoveries have been made in several formerly-inhabited caves. For example, humans inhabited the famous Domica cave, almost 6000 meters long, to a depth of 700 meters. This cave offers one of the biggest Neolithic deposits in Europe. The tribes who created the pottery from the Massif Bukové hory inhabited Domica continuously for more than 800 years.

The transition to the Neolithic era in Central Europe featured the development of agriculture and the clearing of pastures, the first smelting of metals at the local level, the “Retz” style pottery and also fluted pottery. During the “fluted-pottery” era, people built several fortified sites. Some vestiges of these remain today, especially in high-altitude areas. Pits surround the most well-known of these sites at Nitriansky Hrádok. Starting in the Neolithic era, the geographic location of present-day Slovakia hosted a dense trade-network for goods such as shells, amber, jewels and weapons. As a result, it became an important hub in the system of European trade routes.

[edit] Bronze Age

The Bronze Age on the territory of Slovakia went through three stages of development, stretching from 2000 to 800 BCE. Major cultural, economic, and political development can be attributed to the significant growth in production of copper, especially in central Slovakia (for example in Špania Dolina) and north-west Slovakia. Copper became a stable source of prosperity for the local population. After the disappearance of the Čakany and Velatice cultures, the Lusatian people expanded building of strong and complex fortifications, with the large permanent buildings and administrative centers. Excavations of Lusatian hill forts document the substantial development of trade and agriculture at that period.

The richness and the diversity of tombs increased considerably. The inhabitants of the area manufactured arms, shields, jewelry, dishes, and statues. The arrival of tribes from Thrace disrupted the people of the Calenderberg culture, who lived in the hamlets located on the plain (Sereď), and also in the hill forts located on the summits (Smolenice, Molpí). The local power of the “Princes” of the Hallstatt culture disappeared in Slovakia during the last period of the Iron Age after strife between the Scytho-Thracian people and the Celtic tribes, who advanced from the south towards the north, following the Slovak rivers.

[edit] Iron Age and the Roman era

A Celtic coin minted in Bratislava and its replica on a modern 5-koruna coin.

The victory of the Celts marked the beginning of the late Iron Age in the region. Two major Celtic tribes living in Slovakia were Cotini and Boii. Cotini were probably identical or made significant part of so-called Púchov culture. The Celts built large oppida in Bratislava and Liptov (the Havránok shrine). Silver coins with the names of Celtic kings, the so-called Biatecs, represent the first known use of writing in Slovakia. Celtic dominance disappeared with the Germanic incursions, the victory of Dacia over the Boii near the Neusiedler See, and the expansion of the Roman Empire.

The Roman epoch began in Slovakia in 6 CE, inaugurated by the arrival of Roman legions on this territory that led to a war against the Marcomanni and Quadi tribes. The Kingdom of Vannius, a barbarian kingdom founded by the Quadi, existed in western and central Slovakia from 20 to 50 AD. The Romans and their armies occupied only a thin strip of the right bank of the Danube and a very small part of south-western Slovakia (Celemantia, Gerulata, Devín Castle). Only in 174 CE did the emperor Marcus Aurelius penetrate deeper into the river valleys of Váh, Nitra and Hron. On the banks of the Hron he wrote his philosophical work Meditations. In 179 CE, a Roman legion engraved on the rock of the Trenčín Castle the ancient name of Trenčín (Laugaritio), marking the furthest northern point of their presence in this part of Europe.

[edit] The great invasions of the 4-7th centuries

In the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE the Huns began to leave the Central Asian steppes. They crossed the Danube in 377 CE and occupied Pannonia, which they used for 75 years as their base for launching looting-raids into Western Europe. In 451, under the command of Attila, they crossed the Rhine and laid Gaul to waste; then crossed even the Pyrenees, devastating the countryside of Catalonia. However, Attila’s death in 453 brought about the disappearance of the Hun tribe.

After the Huns in the 5-6th century German tribes began to settle in the Carphatian Basin Ostrogoths, Langobards, Gepids, Heruli. Their reign and rivalry determined the events during the first two-thirds of the 6th century.

Langobards, Gepids, Heruli in the 6th Century

Late Avar Period

In 568 a nomadic tribe, the Avars, conducted their own invasion into the Middle Danube region. The Avars occupied the lowlands of the Pannonian Plain, established an empire dominating the Carpathian Basin and they made several raids against the Byzantine Empire whose emperors sent gifts regularly to them in order to avoid their attacks.^[1] In 623, the Slavic population living in the western parts of Pannonia seceded from their empire.^[2] In 626, the Avars and the Persians jointly besieged but failed to capture Constantinople; following this failure, the Avars’ prestige and power declined and they lost the control over their former territories outside the Carpathian Basin but their reign has lasted to 804.^[1]

[edit] The Slavs

[edit] Early history

Main article: Slavic peoples

The following text needs to be harmonized with text in Slavic peoples.

The majority^{[citation needed]} of mainstream historians suggest that the settlement of Central and Western Europe by the Slavs only began in the 6th century CE. However, certain elements attest to the fact that by the beginning of the 6th century, a Slav population had begun to occupy vast territories extending from the Vistula, the Dniestr and the Danube, including present-day Slovakia, Pannonia and Carantania.^{[citation needed]}

Based on their interpretation of recent archeological and literal sources, a minority of historians and linguists has developed an alternative theory holding that Slav tribes emerged on this territory thousands of years BCE, evolving from sedentary indigenous peoples in the midst of Celtic and Germanic tribal movements.^{[citation needed]} The best known proponent has been the Russian Slavic and Hungarian linguist Oleg Nikolayevitch Trubatchov, the main editor of the monumental Ethymological Dictionary of Slavic languages, who wrote a detailed book on this theory.^{[citation needed]} Also, Greek and Roman texts provide possible evidence of an older Slavic presence in the area. For example they contend that the first reference to the Slavs — Vénèdes — appears in a work by Herodotus of Halicarnassus dated 400 BCE.^{[citation needed]}

Mention of the Slav presence also comes in the writings of Pliny the Elder (79 CE) and of Tacitus Cornelius (55-116 CE).^{[citation needed]} The first designation of the Slavs in the Latin form Souveni appears in the writings of Claudius Ptolemaeus in 160 CE.^{[citation needed]} The Slavs of the middle Danube before the 8th century, who lived on the present-day territories of Slovakia, of north and west Hungary, Moravia, Pannonia, Austria and Slovenia, used this name in the form Sloveni (*Slověne).^{[citation needed]}

Recent research has discovered evidence of the co-existence of the Slavs and the Celtic tribes in the region of Liptov in northern Slovakia, near the area of Liptovská Mara.^{[citation needed]} Investigators discovered six Celto-Slav colonies and the site of a castle with a sanctuary in its center, used for Celtic and Slav rites.^{[citation needed]} Slav tribes also coexisted with the Germanic Quadi, according to the latest findings of the Czech archeologist J. Poulík.^{[citation needed]}

The two competing theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive.^{[citation needed]} Contemporary scholarship in general has moved away from the idea of monolithic nations and the Urheimat debates of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its focus of interest is that of a process of ethnogenesis, regarding competing Urheimat scenarios as false dichotomies.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The empire of King Samo

Main article: Samo

The remnants of the Slavic population settled in the Middle Danube and they were unified by King Samo, after a successful Slavic insurrection against the Avar Khaganate in 623. In 631, Samo defeated the Frankish army of King Dagobert I at the Battle of Wogastisburg. Samo’s Empire, the first known political formation of Slavs, disappeared after the death of its founder in 665 and rejoined to Avar Khaganate.

[edit] The rising of Slavic polities

Main article: Principality of Nitra

In the 670s, the new population of the “griffin and tendril” archaeological culture appeared in the Carpathian Basin (identified as Onogurs), and shortly afterwards the Avars could expand their territories even also over the Vienna Basin.^[1] However, archaeological findings from the same period (such as an exquisite noble tomb in Blatnica) also indicate formation of a Slavic upper class on the territory that later became the nucleus of Great Moravia.^[3]

The Avar supremacy over southern Slovakia lasted until 803 – the year when Charlemagne, helped by the Slavs living north of the Danube (in the nucleus of the future Principality of Nitra),^[4] defeated the Avars, who eventually became assimilated into the local Slavic populations.

All our information, based on written sources, on the “Principality of Nitra” was recorded in two entries in Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum (The Conversion of the Bavarians and the Carantanians) around 870.^[5][6] Nevertheless, during the first decades of the 9th century, the Slavic people living in the north-western parts of the Carpathian Basin were under the rule of a tribal leader (styled prince by later historians) whose seat was in Nitra.^[1] An extensive network of settlements developed around the town in the 9th century.^[7] In the early 9th century, the polity was situated on the north-western territories of present-day Slovakia.^[1]

Around 828, Archbishop Adalram of Salzburg consecrated a church for Prince Pribina in Nitrava.^[4] In 833, Mojmír I, Duke of the Moravians expelled Pribina. Pribina went to count Ratbod, who administered the Eastern March of the Carolingian Empire, where Pribina became the head of a principality under the suzerainty of East Francia, with his capital of Blatnograd near where the Zala River flows into the Lake Balaton.^[7][8] Excavations revealed that at least three Nitra castles (Pobedim, Čingov, and Ostrá skala) were destroyed around the time Pribina was expelled.^[3]

[edit] The era of Great Moravia

Main article: Great Moravia

Central Europe in the 9th century. Eastern Francia in blue, Bulgaria in orange, Great Moravia under Rastislav (870) in green. The green line marks the borders of Great Moravia under Svatopluk I (894). Note that some of the borders of Great Moravia are under debate

Great Moravia arose around 830 when Mojmír I unified the Slavic tribes settled north of the Danube and extended the Moravian supremacy over them.^[5] When Mojmír I endeavoured to secede from the supremacy of the king of East Francia in 846, King Louis the German deposed him and assisted Mojmír’s nephew, Rastislav (846–870) in acquiring the throne.^[7] The new monarch pursued an independent policy: after stopping a Frankish attack in 855, he also sought to weaken influence of Frankish priests preaching in his realm. Rastislav asked the Byzantine Emperor Michael III to send teachers who would interpret Christianity in the Slavic vernacular. Upon Rastislav’s request, two brothers, Byzantine officials and missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius came in 863. Cyril developed the first Slavic alphabet and translated the Gospel into the Old Church Slavonic language. Rastislav was also preoccupied with the security and administration of his state. Numerous fortified castles built throughout the country are dated to his reign and some of them (e.g., Dowina, sometimes identified with Devín Castle)^[9][10] are also mentioned in connection with Rastislav by Frankish chronicles.^[7][11]

During Rastislav’s reign, the Principality of Nitra was given to his nephew Svatopluk as an appanage.^[10] The rebellious prince allied himself with the Franks and overthrew his uncle in 870. Similarly to his predecessor, Svatopluk I (871–894) assumed the title of the king (rex). During his reign, the Great Moravian Empire reached its greatest territorial extent, when not only present-day Moravia and Slovakia but also present-day northern and central Hungary, Lower Austria, Bohemia, Silesia, Lusatia, southern Poland and northern Serbia belonged to the empire, but the exact borders of his domains are still disputed by modern authors.^[3][12] Svatopluk also withstood attacks of the seminomadic Magyar tribes^[4] and the Bulgarian Empire, although sometimes it was he who hired the Magyars when waging war against East Francia.^[2]

In 880, Pope John VIII set up an independent ecclesiastical province in Great Moravia with Archbishop Methodius as its head. He also named the German cleric Wiching the Bishop of Nitra.

After the death of King Svatopluk in 894, his sons Mojmír II (894-906?) and Svatopluk II succeeded him as the King of Great Moravia and the Prince of Nitra respectively.^[10] However, they started to quarrel for domination of the whole empire. Weakened by an internal conflict as well as by constant warfare with Eastern Francia, Great Moravia lost most of its peripheral territories.

In the meantime, the Hungarian (Magyar) tribes, having suffered a defeat from the nomadic Pechenegs, left their territories east of the Carpathian Mountains, invaded the Carpathian Basin and started to occupy the territory gradually around 896.^[12] Their armies’ advance may have been promoted by continuous wars among the countries of the region whose rulers still hired them occasionally to intervene in their struggles.^[13]

Both Mojmír II and Svatopluk II probably died in battles with the Hungarians (Magyars) between 904 and 907 because their names are not mentioned in written sources after 906. In three battles (4–5 July and 9 August 907) near Pozsony / Pressburg (Bratislava), the Hungarians (Magyars) routed Bavarian armies. Historians traditionally put this year as the date of the breakup of the Great Moravian Empire.

Great Moravia left behind a lasting legacy in Central and Eastern Europe. The Glagolitic script and its successor Cyrillic were disseminated to other Slavic countries, charting a new path in their cultural development. The administrative system of Great Moravia may have influenced the development of the administration of the Kingdom of Hungary.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The settlement of Hungarians in the 10th century

Main article: Seven chieftains of the Magyars

Main article: Grand Prince of the Hungarians

Arrival of the Hungarians

From 895 to 902 ,^[14] the Magyars (Hungarians), progressively imposed their authority on the Carpathian Basin. Although some contemporary sources mention that Great Moravia disappeared without trace and its inhabitants left for the Bulgars, Croats and Hungarians (Magyars) following the latters’ victories, but archaeological researches and toponyms suggest the continuity of Slavic population in the valleys of the rivers of the Inner Western Carpathians.^[13][13][15] Toponyms may prove that the seminomadic Magyars occupied the Western Pannonian Plain in present-day Slovakia, while the hills were inhabited by a mixed (Slav and Hungarian) population and people living in the valleys of the mountains spoke Slavic language.^[15]

Words borrowed by the Hungarian from Slavic people also prove their coexistence, although it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a certain word was borrowed from a West Slavic or a South Slavic language.^[7] The Hungarians (Magyars) adapted numerous Slavic words, connected to various fields of life, from state organization to agriculture and social relations; around 10% of the word roots of the modern Hungarian language originates from Slavic languages.^[16]

Some references even were made to Moravia in the course of the 10th century, and archaeological findings may also refer to the survival of some noble families of Great Moravia.^{[citation needed]} On the other hand, the chroniclers of the early history of Hungary, recorded that the prominent noble families of the kingdom descended either from leaders of the Magyar tribes or from immigrants, and they did not connect any of them to Great Moravia. For example, the ancestors of the clan Hunt-Pázmán (Hont-Pázmány), whose Great Moravian origin has been advanced by modern scholars,^[17] were mentioned by Simon of Kéza to have arrived from the Duchy of Swabia (in the Holy Roman Empire) to the kingdom in the late 10th century.^[7][18][19]

The territory of the present-day Slovakia became progressively integrated into the developing state ( the future Kingdom of Hungary ) in the early 10th century. The Gesta Hungarorum (“Deeds of the Hungarians”) mentions that Huba, head of one of the seven Hungarian (Magyar) tribes, received possessions around Nyitra / Nitra and the Zsitva / Žitava River; while according to the Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum (“Deeds of the Huns and Hungarians”) another tribal leader, Lél settled down around Galgóc / Hlohovec and following the Magyars’ victory over the Moravians’, he usually stayed around Nyitra / Nitra.^[7] Modern authors also claim that the north-western parts of the Carpathian Basin were occupied by one of the Magyar tribes.^[7]

Between 899 and 970, the Hungarians (Magyars) frequently conducted raids to the territories of present-day Italy, Germany, France and Spain and also to the lands of the Byzantine Empire.^[20] Such activities continued westwards until the Battle of Augsburg on the Lech River in 955, when Otto, King of the Germans destroyed their troops; their raids against the Byzantine Empire finished only in 970.^[20]

From 917, the Hungarians (Magyars) made raids to several territories at the same time which may prove the decay of the uniform direction within their tribal federation.^[21] The sources prove the existence of at least three and maximum five groups of tribes within the federation, and only one of them was lead directly by the Árpáds (the dynasty of the future kings of Hungary) who ruled over the western parts of the Carpathian Basin.^[22]

[edit] Within the Kingdom of Hungary

Main article: History of Hungary

[edit] Tercia pars regni or Principality of Nitra? – 11th century

Main article: Principality of Nitra

The development of the future Kingdom of Hungary started during the reign of Grand Prince Géza (before 972-997) who expanded his rule over the territories of present-day Slovakia west of the River Garam / Hron.^[23] Although, he was baptised in or after 972, he never became a convinced Christian – in contrast to his son, Stephen who followed him in 997.^[23] Some authors claim that following his marriage with Giselle of Bavaria, Stephen received the “Duchy of Nitra” in appanage from his father.^[24] When Géza died, a member of the Árpád dynasty, the pagan Koppány claimed the succession, but Stephen defeated him with the assistance of his wife’s German retinue.^[23] A Slovak folk song mentions that Štefan kral (i.e., King Stephen) could only overcome his pagan opponent with the assistance of Slovak warriors around Bény / Bíňa.^[20] Following his victory, Stephen received a crown from Pope Silvester II and he was crowned as the first King of Hungary in 1000 or 1001.

The Kingdom of Hungary integrated elements of the former Great Moravian state organization.^[3][25] On the other hand, historians has not reached a consensus on this subject; e.g., it is still being debated whether the formation of the basic unit of the administration (vármegye) in the kingdom followed foreign (Bulgarian, Moravian or German) patterns or it was an internal innovation.^[26]

Stephen (1000/1001-1038) established at least eight counties (“vármegye”) on the territories of present-day Slovakia: Abaúj / Abov, Borsod, Esztergom, Hont, Komárom / Komárno, Nyitra / Nitra, Bars / Tekov and Zemplén / Zemplín were probably founded by him.^[26] The scarcely populated northern and north-eastern territories of today Slovakia became the kings’ private forests.^[26] King Stephen also set up several dioceses in his kingdom; in the 11th century, present-day Slovakia’s territories were divided between the Archdiocese of Esztergom (established around 1000) and its suffragan, the Diocese of Eger (founded between 1006–1009).^[26]

Slovakia as part of Poland in 1003

Around 1003^{[citation needed]} or 1015, Duke Boleslaw I of Poland occupied some territories of present-day Slovakia east of the River Morava, but King Stephen recovered these territories already in 1018.^[27]

Following King Stephen’s death, his kingdom got involved in internal conflicts among the claimants for his crown and Henry III, Holy Roman Emperor also intervened in the struggles.^[2] In 1042, the Emperor Henry occupied the parts of today Slovakia east of the River Hron and granted them to King Stephen’s cousin, Béla, but following the withdrawal of the Emperor’s armies, King Samuel Aba’s troops reoccupied the territories.^[27]

In 1048, King Andrew I of Hungary conceded one-third of his kingdom (Tercia pars regni) in appanage to his brother, Duke Béla.^[23] The duke’s domains were centered around Nyitra / Nitra and Bihar (in Romanian: Biharea in present-day Romania).^[7] During the following 60 years, the Tercia pars regni were governed separately by members of the Árpád dynasty (i.e., by the Dukes Géza, Ladislaus, Lampert and Álmos).^[7] The dukes accepted the kings’ supremacy, but some of them (Béla, Géza and Álmos) rebelled against the king in order to acquire the crown and allied themselves with the rulers of the neighbouring countries (e.g., the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia).^[2]

The history of the Tercia pars regni ended in 1107, when King Coloman of Hungary occupied its territories taking advantage of the pilgrimage of Duke Álmos (his brother) to the Holy Land.^[23] Although, Duke Álmos, when returned to the kingdom, tried to reoccupy his former duchy with the military assistance of Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, but he failed and was obliged to accept the status quo.

[edit] Developing counties and towns – the 12-13th centuries

Following the occupation of his brother’s duchy, King Coloman set up (or re-established) the third bishopric in present-day Slovakia, the Diocese of Nitra.^[23] The royal administration of the territory was developing gradually during the 11-13th centuries: new counties were established with the partition of existing ones or central counties of the kingdom expanded their territory northward Pozsony county / Prešporok, Trencsén county / Trenčín, Gömör-Kishont county / Gemer and Nógrád / Novohrad, while the kings’ private forests were organised into “forest counties” around Zólyom | Zvolen and Sáros / Šariš Castle.^[7][26]

The colonisation of the northern parts of the Hungarian kingdom continued during the period; Slavic, Hungarian, German and Walloon “guests” (hospes) arrived to the scarcely populated lands and settled down there.^[7] The contemporary documents mention that settlers from Moravia and Bohemia arrived to the western parts of present-day Slovakia, while on the northern and eastern parts, Polish and Ruthenian “guests” settled down.^[28] Royal privileges prove that several families of the developing local nobility (e.g., the Zathureczky, Pominorszky and Viszocsányi families) were of Slavic origin.^[28] German “guests” settled down in several future towns (e.g., in Korpona / Krupina, Óbars / Starý Tekov and Selmecbánya / Banská Štiavnica already by the first half of the 13th century.^[28] The settlers in the Szepes / Spiš region were originally of Hungarian and Slavic (e.g., Polish) origin; from the 1240s, Walloon “guests” arrived to the region and German settlers joined them.^[28]

The territory of present-day Slovakia was rich in raw materials like gold, silver, copper, iron and salt and therefore the mining industry developed gradually in the region.^[7] The development of the mining industry and commerce enstrengthened the position of some settlements and they received privileges from the kings: the first town privileges were granted to Nagyszombat / Trnava (1238), Óbars / Starý Tekov (1240) and Selmecbánya / Banská Štiavnica (1241 or 1242) in present-day Slovakia.^[7][29][30] The inhabitants of the privileged towns were mainly of German origin, but Hungarian and Slavic citizens were also present in the towns.^[7] The presence of Jews in several towns of today Slovakia (e.g., in Pozsony / Bratislava, Bazin / Pezinok is also documented at least from the 13th century; the Jew’s special status was confirmed by a charter of King Béla IV of Hungary in 1251, but decisions of local synods limited their activities (i.e., they could not hold offices and they could not own lands).^[28] The Muslims, living in the region of Nyitra / Nitra, also had to face similar limitations and they disappeared (probably became Christian) by the end of the 13th century.^[28]

Spiš Castle

In 1241, the Mongols invaded and devastated the north-western parts of the kingdom, only some fortresses (e.g., Trencsén / Trenčín, Nyitra / Nitra, Fülek / Fiľakovo) could resist their attacks.^[7] Following the withdrawal of the Mongol troops (1242), several castles were built or enstrengthened (e.g., Komárom / Komárno, Beckó / Beckov and Zólyom / Zvolen on the order of King Béla IV^[7] He also continued his policy of granting town privileges to several settlements, e.g., to Korpona / Krupina (1244), Nyitra / Nitra(1248), Besztercebánya / Banská Bystrica (1255) and Gölnicbánya / Gelnica (1270).^[7] During his reign, new German immigrants settled down in Szepesvár / Spiš (German: Zips) whose privileges were granted in 1271 by King Stephen V of Hungary.^[7]

The last decades of the 13th century were characterized by discords within the royal family and among the several groups of the aristocracy.^[2] The decay of the royal power and the rise of some powerful aristocrats gave rise to the transformation of the administrative system: the counties that had been the basic units of the royal administration (“royal counties”) transformed gradually into autonomous administrative units of the local nobility (“noble counties”); however, the local nobility was not able to stop the rise of oligarchs.^[7]

[edit] The period of the oligarchs – 1290-1321

Following the Mongol invasion of the kingdom, a competition started among the landowners: each of them endeavored to build a castle with or without the permission of the king.^[18] The competition started a process of differentiation among the noble families, because the nobles who were able to build a castle could also expand their influence over the neighbouring landowners.^[18] The conflicts among the members of the royal family also strengthened the power of the aristocrats (who sometimes received whole counties from the kings) and resulted in the formation of around eight huge territories (“provinces”) in the kingdom, governed by powerful aristocrats in the 1290s.^[7]

In present-day Slovakia, most of the castles were owned by two powerful aristocrats (Amade Aba and Matthew Csák) or their followers.^[7] Following the extinction of the Árpád dynasty (1301), both of them pretended to follow one of the claimants for the throne, but, in practice, they governed their territories independently.^[7] Amade Aba governed the eastern parts of present-day Slovakia from his seat in Gönc.^[7] He was killed by Charles Robert of Anjou’s assassins at the south gate in Kassa / Košice in 1311.^[7]

Matthew Csák was the de facto ruler of the western territories of present-day Slovakia, from his seat at Trencsén / Trenčín.^[7] He allied himself with the murdered Amade Aba’s sons against Kassa / Košice, but King Charles I of Hungary, who had managed to acquire the throne against his opponents, gave military assistance to the town and the royal armies defeated him at the Battle of Rozgony in 1312.^[7] However, the north-western counties remained in his power until his death in 1321 when the royal armies occupied his former castles without resistance.^[7]

Pozsony county was de facto ruled by the Dukes of Austria from 1301 to 1328 when King Charles I of Hungary reoccupied it.^[2]

[edit] The Golden Age of the Kingdom – 14-15th centuries

King Charles I strengthened the central power in the kingdom following a 20-year long period of struggles against his opponents and the oligarchs.^[7] He concluded commercial agreements with Kings John of Bohemia and Casimir III of Poland in 1335 which increased the trade on the commercial routes leading from Kassa / Košice to Kraków and from Zsolna / Žilina to Brno.^[7]

The king confirmed the privileges of the 24 “Saxon” towns in Szepes / Spiš, strengthened the special rights of Eperjes / Prešov and granted town privileges to Szomolnok /Smolník.^[7] The towns of present-day Slovakia were still dominated by its German citizens. However, the Privilegium pro Slavis, dated to 1381, attests notably to nation-building in the wealthy towns: King Louis I gave the Slavs half of the seats in the municipal council of Zsolna / Žilina. Many of the towns (e.g., Besztercebánya / Banská Bystrica, Pozsony / Bratislava, Kassa / Košice, Körmöcbánya / Kremnica and Nagyszombat / Trnava ) received the status of “free royal cities” (liberæ regiæ civitates) and they were entitled to send deputies to the assemblies of the Estates of the Kingdom from 1441.^[31][32]

In the first half of the 14th century, the population of the regions of the former “forest counties” increased and their territories formed new counties such as Árva / Orava, Liptó / Liptov, Turóc / Turiec, Zólyom / Zvolen in the northern parts of present-day Slovakia.^[26] In the region of Szepes / Spiš, some elements of the population received special privileges: the 24 “Saxon” towns formed an autonomous community, independent of Szepes county / Spiš county, and the “nobles with ten lances” were organised into a special autonomous administrative unit (“seat”).^[7] In 1412, King Sigismund mortgaged 13 of the “Saxon” towns to King Władysław II of Poland so they de facto belonged to Poland until 1769.^[32]

From the 1320s, most of the lands of present-day Slovakia were owned by the kings, but prelates and aristocratic families (e.g., the Drugeth, Szentgyörgyi and Szécsényi families) also hold properties on the territory.^[33] In December 1385, the future King Sigismund, who was Queen Mary of Hungary’s prince consort at that time, mortgaged the territories of present-day Slovakia west of the Vág | Váh River to his cousins, the Margraves Jobst and Prokop of Moravia; and the former held his territories until 1389, while the latter could maintain his rule over some of the territories until 1405.^[2] King Sigismund (1387–1437) granted vast territories to his followers (e.g., to the members of the Cillei, Rozgonyi and Perényi families) during his reign; one of his principal advisers, the Polish Stibor of Stiboricz styled himself “Lord of the whole Váh” referring to his 10 castles around the river.^[18]

Following the death of King Albert (1439), civil war broke out among the followers of the claimants for the throne.^[2] The Dowager Queen Elisabeth hired Czech mercenaries led by Jan Jiskra who occupied several towns on the territory of present-day Slovakia (e.g., Körmöcbánya / Kremnica, Lőcse / Levoča and Bártfa / Bardejov) and maintained most of them until 1462 when he surrendered to King Matthias Corvinus.^[2]

[edit] The Ottoman incursion

St. Martin’s Concathedral in Bratislava was the coronation church of the Kingdom of Hungary for three centuries

The catastrophic defeat of the Hungarian armies from Suleiman I (“the Magnificent”) in the Battle of Mohács in 1526, and the conquest of Buda in 1541 by the Turks, brought about the reduction of the Kingdom of Hungary to the territory of what was called Royal Hungary, while the remaining Hungarian territories became part either of the Ottoman Empire or of the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom, which later became the Principality of Transylvania. Southern central regions of her was part of Ottoman Empire as provinces of Budin, Egri and Érsekújvár / Nove Zamky.

The Ottoman Empire occupied the central part of the Kingdom of Hungary (roughly corresponding to present-day Hungary), and set up a Turkish provinces there (see Ottoman Hungary). Transylvania became a Turkish protectorate vassal and a base which gave birth to all the anti-Habsburg revolts led by the nobility of the Kingdom of Hungary during the period 1604 to 1711. The third part of the Kingdom, on present-day territory of Slovakia (except for the southern central regions), northwestern present-day Hungary, northern Croatia and present-day Burgenland, resisted Turkish occupation and subsequently became a direct part of the Habsburg Monarchy which is referred to by historians as the “Royal Hungary”. Ferdinand I, prince of Austria was elected king of “Royal Hungary”. After the conquest of Buda in 1541 by the Turks, the modern-day capital of Slovakia, Bratislava, then called Pressburg in German, Pozsony in Hungarian and Prešporok in Slovak became, for the period between 1536 to 1784/1848 the capital and the coronation city of Hungary. From 1526 to 1830, nineteen Habsburg sovereigns went through coronation ceremonies as Kings and Queens of Hungary in St. Martin’s Cathedral.

Due to the Ottoman invasion, “Royal Hungary” and the southern regions under Turkish control, became, for almost two centuries, the principal battleground of the Turkish wars, and the region paid dearly for the defense of the Habsburg Monarchy (and, moreover, of the rest of Europe ) against Turkish expansion. The territory paid not only with the blood and the goods of its population, but also by losing practically all of its natural riches, especially gold and silver, which went to pay for the costly and difficult combats of an endemic war. In addition, the double taxation of the area was a common practice, which further worsened the living standards of the declining population of Hungarian settlements.

After the ousting of the Turks from Buda 1686 (which later became Budapest), it became later again the capital of Hungary. However, the Slovakian people succeeded in keeping their language and their culture. The survival of the Slovaks was aided by the fact that the greatest loss of life were in the areas populated more heavily by Hungarians.

[edit] Slovak National Movement

During the 18th century the Slovak National Movement emerged, partially inspired by the broader Pan-Slavic movement with the aim of fostering a sense of national identity among the Slovak people.^[34][35][36] Advanced mainly by Slovak religious leaders, the movement grew during the 19th century. At the same time, the movement was divided along the confessional lines and various groups had different views on everything from quotidian strategy to linguistics. Moreover, the Hungarian control remained strict and the movement was constrained by the official policy of magyarization.

The first codification of a Slovak literary language by Anton Bernolák in the 1780s was based on the dialect from western Slovakia. It was supported by mainly Roman Catholic intellectuals, with the center in Trnava. The Lutheran intellectuals continued to use a Slovakized form of the Czech language. Especially Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik were adherents of Pan-Slavic concepts that stressed the unity of all Slavic peoples. They considered Czechs and Slovaks members of a single nation and they attempted to draw the languages closer together.

In the 1840s, the Protestants split as Ľudovít Štúr developed a literal language based on the dialect from central Slovakia. His followers stressed the separate identity of the Slovak nation and uniqueness of its language. Štúr’s version was finally approved by both the Catholics and the Lutherans in 1847 and, after several reforms, it remains the official Slovak language.

Map of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1850, showing the two military districts which had administrative centres in the territory of present day Slovakia

In the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 the Slovak nationalist leaders took the side of the Austrians in order to promote their separation from the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austrian monarchy. The Slovak National Council even took part in the Austrian military campaign as setting up auxiliary troops against the government of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. In September, 1848, it managed to organize a short living administration on the occupied territories. However, the Slovak troops were later disbanded by the Vienna Imperial Court. On the other hand, tens of thousands of volunteers from the current territory of Slovakia, among them a great number of Slovaks, fought in the Hungarian Army. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution, the Hungarian political elite was oppressed by the Austrian authorities, many participant of the Revolution being executed, imprisoned or forced to emigrate. In 1850, with the division of the Kingdom of Hungary into five military districts or provinces, two of them had administrative centers in the territory of present day Slovakia: the Military District of Pressburg ( Bratislava / Pozsony ) and the Military District of Kaschau ( Kassa / Košice). The Austrian authorities abolished both provinces in 1860. The Slovak political elite made use of the period neo-absolutism of the Vienna court and the weakness of the traditional Hungarian elite to promote their national goals. Túrócszentmárton / Martin became the foremost center of the Slovak National Movement with foundation of the nationwide cultural association Matica slovenská (1863), the Slovak National Museum, and the Slovak National Party (1871).

The heyday of the movement came to the sudden end after 1867, when the Habsburg domains in central Europe underwent a constitutional transformation into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary as a result of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The territory of present-day Slovakia remained part of Hungary dominated by the Hungarian political elite which distrusted the Slovak elite due to its Pan-Slavism, separatism and its recent stand against the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Matica was accused of Pan-Slavic separatism and was dissolved by the authorities in 1875 and other Slovak institutions (including schools) shared the same fate.

New signs of national and political life appeared only at the very end of the 19th century. Slovaks became aware that they needed to ally themselves with others in their struggle. One result of this awareness, the Congress of Oppressed Peoples of Hungary, held in Budapest in 1895, alarmed the government. In their struggle Slovaks received a great deal of help from the Czechs. In 1896, the concept of Czecho-Slovak Mutuality was established in Prague to strengthen Czecho-Slovak cooperation and support the secession of Slovaks from Hungary. At the beginning of the 20th century, growing democratization of political and social life threatened to overwhelm the monarchy. The call for universal suffrage became the main rallying cry. In Hungary, only 5 percent of inhabitants could vote. Slovaks saw in the trend towards representative democracy a possibility of easing ethnic oppression and a break-through into renewed political activity.

The Slovak political camp, at the beginning of the century, split into different factions. The leaders of the Slovak National Party based in Martin, expected the international situation to change in the Slovaks’ favor, and they put great store by Russia. The Roman Catholic faction of Slovak politicians led by Father Andrej Hlinka focused on small undertakings among the Slovak public and, shortly before the war, established a political party named the Slovak People’s Party. The liberal intelligentsia rallying around the journal Hlas (“Voice”), followed a similar political path, but attached more importance to Czecho-Slovak cooperation. An independent Social Democratic Party emerged in 1905.

Map of the federalization of Austria-Hungary planned by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, with Slovakia as one of the member states

The Slovaks achieved some results. One of the greatest of these occurred with the election success in 1906, when, despite continued oppression, seven Slovaks managed to get seats in the Assembly. This success alarmed the government, and increased what was regarded by Slovaks as its oppressive measures. Magyarization achieved its climax with a new education act known as the Apponyi Act, named after education minister Count Albert Apponyi. The new act stipulated that the teaching of the Hungarian language, as one of the subjects, must be included in the curriculum of non-state owned four years elementary schools in the frame-work of the compulsory schooling, as a condition for the non-state owned schools to receive state-financing. Ethnic tension intensified when 15 Slovaks were killed during a riot on occasion of the consecration of a new church at Černová / Csernova near Rózsahegy / Ružomberok (see Černová tragedy). The local inhabitants wanted the popular priest and nationalist politician Andrej Hlinka to consecrate their new church. But bishop Párvy according to the canon law refused to consent and appointed ethnic Slovak canon Anton Kurimsky, former parish priest of Rózsahegy / Ružomberok for the task. Local gendarmes, all of them ethnic Slovaks, shot dead 15 Slovakian protesters among a crowd of app. 400 rioters who attacked on the priests’ convoy escorted by the gendarems. All this added to Slovak estrangement from and resistance to Hungarian rule, and the incident became the topic of a propaganda campaign against Austria-Hungary.

Before the outbreak of World War I, the idea of Slovak autonomy became part of Archduke Franz Ferdinand‘s plan of federalization of the monarchy, developed with help of the Slovak journalist and politician Milan Hodža. This last realistic attempt to tie Slovakia to Austria-Hungary was abandoned because of the Archduke’s assassination, which in turn triggered World War I.

[edit] Czechoslovakia

[edit] The formation of Czechoslovakia

Main articles: Origins of Czechoslovakia and First Republic of Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia in 1928

After the outbreak of World War I the Slovak cause took firmer shape in resistance and in determination to leave the Dual Monarchy and to form an independent republic with the Czechs. The decision originated amongst people of Slovak descent in foreign countries. Slovaks in the United States of America, an especially numerous group, formed a sizable organization. These, and other organizations in Russia and in neutral countries, backed the idea of a Czecho-Slovak republic. Slovaks strongly supported this move.

The most important Slovak representative at this time, Milan Rastislav Štefánik, a French citizen of Slovak origin, served as a French general and as leading representative of the Czecho-Slovak National Council based in Paris. He made a decisive contribution to the success of the Czecho-Slovak cause. Political representatives at home, including representatives of all political persuasions, after some hesitation, gave their support to the activities of Masaryk, Beneš and Štefánik.

During the war the Hungarian authorities increased harassment of Slovaks, which hindered the nationalist campaign among the inhabitants of the Slovak lands. Despite stringent censorship, news of moves abroad towards the establishment of a Czech-Slovak state got through to Slovakia and met with much satisfaction.

During World War I (1914–1918) Czechs, Slovaks, and other national groups of Austria-Hungary gained much support from Czechs and Slovaks living abroad in campaigning for an independent state. In the turbulent final year of the war, sporadic protest actions took place in Slovakia – politicians held a secret meeting at Liptószentmiklós / Liptovský Mikuláš on 1 May 1918.

At the end of the war Austria-Hungary dissolved. The Prague National Committee proclaimed an independent republic of Czechoslovakia on 28 October, and, two days later, the Slovak National Council at Túrócszentmárton / Martin acceded to the Prague proclamation. The new republic was to include the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia), a small part of Silesia, and Slovakia; and Carpatho-Ukraine. The new state set up a parliamentary democratic government and established a capital in the Czech city of Prague.

As a result of the counter-attack of the Hungarian Red Army in May–June, 1919, Czech troops were ousted out from central and eastern parts of present Slovakia. However, the Hungarian army stopped its offensive, later the troops were withdrawn on the Entente’s diplomatic intervention.^[37][38][39] In the Treaty of Trianon signed in 1920, the Paris Peace Conference set the southern border of Czechoslovakia further south from the Slovak-Hungarian language border due to strategic and economic reasons. Consequently, fully or mostly Hungarian-populated areas were annexed to Czechoslovakia. According to the 1910 census conducted by the Central Statistical Office of Hungary, 884,309 ethnic Hungarians constituting 30.2% of the population lived on the present territory on Slovakia, and another 160,000 in Carpatho-Ukraine attached also to Czechoslovakia in the era. Czechoslovak census of 1930 recorded 571,952 Hungarians.

Slovaks, whom the Czechs outnumbered, differed in many important ways from their Czech neighbors. Slovakia had a more agrarian and less developed economy than the Czech lands, and the majority of Slovaks practised Catholicism while the Czechs had less likelihood of adhering to established religions. The Slovak people had generally less education and less experience with self-government than the Czechs. These disparities, compounded by centralized governmental control from Prague, produced discontent among Slovaks with the structure of the new state.^{[citation needed]}

Although Czechoslovakia, alone among the only east-central European countries, remained a parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1938, it continued to face minority problems, the most important of which concerned the country’s large German population. A significant part of the new Slovak political establishment sought autonomy for Slovakia. The movement toward autonomy built up gradually from the 1920s until it culminated in independence in 1939.^{[citation needed]}

In the period between the two world wars, the Czechoslovak government attempted to industrialize Slovakia. These efforts did not meet with success, partially due to the Great Depression, the worldwide economic slump of the 1930s. Slovak resentment over perceived economic and political domination by the Czechs led to increasing dissatisfaction with the republic and growing support for ideas of independence. Many Slovaks joined with Father Andrej Hlinka and Jozef Tiso in calls for equality between Czechs and Slovaks and for greater autonomy for Slovakia.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Towards autonomy of Slovakia, 1938 – 1939

Territorial losses in 1938-39

In September 1938, France, Italy, United Kingdom and Nazi Germany concluded the Munich Agreement, which forced Czechoslovakia to cede the predominantly German region known as the Sudetenland to Germany. In November, by the First Vienna Award, Italy and Germany compelled Czechoslovakia (later Slovakia) to cede primarily Hungarian-inhabited Southern Slovakia to Hungary. They did this in spite of pro-German official declarations of Czech and Slovak leaders made in October.

On 14 March 1939, the Slovak Republic (Slovenská republika) declared its independence and became a nominally independent state in Central Europe under Nazi German control of foreign policy and, increasingly, also some aspects of domestic policy. Jozef Tiso became Prime Minister and later President of the new state.

On 15 March, Nazi Germany invaded what remained of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia after the Munich agreement. The Germans established a protectorate over them which was known as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. On the same day, the Carpatho-Ukraine declared its independence as the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine. But Hungary immediately invaded and annexed the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, the territory of which belonged to Hungary before 1920. On 23 March, Hungary then occupied some additional disputed parts of territory of the present-day Eastern-Slovakia. This caused the brief Slovak-Hungarian War.

[edit] World War II

Main articles: Slovak Republic (1939–1945), Slovak invasion of Poland (1939), and Slovak National Uprising

Independent Tiso’s Slovakia in 1941

The nominally-independent Slovak Republic went through the early years of the war in relative peace. As an Axis ally, the country took part in the wars against Poland and the Soviet Union. Although its contribution was symbolic in the German war efforts, the number of troops involved (approx. 45,000 in the Soviet campaign) was rather significant in proportion to the population (2.6 million in 1940).

Soon after independence, under the authoritarian government of Jozef Tiso initiated a series of measures aimed against the 90,000 Jews in the country. The Hlinka’s Guard began to attack Jews, and the “Jewish Code” was passed in September 1941. Resembling the Nuremberg Laws, the Code required that Jews wear a yellow armband, and were banned from intermarriage and many jobs. The Slovak Parliament accepted a bill (May 1942) unanimously deciding the deportation of the Jews. It may be interesting to note that the only voice (vote) disagreeing came from the representative of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia János Esterházy.^[40]Between March and October 1942, the state deported approximately 57,000 Jews to the German-occupied part of Poland, where almost all of them were killed. The deportation of the remaining 24,000 was stopped after the Papal Nuncio informed the Slovak president that the German authorities were killing the Jews deported from Slovakia. However, 12,600 more Jews were deported by the German forces occupying Slovakia after the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. Around a half of them were killed in concentration camps.^[41] Some 10,000 Slovak Jews survived hidden by local people and 6,000–7,000 got official protection from the Slovak authorities.

On 29 August 1944, 60,000 Slovak troops and 18,000 partisans, organized by various underground groups and the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, rose up against the Nazis. The insurrection later became known as the Slovak National Uprising. Slovakia was devastated by the fierce German counter-offensive and occupation, but the guerrilla warfare continued even after the end of organized resistance. Although ultimately quelled by the German forces, the uprising was an important historical reference point for the Slovak people. It allowed them to end the war as a nation which had contributed to the Allied victory.

Later in 1944 the Soviet attacks intensified. Hence the Red Army, helped by Romanian troops, gradually routed out the German army from Slovak territory. On 4 April 1945, Soviet troops marched into the capital city of the Slovak Republic, Bratislava.

[edit] Czechoslovakia after World War II

Main article: History of Czechoslovakia

The victorious Powers restored Czechoslovakia in 1945 in the wake of World War II, albeit without the province of Ruthenia, which Prague ceded to the Soviet Union. The Beneš decrees, adopted as a result of the events of the war, led to disenfranchisement and persecution of the Hungarian minority in southern Slovakia. (The affected Hungarians regained Czechoslovak citizenship in 1948.) The Czechs and Slovaks held elections in 1946. In Slovakia, the Democratic Party won the elections (62%), but the Czechoslovak Communist Party won in the Czech part of the republic, thus winning 38% of the total vote in Czechoslovakia, and eventually seized power in February 1948, making the country effectively a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

Strict Communist control characterized the next four decades, interrupted only briefly in the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 after Alexander Dubček (a Slovak) became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Dubček proposed political, social, and economic reforms in his effort to make “socialism with a human face” a reality. Concern among other Warsaw Pact governments that Dubček had gone too far led to the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968, by Soviet, Hungarian, Bulgarian, East German, and Polish troops. Another Slovak, Gustáv Husák, replaced Dubček as Communist Party leader in April 1969.

Czechoslovakia 1969-1990

The 1970s and 1980s became known as the period of “normalization“, in which the apologists for the 1968 Soviet invasion prevented as best they could any opposition to their conservative régime. Political, social, and economic life stagnated. Because the reform movement had had its center in Prague, Slovakia experienced “normalization” less harshly than the Czech lands. In fact, the Slovak Republic saw comparatively high economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s relative to the Czech Republic (and mostly from 1994 till today^[update]).

The 1970s also saw the development of a dissident movement, especially in the Czech Republic. On 1 January 1977, more than 250 human-rights activists signed a manifesto called Charter 77, which criticized the Czechoslovak government for failing to meet its human-rights obligations.

On 17 November 1989, a series of public protests known as the “Velvet Revolution” began and led to the downfall of Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia. A transition government formed in December 1989, and the first free elections in Czechoslovakia since 1948 took place in June 1990. In 1992, negotiations on the new federal constitution deadlocked over the issue of Slovak autonomy. In the latter half of 1992, agreement emerged to dissolve Czechoslovakia peacefully. On 1 January 1993, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic each simultaneously and peacefully proclaimed their existence. Both states attained immediate recognition from the United States of America and from their European neighbors.

In the days following the “Velvet Revolution,” Charter 77 and other groups united to become the Civic Forum, an umbrella-group championing bureaucratic reform and civil liberties. Its leader, the playwright and former dissident Václav Havel won election as President of Czechoslovakia in December 1989. The Slovak counterpart of the Civic Forum, Public Against Violence, expressed the same ideals.

In the June 1990 elections, Civic Forum and Public Against Violence won landslide victories. Civic Forum and Public Against Violence found, however, that although they had successfully completed their primary objective — the overthrow of the communist régime — they proved less effective as governing parties. In the 1992 elections, a spectrum of new parties replaced both Civic Forum and Public Against Violence.

	Czecho-Slovakia or Czechoslovakia (1918–1939; 1945–1992)
Austria–Hungary (until 1918)(Bohemia, Moravia, a part of Silesia, northern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary (Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia)	Czecho-Slovak/Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR) (1918–1938)	County Sudetenland + other German terrirories (1938–1945)“Highland territories” of Hungary (1938–1945)		Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR) (1945–1960)	Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) (1960–1990) Czech Socialist Republic Slovak Socialist Republic	Czech and Slovak Federal Republic (ČSFR) (1990–1992) Czech Republic Slovak Republic	Czech Republic (since 1993)Slovakia (since 1993)
		Czecho-Slovak Republic (ČSR) incl. autonomous Slovakia and Transcarpathian Ukraine (1938–1939)	Protectorate (1939–1945)WWII Slovak Republic (1939–1945)
			(further) “Highland territories” of Hungary (1939–1945)	part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1945/1946–1991)		Zakarpats’ka oblast’ of Ukraine (from 1991)
		nazism		1948–1989 a satellite of the Soviet Union
			govern. in exile

[edit] Independent Slovakia

Map of Slovakia

In elections held in June 1992, Václav Klaus‘s Civic Democratic Party won in the Czech lands on a platform of economic reform, and Vladimír Mečiar‘s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) emerged as the leading party in Slovakia, basing its appeal on the fairness of Slovak demands for autonomy. Mečiar and Klaus negotiated the agreement to divide Czechoslovakia, and Mečiar’s party — HZDS — ruled Slovakia for most of its first five years as an independent state, except for a 9-month period in 1994 after a vote of no-confidence, during which a reformist government under Prime Minister Jozef Moravčík operated.

The first president of newly-independent Slovakia, Michal Kováč, promised to make Slovakia “the Switzerland of Eastern Europe”. The first prime minister, Vladimír Mečiar, had served as the prime minister of the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia since 1992.

Rudolf Schuster won election as president in 1999. Vladimír Mečiar’s semi-authoritarian government allegedly breached democratic norms and the rule of law before its replacement after the parliamentary elections of 1998 by a coalition led by Mikuláš Dzurinda.

The first Dzurinda government made numerous political and economic reforms that enabled Slovakia to enter the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), close virtually all chapters in European Union (EU) negotiations, and make itself a strong candidate for accession to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, the popularity of the governing parties declined sharply, and several new parties that earned relatively high levels of support in public opinion-polls appeared on the political scene. Mečiar remained the leader (in opposition) of the HZDS, which continued to receive the support of 20% or more of the population during the first Dzurinda government.

In the September 2002 parliamentary election, a last-minute surge in support for Prime Minister Dzurinda’s Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ) gave him a mandate for a second term. He formed a government with three other center-right parties: the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK), the Christian Democrats (KDH) and the Alliance of the New Citizen (ANO). The coalition won a narrow (three-seat) majority in the parliament. The government strongly supports NATO and EU integration and has stated that it will continue the democratic and free market-oriented reforms begun by the first Dzurinda government. The new coalition has as its main priorities – gaining of NATO and EU invitations, attracting foreign investment, and reforming social services such as the health-care system. Vladimír Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which received about 27% of the vote in 1998 (almost 900,000 votes) received only 19.5% (about 560,000 votes) in 2002 and again went into opposition, unable to find coalition partners. The opposition comprises the HZDS, Smer (led by Róbert Fico), and the Communists, who obtained about 6% of the popular vote.

Initially, Slovakia experienced more difficulty than the Czech Republic in developing a modern market economy. Slovakia joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the EU on 1 May 2004. Slovakia was, on 10 October 2005, for the first time elected to a two-year term on the UN Security Council (for 2006–2007).

The latest elections took place on 17 June 2006, where leftist Smer won elections with 29.14% (around 670 000 votes) of the popular vote and formed coalition with Slota’s Slovak National Party and Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. Their opposition comprises the former ruling parties: the SDKÚ, the SMK and the KDH.

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The Yugoslahia Collections Exhibition

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Showcase :

 Yugoslavia Historic Collections Exhibition.

THE YUGOSLAVIA BANKNOTE BELOW COURTECY OF MY FRIEND STOVIAN BLAZANOVIC(more collections will ad at the  historic period,thankyou Mr Stovian for give me permisiion to add your collection in this exhibition-dr Iwan suwandy)

 

General location of the political entities known as Yugoslavia. The precise borders varied over the years.

Yugoslavia (Croatian, Serbian, Slovene: Jugoslavija; Macedonian, Serbian Cyrillic: Југославија) is a term that describes three political entities that existed successively on the western part of Balkan Peninsula in Europe, during most of the 20th century.

The first country to be known by this name was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which before 3 October 1929 was known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It was established on 1 December 1918 by the union of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and the Kingdom of Serbia (to which the Kingdom of Montenegro was annexed on 13 November 1918, and the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris gave international recognition to the union on 13 July 1922).^[1] The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers in 1941, and because of the events that followed, was officially abolished in 1943 and 1945.

The second country with this name was the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, proclaimed in 1943 by the Yugoslav Partisans resistance movement in World War II. It was renamed to the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in 1946, when a communist government was established. In 1963, it was renamed again to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). This was the largest Yugoslav state, as Istria and Rijeka were added to the new Yugoslavia after the end of World War II.

The constituent six Socialist Republics and two Socialist Autonomous Provinces that made up the country, were: SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, SR Croatia, SR Macedonia, SR Montenegro, SR Slovenia and SR Serbia (including the autonomous provinces of SAP Vojvodina and SAP Kosovo who after 1974 were largely equal to the other members of the federation.)^{[citation needed]}

Starting in 1991, the SFRY disintegrated in the Yugoslav Wars which followed the secession of most of the country’s constituent entities. The next Yugoslavia, known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, existed until 2003, when it was renamed “Serbia and Montenegro”.

Contents [hide] 1 Background 2 Kingdom of Yugoslavia 2.1 1918–1928 2.2 King Alexander’s period 2.3 1934-1941 3 Yugoslavia during World War II 3.1 Invasion of Yugoslavia 3.2 Yugoslav People’s Liberation War 4 SFR Yugoslavia 4.1 Demographics 4.2 Government 4.3 Ethnic tensions and the economic crisis 4.4 Approaching the breakup 4.5 Breakup 5 Yugoslav Wars 5.1 The end of the Second Yugoslavia 6 Legacy 6.1 New states 6.2 Remaining cultural and ethnic ties 7 Miscellaneous 8 See also 9 Notes and references 10 Further reading 11 External links

Background

Main article: Creation of Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was the idea for a single state for all South Slavic intelligentsia and emerged in the late 17th and gained prominence in the 19th century Illyrian Movement, that culminated in the realization of the ideal with the 1918 collapse of Habsburg Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. However, the kingdom was better known, colloquially as well as even on maps, as Yugoslavia (or Jugo-Slavia in the rest of Europe), coined from Slavic words “jug” (south) and “slaveni” (Slavs). in 1929 it was formally renamed to “Kingdom of Yugoslavia”.

Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Flag	Coat of Arms

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia and its banovinas in 1929

Main article: Kingdom of Yugoslavia

1918–1928

Yugoslavia was formed after World War I as what was commonly called at the time a “Versailles state”.

King Alexander’s period

King Alexander I banned national political parties in 1929, assumed executive power and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He hoped to curb separatist tendencies and mitigate nationalist passions. However, Alexander’s policies later encountered opposition from other European powers stemming from developments in Italy and Germany, where Fascists and Nazis rose to power, and the Soviet Union, where Stalin became absolute ruler. None of these three regimes favored the policy pursued by Alexander I. In fact, Italy and Germany wanted to revise the international treaties signed after World War I, and the Soviets were determined to regain their positions in Europe and pursue a more active international policy.

Alexander attempted to create a centralized Yugoslavia. He decided to abolish Yugoslavia’s historic regions, and new internal boundaries were drawn for provinces or banovinas. The banovinas were named after rivers. Many politicians were jailed or kept under police surveillance. The effect of Alexander’s dictatorship was to further alienate the non-Serbs from the idea of unity.^[2] During his reign the flags of Yugoslav nations were banned, Communist ideas were banned also.

The king was assassinated in Marseille during an official visit to France in 1934 by an experienced marksman from Ivan Mihailov’s Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in the cooperation of the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist revolutionary organization. Alexander was succeeded by his eleven year old son Peter II and a regency council headed by his cousin Prince Paul.

1934-1941

The international political scene in the late 1930s was marked by growing intolerance between the principal figures, by the aggressive attitude of the totalitarian regimes and by the certainty that the order set up after World War I was losing its strongholds and its sponsors were losing their strength. Supported and pressured by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Croatian leader Vladko Maček and his party managed the creation of the Banovina of Croatia (Autonomous Region with significant internal self-government) in 1939. The agreement specified that Croatia was to remain part of Yugoslavia, but it was hurriedly building an independent political identity in international relations. The entire kingdom was to be federalized but World War II stopped the fulfillment of those plans.

Prince Paul submitted to the fascist pressure and signed the Tripartite Treaty in Vienna on March 25, 1941, hoping to still keep Yugoslavia out of the war. But this was at the expense of popular support for Paul’s regency. Senior military officers were also opposed to the treaty and launched a coup d’état when the king returned on March 27. Army General Dušan Simović seized power, arrested the Vienna delegation, exiled Paul, and ended the regency, giving 17-year-old King Peter full powers. Hitler then decided to attack Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, followed immediately by an invasion of Greece where Mussolini had previously been repelled.^[3]

Yugoslavia during World War II

Partisan fighter Stjepan Filipović shouting “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” (the Partisan slogan) shortly before his death in 1942.

Invasion of Yugoslavia

Main article: Invasion of Yugoslavia

At 5:12 a.m. on April 6, 1941, German, Italian and Hungarian forces attacked Yugoslavia. The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) bombed Belgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. On April 17, representatives of Yugoslavia’s various regions signed an armistice with Germany in Belgrade, ending 11 days of resistance against the invading German Army (Wehrmacht Heer). More than 300,000 Yugoslav officers and soldiers were taken prisoner.

The Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi satellite state, ruled by the fascist militia known as the Ustaše that came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary, and Italy. From 1941-45, the Croatian Ustaše regime murdered around 500,000 people, 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert to Catholicism, the victims were predominantly Serbs, but include 37,000 Jews.^[4]

See: Jasenovac concentration camp

Yugoslav People’s Liberation War

Main article: Yugoslav Front (World War II)

From the start, the Yugoslav resistance forces consisted of two factions: the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans, and the royalist Chetniks. With the former receiving Allied recognition only to the Tehran conference (1943). The heavily pro-Serbian Chetniks were led by Draža Mihajlović, while the pan-Yugoslav oriented Partisans were led by Josip Broz Tito.

The Partisans initiated a guerrilla campaign which was developed into the largest resistance army in occupied Western and Central Europe. The Chetniks were initially supported by the exiled royal government as well as the Allies, but soon focused increasingly on combating the Partisans, rather than the occupying axis forces. By the end of the war, the Chetnik movement transformed into a collaborationist Serb nationalist militia, completely dependent on Axis supplies.^[5] The highly mobile Partisans, however, carried on their guerrilla warfare with great success. Most notable of the victories against the occupying forces were the battles of Neretva and Sutjeska.

On November 25, 1942, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije) was convened in Bihać, modern day Bosnia and Herzegovina. The council reconvened on November 29, 1943, in Jajce, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina and established the basis for post-war organization of the country, establishing a federation (this date was celebrated as Republic Day after the war).

The Yugoslav Partisans were able to expel the Axis from Serbia in 1944 and the rest of Yugoslavia in 1945. The Red Army provided limited assistance with the liberation of Belgrade and withdrew after the war was over. In May 1945, the Partisans met with allied forces outside former Yugoslav borders, after taking over also Trieste and parts of Austrian southern provinces Styria and Carinthia. However, the Partisans withdrew from Trieste in June of the same year.

Western attempts to reunite the Partisans, who denied supremacy of the old government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the emigration loyal to the king, led to the Tito-Šubašić Agreement in June 1944, however Marshal Josip Broz Tito was seen as a national hero by the citizens, and was elected by referendum to lead the new independent communist state, starting as a prime minister. The official Yugoslav post-war estimate of victims in Yugoslavia during World War II is 1,704,000. Subsequent data gathering in the 1980s by historians Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović showed that the actual number of dead was about 1 million.

SFR Yugoslavia

Flag	Coat of Arms

Numbered map of Yugoslav republics and autonomous provinces.

Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

Main article: Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

On November 29, 1945, while still in exile, King Peter II was deposed by Yugoslavia’s Constituent Assembly. However, he refused to abdicate.

On January 31, 1946, the new constitution of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, modeled after the Soviet Union, established six People’s Republics, an Autonomous Province, and an Autonomous District that were part of SR Serbia. The federal capital was Belgrade. Republics and provinces were (in alphabetical order):

Name	Capital	Flag	Coat of Arms	Location
Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina	Sarajevo
Socialist Republic of Croatia	Zagreb
Socialist Republic of Macedonia	Skopje
Socialist Republic of Montenegro	Titograd*
Socialist Republic of Serbia Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina	Belgrade Priština Novi Sad
Socialist Republic of Slovenia	Ljubljana

* now Podgorica.

In 1947, negotiations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were led and finalized with the Bled agreement. The aim of the negotiations was to include Bulgaria in Yugoslavia or to form a new union of two independent countries. After the intervention of Stalin this agreement was never realized.

Yugoslavia solved the national issue of nations and nationalities (national minorities) in a way that all nations and nationalities had the same rights. The flags of the republics used versions of the red flag and/or Slavic tricolor, with a red star in the centre or in the canton.

In 1974, the two provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija (for the latter had by then been upgraded to the status of a province), as well as the republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, were granted greater autonomy to the point that Albanian and Hungarian became nationally recognised minority languages and the Serbo-Croat of Bosnia and Montenegro altered to a form based on the speech of the local people and not on the standards of Zagreb and Belgrade. In Slovenia the recognized minorities were Hungarians and Italians.

Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija formed a part of the Republic of Serbia but those provinces also formed part of the federation, which led to the unique situation that Central Serbia did not have its own assembly but a joint assembly with its provinces represented in it. The country distanced itself from the Soviets in 1948 (cf. Cominform and Informbiro) and started to build its own way to socialism under the strong political leadership of Josip Broz Tito. The country criticized both Eastern bloc and NATO nations and, together with other countries, started the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which remained the official affiliation of the country until it dissolved.

Demographics

Main article: Demographics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

See also: Changes in Yugoslavian Religious Demographics

Yugoslavia had always been a home to a very diverse population, not only in terms of national affiliation, but also religious affiliation. Of the many religions, Islam, Catholicism, Judaism and Protestantism as well as various Orthodox faiths composed the religions of Yugoslavia, comprising over 40 in all. The religious demographics of Yugoslavia have changed dramatically since World War II. A census taken in 1921 and later in 1948 show that 99% of the population appeared to be deeply involved with their religion and practices. With postwar government programs of modernization and urbanization, the percentage of religious believers took a dramatic plunge. Connections between religious belief and nationality posed a serious threat to the post-war Communist government’s policies on national unity and state structure.^[6]

After the rise of communism, a survey taken in 1964 showed that just over 70% of the total population of Yugoslavia considered themselves to be religious believers. The places of highest religious concentration were that of Kosovo with 91% and Bosnia and Herzegovina with 83.8%. The places of lowest religious concentration were Slovenia 65.4%, Serbia with 63.7% and Croatia with 63.6%. Religious differences between Orthodox Christian Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks and the rise of nationalism contributed to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.^[7]

Government

On 7 April 1963, the nation changed its official name to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Tito was named President for Life. In the SFRY, each republic and province had its own constitution, supreme court, parliament, president and prime minister. At the top of the Yugoslav government were the President (Tito), the federal Prime Minister, and the federal Parliament (a collective Presidency was formed after Tito’s death in 1980). Also important were the Communist Party general secretaries for each republic and province, and the general secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Josip Broz Tito was the most powerful person in the country, followed by republican and provincial premiers and presidents, and Communist Party presidents. Slobodan Penezić Krcun, Tito’s chief of secret police in Serbia, fell victim to a dubious traffic incident after he started to complain about Tito’s politics. The Interior Minister Aleksandar Ranković lost all of his titles and rights after a major disagreement with Tito regarding state politics. Sometimes ministers in government, such as Edvard Kardelj or Stane Dolanc, were more important than the Prime Minister.

The suppression of national identities escalated with the so-called Croatian Spring of 1970–1971, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders, but many key Croatian representatives in the Party silently supported this cause, so a new Constitution was ratified in 1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics in Yugoslavia and provinces in Serbia.

Ethnic tensions and the economic crisis

The post-World War II Yugoslavia was in many respects a model^{[citation needed]} of how to build a multinational state. The Federation was constructed against a double background: an inter-war Yugoslavia which had been dominated by the Serbian ruling class; and a war-time division of the country, as Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany split the country apart and endorsed an extreme Croatian nationalist faction called the Ustaše which committed genocide^{[citation needed]} against Serbs. A small faction of Bosniak nationalists joined the Axis forces and attacked Serbs while extreme Serb nationalists engaged in attacks on Bosniaks and Croats.

The ethnic violence was only ended^{[citation needed]} when the multiethnic Yugoslav Partisans took over the country at the end of the war and banned nationalism from being publicly promoted. Overall relative peace was retained under Tito’s rule, though nationalist protests did occur, but these were usually repressed and nationalist leaders were arrested and some were executed by Yugoslav officials. However one protest in Croatia in the 1970s, called the “Croatian Spring” was backed by large numbers of Croats who claimed that Yugoslavia remained a Serb hegemony and demanded that Serbia’s powers be reduced.

Tito, whose home republic was Croatia, was concerned over the stability of the country and responded in a manner to appease both Croats and Serbs, he ordered the arrest of the Croat protestors, while at the same time conceding to some of their demands. In 1974, Serbia’s influence in the country was significantly reduced as autonomous provinces were created in ethnic Albanian-majority populated Kosovo and the mixed-populated Vojvodina.

These autonomous provinces held the same voting power as the republics but unlike the republics, they could not legally separate from Yugoslavia. This concession satisfied Croatia and Slovenia, but in Serbia and in the new autonomous province of Kosovo, reaction was different. Serbs saw the new constitution as conceding to Croat and ethnic Albanian nationalists. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo saw the creation of an autonomous province as not being enough, and demanded that Kosovo become a constituent republic with the right to separate from Yugoslavia. This created tensions within the Communist leadership, particularly amongst Communist Serb officials who resented the 1974 constitution as weakening Serbia’s influence and jeopardizing the unity of the country by allowing the republics the right to separate.

An economic crisis erupted in the 1970s which was the product of disastrous errors by Yugoslav governments, such as borrowing vast amounts of Western capital in order to fund growth through exports. Western economies then entered recession, blocked Yugoslav exports and created a huge debt problem. The Yugoslav government then accepted the IMF loan.

In 1989, according to official sources, 248 firms were declared bankrupt or were liquidated and 89,400 workers were laid off. During the first nine months of 1990 directly following the adoption of the IMF programme, another 889 enterprises with a combined work-force of 525,000 workers suffered the same fate. In other words, in less than two years “the trigger mechanism” (under the Financial Operations Act) had led to the lay off of more than 600,000 workers out of a total industrial workforce of the order of 2.7 million. An additional 20% of the work force, or half a million people, were not paid wages during the early months of 1990 as enterprises sought to avoid bankruptcy. The largest concentrations of bankrupt firms and lay-offs were in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo. Real earnings were in a free fall and social programmes had collapsed; creating within the population an atmosphere of social despair and hopelessness. This was a critical turning point in the events to follow.

Approaching the breakup

Though the 1974 Constitution dampened the institutional and material powers of the federal government, Tito’s authority substituted for this weakness until his death in 1980.

Breakup

Breakup of SFR Yugoslavia.

Serbian President Slobodan Milošević‘s unequivocal desire to uphold the unity of Serbs, a status threatened by each republic breaking away from the federation, in addition to his opposition to the Albanian authorities in Kosovo, further inflamed ethnic tensions.

Croatian President Franjo Tuđman refused to partition Croatia on ethnic lines, which angered the Serb population of Croatia who had wished to remain in union with Serbia-proper. This resulted in the outbreak of violence and war between Croats and Serbs ahead of Croatia’s independence.

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović pushed for independence of Bosnia, claiming that he would not allow Bosnia and Herzegovina to become part of what he called “Greater Serbia” which he accused the Serbian government of sponsoring. As head of Bosnia’s government, Izetbegović would wage war on three fronts: against Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and also against a rebel faction of Bosniaks in northern Bosnia led by Fikret Abdić. The Bosnian state he initially wished to build was both against the Serbs’ desire for their territory to remain in Yugoslavia, and one which would disenfranchise non-Bosniaks.

State entities on the former territory of Yugoslavia, 2008.

Main article: Breakup of Yugoslavia

After Tito’s death on 4 May 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. The legacy of the Constitution of 1974 was used to throw the system of decision-making into a state of paralysis, made all the more hopeless as the conflict of interests had become irreconcilable. The constitutional crisis that inevitably followed resulted in a rise of nationalism in all republics: Slovenia and Croatia made demands for looser ties within the Federation, the Albanian majority in Kosovo demanded the status of a republic, Serbia sought absolute, not only relative dominion over Yugoslavia. Added to this, the Croat quest for independence led to large Serb communities within Croatia rebelling and trying to secede from the Croat republic.

In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts drafted a memorandum addressing some burning issues concerning position of Serbs as the most numerous people in Yugoslavia. The largest Yugoslav republic in territory and population, Serbia’s influence over the regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina was reduced by the 1974 Constitution. Because its two autonomous provinces had de facto prerogatives of full-fledged republics, Serbia found that its hands were tied, for the republican government was restricted in making and carrying out decisions that would apply to the provinces. Since the provinces had a vote in the Federal Presidency Council (an eight-member council composed of representatives from six republics and two autonomous provinces), they sometimes even entered into coalition with other republics, thus outvoting Serbia. Serbia’s political impotence made it possible for others to exert pressure on the 2 million Serbs (20% of total Serbian population) living outside Serbia.

Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević sought to restore pre-1974 Serbian sovereignty. Other republics, especially Slovenia and Croatia, denounced this move as a revival of great Serbian hegemonism. Milošević succeeded in reducing the autonomy of Vojvodina and of Kosovo and Metohija, but both entities retained a vote in the Yugoslav Presidency Council. The very instrument that reduced Serbian influence before was now used to increase it: in the eight member Council, Serbia could now count on four votes minimum — Serbia proper, then-loyal Montenegro, and Vojvodina and Kosovo.

As a result of these events, the ethnic Albanian miners in Kosovo organized strikes, which dovetailed into ethnic conflict between the Albanians and the non-Albanians in the province. At around 80% of the population of Kosovo in the 1980s, ethnic-Albanians were the majority. The number of Slavs in Kosovo (mainly Serbs) was quickly declining for several reasons, among them the ever increasing ethnic tensions and subsequent emigration from the area. By 1999 the Slavs formed as little as 10% of the total population in Kosovo.

Meanwhile Slovenia, under the presidency of Milan Kučan, and Croatia supported Albanian miners and their struggle for formal recognition. Initial strikes turned into widespread demonstrations demanding a Kosovan republic. This angered Serbia’s leadership which proceeded to use police force, and later even the Federal Army was sent to the province by the order of the Serbia-held majority in the Yugoslav Presidency Council.

In January 1990, the extraordinary 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was convened. For most of the time, the Slovenian and Serbian delegations were arguing over the future of the League of Communists and Yugoslavia. The Serbian delegation, led by Milošević, insisted on a policy of “one person, one vote“, which would empower the plurality population, the Serbs. In turn, the Slovenes, supported by Croats, sought to reform Yugoslavia by devolving even more power to republics, but were voted down. As a result, the Slovenian, and eventually Croatian delegation left the Congress, and the all-Yugoslav Communist party was dissolved.

Following the fall of communism in the rest of Eastern Europe, each of the republics held multi-party elections in 1990. Slovenia and Croatia held the elections in April since their communist parties chose to cede power peacefully. Other Yugoslav republics — especially Serbia — were more or less dissatisfied with the democratization in two of the republics and proposed different sanctions (e.g. Serbian “customs tax” for Slovenian products) against the two of the union but as the year passed other republics communist parties saw the inevitability of the democratization process and in December as the last member of the federation — Serbia held parliamentary elections which confirmed (former) communists rule in this republic.

The unresolved issues however remained. In particular, Slovenia and Croatia elected governments oriented towards greater autonomy of the republics (under Milan Kučan and Franjo Tuđman, respectively), since it became clear that Serbian domination attempts and increasingly different levels of democratic standards were becoming increasingly incompatible. Serbia and Montenegro elected candidates who favoured Yugoslav unity. Serbs in Croatia wouldn’t accept a status of a national minority in a sovereign Croatia, since they would be demoted from a constituent nation of Croatia and this would consequently diminish their rights.

Yugoslav Wars

Main article: Yugoslav Wars

The war broke out when the new regimes tried to replace Yugoslav civilian and military forces with secessionist forces. When in August 1990 Croatia attempted to replace police in the Serb populated Croat Krajina by force, the population first looked for refuge in the JNA caserns, while the army remained passive. The civilians then organised armed resistance. These armed conflicts between the Croatian armed forces (“police”) and civilians mark the beginning of the Yugoslav war that inflamed the region. Similarly, the attempt to replace Yugoslav frontier police by the Slovenian police provoked regional armed conflicts which finished with a minimal number of victims.

A similar attempt in Bosnia and Herzegovina led to a war that lasted more than three years (see below). The results of all these conflicts are almost complete emigration of the Serbs from all three regions, massive displacement of the populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and establishment of the three new independent states. The separation of Macedonia was peaceful, although the Yugoslav Army occupied the peak of the Straža mountain on the Macedonian soil.

Serbian uprisings in Croatia began in August 1990 by blocking roads leading from the Dalmatian coast towards the inland almost a year before Croatian leadership made any move towards independence. These uprisings were more or less discretely backed up by the Serbian dominated federal army (JNA). The Serbs proclaimed the emergence of Serbian Autonomous Areas (known later as Republic of Serb Krajina) in Croatia. Federal army tried to disarm the Territorial defence forces of Slovenia (republics had their local defence forces similar to Home guard ) in 1990 but wasn’t completely successful. Still, Slovenia began to covertly import arms to replenish its armed forces.

Croatia also embarked upon the illegal import of arms, (following the disaramament of the republics armed forces by the federal JNA) mainly from Hungary, and were under constant surveillance which produced a video of a secret meeting between the Croatian Defence minister Martin Špegelj and the two men, filmed by the Yugoslav Counter Intelligence (KOS, Kontra-obavještajna Služba). Špegelj announced that they were at war with the army and gave instructions about arms smuggling as well as methods of dealing with the Yugoslav Army’s officers stationed in Croatian cities. Serbia and JNA used this discovery of Croatian rearmament for propaganda purposes. The film was spiced by distorting sounds and fabricated voice of the Croatian minister.

Also, guns were fired from army bases through Croatia. Elsewhere, tensions were running high.

In the same month, the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija, JNA) met with the Presidency of Yugoslavia in an attempt to get them to declare a state of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. The army was seen as a Serbian service by that time so the consequence feared by the other republics was to be total Serbian domination of the union. The representatives of Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Vojvodina voted for the decision, while all other republics, Croatia (Stipe Mesić), Slovenia (Janez Drnovšek), Macedonia (Vasil Tupurkovski) and Bosnia and Hercegovina (Bogić Bogićević), voted against. The tie delayed an escalation of conflicts, but not for long. Slobodan Milošević installed his proponents in Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro during Yogurt Revolutions.

Following the first multi-party election results, in the autumn of 1990, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia proposed transforming Yugoslavia into a loose confederation of six republics. By this proposal republics would have right to self-determination. However Milošević rejected all such proposals, arguing that like Slovenes and Croats, the Serbs (having in mind Croatian Serbs) should also have a right to self-determination.

On March 9, 1991, demonstrations were held against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade, but the police and the military were deployed in the streets to restore order, killing two people. In late March 1991, the Plitvice Lakes incident was one of the first sparks of open war in Croatia. The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), whose superior officers were mainly of Serbian ethnicity, maintained an impression of being neutral, but as time went on, they got more and more involved in the state politics.

On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia became the first republics to declare independence from Yugoslavia. The federal customs officers in Slovenia on the border crossings with Italy, Austria and Hungary mainly just changed uniforms since most of them were local Slovenes. The border police were mostly already Slovenian before Slovenia’s declaration of independence. The following day (June 26), the Federal Executive Council specifically ordered the army to take control of the “internationally recognized borders”. See Ten-Day War.

The Yugoslav People’s Army forces, based in barracks in Slovenia and Croatia, attempted to carry out the task within the next 48 hours. However, because of the misinformation given to the Yugoslav Army conscripts that the Federation was under attack by foreign forces, and the fact that the majority of them did not wish to engage in a war on the ground where they served their conscription, the Slovene territorial defence forces retook most of the posts within several days with only minimal loss of life on both sides.

There was a suspected incident of a war crime, as the Austrian ORF TV station showed footage of three Yugoslav Army soldiers surrendering to the Territorial defense, before gunfire was heard and the troops were seen falling down. However, none were killed in the incident. There were however numerous cases of destruction of civilian property and civilian life by the Yugoslav Peoples Army — houses, a church, civilian airport was bombarded and civilian hangar and airliners inside it, truck drivers on the road Ljubljana — Zagreb and Austrian journalists on Ljubljana Airport were killed. Ceasefire was agreed upon. According to the Brioni Agreement, recognized by representatives of all republics, the international community pressured Slovenia and Croatia to place a three-month moratorium on their independence.

During these three months, the Yugoslav Army completed its pull-out from Slovenia, but in Croatia, a bloody war broke out in the autumn of 1991. Ethnic Serbs, who had created their own state Republic of Serbian Krajina in heavily Serb-populated regions resisted the police forces of the Republic of Croatia who were trying to bring that breakaway region back under Croatian jurisdiction. In some strategic places, the Yugoslav Army acted as a buffer zone, in most others it was protecting or aiding Serbs with resources and even manpower in their confrontation with the new Croatian army and their police force.

In September 1991, the Republic of Macedonia also declared independence, becoming the only former republic to gain sovereignty without resistance from the Belgrade-based Yugoslav authorities. 500 U.S. soldiers were then deployed under the U.N. banner to monitor Macedonia’s northern borders with the Republic of Serbia, Yugoslavia. Macedonia’s first president, Kiro Gligorov, maintained good relations with Belgrade and the other breakaway republics and there have to date been no problems between Macedonian and Serbian border police even though small pockets of Kosovo and the Preševo valley complete the northern reaches of the historical region known as Macedonia (Prohor Pčinjski part), which would otherwise create a border dispute if ever Macedonian romantic nationalism should resurface (see VMRO). This was despite the fact that the Yugoslav Army refused to abandon its military infrastructure on the top of the Straža Mountain up to the year 2000.

As a result of the conflict, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted UN Security Council Resolution 721 on November 27, 1991, which paved the way to the establishment of peacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia.^[8]

In Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1991, the Bosnian Serbs held a referendum which resulted in an overwhelming vote in favour of forming Serbian republic in borders of Bosnia and Herzegovina and staying in a common state with Serbia and Montenegro. On January 9, 1992, the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb assembly proclaimed a separate “Republic of the Serb people of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. The referendum and creation of SARs were proclaimed unconstitutional by the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and declared illegal and invalid. However, in February-March 1992 the government held a national referendum on Bosnian independence from Yugoslavia. That referendum was in turn declared contrary to the BiH and Federal constitution by the federal Constitution court in Belgrade and the newly established Bosnian Serb government.

The referendum was largely boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs. The Federal court in Belgrade did not decide on the matter of the referendum of the Bosnian Serbs. The turnout was somewhere between 64–67% and 98% of the voters voted for independence. It was not clear what the two-thirds majority requirement actually meant and whether it was satisfied. The republic’s government declared its independence on 5 April, and the Serbs immediately declared the independence of Republika Srpska. The war in Bosnia followed shortly thereafter.

The end of the Second Yugoslavia

Various dates are considered as the end of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia:

• June 25, 1991, when Croatia and Slovenia declared independence
• September 8, 1991, following a referendum the Republic of Macedonia declared independence
• October 8, 1991, when the July 9 moratorium on Slovenian and Croatian secession was ended and Croatia restated its independence in Croatian Parliament (that day is celebrated as Independence Day in Croatia)
• January 15, 1992, when Slovenia and Croatia were internationally recognized by most European countries
• April 6, 1992, full recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s independence by the U.S. and most European countries
• April 28, 1992, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is formed
• November 1995, Dayton Agreement is signed by leaders of FR Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia

Legacy

Main article: Former Yugoslavia

New states

Countries created from the former Yugoslavia:

Name	Capital	Flag	Coat of Arms
Bosnia and Herzegovina	Sarajevo
Croatia	Zagreb
Kosovo[a]	Pristina
Macedonia	Skopje
Montenegro	Podgorica
Serbia	Belgrade
Slovenia	Ljubljana

The first former Yugoslav republic to join the European Union was Slovenia, which applied in 1996 and became a member in 2004. Croatia applied for membership in 2004. Macedonia applied in 2004, and will probably join by 2010–2015.^[9]. Montenegro presented its official application to the European Union, with the hopes of gaining EU candidate status by 2009, although it has yet to be accepted.^[10] The remaining three republics have yet to apply so their acceptance generally is not expected before 2015. These states are signatories of various partnership agreements with the European Union. Since 1 January 2007, they have been encircled by member-states of EU (and Albania, which is encircled with them). The Assembly of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. Its independence is recognised by 71 UN member states and the Republic of China (Taiwan). On 8 October 2008, upon request of Serbia, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution asking the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the issue of Kosovo’s declaration of independence.^[11] On 22 July 2010, the court ruled that Kosovo’s independence was not illegal.^[12]

Remaining cultural and ethnic ties

Main article: Yugosphere

The similarity of the languages and the long history of common life have left many ties among the peoples of the new states, even though the individual state policies of the new states favour differentiation, particularly in language. The Serbo-Croatian language is linguistically a unique language, with several literary and spoken variants and also was the imposed means of communication used where other languages dominated (Slovenia, Macedonia). Now, separate sociolinguistic standards exist for the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages. Although the SFRY had no official language, technically there had been three official languages, along with minority languages official where minorities lived, but in all federal organs only Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian was used and others were expected to use it as well.

Remembrance of the time of the joint state and its perceived positive attributes is referred to as Yugo-nostalgia (Jugonostalgija). Many aspects of Yugonostalgia refer to the socialist system and the sense of social security it provided. There are still people from the former-Yugoslavia who self-identify as Yugoslavs, and commonly seen in demographics relating to ethnicity in today’s independent states.

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THE BOSNIA HERZOGOWINA COLLECTIONS EXHIBITION

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SHOWCASE :

The Bosnian and Herzogovina Historic collections Exhibition

History of Bosnia and Herzegovina
This article is part of a series
Early History
Prehistory and Roman era
Slavic peoples
Monarchy
Bosnian Kingdom
Ottoman era (Bosnia Province) (Herzegovina Province)
Austro-Hungarian condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Yugoslavia
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
World War II
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Contemporary
War in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia and Herzegovina Portal  v • d • e

Because of its central geographic position within the Yugoslavian federation, post-war Bosnia was strategically selected as a base for the development of the military defense industry. This contributed to a large concentration of arms and military personnel in Bosnia; a significant factor in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, Bosnia’s existence within Yugoslavia, for the large part, was peaceful and prosperous. Being one of the poorer republics in the early 1950s it quickly recovered economically, taking advantage of its extensive natural resources to stimulate industrial development. The Yugoslavian communist doctrine of “brotherhood and unity” particularly suited Bosnia’s diverse and multi-ethnic society that, because of such an imposed system of tolerance, thrived culturally and socially. Cultural ascendance of Bosnia and Herzegovina culminated with the selection of Sarajevo to host 1984 Winter Olympics.

 Politics

Though considered a political backwater of the federation for much of the 50s and 60s, the 70s saw the ascension of a strong Bosnian political elite. While working within the communist system, politicians such as Džemal Bijedić, Branko Mikulić and Hamdija Pozderac reinforced and protected the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their efforts proved key during the turbulent period following Tito‘s death in 1980, and are today considered some of the early steps towards Bosnian independence. However, the republic hardly escaped the increasingly nationalistic climate of the time unscathed.

Following the death of Tito in 1980, rising nationalist ideas primarily noted in Serbian academia, pressured Bosnia to deal with allegations of rising nationalism in their own society. One of the most controversial events that were taken by a Bosnian political leadership was a so called Sarajevo process in 1983 where, under significant pressure from Serbia’s political leadership, Bosnian political elite used their influence to secure convictions for several Muslim nationalists as a type of a political sacrifice to gain political points in the fight against Serbian nationalists.

The Sarajevo process centered on convicting Alija Izetbegovic for writing “The Islamic Declaration”, a literary work which was in the Yugoslav communist regime considered a radical approach towards socialist ideals of former Yugoslavia that were based on suppression of nationalism and any violation of that doctrine was punishable by law. Such trials in the communist regime were quite common and a typical practice of suppressing the right to free speech. Bosnian politicians used this practice to reaffirm their political opposition to Serbian nationalist tendencies and in particular opposition to the politics of Slobodan Milošević who was trying to revert the constitutional amendments of 1970s that awarded the Bosniaks the status of a constituent ethnicity.

The process also backfired as the Serbian lobby insisted that Bosnia was a “dark nation” where all those who oppose the government will be prosecuted, where Bosnian Muslim communists were prosecuting Muslim believers. That kind of propaganda attracted many Bosnian Muslims to their way of thinking. Others were interpreting the Sarajevo process as a way of removing the political amateurs who could end up disrupting the process of Bosnian independence.

The Pre-war Situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina

With the fall of communism and the start of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the old communist doctrine of tolerance began to lose its potency, creating an opportunity for nationalist elements in the society to spread their influence.

On the first multi-party elections that took place in November 1990 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the three largest ethnic parties in the country won: the Bosniak Party of Democratic Action, the Serbian Democratic Party and the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the elections, they formed a coalition government. The primary motivation behind this union was to maintain an atmosphere of harmony and tolerance and further their common goal to rule as a democratic alternative to the Socialist government that preceded them.

Parties divided the power along the ethnic lines so that the President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was a Bosniak, president of the Parliament was a Bosnian Serb and the prime minister a Bosnian Croat.

 Independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina

After Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its sovereignty in October 1991 and organized a referendum on independence in March 1992. The decision of the Parliament of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina on holding the referendum was taken after the majority of Bosnian Serb members had left the assembly in protest.

These Bosnian Serb assembly members invited the Bosnian Serb population to boycott the referendum held on February 29 and March 1 1992. The turnout in the referendum was 64-67% and the vote was 98% in favor of independence. Independence was declared on March 5 1992 by the parliament. The referendum and the murder of a member of a wedding procession on the day before the referendum was utilized by the Bosnian Serb political leadership as a reason to start road blockades in protest. Bosnian War followed

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The Serbia Collections Exhibition

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_____________________________________________________________________

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                                                     THE FOUNDER

                                            Dr IWAN SUWANDY, MHA

                                                         

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History of Serbia
This article is part of a series
Prehistoric Serbia
Starčevo · Vinča
Ancient Serbia
Scordisci
Roman Serbia
Moesia Dacia
Medieval Serbia
Rascia · Doclea-Zeta Zachlumia · Travunia
Medieval Kingdom of Serbia
Serbian Empire
Moravian Serbia
Battle of Kosovo
Serbian Despotate
Ottoman/Habsburg Serbia
First Habsburg Serbia
Second Habsburg Serbia
Great Serb Migrations
Modern Serbia
Revolutionary Serbia
Principality of Serbia
Kingdom of Serbia
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
Nedić regime
Republic of Užice
Socialist Republic of Serbia
Republic of Serbia (federal)
Republic of Serbia
Serbia Portal  v • d • e

The History of Serbia begins with the Slavic migrations on the Balkans, on the territories governed by the Byzantine Empire, in the 7th century.

Serbia was formed on territories previously under direct Roman; Byzantine rule. The Roman Empire conquered this part in the 1st century BC. Thracian, Dacian and Illyrian tribes were autochthonous to the region and gradually became weaker with the emergence of the Celtic Scordisci and subsequent Romanization.

One of the first acknowledged Serbian principalities, Raška, was founded in the early 9th century by the House of Vlastimirović; it evolved into a Serbian Kingdom in the 12th century and later into the Serbian Empire in the 14th century under the House of Nemanjić.

The Serbian realms disappeared by the mid-16th century, torn by domestic feuds, and Ottoman conquest. The success of the Serbian revolution against Ottoman rule in 1817 marked the birth of the Principality of Serbia, which achieved de facto independence in 1867 and was finally recognized in the Berlin Congress of 1878. As a victor in the Balkan Wars in 1913, Serbia regainedVardar Macedonia, Kosovo and Raška (Sandžak) (Old Serbia). In 1918, the region of Republic of Vojvodina proclaimed their secession from Austria-Hungary to unite with the pan-Slavic State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, the Kingdom of Serbia joined the union on 1 December 1918, and the country was named Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1918, Serbia was recognized as a state by the world for the first time.

Serbia settled its current borders after World War II, when it became a federal unit within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After its dissolution in a series of wars in the 1990s, Serbia once again became an independent state on June 5, 2006, following the breakup of a short-lived union with Montenegro.

In February 2008, the parliament of Republic of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia after turmoil of 1990s, ten years of UN administration and unsettled negotiations on its final status. The response from the international community has been mixed. Serbia still regards Kosovo as its United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo governed by the UN.

Contents [hide] 1 History 1.1 Early history 1.1.1 Prehistoric Serbia 1.1.2 Ancient Serbia 1.1.3 Roman Serbia 1.2 Medieval Serbia, 7th – 14th century 1.3 Ottoman Empire (14th – 20th century) 1.4 Modern Serbia 1.4.1 Serbia in World War I 1.5 The Kingdom of Yugoslavia 1.5.1 Serbia in World War II 1.6 Serbia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1.6.1 The break-up of Yugoslavia 1.7 Serbian independence 1.8 Kosovo dispute 2 See also 3 Gallery 4 References 5 External links

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[edit] History

[edit] Early history

This section requires expansion.

Roman and Byzantine Era      Roman Republic      Roman Empire      Western Roman Empire      Eastern Roman Empire

Much of Serbia during the Neolithic period was occupied by the Vinča culture.

Serbia’s strategic location between two continents has subjected it to invasions by many peoples. Greeks colonized its south in the 11th century B.C., the northernmost point of the empire of Alexander the Great being the town of Kale-Krsevica.^[1] Belgrade is believed to have been torn by 140 wars since Roman times.^[2]

The northern city of Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica) was among the top 4 cities of the late Roman Empire, serving as its capital during the Tetrarchy.^[3] Contemporary Serbia comprises the classical regions of Moesia, Pannonia, parts of Dalmatia, Dacia and Macedonia.^[4]

Around the 7th century, Slavs appeared on the Byzantine borders in great numbers.^[5] Slavic people have been under nominal Serbian rule since the 7th century. They were allowed to settle in the Byzantine Empire by its emperor Heraclius after their victory over the Avars.^[6]

Throughout its early history, various parts of the territory of modern Serbia have been colonized, claimed or ruled by:

• the Greeks and Romans (conquered the indigenous Celts and Illyrians)
• the Western and Eastern Roman Empires
• challenged by the incursions of the Huns, the Ostrogoths, the Sarmatians, the Avars, the Serbs, the Frankish Kingdom, the Great Moravia, the Bulgarians and finally, the Hungarians.

No fewer than 17 Roman Emperors were born in the land that is now Serbia.^[7]

[edit] Prehistoric Serbia

This section requires expansion.

Main article: Prehistoric Serbia

Further information: Prehistoric Balkans

The Neolithic Starčevo and Vinča cultures existed in or near Belgrade and dominated the Balkans (as well as parts of Central Europe and Asia Minor) about 8,500 years ago.^[8][9] Some scholars believe that the prehistoric Vinča signs represent one of the earliest known forms of Writing systems (dating to 6000-4000BC).^[10]

[edit] Ancient Serbia

This section requires expansion.

Main article: Ancient Serbia

The Thracians dominated Serbia before the Illyrian migration in the southwest.^[11]

Greeks colonized the south in the 4th century B.C., the northernmost point of the empire of Alexander the Great being the town of Kale.^[12]

[edit] Roman Serbia

This section requires expansion.

Main article: Roman Serbia

Further information: Moesia, Pannonia, Dalmatia, Dacia, and Macedonia (region)

Felix Romuliana (Gamzigrad), 4th century, UNESCO

The Romans conquered parts of Serbia in 2nd century BC, in 167 BC when conquering the West, establishing the province of Illyricum and the rest of Central Serbia in 75 BC, establishing the province of Moesia. Srem is conquered by 9 BC and Backa and Banat in 106 AD after the Dacian wars.

Belgrade, Prehistoric capital of Europe,^[13] is believed to have been torn by 140 wars since Roman times.^[14] The northern Serbian city of Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica) was among the top 4 cities of the late Roman Empire, serving as its capital during the Tetrarchy.^[15] Contemporary Serbia comprises the classical regions of Moesia, Pannonia, parts of Dalmatia, Dacia and Macedonia.^[16]

The chief towns of Serbian Upper Moesia in the Principate were: Singidunum (Belgrade), Viminacium (sometimes called municipium Aelium; modern Kostolac), Remesiana (Bela Palanka)

17 Roman Emperors were born in present-day Serbia.^[17]

[edit] Medieval Serbia, 7th – 14th century

Main article: Medieval Serbia

See also: List of Serbian monarchs and History of Yugoslavia

The Adriatic Sklaviniae c. 800 AD, according to Klaić

The Serb Archonty c. 850.

Serbs were ruled by the descendants of the Unknown Archont who led them to the Balkans from White Serbia; its three related medieval dynasties follow a continuous bloodline all the way to the 16th century.

The earliest rudimentary Serb state arose in the mid 11th century, although it was mostly a vassal principality to the Byzantine Empire and Bulgarian Empires alternatively. Official adoption of Christianity soon followed (under Prince Mutimir Vlastimirović).^[18] The First dynasty ended in 960 A.D. with the death of Prince Časlav, who managed to unify all the Serb populated lands, centered between contemporary South Serbia and Montenegro and the coastal south of Croatia.^[19] Following this, Serb lands were soon incorporated under direct Byzantine rule after their defeat of the First Bulgarian Empire in 1018 AD.

Around 1040 AD a Byzantine army sent by Constantine Monomachus was destroyed by the Serbian army led by Vojislav, which resulted in liberation of Duklja (Overthrowing of Byzantine Supremacy).

Duklja then assumed domination over the Serbian lands between 11–12th centuries under the dynasty of Vojislavljević (cadet branch of the 1st Serbian dynasty). In 1077 A.D. Duklja became the first Serb Kingdom (under Michael I– ‘ruler of Tribals and Serbs’),^[20] following the establishment of the catholic Bisphoric of Bar. From late 12th century onwards, a new state called Raska, centred in present-day southern Serbia, rose to become the paramount Serb state. Over the 13th and 14th centuries, it ruled over the other Serb lands (the Hum, Travunia and Duklja/Zeta. During this time, Serbia began to expand eastward (toward Niš), southward into Kosovo and northern Macedonia and northward toward Srem and Macva for the first time. This shift away from the Adriatic coast brought Serbia increasingly under the influence of the Eastern Orthodox, although a substantial proportion of Catholics were found in the coastal regions. Although Europe had already experience the East-West Schism by this time, such a split was far less concrete than it is today, and Catholic Slavs in Bosnia and the Dalmatian coast practiced Christianity in a similar way to Orthodox Slavs – priests married, wore beards and gave liturgy in Slavic rather than Latin. By the beginning of the 14th century Serbs lived in three distinctly independent kingdoms- Dioclea, Rascia and Syrmia.^[21][22][23]

The House of Nemanjić, descendants of the kings of Duklja, moved from Duklj] to Raška, moving the state centre towards continental Serbia in the late 12th century. Lead by the Nemanjić dynasty, medieval Serbia reached its military, economic and legal climax. The Serbian Kingdom was proclaimed in 1217. Direct result of this was the establishment of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1219. In the same year Saint Sava published the first constitution in Serbia — St. Sava’s Nomocanon (Serbian: Zakonopravilo)^[24][25][26]. This legal act was well developed. St. Sava’s Nomocanon was the compilation of Civil law, based on Roman Law^[27][28] and Canon law, based on Ecumenical Councils and its basic purpose was to organize functioning of the young Serbian kingdom and the Serbian church. Stefan Dušan proclaimed the Serbian Empire in 1346. During Dušan’s rule, Serbia reached its territorial, political and economical peak, proclaiming itself as the successor of the Byzantine Empire, and indeed was the most powerful Balkan state of that time. Dušan’s Code (Serbian: Dušanov zakonik)^[29], a universal system of norms, was enacted in 1349 and added in 1354. The Code was based on Roman-Byzantine law. The legal transplanting is notable with the articles 171 and 172 of Dušan’s Code, which regulated the juridical independence. They were taken from the Byzantine code Basilika (book VII, 1, 16-17). Tsar Dušan opened new trade routes and strengthened the state’s economy. Serbia flourished, becoming one of the most developed countries and cultures in Europe. Medieval Serbia had a high political, economic, and cultural reputation in Europe. The Serbian identity has been profoundly shaped by the rule of this dynasty and its accomplishments, with the Serbian Orthodox Church who assumed the role of the national spiritual guardian.

Nemanjic’s Serbia, 1150–1220, during the rules of Stefan Nemanja and Stefan Prvovenčani

Serbian Empire, 1355 A.D.

Serbian realms 1373-1395.

Before his sudden death, Stefan Dušan tried to organize a Crusade with the Pope against the threatening Turks. He died in December 1355 at the age 47. He was succeeded by his son Uroš, called the Weak, a term that might also apply to the state of the empire which slowly slided into a feudal anarchy. This was a period marked by the rise of a new threat: the Ottoman Turk sultanate which spread from Asia to Europe. They conquered Byzantium and then the other states in the Balkans.

[edit] Ottoman Empire (14th – 20th century)

Main article: History of Ottoman Serbia

Two Barons in the Serbian region, Mrnjavčević brothers, gathered a large army to repel the Ottomans. They marched into Ottoman territory in 1371 to attack the Turks, but they were too self-confident. They built an overnight camp near the river Maritsa at Chernomen in today’s Bulgaria, and started celebrating the victory in advance, and eventually got drunk. During the night, a detachment of Ottoman forces attacked the drunk Serbian knights and pushed them to the river. Most of the knights were either killed or drowned. This battle became known as the Battle of Maritsa. The result of this battle was that Serbs lost control over the south half of their former empire.

“A Portrait of the Evangelist”, a miniature from the Radoslav Gospel (1429)

In Battle of Pločnik in 1386, Serbian forces defeated the Ottoman army. But, the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was the turning point of the war between the Serbs and the Turks. Serbian armoured horseman, commanded by Prince Lazar – the strongest regional nobleman in Serbia at the time, had the advantage in the battle. Lazar’s vassal Obilić killed the Ottoman sultan Murad I. Eventually, Murad’s son Bayezid I retreated the rest of his troops from the battlefield, so it was the Serbian victory. But, the Serbian losses were so heavy and the result of this battle was a catastrophe for the Serbs. The Battle of Kosovo defined the fate of the medieval Serbia. After the battle there was no force in the Balkans capable of standing up to the Ottoman Turks. Kosovo was taken by the Ottomans in the following years and the Serbian realm was moved northwards. That unstable period was marked by the rule of Prince Lazar’s son, despot Stefan Lazarević, a true European-style knight and a poet; and his cousin Đurađ Branković, who moved the capital north to the newly built fortified town of Smederevo. The Ottomans continued their conquest until they finally seized the entire northern medieval Serbia in 1459, when Smederevo fell into their hands. Medieval Bosnia and Zeta lasted until 1496. A Serbian principality was restored a few years after the fall of the Serbian despotate by the Brankovics and existed as a Hungarian dependency situated in what is now Vojvodina and the northern Hungary/Romania. It was ruled by exiled Serbian nobles and existed until 1540 when it fell to the Ottomans.

From the 14th century onward an increasing number of Serbs began migrating to the north to the region today known as Vojvodina, which was under the rule of the Kingdom of Hungary in that time. The Hungarian kings encouraged the immigration of Serbs to the kingdom, and hired many of them as soldiers and border guards. During the struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Hungary, this Serb population performed an attempt of the restoration of the Serbian state. In the Battle of Mohács on August 29, 1526, Ottoman Empire destroyed the army of Hungarian–Czech king Louis Jagellion, who was killed on the battlefield. After this battle Hungary ceased to be independent state and much of its former territory became part of the Ottoman Empire. Soon after the Battle of Mohács, leader of Serbian mercenaries in Hungary, Jovan Nenad established his rule in Bačka, northern Banat and a small part of Srem (These three regions are now parts of Vojvodina). He created an ephemeral independent state, with city of Subotica as its capital. At the peak of his career, Jovan Nenad crowned himself in Subotica for Serb emperor. King John of Hungary forces defeated his rebellion in the summer of 1527. Jovan Nenad was killed and his ‘state’ collapsed.

European powers, and Austria in particular, fought many wars against the Ottoman Empire, sometimes with assistance from Serbs. During the Austrian–Ottoman War (1593–1606), in 1594, some Serbs participated an uprising in Banat—the Pannonian part of the Ottoman Empire, and Sultan Murad III retaliated by burning the relics of St. Sava.^{[citation needed]} Austria established troops in Herzegovina but when peace was signed by Ottoman Empire and Austria, Austria abandoned to Ottoman vengeance. This sequence of events became customary for the centuries that followed.

During the Great War (1683–90) between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League—created with the sponsorship of the Pope and including Austria, Poland and Venice—these three powers as means of divide and conquer strategy, incited including Serbs to rebel against the Ottoman authorities and soon uprisings and terrorism spread throughout the western Balkans: from Montenegro and the Dalmatian Coast to the Danube basin and Old Serbia (Macedonia, Raška, Kosovo and Metohija). However, when the Austrians started to pull out of the Ottoman region, they invited Austrian-loyal people to come north with them into Hungarian territories. Having to choose between Ottoman reprisal or living in Hungary, some Serbs abandoned their homesteads and headed north lead by patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević.

Another important episode in the history of the region took place in 1716–18, when the territories ranging from Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to Belgrade and the Danube basin became the battleground for a new Austria-Ottoman war launched by Prince Eugene of Savoy. Some Serbs sided once again with Austria. After a peace treaty was signed in Požarevac, the Ottomans lost all its possessions in the Danube basin, as well as today’s northern Serbia and northern Bosnia, parts of Dalmatia and the Peloponnesus.

The last Austrian-Ottoman war was the so-called Dubica War (1788–91), when the Austrians urged the Christians in Bosnia to rebel. No wars were fought afterwards until the 20th century that marked the fall of both Austrian and Ottoman empires, staged together by the European powers/ imperialism just after World War I.

[edit] Modern Serbia

Main article: History of Modern Serbia

Leader of First Serbian uprising, Karadjordje Petrović circa 1810

Serbia gained its autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in two uprisings in 1804 (led by Đorđe Petrović – Karađorđe) and 1815 (led by Miloš Obrenović), although Turkish troops continued to garrison the capital, Belgrade, until 1867. The Turkish Empire was already faced with a deep internal crisis without any hope of recuperating. This had a particularly hard effect on the orthodox nations living under its rule. The Serbs launched not only a national revolution but a social one as well. Resulting from the uprisings and subsequent wars against the Ottoman Empire, the independent Principality of Serbia was formed and granted international recognition after the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. Serbia was a principality or kneževina (knjaževina), between 1817 and 1882, and a kingdom between 1882 and 1918, during which time the internal politics revolved largely around dynastic rivalry between the Obrenović and Karađorđević families.

This period was marked by the alternation of two dynasties descending from Đorđe Petrović—Karađorđe, leader of the First Serbian Uprising and Miloš Obrenović, leader of the Second Serbian Uprising. Further development of Serbia was characterized by general progress in economy, culture and arts, primarily due to a wise state policy of sending young people to European capitals to get an education. They all brought back a new spirit and a new system of values.^{[citation needed]} One of the external manifestations of the transformation that the former Turkish province was going through was the proclamation of the Province of Serbia in 1882.

Southern and Northern Serbia (Vojvodina) in 1848

Southern and Northern Serbia (Vojvodina) in 1849

During the Revolutions of 1848, the Serbs in the Austrian Empire proclaimed Serbian autonomous province known as Serbian Vojvodina. By a decision of the Austrian emperor, in November 1849, this province was transformed into the Austrian crown land known as the Vojvodina of Serbia and Tamiš Banat (Dukedom of Serbia and Tamiš Banat). Against the will of the Serbs, the province was abolished in 1860, but the Serbs from the region gained another opportunity to achieve their political demands in 1918. Today, this region is known as Vojvodina.

In 1885 Serbia is against the unification of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia and attacks Bulgaria. This is also known as Serbo-Bulgarian war. Despite the better weapons and commanders Serbia loses this war.

In the second half of 19th century, Serbia gained statehood as the Kingdom of Serbia. It thus became part of the constellation of European states and the first political parties were founded, thus giving new momentum to political life. The May Overthrow in 1903, bringing Karađorđe’s grandson to the throne with the title of King Petar I opened the way for parliamentary democracy in Serbia. Having received a European education, this liberal king translated “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill and gave his country a democratic constitution. It initiated a period of parliamentary government and political freedom interrupted by the outbreak of the liberation wars. The Balkan wars 1912–13, terminated the Turkish domination in the Balkans. Turkey was pushed back towards the Bosporus, and national Balkan states were created in the territories it withdrew from. Even though, war was meant to free region from Ottoman Empire serbs at the time were fighting all nations living in Balkans.

[edit] Serbia in World War I

Kingdom of Sebia in 1913

Main article: Serbian Campaign (World War I)

The June 28, 1914 assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, by Gavrilo Princip, a member of Young Bosnia and one of several (seven) assassins organized by terrorist group The Black Hand (Crna Ruka), served as a pretext for the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia, marking the beginning of World War I, despite Serbia’s acceptance (on July 25) of nearly all of Austria-Hungary‘s demands . The Serbian Army defended the country and won several victories, but it was finally overpowered by the forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, and had to withdraw from the national territory marching across the Albanian mountain ranges to the Adriatic Sea. On 16 August Serbia was promised by the Entente the territories of Srem, Bačka, Baranja, eastern Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and eastern Dalmatia as a reward after the war. Having recuperated on Corfu the Serbian Army returned to combat on the Thessaloniki front together with other Entente forces comprising France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Italy and the United States. In World War I, Serbia had 1,264,000 casualties—28% of its population of 4,5 million , which also represented 58% of its male population—a loss from which it never fully recovered.

[edit] The Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Main article: History of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

A successful Allied offensive in September 1918 secured first Bulgaria’s surrender and then the liberation of the occupied Serbian territories (November 1918). On November 25, the Assembly of Serbs, Bunjevci, and other nations of Vojvodina in Novi Sad voted to join the region to Serbia. Also, on November 29 the National Assembly of Montenegro voted for union with Serbia, and two days later an assembly of leaders of Austria–Hungary’s southern Slav regions voted to join the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

Short-lived borders of Serbia on November 30, 1918

With the end of World War I and the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires the conditions were met for proclaiming the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in December 1918. The Yugoslav ideal had long been cultivated by the intellectual circles of the three nations that gave the name to the country, but the international constellation of political forces and interests did not permit its implementation until then. However, after the war, idealist intellectuals gave way to politicians, and the most influential Croatian politicians opposed the new state right from the start.

In the early 1920s, the Yugoslav government of Serbian prime minister Nikola Pasic used police pressure over voters and ethnic minorities, confiscation of opposition pamphlets^[30] and other measures of election rigging to keep the opposition, and mainly the Croatian Peasant Party and its allies in minority in Yugoslav parliament.^[31] Pasic believed that Yugoslavia should be as centralized as possible, creating in place of distinct regional governments and identities a Greater Serbian national concept of concentrated power in the hands of Belgrade.^[32]

However, what pushed the Kingdom into crisis was when a Serb representative opened fire on the opposition benches in the Parliament, killing two outright and mortally wounding the leader of the Croatian Peasants Party , Stjepan Radić in 1928.

Taking advantage of the resulting crisis, King Alexander I banned national political parties in 1929, assumed executive power, and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He hoped to curb separatist tendencies and mitigate nationalist passions. However, the balance of power changed in international relations: in Italy and Germany, Fascists and Nazis rose to power, and Joseph Stalin became the absolute ruler in the Soviet Union. None of these three states favored the policy pursued by Alexander I. The first two wanted to revise the international treaties signed after World War I, and the Soviets were determined to regain their positions in Europe and pursue a more active international policy. Yugoslavia was an obstacle for these plans, and King Aleksandar I was the pillar of the Yugoslav policy.

During an official visit to France in 1934, the king was assassinated in Marseille by a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization — an extreme nationalist organization in Bulgaria that had plans to annex territories along the eastern and southern Yugoslav border—with the cooperation of the Ustaše — a Croatian fascist separatist organization. The international political scene in the late 1930s was marked by growing intolerance between the principal figures, by the aggressive attitude of the totalitarian regimes. Croatian leader Vlatko Maček and his party managed to extort the creation of the Croatian banovina (administrative province) in 1939.^{[citation needed]} The agreement specified that Croatia was to remain part of Yugoslavia, but it was hurriedly building an independent political identity in international relations.

[edit] Serbia in World War II

Serbia and Banat, 1941–1944

In the run up to World War II, Prince Regent Paul signed a treaty with Hitler (as did Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary). However, a popular uprising amongst the people rejected this agreement and Prince Regent Paul was sent to exile. King Peter II assumed full royal duty.

Thus the beginning of the 1940s, Yugoslavia found itself surrounded by hostile countries. Except for Greece, all other neighboring countries had signed agreements with either Germany or Italy. Adolf Hitler was strongly pressuring Yugoslavia to join the Axis powers. The government was even prepared to reach a compromise with him, but the spirit in the country was completely different. Public demonstrations against Nazism prompted a brutal reaction.

In April 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and other major cities. Ground forces from Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Yugoslavia. After a brief war, Yugoslavia surrendered unconditionally. Acting upon advice and with a heavy heart,^{[citation needed]} King Peter II left the country to seek Allied support. He was greeted as the hero who dared oppose Hitler.^{[citation needed]} The Royal Yugoslav Government, the only legal body of Yugoslavia, continued to work in London. The occupying Axis powers then divided Yugoslavia up. The western parts of the country together with Bosnia and Herzegovina were turned into a Nazi puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and ruled by the Ustashe. Serbia was set up as another puppet state under Serbian army general Milan Nedić, which was known as the Government of National Salvation. The northern territories were annexed by Hungary, and eastern and southern territories by Bulgaria. Kosovo and Metohia were mostly annexed by Albania which was under the sponsorship of fascist Italy. Montenegro also lost territories to Albania and was then occupied by Italian troops. Slovenia was divided between Germany and Italy, which also seized the islands in the Adriatic.

In Serbia, the German occupation authorities organized several concentration camps for Jews and members of the communist Partisan resistance movement as well as the royalist Chetniks who remained loyal to the King and who started a resistance movement of their own.

The biggest concentration camps were Banjica and Sajmište near Belgrade, where, according to the most conservative estimates, around 40,000 Jews were killed.In the concentration camp of Jasenovac 1.200.000 people were killed by Ustase mostly Serbians.In all those camps, some 90 percent of the Serbian Jewish population perished. In the Bačka region annexed by Hungary, numerous Serbs and Jews were killed in 1942 raid by the Hungarian authorities. The persecutions against ethnic Serb population also occurred in the region of Syrmia, which was controlled by the Independent State of Croatia and in the region of Banat, which was under direct German control.

The ruthless attitude of the German occupation forces and the genocidal policy of the Croatian Ustaša regime, aimed at Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-Ustaša Croats, created a strong anti-fascist resistance in the NDH. Many Serbs and other nationalities stood up against the genocide and the Nazis.^{[citation needed]} Many joined the Partisan forces created by the Communist Party (National Liberation Army headed by Josip Broz Tito) in the liberation and the revolutionary war against Nazis and all the others who were against communism. There was another resistance movement, namely that of royalist General Dragoljub Draza Mihailovic, which was mostly active in Serbia, and among the Serbian people in Montenegro, Bosnia, Hercegovina. The Royalists fought the Ustashe and the Communists, as well as the Germans. Thanks to the shifts of the big powers,^{[citation needed]} in the end, the Communists illegally seized power in all of Yugoslavia.

During this war and after it, the Partisans killed many civilians who did not support their Communist ideals. The Communists shot people without trials, or following politically and ideologically motivated courts. The Agricultural Reform conducted after the war meant that peasants had to give away most of their wheat, grain, and cattle to the state, or face serious imprisonment. Land and property were confiscated on a massive scale. Many people also lost civil rights and their names were smeared. Also, a censorship was enforced on all levels of the society and media, and a cult of Tito was created in the media.

By the end of 1944, the Red Army liberated Serbia, and by May 1945, the remaining republics were meeting up with the Allied forces in Hungary, Austria and Italy. Yugoslavia was among the countries that had the greatest losses in the war: 1,700,000 (10.8% of the population) people were killed and national damages were estimated at US $9.1 billion according to the prices of that period.

[edit] Serbia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Main article: History of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

After the war, Josip Broz Tito became the first president of the new—socialist—Yugoslavia, which he ruled with an iron hand. Once a predominantly agricultural country, Yugoslavia was transformed into a mid-range industrial country, and acquired an international political reputation by supporting the decolonization process and by assuming a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement. Socialist Yugoslavia was established as a federal state comprising of six republics, from north to south: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia and two autonomous regions within Serbia — Vojvodina and Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo.

The basic motto of Tito’s Yugoslavia was “brotherhood and unity”, workers’ self-management, state-owned property with minimal privately owned property. In the beginning, the country copied the Soviet model, but after the 1948 split with the Soviet Union, it turned more towards the West. Eventually, it created its own brand of socialism, with a hint of a market economy, and milked both the East and the West for significant financial loans.

The 1974 constitution produced a significantly less centralized federation, increasing the autonomy of Yugoslavia’s republics as well as the autonomous provinces of Serbia.

When Tito died in 1980, he was succeeded by a rotating presidency that led to a further weakening of ties between the republics. During the 1980s the republics pursued significantly different economic policies, with Western-oriented Slovenia and Croatia allowing significant market-based reforms, while Serbia kept to its existing program of state ownership. This, too, was a cause of tension between north and south, as Slovenia in particular experienced a period of strong growth. Prior to the war, inflation skyrocketed. Then, under Prime Minister Ante Markovic, things began to improve. Economic reforms had opened up the country, the living standard was at its peak, capitalism seemed to have entered the country and nobody thought that just a year later the first gunshots would be fired.

[edit] The break-up of Yugoslavia

Main article: Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars

Territories controlled by Army of Republika Srpska and Army of Serb Krajina

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up in 1991/1992 in a series of wars following the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the Macedonia left the federation peacefully. The two remaining republics of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, formed in 1992 a new federation named Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 2003 this state was transformed into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro). After a peaceful separation, Montenegro became a sovereign state in 2006, and so did Serbia. The international rights and obligations passed to Serbia as the successor state of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Serbia Montenegro.

All the countries of the former Yugoslavia are now believed to be democratic and in transition towards market economy, respect of human rights and potential membership in the European Union. Only the status of Kosovo remains unsolved, and presents a potential region of instability not only for Serbia, but for the wider Balkan region as well. So far, of all the countries that have emerged from Yugoslavia, only Slovenia has become a member of the European Union.

[edit] Serbian independence

Following Montenegro’s vote for full independence in the referendum of May 21, 2006 (55.4% yes, 44.6% no),^[33] Montenegro declared independence on June 3, 2006.^[34] This was followed on June 5, 2006 by Serbia’s declaration of independence, marking the final dissolution of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, and the re-emergence of Serbia as an independent state, under its own name, for the first time since 1918.

[edit] Kosovo dispute

On February 17, 2008, the Kosovo parliament unilaterally proclaimed independence from Serbia to mixed international reactions. The declaration was officially recognized by the U.S., Austria, Great Britain, Germany, France, Turkey and dozen other countries. Serbia, Russia, China, Spain, India, Brazil, Greece, Romania and other countries oppose this declaration and consider it illegal. In July 2010, the United Nations International Court of Justice deemed the separation of Kosovo legal, and Kosovo officials plan a 2011 application to the UN.^[35][36]

[edit] See also

• Serbia
• Serbs
• Capitals of Serbia
• Zakonopravilo
• Dušan’s Code
• Serbian Empire
• Serbian Despotate
• Corpus Juris Civilis

[edit] Gallery

Serbian states in the 14th century

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History of Latvia

 

History of Latvia
This article is part of a series
Ancient Latvia
Kunda culture
Narva culture
Corded Ware culture
Amber Road and Aesti
Baltic Finns: Livonians, Vends
Latgalians, Curonians, Selonians, Semigallians
Middle ages
Principality of Jersika, Principality of Koknese
Livonian Crusade, Livonian Brothers of the Sword, Livonian Order
Archbishopric of Riga, Bishopric of Courland
Terra Mariana
Early modern period
Livonian War
Kingdom of Livonia
Duchy of Livonia, Duchy of Courland and Semigallia
Polish–Swedish war (1600-1629), Second Northern War
Swedish Livonia, Inflanty Voivodeship
Great Northern War
Governorate of Livonia, Courland Governorate
Modern Latvia
Latvian National Awakening, New Current
German occupation, Latvian Riflemen, United Baltic Duchy, Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic
War of Independence
Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, Occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany, Occupation of Latvia by Soviet Union 1944–1945
Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic
Popular Front of Latvia
Singing Revolution
Restoration of Independence
Republic of Latvia
Chronology
Latvia Portal  v • d • e

The History of Latvia began when the area which is today Latvia was settled following the end of the last glacial period, around 9,000 BC. Ancient Baltic peoples appeared during the second millennium BC and four distinct tribal realms in Latvia’s territories were identifiable towards the end of the first millennium AD. Latvia’s principal river, the Daugava River, was at the head of an important mainland route from the Baltic region through Russia into southern Europe and the Middle East used by the Vikings and later Nordic and German traders.

In the early medieval period, the region’s peoples resisted Christianisation and became subject to attack in the Northern Crusades. Today’s capital, Riga, founded in 1201 by Teutonic colonists at the mouth of the Daugava, became a strategic base in a papally-sanctioned conquest of the area by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. It was to be the first major city of the southern Baltic and, after 1282, a principal trading centre in the Hanseatic League. By the 16th century Germanic dominance in the region was increasingly challenged by other powers.

Due to Latvia’s strategic location and prosperous city, its territories were a frequent focal point for conflict and conquest between at least four major powers, Prussia (later Germany), Poland, Sweden and Russia. The longest period of external hegemony in the modern period began in 1710 when control over Riga switched from Sweden to Russia during the Great Northern War. Under Russian control, Latvia was in the vanguard of industrialisation and the abolition of serfdom so that by the end of the 19th century it had become one of the most developed parts of the Russian Empire. The increasing social problems and rising discontent which this brought meant that Riga also played a leading role in the 1905 Russian Revolution.

A rising sense of Latvian nationalism from the 1850s onwards bore fruit after World War I when, after two years of struggle in the Russian Civil War, Latvia finally won sovereign independence recognised by Russia in 1920 and by the international community in 1921. Latvia’s independent status was interrupted at the outset of World War II when in 1940 the country was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, then retaken by the Soviets in 1944 after Germany surrendered.

From the mid-1940s the country was subject to Soviet economic control and saw considerable Russification of its peoples, but Latvian culture and infrastructures survived such that, during the period of Soviet liberalisation under Mikhail Gorbachev, Latvia once again took a path towards independence which eventually succeeded in August 1991 and was recognised by Russia the following month. Since then, under restored independence, Latvia has become a member of the United Nations, entered NATO and joined the European Union.

Contents [hide] 1 Prehistory 2 German period (1207-1561) 3 Lithuanian-Polish and Swedish period (1561-1795) 3.1 Livonian War 1558-1582 3.2 Duchy of Livonia 1561-1621 3.3 Kingdom of Livonia 1570-1578 3.4 Inflanty Voivodeship 1621-1772 3.5 Swedish Livonia 1629-1721 4 Russian period (1721-1918) 4.1 Napoleonic War 1812 4.2 1905 Revolution 4.3 German occupation World War I 5 Independence 6 World War II 6.1 Soviet Occupation 6.2 Occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany 7 Soviet era 8 Restoration of independence 9 Modern history 10 See also 11 Notes 12 References 13 External links

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[edit] Prehistory

Baltic Tribes, about 1200 CE.

Main articles: Bandava, Jersika, Metsepole, Piemare, and Principality of Kukenois

The proto-Baltic forefathers of the Latvian people have lived on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea since the third millennium BCE ^[1].

At the beginning of this era the territory known today as Latvia became famous as a trading crossroads. The famous “route from the Vikings to the Greeks” mentioned in ancient chronicles stretched from Scandinavia through Latvian territory via the Daugava River to the ancient Rus and Byzantine Empire.

The ancient Balts of this time actively participated in the trading network. Across the European continent, Latvia’s coast was known as a place for obtaining amber. Up to and into the Middle Ages amber was more valuable than gold in many places. Latvian amber was known in places as far away as Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire and the Amber Road was intensively used for the transfer of amber to the south of Europe. In the 10th century AD, the ancient Balts started to form specific tribal realms. Gradually, five individual Baltic tribal cultures developed: Curonians, Livonians, Latgalians, Selonians, Semigallians (Latvian: kurši, līvi, latgaļi, sēļi, zemgaļi). The largest of them was the Latgallian tribe, which was the most advanced in its socio-political development. The main Latgallian principality was Jersika, ruled by the Greek Orthodox princes from Latgallian-Polotsk branch of Rurik dynasty. The last ruler of Jersika, mentioned in the Chronicle of Henry of Livonia was prince Visvaldis (Vissewalde, rex de Gercike). During dividing of his realm in 1211 part of the country was called “Latvia” (terra, quae Lettia dicitur), probably the first time this name ist mentioned in written sources. In contrast, the Couronians maintained a lifestyle of intensive invasions that included looting and pillaging. On the west coast of the Baltic Sea, they became known as the “Baltic Vikings”. But Selonians and Semgallians, closely related to Aukštaitians and Samogitians, were known as peace-loving and prosperous farmers. Livonians lived along the shores of the Gulf of Riga and were fischers and traders.

[edit] German period (1207-1561)

Main articles: Terra Mariana, Monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, Archbishopric of Riga, and Bishopric of Courland

Medieval Livonia in 1260.

Because of its strategic geographic location,^{[who?][citation needed]} Latvian territory has always been invaded by other larger nations, and this situation has defined the fate of Latvia and its people.

At the end of the 12th century, Latvia was more often visited by traders from western Europe who set out on trading journeys along Latvia’s longest river, the Daugava, to Russia. At the very end of the 12th century, German traders arrived and with them came preachers of the Christian faith who attempted to convert the pagan Baltic and Finno-Ugric tribes to the Christian faith. The Balts did not willingly convert to the new and different beliefs and practices, and particularly opposed the ritual of baptism. News of this reached the Pope in Rome and it was decided that Crusaders would be sent into Latvia to influence the situation.

The Germans founded Riga in 1201, and gradually it became the largest city in the southern part of the Baltic Sea. With the arrival of the German Crusaders, the development of separate tribal realms of the ancient Latvians came to an end.

In the 13th century, an ecclesiastical state Terra Mariana was established under the Germanic authorities consisting of Latvia and Estonia. In 1282, Riga and later Cēsis, Limbaži, Koknese and Valmiera were included in the Northern German Trading Organisation, or the Hanseatic League (Hansa). From this time, Riga became an important point in west-east trading. Riga, being the centre of the eastern Baltic region, formed close cultural contacts with Western Europe.

[edit] Lithuanian-Polish and Swedish period (1561-1795)

Main article: Duchy of Courland and Semigallia

The 1490s were a time of great changes for the inhabitants of Latvia, notable for the reformation and the collapse of the Livonian nation.

[edit] Livonian War 1558-1582

Main article: Livonian War

Europe, 1550.

Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor once again asked for help of Gustav I of Sweden, and The Kingdom of Poland (1385–1569) also began direct negotiations with Gustavus, but nothing resulted because on September 29, 1560, Gustavus I Vasa died. The chances for success of Magnus and his supporters looked particularly good in 1560 (and 1570). In the former case he had been recognised as their sovereign by The Bishopric of Ösel-Wiek and The Bishopric of Courland, and as their prospective ruler by the authorities of The Bishopric of Dorpat; The Bishopric of Reval with the Harrien–Wierland gentry were on his side; Livonian Order conditionally recognised his right of ownership of Estonia (Principality of Estonia). Then along with Archbishop Wilhelm von Brandenburg of The Archbishopric of Riga and his Coadjutor Christoph von Mecklenburg, Kettler gave to Magnus the portions of The Kingdom of Livonia, which he had taken possession of, but they refused to give him any more land. Once Eric XIV of Sweden became king he took quick actions to get involved in the war. He negotiated a continued peace with Muscovy and spoke to the burghers of Reval city. He offered them goods to submit to him as well as threatening them. By June 6, 1561 they submitted to him contrary to the persuasions of Kettler to the burghers. The King’s brother Johan married the Polish princess Catherine Jagiellon. Wanting to obtain his own land in Livonia, he loaned Poland money and then claimed the castles they had pawned as his own instead of using them to pressure Poland. After Johan returned to Finland, Erik XIV forbade him to deal with any foreign countries without his consent. Shortly after that Erik XIV started acting quickly lost any allies he was about to obtain, either from Magnus or the Archbishop of Riga. Magnus was upset he had been tricked out of his inheritance of Holstein. After Sweden occupied Reval, Frederick II of Denmark made a treaty with Erik XIV of Sweden in August 1561. The brothers were in great disagreement and Frederick II negotiated a treaty with Ivan IV on August 7, 1562 in order to help his brother obtain more land and stall further Swedish advance. Erik XIV did not like this and The Northern Seven Years’ War between The Free City of Lübeck, Denmark, Poland, and Sweden broke out. While only losing land and trade, Frederick II and Magnus were not faring well. But in 1568 Erik XIV became insane and his brother Johan III took his place. Johan III ascended to the throne of Sweden and due to his friendship with Poland he began a policy against Muscovy. He would try to obtain more land in Livonia and exercise strength over Denmark. After all parties had been financially drained, Frederick II let his ally, King Sigismund II Augustus of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, know that he was ready for peace. On December 15, 1570, the Treaty of Stettin was concluded. It is, however, more difficult to estimate the scope and magnitude of the support Magnus received in Livonian cities. Compared to the Harrien-Wierland gentry, the Reval city council, and hence probably the majority of citizens, demonstrated a much more reserved attitude towards Denmark and King Magnus of Livonia. Nevertheless, there is no reason to speak about any strong pro-Swedish sentiments among the residents of Reval. The citizens who had fled to The Bishopric of Dorpat or had been deported to Muscovy hailed Magnus as their saviour until 1571. The analysis indicates that during the Livonian War a pro-independence wing emerged among the Livonian gentry and townspeople, forming the so-called “Peace Party“. Dismissing hostilities, these forces perceived an agreement with Muscovy as a chance to escape the atrocities of war and avoid the division of Livonia. That is why Magnus, who represented Denmark and later struck a deal with Ivan the Terrible, proved a suitable figurehead for this faction.

The Peace Party, however, had its own armed forces – scattered bands of household troops (Hofleute) under diverse command, which only united in action in 1565 (Battle of Pärnu, 1565 and Siege of Reval, 1565), in 1570–1571 (Siege of Reval, 1570-1571; 30 weeks), and in 1574–1576 (first on Sweden’s side, then came the sale of Wiek to the Danish Crown, and the loss of the territory to the Tsardom of Russia. In 1575 after Muscovy attacked Danish claims in Livonia, Frederick II dropped out of the competition as well as the Holy Roman Emperor. After this Johan III held off on his pursuit for more land due to Muscovy obtaining lands that Sweden controlled. He used the next two years of truce to get in a better position. In 1578, he resumed the fight for not only Livonia, but also everywhere due to an understanding he made with Rzeczpospolita. In 1578 Magnus retired to Rzeczpospolita and his brother all but gave up the land in Livonia.

[edit] Duchy of Livonia 1561-1621

Main article: Duchy of Livonia

Outline of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth with its major subdivisions after the 1618 Peace of Deulino, superimposed on present-day national borders.      The Crown      Duchy of Prussia, Polish fief      Grand Duchy of Lithuania      Duchy of Courland, Lithuanian fief      Duchy of Livonia      Swedish and Danish Estonia

In 1561 during the Livonian War, Livonia fell to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania^[2][3][4] with vassal dependency of it.^[4] Eight years later, in 1569, when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Kingdom of Poland formed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Livonia became a joint domain administered directly by the king and grand duke.^{[2][4][5][6][7][8]} Having rejected peace proposals from its enemies, Ivan the Terrible found himself in a difficult position by 1579, when Crimean Khanate devastated Muscovian territories and burnt down Moscow (see Russo-Crimean Wars), the drought and epidemics have fatally affected the economy, Oprichnina had thoroughly disrupted the government, while The Grand Principality of Lithuania had united with The Kingdom of Poland (1385–1569) and acquired an energetic leader, Stefan Batory, supported by Ottoman Empire (1576). Stefan Batory replied with a series of three offensives against Russia, trying to cut The Kingdom of Livonia from Russian territories. During his first offensive in 1579 with 22,000 men he retook Polotsk, during the second, in 1580, with 29,000-strong army he took Velikiye Luki, and in 1581 with a 100,000-strong army he started the Siege of Pskov. Frederick II of Denmark and Norway had trouble continuing the fight against Muscovy unlike Sweden and Poland. He came to an agreement with John III in 1580 giving him the titles in Livonia. That war would last from 1577 to 1582. Muscovy recognized Polish-Lithuanian control of Ducatus Ultradunensis only in 1582. After Magnus von Lyffland died in 1583, Poland invaded his territories in The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia and Frederick II decided to sell his rights of inheritance. Except for the island of Œsel, Denmark was out of the Baltic by 1585. As of 1598 Polish Livonia was divided onto:

• Wenden Voivodeship (województwo wendeńskie, Kieś)
• Dorpat Voivodeship (województwo dorpackie, Dorpat)
• Parnawa Voivodeship (województwo parnawskie, Parnawa)

[edit] Kingdom of Livonia 1570-1578

Main article: Kingdom of Livonia

The armies of Ivan the Terrible were initially successful, taking Polotsk (1563) and Parnawa (1575) and overrunning much of Grand Duchy of Lithuania up to Vilnius. Eventually, Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Kingdom of Poland formed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 under the Union of Lublin. Eric XIV of Sweden did not like this and The Northern Seven Years’ War between Free City of Lübeck, Denmark, Poland, and Sweden broke out. While only losing land and trade, Frederick II of Denmark and Magnus von Lyffland of Œsel-Wiek were not faring well. But in 1569 Erik XIV became insane and his brother John III of Sweden took his place. After all parties had been financially drained, Frederick II let his ally, King Zygmunt II August, know that he was ready for peace. On December 15, 1570, the Treaty of Stettin was concluded.

Livonia, as shown in the map of 1573 of Joann Portantius.

In the next phase of the conflict, in 1577 Ivan IV took opportunity of the Commonwealth internal strife (called the war against Gdańsk in Polish historiography), and during the reign of Stefan Batory in Poland invaded Livonia, quickly taking almost the entire territory, with the exception of Riga and Rewel. In 1578 Magnus of Livonia recognized the sovereignty of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (not ratified by the Sejm of Poland-Lithuania, or recognized by Denmark). The Kingdom of Livonia was beaten back by Muscovy on all fronts. In 1578 Magnus of Livonia retired to The Bishopric of Courland and his brother all but gave up the land in Livonia.

The Livonian Confederation became secularized under the Union of Wilno of November 28, 1561. After the Livonian War (1558–83), today’s Latvian territory came under the rule of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was later passed to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as the Duchy of Livonia and the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. The Lutheran faith was accepted in Courland, Zemgale and Vidzeme, but the Roman Catholic faith maintained its dominance in Latgalia – it remains so to this day.

[edit] Inflanty Voivodeship 1621-1772

Main article: Inflanty Voivodeship

In the 17th century, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, once a part of Livonia, experienced a notable economic boom. It established two colonies — an island in the estuary of the Gambia River (in Africa) and Tobago Island (in the Caribbean Sea). Names from this period still survive today in these places.

[edit] Swedish Livonia 1629-1721

Main article: Swedish Livonia

However after the Polish-Swedish war (1600–1629) Riga came under Swedish rule in 1621. It became the largest and most developed Swedish City. During this time Vidzeme was known as the “Swedish Bread Basket” because it supplied the larger part of the Swedish kingdom with wheat. The rest of Latvia stayed Polish until the second partition of Poland in 1793, when it became Russian.

Consolidation of the Latvian nation occurred in the 17th century. With the merging of the Couronians, Latgallians, Selonians, Semgallians and Livonians (Finno-Ugrians, in Latvian called: lībieši or līvi) a culturally unified nation was developed – the Latvians (Latvian: latvieši) that spoke a common language called Latvian (Latvian: latviešu valoda).

[edit] Russian period (1721-1918)

Main articles: Governorate of Livonia and Courland Governorate

In 1700, the Great Northern War broke out. The course of this war was directly linked with today’s Latvian territory and the territorial claims of the Russian Empire. One of its goals was to secure the famous and rich town of Riga. In 1710, the Russian Tsar, Peter I, managed to secure Vidzeme. Through Vidzeme to Riga, Russia obtained a clear passage to Europe. By the end of the 18th century, due to the Partitions of Poland, all of Latvia’s territory was under Russian rule.

Serfdom was abolished in Courland Governorate in 1818 and Governorate of Livonia in 1819. However all the land stayed in the hands of nobility. Only in 1849, a law granted a legal basis for the creation of peasant-owned farms. Reforms were slower in Latgale which was part of Vitebsk Governorate, where serfdom was only abolished in 1861 after emancipation reform. In the middle of 19th century industry developed quickly and the number of the inhabitants grew. Courland and Vidzeme became one of Russia’s most developed provinces.

In the 19th century, the first Latvian National Awakening began among ethnic Latvian intellectuals, a movement that partly reflected similar nationalist trends elsewhere in Europe. This revival was led by the “Young Latvians” (in Latvian: jaunlatvieši) from the 1850s to the 1880s. Primarily a literary and cultural movement with significant political implications, the Young Latvians soon came into severe conflict with the Baltic Germans.

In the 1880’s and 1890’s the russification policy began by Alexander III was aimed at reducing the autonomy of Baltic provinces and the introduction of the Russian language in administration, court and education replacing German or Latvian (in regard to schools).

With increasing pauperization in rural areas and growing urbanization, a loose but broad leftist movement called the “New Current” arose in the late 1880s. Led by Rainis and Pēteris Stučka, editors of the newspaper Dienas Lapa, this movement was soon influenced by Marxism and led to the creation of the Latvian Social Democratic Labour Party.

Latvia in the 20th century saw an explosion of popular discontent in the 1905 Revolution.

[edit] Napoleonic War 1812

Main article: French invasion of Russia

[edit] 1905 Revolution

Main article: Russian Revolution in 1905

Following the shooting of demonstrators in St. Petersburg a wide-scale general strike began in Riga. On January 13 Russian army troops opened fire on demonstrators in Riga killing 73 and injuring 200 people. During the summer 1905 main revolutionary events moved to the countryside. 470 new parish administrative bodies were elected in 94% of the parishes in Latvia. The Congress of Parish Representatives was held in Riga in November. Mass meetings and demonstrations took place including violent attacks against Baltic German nobles, burning estate buildings and seizure of estate property including weapons. In the autumn 1905 armed conflict between the German nobility and the Latvian peasants begun in the rural areas of Vidzeme and Courland. In Courland, the peasants sized or surrounded several towns. In Livland the fighters controlled the Rūjiena-Pärnu railway line. Altogether, a thousand armed clashes were registered in Latvia in 1905.^[9] Martial law was declared in Courland in August 1905 and in Livland in late November. Special punitive expeditions were dispatched in mid-December to suppress the movement. They executed 1170 people without trial or investigation and burned 300 peasant homes. In 1906 the revolutionary movement gradually subsided.

[edit] German occupation World War I

Main article: Ober Ost

On August 1, 1914 Germany declared war on Russia and by 1915, the conflict reached Latvia. On May 7 the Germans captured Liepāja and on May 18, Talsi, Tukums and Ventspils. On June 29 Russian Supreme Command ordered to evacuate whole population from Kurzeme and around 400,000 refugees fled to the east. Some of them settled in Vidzeme but most continued their way to Russia. On July 19 Russian War Minister ordered to evacuate the factories of Riga together with their workers. In the summer of 1915, 30,000 railway wagons loaded with machines and equipment from factories were taken away. In August the formation of Latvian battalions known as Latvian Riflemen started. From 1915 to 1917, the Riflemen fought in the Russian army against the Germans in positions along Daugava River. In December 1916 and January 1917, they suffered heavy casualties in month-long Christmas Battles. In February 1917 Revolution broke out in Russia and in the summer Russian army collapsed. The German offensive was successful and on September 3 they entered Riga. In November, 1917, the Communist Bolsheviks took power in Russia. The Bolshevik government tried to end the war and in March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed which gave Kurzeme and Vidzeme to the Germans. By February the Germans had occupied all of Latvia. However after the German Revolution, on 11 November the armistice treaty between the Allies and Germany was signed thus the World War I came to an end.^[10]

[edit] Independence

Flag of the Republic of Latvia.

The idea of an independent Latvia became a reality at the beginning of the 1900s. The course of World War I activated the idea of independence. World War I directly involved Latvians and Latvian territory. Latvian riflemen (latviešu strēlnieki) fought on the Russian side during this war, and earned recognition for their bravery far into Europe.^{[citation needed]} During the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), Latvians fought on both sides with a significant group (known as Latvian red riflemen) supporting the Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1919 the red Latvian division participated in a major battle against the “white” anti-bolshevik army headed by the Russian general Anton Denikin.

“Poland & The New Baltic States” map from a British atlas in 1920, showing still-undefined borders in the situation after the treaties of Brest and Versailles and before the Peace of Riga.

Latvia was ostensibly included within the proposed Baltic German-led United Baltic Duchy,^[11] but this attempt collapsed after the defeat of the German Empire in 1918. The post-war confusion was a suitable opportunity for the development of an independent nation. Latvia proclaimed independence shortly after the end of World War I – on November 18, 1918 which is now the Independence Day in Latvia.

A series of conflicts within the territory of Latvia during 1918-1920 is commonly known as the Latvian War of Independence. In December 1918 Soviet Russia invaded the new republic and during the couple of month conquered almost all territory of Latvia, with exception of a small territory near Liepāja. Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 17 December 1918 with the political, economic, and military backing of Bolshevik government of the Soviet Russia. On March 3, 1919 German and Latvian forces commenced counterattack against the forces of Soviet Latvia. In June 1919 collisions started between German forces on one side and Latvian and Estonian- on other. The Latvians and Estonians defeated the German forces in the Battle of Wenden on June 23. An armistice was signed at Strazdumuiža, under the terms of which the Germans had to leave Latvia. However the German forces instead of leaving, were incorporated into the West Russian Volunteer Army. On October 5 it commenced offensive on Riga taking west bank of the Daugava River but on November 11 was defeated by Latvian forces and by the end of the month, driven from Latvia. On January 3, 1920 the united Latvian and Polish forces launched attack on Soviet army in Latgale and took Daugavpils. By the end of January they reached the etnographic border of Latvia. On August 11, 1920 according to the Latvian–Soviet Peace Treaty (“Treaty of Riga”) Soviet Russia relinquished authority over the Latvian nation and claims to Latvian territory “once and for all times”.

The international community (United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Italy and Japan) recognized Latvia’s independence on January 26, 1921, and the recognition from many other countries followed soon. In this year Latvia also became a member of the League of Nations (September 22, 1921).

In April 1920 elections to the Constituent assembly were held. In May 1922 the Constitution of Latvia and in June the new Law on Elections were passed, opening the way to electing the parliament- Saeima. At Constituent Assembly, the law on the land reform was passed, which expropriated the manor lands. Landowners were left with 50 hectares each and their land was distributed to the landless peasants without cost. In 1897, 61.2% of the rural population had been landless; by 1936, that percentage had been reduced to 18%. The extent of cultivated land surpassed the pre-war level already in 1923.^[12]

Because of the world economic crisis there was a growing dissatisfaction among the population at the beginning of the 1930s. In Riga on May 15, 1934, Prime Minister Kārlis Ulmanis, one of the fathers of Latvian independence, took power by a bloodless coup d’état: the activities of the parliament (the Saeima) and all the political parties were suspended.

Rapid economic growth took place in the second half of 1930s, due to which Latvia reached one of the highest living standards in Europe.^[13] Because of improving living standards in Latvian society, there was no serious opposition to the authoritarian rule of the Prime Minister Kārlis Ulmanis and no possibility of it arising.

[edit] World War II

[edit] Soviet Occupation

Main article: Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940

The Soviet Union guaranteed its interests in the Baltics with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on August 23, 1939. Under threat of invasion,^{[note 1]} Latvia (along with Estonia and Lithuania) signed a mutual assistance pact with Soviet Union, providing for the stationing of up to 25,000 Soviet troops on Latvian soil. Following the initiative from Nazi Germany, Latvia on October 30, 1939 concluded an agreement to repatriate ethnic Germans in the wake of the impeding Soviet takeover.

Seven months later, the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov accused the Baltic states of conspiracy against the Soviet Union. On June 16, 1940, threatening an invasion,^{[note 2]} Soviet Union issued an ultimatum demanding that the government be replaced and that an unlimited number of Soviet troops be admitted.^[16] Knowing that the Red Army had entered Lithuania a day before, that its troops were massed along the eastern border and mindful of the Soviet military bases in Western Latvia, the government acceded to the demands, and Soviet troops occupied the country on June 17. Staged elections were held July 14–15 , 1940, whose results were announced in Moscow 12 hours before the polls closed; Soviet documents show the election results were forged. The newly elected “People’s Assembly” declared Latvia a Socialist Soviet Republic and applied for admission into the Soviet Union on July 21. Latvia was incorporated into the Soviet Union on August 5, 1940. The overthrown Latvian government continued to function in exile while the republic was under the Soviet control.

In the spring of 1941, the Soviet central government began planning the mass deportation of anti-Soviet elements from the occupied Baltic states. In preparation, General Ivan Serov, Deputy People’s Commissar of Public Security of the Soviet Union, signed the Serov Instructions, “Regarding the Procedure for Carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.” During the night of 13–14 June 1941, 15,424 inhabitants of Latvia — including 1,771 Jews and 742 ethnic Russians — were deported to camps and special settlements, mostly in Siberia.^[17] 35,000 people were deported in the first year of Soviet occupation (131,500 across the Baltics).

[edit] Occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany

Main articles: Occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany, The Holocaust in Latvia, and Latvian resistance movement

Hinrich Lohse in the Riga Central Railway Station.

The Nazi invasion, launched a week later, cut short immediate plans to deport several hundred thousand more from the Baltics. Nazi troops occupied Riga on July 1, 1941. Immediately after the installment of German authority, a process of eliminating the Jewish and Gypsy population began, with many killings taking place in Rumbula. The killings were committed by the Einsatzgruppe A, the Wehrmacht and Marines (in Liepāja), as well as by Latvian collaborators, including the 500-1,500 members of the infamous Arajs Commando (which alone killed around 26,000 Jews) and the 2,000 or more Latvian members of the SD.^[18][19] By the end of 1941 almost the entire Jewish population was killed or placed in the death camps. In addition, some 25,000 Jews were brought from Germany, Austria and the present-day Czech Republic, of whom around 20,000 were killed. The Holocaust claimed approximately 85,000 lives in Latvia,^[18] the vast majority of whom were Jews.

A large number of Latvians resisted the German occupation. The resistance movement was divided between the pro-independence units under the Latvian Central Council and the pro-Soviet units under the Latvian Partisan Movement Headquarters (латвийский штаб партизанского движения) in Moscow. Their Latvian commander was Arturs Sproģis. The Nazis planned to Germanise the Baltics after the war.^[18]) In 1943 and 1944 two divisions of Waffen-SS were formed from Latvian conscripts and volunteers to help Germany against the Red Army.

[edit] Soviet era

Main article: Occupation of Latvia by Soviet Union 1944-1945

In 1944, when the Soviet military advances reached the area heavy fighting took place in Latvia between German and Soviet troops which ended with another German defeat. During the course of the war, both occupying forces conscripted Latvians into their armies, in this way increasing the loss of the nation’s “live resources”. In 1944, part of the Latvian territory once more came under Soviet control and Latvian national partisans began their fight against another occupier – the Soviet Union. 160,000 Latvian inhabitants took refuge from the Soviet army by fleeing to the Germany and Sweden. The first post-war years were marked by particularly dismal and sombre events in the fate of the Latvian nation. On March 25, 1949, 43,000 rural residents (“kulaks“) and Latvian patriots (“nationalists”) were deported to Siberia in a sweeping repressive Operation Priboi in all three Baltic States, which was carefully planned and approved in Moscow already on January 29, 1949. All together 120,000 Latvian inhabitants were imprisoned or deported to Soviet concentration camps (the Gulag). Some managed to escape arrest and joined the partisans.

Flag of the Latvian SSR.

In the post-war period, Latvia was forced to adopt Soviet farming methods and the economic infrastructure developed in the 1920s and 1930s was eradicated. Rural areas were forced into collectivisation. The massive influx of labourers, administrators, military personnel and their dependents from Russia and other Soviet republics started. By 1959 about 400,000 persons arrived from other Soviet republics and the ethnic Latvian population had fallen to 62%.^[20] An extensive programme to impose bilingualism was initiated in Latvia, limiting the use of Latvian language in favor of Russian. All of the minority schools (Jewish, Polish, Belarusian, Estonian, Lithuanian) were closed down leaving only two languages of instructions in the schools- Latvian and Russian.^[21] The Russian language were taught notably, as well as Russian literature, music and history of Soviet Union (actually- history of Russia).

On 5 March 1953 Joseph Stalin died and his successor became Nikita Khrushchev. The period known as the Khrushchev Thaw began but attempts by the national communists led by Eduards Berklavs to gain a degree of autonomy for the republic and protect the rapidly deteriorating position of the Latvian language were not successful. In 1959 after Krushchev’s visit in Latvia national communists were stripped of their posts and Berklavs was deported to Russia.

Because Latvia had still maintained a well-developed infrastructure and educated specialists it was decided in Moscow that some of the Soviet Union’s most advanced manufacturing factories were to be based in Latvia. New industry was created in Latvia, including a major machinery factory RAF in Jelgava, electrotechnical factories in Riga, chemical factories in Daugavpils, Valmiera and Olaine, as well as food and oil processing plants.^[22] However, there were not enough people to operate the newly built factories. In order to expand industrial production, more immigrants from other Soviet republics were transferred into the country, noticeably decreasing the proportion of ethnic Latvians.

By 1989, the ethnic Latvians comprised about 52% of the population (1,387,757), compared to a pre-war proportion of 77% (1,467,035). In 2005 there were 1,357,099 ethnic Latvians, showing a real decrease in the titular population. Proportionately, however, the titular nation already comprises approximately 60% of the total population of Latvia (2,375,000).

[edit] Restoration of independence

Barricade in Riga to prevent the Soviet Army from reaching the Latvian Parliament, July 1991.

Liberalization in the communist regime began in the mid 1980s in the USSR with the perestroika and glasnost instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev. In Latvia, several mass political organizations were constituted that made use of this opportunity – Popular Front of Latvia (Tautas Fronte), Latvian National Independence Movement (Latvijas Nacionālās Neatkarības Kustība) and Citizens’ Congress (Pilsoņu kongress). These groups began to agitate for the restoration of national independence.

On the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (August 23, 1989) to the fate of the Baltic nations, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians joined hands in a human chain, the Baltic Way, that stretched 600 kilometres from Tallinn, to Riga, to Vilnius. It symbolically represented the united wish of the Baltic States for independence.

Subsequent steps towards full independence were taken on May 4, 1990. The Latvian SSR Supreme Council, elected in the first democratic elections since the 1930s, adopted a declaration restoring independence that included a transition period between autonomy within the Soviet Union and full independence. In January 1991, however, pro-communist political forces attempted to restore Soviet power with the use of force. Latvian demonstrators managed to stop the Soviet troops from re-occupying strategic positions (January 1991 events in Latvia). On the August 21, after unsuccessful attempt at a coup d’état in Moscow, parliament voted for an end to the transition period, thus restoring Latvia’s pre-war independence. On September 6, 1991 Latvian independence was once again recognised by the Soviet Union.

[edit] Modern history

George W. Bush, Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Arnold Rüütel, and Valdas Adamkus in Riga, May 7, 2005.

Soon after reinstating independence, Latvia, which had been a member of the League of Nations prior to World War II, became a member of the United Nations. In 1992, Latvia became eligible for the International Monetary Fund and in 1994 took part in the NATO Partnership for Peace program in addition to signing the free trade agreement with the European Union. Latvia became a member of the European Council as well as a candidate for the membership in the European Union and NATO. Latvia was the first of the three Baltic nations to be accepted into the World Trade Organization.

At the end of 1999 in Helsinki, the heads of the European Union governments invited Latvia to begin negotiations regarding accession to the European Union. In 2004, Latvia’s most important foreign policy goals, membership of the European Union and NATO, were fulfilled. On April 2, Latvia became a member of NATO and on May 1, Latvia, along with the other two Baltic States, became a member of the European Union. Around 67% had voted in favor of EU membership in a September 2003 referendum with turnout at 72.5 percent

the end@copyright Dr Iwan Suwandy 2010

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See also: History of Europe and Pannonian basin before Hungary

Hungary is a state in central Europe. Its history under this name dates to the early Middle Ages, when the Pannonian Basin was colonized by the Magyars, a seminomadic people from what is now central-northern Russia. For history of the area before this period, see Pannonian basin before Hungary.

Contents [hide] 1 Early history 2 Middle Ages (895–1526) 2.1 The Patrimonial Kingdom 2.2 Mongol attacks 2.3 Age of elected Kings 2.4 Age of early absolutism 2.5 Decline (1490–1526) 3 Early modern age (1526–1700) 4 Modern and contemporary age (1700–1919) 4.1 The Period of Reforms (1825–1848) 4.2 Revolution, and War of Independence 4.3 Austria–Hungary (1867–1918) 4.4 World War I 5 Between the two world wars (1918–1941) 5.1 Hungarian Democratic Republic 5.2 Hungarian Soviet Republic (“Republic of the Councils”) 5.3 Counterrevolution 5.4 Trianon Hungary and the Regency 5.5 World War II 6 Post-War Communist period 6.1 Transition to Communism (1944–1949) 6.2 Stalinist era (1949–1956) 6.3 1956 Revolution 6.4 Post Revolution (or Kádár) era 1956–1989 7 Democracy and social market economy since 1989 8 See also 9 References 10 External links 10.1 Encyclopaedia Humana Hungarica (1–5)

[edit] Early history

Main articles: Pannonian basin before the Hungarians and Hungarian prehistory

Prince Árpád crossing the Carpathians. A detail of the Arrival of the Hungarians, Árpád Feszty‘s and his assistants’ vast (1800 m²) cycloramic canvas, painted to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of the Magyar conquest of Hungary, now displayed at the Ópusztaszer National Historical Memorial Park in Hungary.

From 9 BC to the end of the 4th century ADPannonia, the Western part of the basin was a part of the Roman Empire. In the final stages of the expansion of the Roman empire, for a short while the Carpathian Basin fell into the sphere of the Mediterranean, Greco-Roman civilization – town centers, paved roads, and written sources were all part of the advances to which the Migration of Peoples put an end.

After the Western Roman Empire collapsed under the stress of the migration of Germanic tribes and Carpian pressure, the Migration Period has continued bringing many invaders to Europe. Among the first to arrive were the Huns, who built up a powerful empire under Attila in 435 CE. Attila the Hun in the past centuries was regarded as an ancestral ruler of the Hungarians, but this is considered to be erroneous today.^[1] It is believed that the origin of the name “Hungary” does not come from the Central Asian nomadic invaders called the Huns, but rather originated from the 7th century, when Magyar tribes were part of a Bulgar alliance called On-Ogour, which in Bulgar Turkic meant “(the) Ten Arrows”.^[2] After Hunnish rule faded, the Germanic Ostrogoths then the Lombards came to Pannonia, and the Gepids had a presence in the eastern part of the Carpathian Basin for about 100 years. In the 560s the Avars founded the Avar Khaganate,^[3] a state which maintained supremacy in the region for more than two centuries and had the military power to launch attacks against all its neighbours. The Avar Khagnate was weakened by constant wars and outside pressure and the Franks under Charlemagne managed to defeat the Avars ending their 250-year rule. Neither the Franks nor others were able to create a lasting state in the region until the freshly unified Hungarians led by Árpád settled in the Carpathian Basin starting in 895. Much of early Hungarian history is recorded in the following Hungarian chronicles, retelling the early legends and history of the Huns, Magyars and the Kingdom of Hungary:

• Anonymi Gesta Hungarorum (Anonymous “Deeds of the Hungarians”) by Magister P. (around 1200)
• Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum or Gesta Hungarorum (II) (“Deeds of the Huns and Hungarians” or just “Deeds of the Hungarians”) by Simon of Kéza (late 13th century)
• Chronicon Pictum (“Illuminated Chronicle”) (late 14th century)
• Chronicle of the Hungarians by Johannes de Thurocz (1480s)

[edit] Middle Ages (895–1526)

Hungarian raids in the 10th century. Most European nations were praying for mercy: “Sagittis hungarorum libera nos Domine” – “Lord save us from the arrows of Hungarians”.

Main articles: Kingdom of Hungary in the Middle Ages and Ottoman–Hungarian Wars

First Hungarian coin. It was coined by Duke Géza circa the end of 970s.

Árpád was the Magyar leader whom sources name as the single leader who unified the Magyar tribes via the Covenant of Blood (Hungarian: Vérszerződés) forged one nation, thereafter known as the Hungarian nation^[4] and led the new nation to the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century.^[4] From 895 to 902 the whole area of the Carpathian Basin was conquered by the Hungarians.^[5] After that an early Hungarian state (Principality of Hungary, founded in 895) was formed in this territory and the military power of the nation allowed the Hungarians to conduct successful fierce campaigns and raids as far as today’s Spain.^[6] A later defeat at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 signaled an end to raids on western territories (Byzantine raids continued until 970), and links between the tribes weakened. The ruling prince (fejedelem) Géza of the Árpád dynasty, who was the ruler of only some of the united territory, but the nominal overlord of all seven Magyar tribes, intended to integrate Hungary into Christian Western Europe, rebuilding the state according to the Western political and social model.^[7] He established a dynasty by naming his son Vajk (the later King Stephen I of Hungary) as his successor. This was contrary to the then-dominant tradition of the succession of the eldest surviving member of the ruling family. (See:agnatic seniority) By ancestral right prince Koppány, -as the oldest member of the dynasty- should have claimed the throne, but Géza chose his first-born son to be his successor.^[8] The fight in the chief prince’s family started after Géza‘s death, in 997. Duke Koppány took up arms, and many people in Transdanubia joined him. The rebels represented the old faith and order, ancient human rights, tribal independence and pagan belief, but Stephen won a decisive victory over his uncle Koppány, and had him executed.

King Stephen I of Hungary, patron saint of Kings (from the Chronicon Hungariae Pictum).

[edit] The Patrimonial Kingdom

Hungary in the 11th century

Hungary was recognized as a Catholic Apostolic Kingdom under Saint Stephen I.

Europe with former borders as divided by the East-West Schism in 1054.

Stephen was the son of Géza^[9] and thus a descendant of Árpád.

Stephen was crowned by the Holy Crown of Hungary in December 1000 AD in the capital, Esztergom. The Papacy confers on him the right to have the cross carried before him, with full administrative authority over bishoprics and churches. By 1006, Stephen had solidified his power, eliminating all rivals who either wanted to follow the old pagan traditions or wanted an alliance with the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire. Then he started sweeping reforms to convert Hungary into a western feudal state, complete with forced Christianisation.^[10] Stephen established a network of 10 episcopal and 2 archiepiscopal sees, and ordered the buildup of monasteries churches and cathedrals. In the earliest times Hungarian language was written in a runic-like script. The country switched to the Latin alphabet under Stephen.

Romanesque cathedral of Pécs

Gothic Church of Our Lady in Buda

From 1000 to 1844, Latin was the official language of the country. He followed the Frankish administrative model: The whole of this land was divided into counties (megyék), each under a royal official called an ispán count (Latin: comes)—later főispán (Latin: supremus comes). This official represented the king’s authority, administered its population, and collected the taxes that formed the national revenue. Each ispán maintained an armed force of freemen at his fortified headquarters (castrum or vár).

What emerged was a strong kingdom^[11] that withstood attacks from German kings and Emperors, and nomadic tribes following the Hungarians from the East, integrating some of the latter into the population (along with Germans invited to Transylvania and the northern part of the kingdom, especially after the Battle of Mohi), and conquering Croatia in 1091.^{[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]} According to an alternative history based on the document Pacta Conventa, which is most likely a forgery^[19] Hungary and Croatia created a personal union. There is no undoubtedly genuine document of the personal union, and medieval sources mention the annexation into the Hungarian kingdom.

After the Great Schism (The East-West Schism /formally in 1054/, between Western Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.) Hungary determined itself as the Easternmost bastion of Western civilization (This statement was affirmed later by Pope Pius II who wrote that to Emperor Friedrich III, “Hungary is the shield of Christianity and the defender of Western civilization”).

Important members of the Árpád dynasty:

• Coloman the “Book-lover” (King: 1095–1116):

One of his most famous laws was half a millennium ahead of its time: De strigis vero quae non sunt, nulla amplius quaestio fiat (As for the matter of witches, no such things exist, therefore no further investigations or trials are to be held).

• Béla III (King: 1172–1192)

He was the most powerful and wealthiest member of the dynasty, Béla disposed of annual equivalent of 23,000 kg of pure silver. It exceeded those of the French king (estimated at some 17,000 kilograms) and was double the receipts of the English Crown.^[20] He rolled back the Byzantine potency in Balkan region. In 1195, Bela III had expanded the Hungarian Kingdom southward and westward to Bosnia and Dalmatia, helping to break up the Byzantine Empire, and extending suzerainty over Serbia.^[21]

• Andrew II of Hungary (King: 1205–1235)

Golden Bull of 1222.

In 1211 Andrew II of Hungary (ruled from 1205 to 1235) granted the Burzenland (in Transylvania) to the Teutonic Knights. In 1225, Andrew II expelled the Teutonic Knights from Transylvania, hence Teutonic Order had to transfer to the Baltic sea. In 1224, Andrew issued the Diploma Andreanum which unified and ensured the special privileges of the Transylvanian Saxons. It is considered the first Autonomy law in the world.^[22]

He led the Fifth Crusade to the Holy Land in 1217. He set up the largest royal army in the history of Crusades (20,000 knights and 12,000 castle-garrisons). The Golden Bull of 1222 was the first constitution in Continental Europe. It limited the king’s power. The Golden Bull — the Hungarian equivalent of England’s Magna Carta — to which every Hungarian king thereafter had to swear, had a twofold purpose: to reaffirm the rights of the smaller nobles of the old and new classes of royal servants (servientes regis) against both the crown and the magnates and to defend those of the whole nation against the crown by restricting the powers of the latter in certain fields and legalizing refusal to obey its unlawful/unconstitutional commands (the ius resistendi). The lesser nobles also began to present Andrew with grievances, a practice that evolved into the institution of the parliament, or Diet. Hungary became the first country where the parliament had supremacy over the kingship. The most important legal ideology was the Doctrine of the Holy Crown.

Important points of the Doctrine: The sovereignty belongs to the noble nation→(the Holy Crown). The members of the Holy Crown are the citizens of the Crown’s lands. None can reach full power. The nation is sharing a portion of the political power with the ruler. Minority cannot rule over majority. ( against tyranny and oligarchy ) .

[edit] Mongol attacks

Main article: Mongol invasion of Europe

Mongol invasion of the Kingdom of Hungary

In 1241–1242, the kingdom received a major blow with the Mongol (Tatar) Invasion: after the defeat of the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohi,^[23] Béla IV of Hungary fled, and a large part of the population died^[24] in the ensuing destruction leading later to the invitation of settlers, largely from Germany. Historians estimate that up to half of Hungary’s then population of 2,000,000 were victims of the Mongol invasion.^[25] In the plains between 50 and 80% of the settlements were destroyed.^[26] Only castles, strongly fortified cities and abbeys could withstand the assault.

During the Russian campaign, the Mongols drove some 40,000 Cumans, a nomadic tribe of pagan Kipchaks, west of the Carpathian Mountains.^[27] There, the Cumans appealed to King Béla IV of Hungary for protection.^[28] The Iranian Jassic people came to Hungary together with the Cumans after they were defeated by the Mongols. Cumans constituted perhaps up to 7-8% of the population of Hungary in the second half of the 13th century.^[29] Over the centuries they were fully assimilated into the Hungarian population, and their language disappeared, but they preserved their identity and their regional autonomy until 1876.^[30]

As a consequence, after the Mongols retreated, King Béla ordered the construction of hundreds of stone castles and fortifications, to defend against a possible second Mongol invasion. The Mongols returned to Hungary in 1286, but the new built stone-castle systems and new tactics (using a higher proportion of heavily armed knights) stopped them. The invading Mongol force was defeated near Pest by the royal army of Ladislaus IV of Hungary. As with later invasions, it was repelled handily, the Mongols losing much of their invading force.

These castles proved to be very important later in the long struggle with the Ottoman Empire. However the cost of building them indebted the Hungarian King to the major feudal landlords again, so the royal power reclaimed by Béla IV after his father Andrew II significantly weakened it was once again dispersed amongst lesser nobility. The countries of the Balkan region and the territory of Russian states fell under Ottoman/Mongolian rule very rapidly, due to the lack of the network of stone/brick castles and fortresses in these countries.

[edit] Age of elected Kings

King Charles’ last battle against the oligarchy, Rozgony (1312)

King Louis the Great the strongest king in medieval Hungarian history

After the destructive period of interregnum (1301–1308), the first Angevin king, Charles I of Hungary (reigned 1308–1342) – a descendant of the Árpád dynasty in the female line – successfully restored royal power, and defeated oligarch rivals, the so called “little kings”. His new fiscal, customs and monetary policies proved successful during his reign.

One of the primary sources of his power was the wealth derived from the gold mines of eastern and northern Hungary. Eventually production reached the remarkable figure of 3,000 lb. (1350 kg) of gold annually – one third of the total production of the world as then known, and five times as much as that of any other European state.^[31][32] Charles also sealed an alliance with the Polish king Casimir. After Italy, Hungary was the first European country where the renaissance appeared.^[33]

The second Hungarian king in the Angevin line, Louis the Great (reigned 1342–1382) extended his rule as far as the Adriatic Sea, and occupied the Kingdom of Naples several times. During his reign lived the epic hero of Hungarian literature and warfare, the king’s Champion: Nicolas Toldi. Louis had become popular in Poland because of his campaign against the Tatars and pagan Lithuanians. Two successful wars (1357–1358, 1378–1381) against Venice annexed Dalmatia and Ragusa and more territories on the Adriatic Sea. Venice also had to raise the Angevin flag in St. Mark’s Square on holy days.

Some Balkan states (Vallachia, Moldova, Serbia, Bosnia) became his vassals. Louis I established a university in Pécs in 1367 (by papal accordance). The Ottoman Turks confronted the Balkan vassal states ever more often. In 1366 and 1377, Louis led successful campaigns against the Ottomans (Battle of Nicapoli in 1366). From the death of Casimir III of Poland in 1370, he was also king of Poland. He retained his strong influence in the political life of Italian Peninsula for the rest of his life.

King Louis died without a male heir, and after years of anarchy the country was stabilized only when Sigismund (reigned 1387–1437), a prince of the Luxembourg line, succeeded to the throne by marrying the daughter of Louis the Great, Queen Mary. It was not for entirely selfless reasons that one of the leagues of barons helped him to power: Sigismund had to pay for the support of the lords by transferring a sizeable part of the royal properties. For some years, the baron’s council governed the country in the name of the Holy Crown; the king was imprisoned for a short time. The restoration of the authority of the central administration took decades.

In 1404 Sigismund introduced the Placetum Regnum. According to this decree, Papal bulls and messages could not be pronounced in Hungary without the consent of the king. Sigismund summoned the Council of Constance (1414–1418) to abolish the Avignon Papacy and the Papal Schism of the Catholic Church, which was resolved by the election of a new pope. In 1433 he even became Holy Roman Emperor. During his long reign the Royal castle of Buda became probably the largest Gothic palace of the late Middle Ages. After the death of Sigismund, his son in law, Albert II of Germany, was titled king of hungary. Albert II, however, died in 1439. The first Hungarian Bible translation was completed in 1439. For a half year in 1437, there was an antifeudal and anticlerical peasant revolt in Transylvania which was strongly influenced by Hussite ideas. (See: Budai Nagy Antal Revolt)

From a small noble family in Transylvania, John Hunyadi grew to become one of the country’s most powerful lords, thanks to his outstanding capabilities as a mercenary commander. In 1446, the parliament elected the great general John Hunyadi governor (1446–1453), then regent (1453–1456). He was a successful crusader against the Ottoman Turks, one of his greatest victories being the Siege of Belgrade in 1456. Hunyadi defended the city against the onslaught of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. During the siege, Pope Callixtus III ordered the bells of every European church to be rung every day at noon, as a call for believers to pray for the defenders of the city. However, in many countries, (like England and Spanish kingdoms), the news of the victory arrived before the order, and the ringing of the church bells at noon was transformed into a commemoration of the victory. The Popes didn’t withdraw the order, and Catholic (and the older Protestant) churches still ring the noon bell in the Christian world to this day.^[34]

John Hunyadi – One of the greatest generals and a later regent of Hungary

[edit] Age of early absolutism

Western conquests of Matthias Corvinus

The last strong king was the Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus (king from 1458 to 1490). Matthias was the son of John Hunyadi. András Hess set up a printing press in Buda in 1472.

This was the first time in the medieval Hungarian kingdom that a member of the nobility, without dynastic ancestry and relationship, mounted the royal throne. A true Renaissance prince, a successful military leader and administrator, an outstanding linguist, a learned astrologer, and an enlightened patron of the arts and learning.^[35] Although Matyas regularly convened the Diet and expanded the lesser nobles’ powers in the counties, he exercised absolute rule over Hungary by means of huge secular bureaucracy. Matthias set out to build a great empire, expanding southward and northwest, while he also implemented internal reforms. The serfs, common people considered Matthias a just ruler because he protected them from excessive demands and other abuses by the magnates.^[36] Like his father, Matthias desired to strengthen the Kingdom of Hungary to the point where it became the foremost regional power and overlord, strong enough to push back the Ottoman Empire; toward that end he deemed necessary the conquering of large parts of the Holy Roman Empire.^[37] In 1479, under the leadership of general Pál Kinizsi, the Hungarian army destroyed the Ottoman and Wallachian troops at the Battle of Breadfield. Army of Hungary, almost all times destroyed the enemies when Matthias was the king. His mercenary standing army called the Black Army of Hungary (Hungarian: Fekete Sereg) was an unusually big army in its age, it accomplished a series of victories also capturing parts of Austria, Vienna (1485) and parts of Bohemia. The king died without a legal successor. His library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was Europe’s greatest collection of historical chronicles, philosophic and scientific works in the 15th century, and second only in size to the Vatican Library which mainly contained religious material. His renaissance library is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.^[38]

The battle of Mohács, by Bertalan Székely.

[edit] Decline (1490–1526)

By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire became the second most populous state in the world, which opened the door to creation of the largest armies of the era.

Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia, the young king, who died at the Battle of Mohács.

The magnates, who did not want another heavy-handed king, procured the accession of Vladislaus II (King: 1490–1516), king of Bohemia (Ulászló II in Hungarian), precisely because of his notorious weakness: he was known as King Dobže, or Dobzse (meaning “Good” or, loosely, “OK”), from his habit of accepting with that word every paper laid before him.^[35] Under his reign the central power began to experience severe financial difficulties, largely due to the enlargement of feudal lands at his expense. The magnates also dismantled administration and institute systems of the country. The country’s defenses sagged as border guards and castle garrisons went unpaid, fortresses fell into disrepair, and initiatives to increase taxes to reinforce defenses were stifled.^[39] Hungary’s international role was wasted, its political stability shaken, and social progress was deadlocked.

In 1514, the weakened old King Vladislaus II faced a major peasant rebellion led by György Dózsa, which was ruthlessly crushed by the nobles, led by János Szapolyai. The resulting degradation of order paved the way for Ottoman preeminence. In 1521, the strongest Hungarian fortress in the South, Nándorfehérvár (modern Belgrade) fell to the Turks, and in 1526, the Hungarian army was crushed at the Battle of Mohács. The young king Louis II, and the leader of the Hungarian army, Pál Tomori died in the battle. The early appearance of protestantism further worsened internal relations in the anarchical country.

Through the centuries Hungary kept its old “constitution”, which granted special “freedoms” or rights to the nobility, the free royal towns such as Buda, Kassa (Košice), Pozsony (Bratislava), and Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) and groups like the Jassic people or Transylvanian Saxons.

[edit] Early modern age (1526–1700)

See also: Ottoman Hungary, Royal Hungary, and Transylvania

Hungary around 1550.

Hungary in the 17th century.

After some 150 years of war in the south of Hungary, Ottoman forces conquered parts of the country, continuing their expansion until 1556. The Ottomans achieved their first decisive victory over the Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohács in 1526.

The Siege of Eger (1552), in which 2,000 Hungarians fought with close to 200,000 Turk warriors. The battle finished with Hungarian victory.

Subsequent decades were characterised by political chaos. A divided Hungarian nobility elected two kings simultaneously, János Szapolyai (1526–1540, of Hungarian-German origin) and the Austrian Ferdinand of Habsburg (1527–1540). Armed conflicts between the new rival monarchs further weakened the country from the internal side. With the conquest of Buda in 1541 by the Turks, Hungary was riven into three parts. The north-west (present-day Slovakia, western Transdanubia and Burgenland, western Croatia and parts of north-eastern present-day Hungary) remained under Habsburg rule; although initially independent, later it became a part of Habsburg Monarchy under the informal name Royal Hungary. The Habsburg Emperors would from then on be crowned also as Kings of Hungary. Turks were unable to conquer Northern and Western parts of Hungary.

The eastern part of the kingdom (Partium and Transylvania) became at first an independent principality, but gradually was brought under Turkish rule as a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. The remaining central area (most of present-day Hungary), including the capital of Buda, became a province of the Ottoman Empire. Much of the land was devastated by recurrent warfare. Most small Hungarian settlements disappeared. Rural people living in the now Ottoman provinces could survive only in larger settlements known as Khaz towns, which were owned and protected directly by the Sultan. The Turks were indifferent to the sect of Christianity practiced by their Hungarian subjects.

For this reason, a majority of Hungarians living under Ottoman rule became Protestant (largely Calvinist), as Habsburg counter-reformation efforts could not penetrate Ottoman lands. Largely throughout this time, Pozsony (Pressburg, today: Bratislava) acted as the capital (1536–1784), coronation town (1563–1830) and seat of the Diet of Hungary (1536–1848). Nagyszombat (modern Trnava) acted in turn as the religious center, starting from 1541.

In 1558 the Transylvanian Diet of Turda declared free practice of both the Catholic and Lutheran religions, but prohibited Calvinism. Ten years later, in 1568, the Diet extended this freedom, declaring that “It is not allowed to anybody to intimidate anybody with captivity or expelling for his religion”. Four religions were declared as accepted (recepta) religions, while Orthodox Christianity was “tolerated” (though the building of stone Orthodox churches was forbidden). Hungary entered the Thirty Years’ War, Royal (Habsburg) Hungary joined the catholic side, until Transylvania joined the Protestant side.

In 1686, two years after the unsuccessful siege of Buda, a renewed European campaign was started to enter the Hungarian capital. This time, the Holy League’s army was twice a large, containing over 74,000 men, including German, Croat, Dutch, Hungarian, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, French, Burgundian, Danish and Swedish soldiers, along with other Europeans as volunteers, artilleryman, and officers, the Christian forces reconquered Buda. The second Battle of Mohács was a crushing defeat for the Turks, in the next few years, all of the former Hungarian lands, except areas near Timişoara (Temesvár), were taken from the Turks. At the end of the 17th century, Transylvania became part of Hungary again.^[40] In the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz these territorial changes were officially recognized, and in 1718 the entire Kingdom of Hungary was removed from Ottoman rule.

Concurrently, between 1604 and 1711, there was a series of anti-Austrian, and anti-Habsburg uprisings which took place in the Habsburg state of Royal Hungary (more precisely, in present-day Slovakia and in present day western and central Hungary), as well as anti-Catholic uprisings, which were to be found across the Hungarian lands. Religious protesters demanded equal rights among Christian groups. The uprisings were usually organized from Transylvania.

Ethnic aftermath of Ottoman wars

As a consequence of the constant warfare between Hungarians and Ottoman Turks, population growth was stunted and the network of medieval settlements with their urbanized bourgeois inhabitants perished. The 150 years of Turkish wars fundamentally changed the ethnic composition of Hungary. As a result of demographic losses including deportations and masscares, the number of ethnic Hungarians in existence at the end of the Turkish period was substantially diminished.^[41]

See also: Moldavian Magnate Wars, Stephen Bathory, King of Poland, and Battle of Vienna

[edit] Modern and contemporary age (1700–1919)

Main article: History of Hungary 1700–1919

Ferenc Rákóczi.

BME, The oldest University of Technology in the World, founded in 1782

There were a series of anti-Habsburg (i.e. anti-Austrian) and anti-Catholic (requiring equal rights and freedom for all Christian religions) uprisings between 1604 and 1711, which – with the exception of the last one – took place in Royal Hungary. The uprisings were usually organized from Transylvania. The last one was an uprising led by ‘II. Rákóczi Ferenc’, who after the dethronement of the Habsburgs in 1707 at the Diet of Ónód took power as the “Ruling Prince” of Hungary. The Hungarian Kuruc army lost the main battles at Battle of Trencin however there were also success actions, for example when Ádám Balogh almost captured the Austrian Emperor with Kuruc troops. When Austrians defeated the uprising in 1711, Rákóczi was in Poland. He later fled to France, finally Turkey, and lived to the end of his life (1735) in nearby Rodosto. Ladislas Ignace de Bercheny who was son of Miklós Bercsényi immigrated to France and created the first French hussar regiment. Afterwards, to make further armed resistance impossible, the Austrians blew up some castles (most of the castles on the border between the now-reclaimed territories occupied earlier by the Ottomans and Royal Hungary), and allowed peasants to use the stones from most of the others as building material (the végvárs among them). The 18th century also saw one of the most famous Hungarian hussars named Michael Kovats. He created the modern US cavalry in the American Revolutionary War and is commemorated today with a statue in Charleston.

[edit] The Period of Reforms (1825–1848)

During the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards, the Hungarian Diet had not convened for decades.^{[citation needed]} In the 1820s, the Emperor was forced to convene the Diet, and thus a Reform Period began. Nevertheless, its progress was slow, because the nobles insisted on retaining their privileges (no taxation, exclusive voting rights, etc.). Therefore the achievements were mostly of national character (e.g. introduction of Hungarian as one of the official languages of the country, instead of the former Latin).

Count István Széchenyi,the most prominent statesmen of the country recognized the urgent need of modernization and their message got through. The Hungarian Parliament was reconvened in 1825 to handle financial needs. A liberal party emerged in the Diet. The party focused on providing for the peasantry in mostly symbolic ways because of their ability to understand the needs of the laborers. Lajos Kossuth emerged as leader of the lower gentry in the Parliament. Habsburg monarchs tried to preclude the industrialisation of the country. A remarkable upswing started as the nation concentrated its forces on modernisation even though the Habsburg monarchs obstructed all important liberal laws about the human civil and political rights and economic reforms. Many reformers (like Lajos Kossuth, Mihály Táncsics ) were imprisoned by the authorities.

[edit] Revolution, and War of Independence

Main article: Hungarian Revolution of 1848

Artist Mihály Zichy’s rendition of Sándor Petőfi reciting the Nemzeti dal to a crowd on 15 March 1848

On 15 March 1848 mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda enabled Hungarian reformists to push through a list of 12 demands. The Hungarian Diet took the opportunity presented by the revolution to enact a comprehensive legislative program of dozens of civil and human rights reforms, referred to as the April laws. Faced with revolution both at home and in Vienna, Austrian Emperor Ferdinand I first had to accept Hungarian demands. After the Austrian revolution was suppressed,emperor Franz Joseph replaced his epileptic uncle Ferdinand I as Emperor. Franz Joseph refused all reforms and started to arm against Hungary. Later, under governor and president Lajos Kossuth and the first Prime minister, Lajos Batthyány, the House of Habsburg was dethroned and the form of government was changed to create the first Republic of Hungary. The Habsburg Ruler and his advisors skillfully manipulated the Croatian, Serbian and Romanian peasantry, led by priests and officers firmly loyal to the Habsburgs, and induced them to rebel against the Hungarian government. The Hungarians were supported by the vast majority of the Slovak, German and Rusyn nationalities and by all the Jews of the kingdom, as well as by a large number of Polish, Austrian and Italian volunteers.^[42] Many members of the nationalities gained coveted the highest positions within the Hungarian Army, like General János Damjanich, an ethnic Serb who became a Hungarian national hero through his command of the 3rd Hungarian Army Corps. Initially, the Hungarian forces (Honvédség) defeated Austrian armies. In July 1849 Hungarian Parliament proclaimed and enacted foremost the ethnic and minority rights in the world, but it was too late: To counter the successes of the Hungarian revolutionary army, Franz Joseph asked for help from the “Gendarme of Europe,” Czar Nicholas I, whose Russian armies invaded Hungary. The huge army of the Russian Empire and the Austrian forces proved too powerful for the Hungarian army, and General Artúr Görgey surrendered in August 1849. Julius Freiherr von Haynau, the leader of the Austrian army, then became governor of Hungary for a few months and, on 6 October, ordered the execution of 13 leaders of the Hungarian army as well as Prime Minister Batthyány. Lajos Kossuth escaped into exile.

Following the war of 1848–1849, the whole country was in “passive resistance”. Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg was appointed governor of the Kingdom of Hungary, and this time was remembered for Germanization pursued with the help of Czech officers.

[edit] Austria–Hungary (1867–1918)

Main article: Austria-Hungary

Map of the counties in Hungary around 1880

Magyars in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1890

Due to external and internal problems, reforms seemed inevitable to secure the integrity of the Habsburg Empire. Major military defeats, like the Battle of Königgrätz (1866), forced the Emperor to concede internal reforms. To appease Hungarian separatism, the Emperor made a deal with Hungary, negotiated by Ferenc Deák, called the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, by which the dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary came into existence. The two realms were governed separately by two parliaments from two capitals, with a common monarch and common external and military policies. Economically, the empire was a customs union. The first prime minister of Hungary after the Compromise was Count Gyula Andrássy. The old Hungarian Constitution was restored, and Franz Joseph was crowned as King of Hungary.

In 1868, Hungarian and Croatian assembly made the Croatian–Hungarian Agreement by which Croatia was recognized as autonomous region of Holly crown.

Austria-Hungary was geographically the second largest country in Europe after the Russian Empire (239,977 sq. m in 1905 ^[43]), and the third most populous (after Russia and the German Empire).

Cutaway Drawing of Millennium Underground in Budapest (1894–1896) which was the first underground in Continental Europe.

World War I Memorial in Solt, Hungary.

The era witnessed an impressive economic development. The formerly backward Hungarian economy became relatively modern and industrialized by the turn of the 20th century, although agriculture remained dominant. In 1873, the old capital Buda and Óbuda(Ancient Buda) were officially merged with the third city, Pest, thus creating the new metropolis of Budapest. The dynamic Pest grew into the country’s administrative, political, economic, trade and cultural hub.

Technological change accelerated industrialization and urbanization. The GNP per capita grew roughly 1.45% per year from 1870 to 1913. That level of growth compared very favorably to that of other European nations such as Britain (1.00%), France (1.06%), and Germany (1.51%). The strong points of the industry were the electricity and electrotechnology, telecommunication, and the transport industry: (locomotive and tram construction ship construction) The key symbols of industrialization were (at the time) the famous Ganz concern, and Tungsram Works. Many of the state institutions and the modern administrative system of Hungary were established during this period.

Due to various reasons like the policy of Magyarization ^[44][45] and the migration of millions, the census in 1910 (excluding Croatia), recorded the following distribution of population: Hungarian 54.5%, Romanian 16.1%, Slovak 10.7%, and German 10.4%. The largest religious denomination was the Roman Catholic (49.3%), followed by the Calvinist (14.3%), Greek Orthodox (12.8%) /Romanians Serbians Ruthenians), Greek Catholic (11.0%), Lutheran (7.1%), and Jewish (5.0%) religions. In 1910, 6.37% of the population were eligible to vote in elections due to census.^[46]

[edit] World War I

Main article: Hungary in World War I

After the Assassination in Sarajevo the Hungarian prime minister, István Tisza and his cabinet tried to avoid the breaking out and excalating of a war in Europe, but his diplomatic attempts remained unsuccessful.

Austria–Hungary drafted 9 million (fighting forces: 7,8 million) soldiers in WW1 (4 million from Kingdom of Hungary). In First World War Austria–Hungary was fighting on the side of Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey. The Central Powers conquered Serbia. Romania proclaimed war. The Central Powers conquered Southern Romania and the Romanian capital Bucharest. On November 1916 Emperor Franz Joseph died, the new monarch Charles IV sympathized by pacifists. With great difficulty, the Central powers stopped and repelled the attacks of the Russian Empire. The Eastern front of the Allied (Entente) Powers completely collapsed. The A-H Empire withdrew from defeated countries. On the Italian front, the Austro-Hungarian army could not make more successful progress against Italy after January 1918. Despite of great Eastern successes, Germany suffered complete defeat in the more determinant Western front. By 1918, the economic situation had deteriorated (strikes in factories were organized by leftist and pacifist movements), and uprisings in the army had become commonplace. In the capital cities (Vienna and Budapest), the Austrian and the Hungarian leftist liberal movements (the maverick parties) and their leader politicians supported and strengthened the separatism of ethnic minorities. Austria-Hungary signed general armistice in Padua on 3 November 1918. In October 1918, the personal union with Austria was dissolved.

[edit] Between the two world wars (1918–1941)

Main articles: Hungary between the two world wars and Hungarian interwar economy

[edit] Hungarian Democratic Republic

Main article: Hungarian Democratic Republic

In 1918, as a political result of German defeat on the Western front in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy collapsed. French Entente troops landed in Greece to rearm the defeated Romania Serbia, and the newly formed Czech state. Despite of general armistice agreement, the Balkanian French army organized new campaigns against Hungary with the help of Czech Romanian and Serbian governments.

Tisza was murdered in Budapest by a gang of soldiers during Aster Revolution of October 1918. On 31 October 1918 the success of the Aster Revolution in Budapest brought the leftist liberal count Mihály Károlyi to power as Prime-Minister. Károlyi was a devotee of Entente from the beginning of the war. On 13 November 1918 Charles IV surrendered his powers as King of Hungary; however, he did not abdicate, a technicality that made a return to the throne possible.^[47] By a notion of Woodrow Wilson‘s pacifism, Károlyi ordered the full disarmament of Hungarian Army. Hungary remained without national defense in the darkest hour of its history. Surrounding countries started to arm. The First Republic was proclaimed on 16 November 1918 with Károlyi being named as president. On 5 November 1918 Serbian Army with French involvement attacked Southern parts of the country, on 8 November Czech Army attacked Northern part of Hungary, on 2 December Romanian Army started to attack the Eastern (Transylvanian) parts of Hungary. The Károlyi government pronounced illegal all armed associations and proposals which wanted to defend the integrity of the country. The Károlyi government’s measures failed to stem popular discontent, especially when the Entente powers began distributing slices of Hungary’s traditional territory to Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. French and Serbian forces occupied the southern parts of Hungary.

By February 1919 the government had lost all popular support, having failed on domestic and military fronts. On 21 March after the Entente military representative demanded more and more territorial concessions from Hungary, Károlyi signed all concessions and resigned.

[edit] Hungarian Soviet Republic (“Republic of the Councils”)

Main articles: Hungarian Soviet Republic and Red Terror (Hungary)

1919: The Heroes Square of Budapest in red. The Communists wanted to destroy all Hungarian historical monuments, statues and national symbols.

The Communist Party of Hungary, led by Béla Kun, allied itself with the Hungarian Social Democratic Party came to power and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Communists also promised equality and social justice. Social Democrat Sándor Garbai was the official Head of government, but the Soviet Republic was de facto dominated by Béla Kun, who was in charge of foreign affairs. The Communists – “The Reds” – came to power largely thanks to being the only group with an organized fighting force, and they promised that Hungary would defend its territory without conscription. (possibly with the help of the Soviet Red Army). Hence: the Red Army of Hungary was a little voluntary army (53,000 men). Most soldiers of the Red Army were armed factory workers from Budapest. Initially, Kun’s regime achieved some military successes: the Hungarian Red Army, under the lead of the genius strategist, Colonel Aurél Stromfeld, ousted Czech troops from the north and planned to march against the Romanian army in the east. In terms of domestic policy, the Communist government nationalized industrial and commercial enterprises, socialized housing, transport, banking, medicine, cultural institutions, and all landholdings of more than 400,000 square metres. The support of the Communists proved to be short lived in Budapest. The Communists had never been popular in country towns and countryside. In the aftermath of a coup attempt, the government took a series of actions called the Red Terror, murdering several hundred people(mostly scientists and intellectuals). The Soviet Red Army was never able to aid the new Hungarian republic. Despite the great military successes against Czechoslovakian army, the communist leaders gave back all recaptured lands. That attitude demoralized the voluntary army. The Hungarian Red Army was dissolved before it could successfully complete its campaigns. In the face of domestic backlash and an advancing Romanian force, Béla Kun and most of his comrades fled to Austria, while Budapest was occupied on 6 August. Kun and his followers took along numerous art treasures and the gold stocks of the National Bank.^[48] All these events, and in particular the final military defeat, led to a deep feeling of dislike among the general population against the Soviet Union (which did not offer military assistance) and the Jews (since most members of Kun’s government were Jewish, making it easy to blame the Jews for the government’s mistakes).

[edit] Counterrevolution

Main articles: White Terror (Hungary) and Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)

The new fighting force in Hungary were the Conservative Royalists counter-revolutionaries – the “Whites”. These, who had been organizing in Vienna and established a counter-government in Szeged, assumed power, led by István Bethlen, a Transylvanian aristocrat, and Miklós Horthy, the former commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy. The conservatives determinded the Károlyi government and communists as capital treason. Starting in Western Hungary and spreading throughout the country, a White Terror began by other half-regular and half-militarist detachments (as the police power crashed, there were no serious national regular forces and authorities), and many arrant Communists and other leftists were tortured and executed without trial. Radical Whites launched pogroms against the Jews, displayed as the cause of all territorial losses of Hungary. The most notorious commander of the Whites was Pál Prónay. The leaving Romanian army pillaged the country: livestock, machinery and agricultural products were carried to Romania in hundreds of freight cars.^[49][50] The estimated property damage of their activity was so much that the international peace conference in 1919 did not require Hungary to pay war redemption to Romania.^{[citation needed]} On 16 November with the consent of Romanian forces, Horthy’s army marched into Budapest. His government gradually restored security, stopped terror, and set up authorities, but thousands of sympathizers of the Károlyi and Kun regimes were imprisoned. Radical political movements were suppressed. In March the parliament restored the Hungarian monarchy but postponed electing a king until civil disorder had subsided. Instead, Miklos Horthy was elected Regent and was empowered, among other things, to appoint Hungary’s Prime Minister, veto legislation, convene or dissolve the parliament, and command the armed forces.

[edit] Trianon Hungary and the Regency

Main article: Treaty of Trianon

The Treaty of Trianon: Hungary lost 72% of its land and sea ports in Croatia, 3,425,000 Magyars found themselves separated from their motherland.^[51][52] The country lost 5 of its 10 biggest Hungarian cities.

Hungary’s signing of the Treaty of Trianon on 4 June 1920 ratified the country’s borders being redrawn. The territorial provisions of the treaty required Hungary to surrender more than two-thirds of its pre-war lands. However, nearly one-third of the 10 million ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside the diminished homeland. The country’s ethnic composition was left almost homogeneous, Hungarians constituting about 90% of the population, Germans made up about 6%, and Slovaks, Croats, Romanians, and Roma accounted for the remainder.^{[citation needed]}

New international borders separated Hungary’s industrial base from its sources of raw materials and its former markets for agricultural and industrial products. Hungary lost 84% of its timber resources, 43% of its arable land, and 83% of its iron ore. Furthermore, post-Trianon Hungary possessed 90% of the engineering and printing industry of the Kingdom, while only 11% of timber and 16% iron was retained. In addition, 61% of arable land, 74% of public road, 65% of canals, 62% of railroads, 64% of hard surface roads, 83% of pig iron output, 55% of industrial plants, 100% of gold, silver, copper, mercury and salt mines, and most of all, 67% of credit and banking institutions of the former Kingdom of Hungary lay within the territory of Hungary’s neighbors.^[53][54][55]

Horthy appointed Count Pál Teleki as Prime Minister in July 1920. His government issued a numerus clausus law, limiting admission of “political insecure elements” (these were often Jews) to universities and, in order to quiet rural discontent, took initial steps toward fulfilling a promise of major land reform by dividing about 3,850 km² from the largest estates into smallholdings. Teleki’s government resigned, however, after, Charles IV, unsuccessfully attempted to retake Hungary’s throne in March 1921. King Charles’s return produced split parties between conservatives who favored a Habsburg restoration and nationalist right-wing radicals who supported election of a Hungarian king. Count István Bethlen, a non-affiliated right-wing member of the parliament, took advantage of this rift forming a new Party of Unity under his leadership. Horthy then appointed Bethlen prime minister. Charles IV died soon after he failed a second time to reclaim the throne in October 1921. (For more detail on Charles’s attempts to retake the throne, see Charles IV of Hungary’s conflict with Miklós Horthy.)

Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya, Regent of Hungary

As prime minister, Bethlen dominated Hungarian politics between 1921 and 1931. He fashioned a political machine by amending the electoral law, providing jobs in the expanding bureaucracy to his supporters, and manipulating elections in rural areas. Bethlen restored order to the country by giving the radical counter-revolutionaries payoffs and government jobs in exchange for ceasing their campaign of terror against Jews and leftists. In 1921, he made a deal with the Social Democrats and trade unions (called the Bethlen-Peyer Pact), agreeing, among other things, to legalize their activities and free political prisoners in return for their pledge to refrain from spreading anti-Hungarian propaganda, calling political strikes, and organising the peasantry. Bethlen brought Hungary into the League of Nations in 1922 and out of international isolation by signing a treaty of friendship with Italy in 1927. The revision of the Treaty of Trianon rose to the top of Hungary’s political agenda and the strategy employed by Bethlen consisted of strengthening the economy and building relations with stronger nations. Revision of the treaty had such a broad backing in Hungary that Bethlen used it, at least in part, to deflect criticism of his economic, social and political policies. The Great Depression induced a drop in the standard of living and the political mood of the country shifted further toward the right. In 1932 Horthy appointed a new prime minister, Gyula Gömbös, that changed the course of Hungarian policy towards closer cooperation with Germany and started an effort to magyarise the few remaining ethnic minorities in Hungary. Gömbös signed a trade agreement with Germany that drew Hungary’s economy out of depression but made Hungary dependent on the German economy for both raw materials and markets. Adolf Hitler appealed to Hungarian desires for territorial revisionism, while extreme right wing organizations, like the Arrow Cross party, increasingly embraced extreme Nazi policies, including those relating to the suppression and victimisation of Jews. The government passed the First Jewish Law in 1938. The law established a quota system to limit Jewish involvement in the Hungarian economy.

Imrédy’s attempts to improve Hungary’s diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom initially made him very unpopular with Germany and Italy. In light of Germany’s Anschluss of Austria in March, he realized that he could not afford to alienate Germany and Italy for long. In the autumn of 1938 his foreign policy became very much pro-German and pro-Italian.^[56] Intent on amassing a base of power in Hungarian right wing politics, Imrédy began to suppress political rivals, so the increasingly influential Arrow Cross Party was harassed, and eventually banned by Imrédy’s administration. As Imrédy drifted further to the right, he proposed that the government be reorganized along totalitarian lines and drafted a harsher Second Jewish Law. Parliament, under the new government of Pál Teleki, approved the Second Jewish Law in 1939, which greatly restricted Jewish involvement in the economy, culture and society and, significantly, defined Jews by race instead of religion. This definition significantly and negatively altered the status of those who had formerly converted from Judaism to Christianity.

[show] v • d • e This template contains contemporary geographical-historical regions that between 1867 and 1918 (before the 1920 Treaty of Trianon) were part of Transleithania inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now are part of other states.   Hungary proper Burgenland (Austria) · Carpathian Ruthenia (Ukraine) · Međimurje (Croatia) · Prekmurje (Slovenia) · Transylvania (Romania) · Crişana / Partium (Romania) · Maramureş (Romania) · Upper Hungary (Slovakia) · Bačka (Serbia) · Banat (Romania, Serbia) · Baranya (Croatia)   Croatia-Slavonia Croatia (Croatia) · Slavonia (Croatia) · Syrmia (Serbia, Croatia)

[edit] World War II

Map of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1941

Main articles: Hungary during the Second World War, Vienna Awards, and Government of National Unity (Hungary)

Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sought to enforce peacefully the claims of Hungarians on territories Hungary lost in 1920 with the signing of the Treaty of Trianon, and the two Vienna Awards returned parts of Czechoslovakia and Transylvania to Hungary.

On 20 November 1940 under pressure from Germany, Pál Teleki affiliated Hungary with the Tripartite Pact. In December 1940, he also signed an ephemeral “Treaty of Eternal Friendship” with Yugoslavia. A few months later, after a Yugoslavian coup threatened the success of the planned German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), Hitler asked the Hungarians to support his invasion of Yugoslavia. He promised to return some former Hungarian territories lost after World War I in exchange for cooperation.^[47] Unable to prevent Hungary’s participation in the war alongside Germany, Teleki committed suicide. The right-wing radical László Bárdossy succeeded him as Prime Minister. Eventually Hungary annexed small parts of present day Slovenia and Serbia.

After war broke out on the Eastern Front many Hungarian officials argued for participation in the war so as not to encourage Hitler into favouring Romania in the event of border revisions in Transylvania. Hungary entered the war and on 1 July 1941 at the direction of the Germans, the Hungarian Karpat Group advanced far into southern Russia. At the Battle of Uman the Gyorshadtest participated in the encirclement of the 6th Soviet Army and the 12th Soviet Army. Twenty Soviet divisions were captured or destroyed.

Worried about Hungary’s increasing reliance on Germany, Admiral Horthy forced Bárdossy to resign and replaced him with Miklós Kállay, a veteran conservative of Bethlen’s government. Kállay continued Bárdossy’s policy of supporting Germany against the Red Army, while he also surreptitiously entered into negotiations with the Western Powers.

During the Battle of Stalingrad, the Hungarian Second Army suffered terrible losses. The heavy Soviet breakthrough at the Don River sliced directly through the Hungarian units.^{[citation needed]} Shortly after the fall of Stalingrad in January 1943, the Hungarian Second Army effectively ceased to exist as a functioning military unit.

Secret negotiations with the British and Americans continued.^[56] As per the request of the Western Allies, there were no connection made with the Soviets.^{[citation needed]} Aware of Kállay’s deceit and fearing that Hungary might conclude a separate peace, Hitler ordered Nazi troops to launch Operation Margarethe and occupy Hungary in March 1944. Döme Sztójay, an avid supporter of the Nazis, become the new Prime Minister with the aid of a Nazi military governor, Edmund Veesenmayer.

The infamous SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann went to Hungary to oversee the large-scale deportations of Jews to German death camps in occupied Poland. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944 the Hungarians deported 437,402 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.^[57][58]

In August 1944 Horthy replaced Sztójay with the anti-Fascist General Géza Lakatos. Under the Lakatos regime, the acting Interior Minister Béla Horváth ordered Hungarian gendarmes to prevent any Hungarian citizens from being deported.

In September 1944, Soviet forces crossed the Hungarian border. On 15 October 1944, Horthy announced that Hungary had signed an armistice with the Soviet Union. The Hungarian army ignored the armistice. The Germans launched Operation Panzerfaust and, by kidnapping his son (Miklós Horthy, Jr.), forced Horthy to abrogate the armistice, depose the Lakatos government, and name the leader of the Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, as Prime Minister. Szálasi became Prime Minister of a new fascist Government of National Unity and Horthy abdicated.

In cooperation with the Nazis, Szálasi restarted the deportations of Jews, particularly in Budapest. Thousands more Jews were killed by Hungarian Arrow Cross members. The retreating German army demolished the rail, road, and communications systems.

On 28 December 1944 a provisional government was formed in Hungary under acting Prime Minister Béla Miklós. Miklós and Szálasi’s rival governments each claimed legitimacy : the Germans and pro-German Hungarians loyal to Szálasi fought on, as the territory effectively controlled by the Arrow Cross regime shrunk gradually. The Red Army completed the encirclement of Budapest on 29 December 1944 and the Battle of Budapest began and continued into February 1945. Most of what remained of the Hungarian First Army was destroyed about 200 miles north of Budapest between 1 January and 16 February 1945.

On 20 January 1945, representatives of the Hungarian provisional government signed an armistice in Moscow. Szálasi’s government had fled the country by the end of March. Officially, Soviet operations in Hungary ended on 4 April 1945 when the last German troops were expelled. On 7 May 1945 General Alfred Jodl, the German Chief of Staff, signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces.

Hungary’s World War II casualties: Tamás Stark of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has provided the following assessment of losses from 1941–1945 in Hungary. Military losses were 300,000-310,000 including 110-120,000 killed in battle and 200,000 missing in action and POW in the Soviet Union. Hungarian military losses include 110,000 men who were conscripted from the annexed territories of Greater Hungary in Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia and the deaths of 20-25,000 Jews conscripted for Army labor units. Civilian losses of about 80,000 include 45,500 killed in the 1944–1945 military campaign and in air attacks,^[59] and the genocide of Romani people of 28,000 persons.^[60] Jewish Holocaust victims totaled 200,000.^[61] See World War II casualties.

[edit] Post-War Communist period

Main article: People’s Republic of Hungary

[edit] Transition to Communism (1944–1949)

The Soviet Army occupied Hungary from September 1944 until April 1945. The siege of Budapest lasted almost 2 months, from December 1944 to February 1945 (the longest successful siege of any city in the entire war, including Berlin) and the city suffered widespread destruction, including all the Danube bridges which were blown up by the Germans in an effort to slow the Soviet advance.

By signing the Peace Treaty of Paris, Hungary again lost all the territories that it had gained between 1938 and 1941. Neither the Western Allies nor the Soviet Union supported any change in Hungary’s pre-1938 borders, which was the primary motive behind the Hungarian involvement in the war. The Soviet Union itself annexed Sub-Carpathia (before 1938 the eastern edge of Czechoslovakia), which is today part of Ukraine.

The Treaty of Peace with Hungary signed on 10 February 1947 declared that “The decisions of the Vienna Award of November 2, 1938, are declared null and void” and Hungarian boundaries were fixed along the former frontiers as they existed on 1 January 1938 except a minor loss of territory on the Czechoslovakian border. Many of the communist leaders of 1919 returned from Moscow. The first major violation of civil rights was suffered by the ethnic German minority, half of which (240,000 people) were deported to Germany in 1946–1948, although the great majority of them did not support Germany and were not members of any pro-Nazi movement. There was a forced “exchange of population” between Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which involved about 70,000 Hungarians living in Slovakia and somewhat smaller numbers of ethnic Slovaks living in the territory of Hungary. Unlike the Germans, these people were allowed to carry some of their property with them.

The Soviets originally planned for a piecemeal introduction of the Communist regime in Hungary, therefore when they set up a provisional government in Debrecen on 21 December 1944, they were careful to include representatives of several moderate parties. Following the demands of the Western Allies for a democratic election, the Soviets authorized the only essentially free election in Eastern Europe in November 1945 in Hungary. This was also the first election held in Hungary on the basis of universal franchise. People voted for party lists, not for individual candidates. At the elections the Independent Smallholders’ Party, a center-right peasant party, won 57% of the vote. Despite the hopes of the Communists and the Soviets that the distribution of the aristocratic estates among the poor peasants would increase their popularity, the Hungarian Communist Party received only 17% of the votes. The Soviet commander in Hungary, Marshal Voroshilov, refused to allow the Smallholders’ Party to form a government on their own. Under Voroshilov’s pressure, the Smallholders organized a coalition government including the Communists, the Social Democrats and the National Peasant Party (a left-wing peasant party), in which the Communists held some of the key posts. On 1 February 1946 Hungary was declared a Republic, and the leader of the Smallholders, Zoltán Tildy, became President handing over the office of Prime Minister to Ferenc Nagy. Mátyás Rákosi, leader of the Communist Party, became deputy prime minister.

Another leading Communist, László Rajk became minister of the interior responsible for controlling law enforcement, and in this position established the security police (ÁVH). The Communists exercised constant pressure on the Smallholders both inside and outside the government, nationalising industrial companies, banning religious civil organizations and occupying key positions in local public administration. In February 1947 the police began arresting leaders of the Smallholders Party, charging them with “conspiracy against the Republic”. Several prominent figures decided to emigrate or were forced to escape abroad, including Prime Minister Ferenc Nagy in May 1947. Later Mátyás Rákosi boasted that he had dealt with his partners in the government, one by one, “cutting them off like slices of salami.”

At the next parliamentary election in August 1947 the Communists committed widespread election fraud with absentee ballots (the so-called “blue slips”), but even so, they only managed to increase their share from 17% to 24% in Parliament. The Social Democrats (by this time a servile ally of the Communists) received 15% in contrast to their 17% in 1945. The Smallholders’ Party lost much of its popularity and ended up with 15%, but their former voters turned towards three new center-right parties which seemed more determined to resist the Communist onslaught: their combined share of the total votes was 35%.

Faced with their second failure at the polls, the Communists changed tactics, and, under new orders from Moscow, decided to eschew democratic facades and speed up the Communist takeover. In June 1948 the Social Democratic Party was forced to “merge” with the Communist Party, creating the Hungarian Working People’s Party, which was dominated by the Communists. Anti-Communist leaders of the Social Democrats, such as Károly Peyer or Anna Kéthly, were forced into exile or excluded from the party. Soon after, President Zoltán Tildy was also removed from his position, and replaced by a fully cooperative Social Democrat, Árpád Szakasits. Ultimately, all “democratic” parties were organized into a so-called People’s Front in February 1949, thereby losing even the vestiges of their autonomy. The leader of the People’s Front was Rákosi himself. Opposition parties were simply declared illegal and their leaders arrested or forced into exile.

On 18 August 1949 the parliament passed the new constitution of Hungary (1949/XX.) modelled after the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union. The name of the country changed to the People’s Republic of Hungary, “the country of the workers and peasants” where “every authority is held by the working people”. Socialism was declared as the main goal of the nation. A new coat-of-arms was adopted with Communist symbols, such the red star, hammer and sickle.

[edit] Stalinist era (1949–1956)

Mátyás Rákosi, who as a chief secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party was de facto the leader of Hungary, possessed practically unlimited power and demanded complete obedience from fellow members of the Party, including his two most trusted colleagues, Ernő Gerő and Mihály Farkas. All three of them returned to Hungary from Moscow, where they spent long years and had close ties to high-ranking Soviet leaders there. Their main rivals in the party were the ‘Hungarian’ Communists who led the illegal party during the war in Hungary, and were considerably more popular within party ranks. Their most influential leader, László Rajk, who was minister of foreign affairs at the time, was arrested in May 1949. He was accused of rather surreal crimes, such as spying for Western imperialist powers and for Yugoslavia (which was also a Communist country but in very bad relations with the Soviet Union at the time). At his trial in September 1949 he made a forced confession to be an agent of Miklós Horthy, Leon Trotsky, Josip Broz Tito and Western imperialism. He also admitted that he had taken part in a murder plot against Mátyás Rákosi and Ernő Gerő. Rajk was found guilty and executed. In the next three years, other leaders of the party deemed untrustworthy, like former Social Democrats or other Hungarian illegal Communists such as János Kádár, were also arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

The showcase trial of Rajk is considered the beginning of the worst period of the Rákosi dictatorship. Mátyás Rákosi now attempted to impose totalitarian rule on Hungary. The centrally orchestrated personality cult focused on him and Stalin soon reached unprecedented proportions. Rákosi’s images and busts were everywhere, all public speakers were required to glorify his wisdom and leadership. In the meantime, the secret police, led through Gábor Péter by Rákosi himself, mercilessly persecuted all ‘class enemies’ and ‘enemies of the people’. An estimated 2,000 people were executed and over 100,000 were imprisoned. Some 44,000 ended up in forced-labour camps, where many died due to horrible work conditions, poor food and practically no medical care. Another 15,000 people, mostly former aristocrats, industrialists, military generals and other upper-class people were deported from the capital and other cities to countryside villages where they were forced to do hard agricultural labour. These policies were opposed by some members of the Hungarian Working People’s Party and around 200,000 were expelled by Rákosi from the organization.

By 1950, the state controlled most of the economy, as all large and mid-sized industrial companies, plants, mines, banks of all kind as well as all companies of retail and foreign trade were nationalized without any compensation. Slavishly following Soviet economic policies, Rákosi declared that Hungary would become a “country of iron and steel”, even though Hungary lacked iron ore completely. The forced development of heavy industry served military purposes; it was meant to be preparation for the impending World War III against Western imperialism. A disproportionate amount of the country’s resources were spent on building whole industrial cities and plants from scratch, while much of the country was still in ruins since the war. Traditional strengths of Hungary, such as the food and textile industries were neglected.

Large agricultural latifundia were divided and distributed among poor peasants already in 1945. In agriculture, the government tried to force independent peasants to enter co-operatives in which they would become merely paid labourers, but many of them stubbornly resisted. The government retaliated with ever higher requirements of compulsory food quotas imposed on peasants’ produce. Rich peasants, called ‘kulaks’ in Russians, were declared ‘class enemies’ and suffered all sorts of discrimination, including imprisonment and loss of property. With them, some of the most able farmers were removed from production. The declining agricultural output led to a constant scarcity of food, especially meat.

Rákosi rapidly expanded the education system in Hungary. This was an attempt to replace the educated class of the past by what Rákosi called a new “working intelligentsia”. In addition to effects such as better education for the poor, more opportunities for working class children and increased literacy in general, this measure also included the dissemination of communist ideology in schools and universities. Also, as part of an effort to separate the Church from the State, practically all religious schools were taken into state ownership, and religious instruction was denounced as retrograde propaganda and was gradually eliminated from schools.

The Hungarian churches were systematically intimidated. Cardinal József Mindszenty, who had bravely opposed the German Nazis and the Hungarian Fascists during the Second World War, was arrested in December 1948 and accused of treason. After five weeks under arrest (which included torture), he confessed to the charges against him and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Protestant churches were also purged and their leaders were replaced by those willing to remain loyal to Rákosi’s government.

The new Hungarian military hastily staged public, pre-arranged trials to purge “Nazi remnants and imperialist saboteurs”. Several officers were sentenced to death and executed in 1951, including Lajos Toth, a 28 victory-scoring fighter ace of World War II Royal Hungarian Air Force, who had voluntarily returned from US captivity to help revive Hungarian aviation. The victims were cleared posthumously following the fall of communism.

Preparations for a show trial started in Budapest in 1953^[62] to prove that Raoul Wallenberg had not been dragged off in 1945 to the Soviet Union but was the victim of cosmopolitan Zionists. For the purposes of this show trial, three Jewish leaders as well as two would-be “eyewitnesses” were arrested and interrogated by torture. The show trial was initiated in Moscow, following Stalin-s anti-Zionist campaign. After the death of Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the preparations for the trial were stopped and the arrested persons were released.

Rákosi had great difficulties managing the economy and the people of Hungary saw living standards fall. Although his government became increasingly unpopular, he had a firm grip on power until Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953 when a confused power struggle began in Moscow. Some of the Soviet leaders perceived the unpopularity of the Hungarian regime and ordered Rákosi to give up his position as prime minister in favour of another former Communist-in-exile in Moscow, Imre Nagy, who was Rákosi’s chief opponent in the party. Rákosi, however, retained his position as general secretary of the Hungarian Working People’s Party and over the next three years the two men became involved in a bitter struggle for power.

As Hungary’s new prime minister, Imre Nagy slightly relaxed state control over the economy and the mass media and encouraged public discussion on political and economic reform. In order to improve the general supply, he increase the production and distribution of consumer goods and reduced the tax and quota burdens of the peasants. Nagy also closed forced-labour camps, released most of the political prisoners – the Communists were allowed back into Party ranks -, and reined in the secret police, whose hated head, Gábor Péter, was convicted and imprisoned in 1954. All these rather moderate reforms earned him widespread popularity in the country, especially among the peasantry and the left-wing intellectuals.

Following a turn in Moscow, where Malenkov, Nagy’s primary patron lost the power struggle against Khrushchev, Mátyás Rákosi started a counterattack on Nagy. On March 9, 1955, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Working People’s Party condemned Nagy for “rightist deviation”. Hungarian newspapers joined the attacks and Nagy was accused of being responsible for the country’s economic problems and on 18 April he was dismissed from his post by a unanimous vote of the National Assembly. Soon after, Nagy was even excluded from the Party and temporarily retired from politics. Rákosi once again became the unchallenged leader of Hungary.

Rákosi’s second reign, however, did not last long. His power was undermined by a speech made by Nikita Khrushchev in February 1956, in which he denounced the policies of Joseph Stalin and his followers in Eastern Europe, especially the attacks on Yugoslavia and the cult of personality. On 18 July 1956 visiting Soviet leaders removed Rákosi from all his positions and he boarded a plane bound for the Soviet Union, never to return to Hungary. But the Soviets made a major mistake by the appointment of his close friend and ally, Ernő Gerő, as his successor, who was equally unpopular and shared responsibility for most of Rákosi’s crimes.

The fall of Rákosi was followed by a flurry of reform agitation both inside and outside the Party. László Rajk and his fellow victims of the showcase trial of 1949 were cleared of all charges, and on 6 October 1956, the Party authorized a reburial, which was attended by tens of thousands of people and became a silent demonstration against the crimes of the regime. On 13 October it was announced that Imre Nagy had been reinstated as a member of the party.

[edit] 1956 Revolution

Main article: Hungarian Revolution of 1956

On 23 October 1956 a peaceful student demonstration in Budapest produced a list of 16 demands for reform and greater political freedom. As the students attempted to broadcast these demands, police made some arrests and tried to disperse the crowd with tear gas. When the students attempted to free those arrested, the police opened fire on the crowd, setting off a chain of events which led to the Hungarian Revolution.

That night, commissioned officers and soldiers joined the students on the streets of Budapest. Stalin’s statue was brought down and the protesters chanted “Russians go home”, “Away with Gerő” and “Long Live Nagy”. The Central Committee of the Hungarian Working People’s Party responded to these developments by requesting Soviet military intervention and deciding that Imre Nagy should become head of a new government. Soviet tanks entered Budapest at 2 a.m. on 24 October.

On 25 October Soviet tanks opened fire on protesters in Parliament Square. One journalist at the scene saw 12 dead bodies and estimated that 170 had been wounded. Shocked by these events the Central Committee of the Hungarian Working People’s Party forced Ernő Gerő to resign from office and replaced him with János Kádár.

Imre Nagy now went on Radio Kossuth and announced he had taken over the leadership of the Government as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.” He also promised “the far-reaching democratization of Hungarian public life, the realisation of a Hungarian road to socialism in accord with our own national characteristics, and the realisation of our lofty national aim: the radical improvement of the workers’ living conditions.”

On 28 October Nagy and a group of his supporters, including János Kádár, Géza Losonczy, Antal Apró, Károly Kiss, Ferenc Münnich and Zoltán Szabó, managed to take control of the Hungarian Working People’s Party. At the same time revolutionary workers’ councils and local national committees were formed all over Hungary.

The change of leadership in the party was reflected in the articles of the government newspaper, Szabad Nép (i.e. Free People). On 29 October the newspaper welcomed the new government and openly criticised Soviet attempts to influence the political situation in Hungary. This view was supported by Radio Miskolc that called for the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country.

On 30 October Imre Nagy announced that he was freeing Cardinal József Mindszenty and other political prisoners. He also informed the people that his government intends to abolish the one-party state. This was followed by statements of Zoltán Tildy, Anna Kéthly and Ferenc Farkas concerning the restitution of the Smallholders Party, the Social Democratic Party and the Petőfi (former Peasants) Party.

Nagy’s most controversial decision took place on 1 November when he announced that Hungary intended to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact as well as proclaiming Hungarian neutrality he asked the United Nations to become involved in the country’s dispute with the Soviet Union.

On 3 November Nagy announced details of his coalition government. It included communists (János Kádár, Georg Lukács, Géza Losonczy), three members of the Smallholders Party (Zoltán Tildy, Béla Kovács and István Szabó), three Social Democrats (Anna Kéthly, Gyula Keleman, Joseph Fischer), and two Petőfi Peasants (István Bibó and Ferenc Farkas). Pál Maléter was appointed minister of defence.

Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, became increasingly concerned about these developments and on 4 November 1956 he sent the Red Army into Hungary. Soviet tanks immediately captured Hungary’s airfields, highway junctions and bridges. Fighting took place all over the country but the Hungarian forces were quickly defeated.

During the Hungarian Uprising an estimated 20,000 people were killed, nearly all during the Soviet intervention. Imre Nagy was arrested and replaced by the Soviet loyalist, János Kádár. Nagy was imprisoned until being executed in 1958. Other government ministers or supporters who were either executed or died in captivity included Pál Maléter, Géza Losonczy, Attila Szigethy and Miklós Gimes.

[edit] Post Revolution (or Kádár) era 1956–1989

Further information: Goulash Communism

Once he was in power, János Kádár led an attack against revolutionaries. 21,600 mavericks (democrats, liberals, reformist communists alike) were imprisoned, 13,000 interned, and 400 killed. But in the early 1960s, Kádár announced a new policy under the motto of “He who is not against us is with us.” (this was a modification of Rákosi’s statement ‘He who is not with us is against us’). He declared a general amnesty, gradually curbed some of the excesses of the secret police, and introduced a relatively liberal cultural and economic course aimed at overcoming the post-1956 hostility toward him and his regime. In 1966, the Central Committee approved the “New Economic Mechanism,” through which it sought to rebuild the economy, increase productivity, make Hungary more competitive in world markets, and create prosperity to ensure political stability. Over the next two decades of relative domestic quiet, Kádár’s government responded alternately to pressures for minor political and economic reforms as well as to counter-pressures from reform opponents. By the early 1980s, it had achieved some lasting economic reforms and limited political liberalization and pursued a foreign policy which encouraged more trade with the West. Nevertheless, the New Economic Mechanism led to mounting foreign debt, incurred to shore up unprofitable industries.

Hungary’s transition to a Western-style democracy was one of the smoothest among the former Soviet bloc. By late 1988, activists within the party and bureaucracy and Budapest-based intellectuals were increasing pressure for change. Some of these became reform socialists, while others began movements which were to develop into parties. Young liberals formed the Federation of Young Democrats (Fidesz); a core from the so-called Democratic Opposition formed the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), and the national opposition established the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). Civic activism intensified to a level not seen since the 1956 revolution.

In 1988, Kádár was replaced as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and reform communist leader Imre Pozsgay was admitted to the Politburo. In 1989, the Parliament adopted a “democracy package,” which included trade-union pluralism; freedom of association, assembly, and the press; a new electoral law; and in October 1989 a radical revision of the constitution, among others. Since then, Hungary has tried to reform its economy and increase its connections with western Europe, hoping to become a member of the European Union as soon as possible. A Central Committee plenum in February 1989 endorsed in principle the multiparty political system and the characterization of the October 1956 revolution as a “popular uprising,” in the words of Pozsgay, whose reform movement had been gathering strength as Communist Party membership declined dramatically. Kádár’s major political rivals then cooperated to move the country gradually to democracy. The Soviet Union reduced its involvement by signing an agreement in April 1989 to withdraw Soviet forces by June 1991.

National unity culminated in June 1989 as the country reburied Imre Nagy, his associates, and, symbolically, all other victims of the 1956 revolution. A national round table, comprising representatives of the new parties and some recreated old parties—such as the Smallholders and Social Democrats—the Communist Party, and different social groups, met in the late summer of 1989 to discuss major changes to the Hungarian constitution in preparation for free elections and the transition to a fully free and democratic political system.

In October 1989, the communist party convened its last congress and re-established itself as the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP). In a historic session on 16–20 October 1989, the Parliament adopted legislation providing for multiparty parliamentary elections and a direct presidential election. The legislation transformed Hungary from a People’s Republic into the Republic of Hungary, guaranteed human and civil rights, and created an institutional structure that ensures separation of powers among the judicial, executive, and legislative branches of government. On the day of the 1956 Revolution, 23 October, the Hungarian Republic was officially declared (by the provisional President of the Republic Mátyás Szűrös), replacing the Hungarian People’s Republic. The revised constitution also championed the “values of bourgeois democracy and democratic socialism” and gave equal status to public and private property.

[edit] Democracy and social market economy since 1989

Choose, please! – A 1990 political poster by Fidesz, depicting Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker performing a traditional and widely known communist-style kiss-greeting (archive photo, above) and a kissing contemporary young couple (below).

The first free parliamentary election, held in May 1990, was a plebiscite of sorts on the communist past. The revitalized and reformed communists performed poorly despite having more than the usual advantages of an “incumbent” party. Populist, center-right, and liberal parties fared best, with the Democratic Forum (MDF) winning 43% of the vote and the Free Democrats (SZDSZ) capturing 24%. Under Prime Minister József Antall, the MDF formed a center-right coalition government with the Independent Smallholders’ Party (FKGP) and the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) to command a 60% majority in the parliament. Parliamentary opposition parties included SZDSZ, the Socialists (MSZP), and the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fidesz).

Between March 12, 1990 and June 19, 1991 the Soviet troops (“Southern Army Group”) left Hungary. The last units commanded by general Viktor Silov crossed the Hungarian-Ukrainian border at Záhony – Csap. The total number of Soviet military and civilian personnel stationed in Hungary was around 100,000, having at their disposal approximately 27,000 military equipment. The withdrawal was performed with 35,000 railway cars. Since 2001, by a special bill passed in the Hungarian Parliament, June 16 was declared a national memorial day.

Péter Boross succeeded as Prime Minister after Antall died in December 1993.

The Antall/Boross coalition governments had to create a reasonably well-functioning parliamentary democracy and the comprehensive rules of market-economy, while had to manage the social crises resulting from the economical crises resulting from the collapse of the former system, and the political crises generating from the social crises. The massive worsening of living standards led to a massive loss of support. The historical centre-right sacrificed itself for the first term.

In May 1994 the legal successor of the state-party came back to win a plurality of votes and 54% of the seats after an election campaign focused largely on economic issues and the substantial decline in living standards since 1990. This signalled a wish to turn back to the safety and wealth of the socialist era, yet this showed that voters rejected both right and left-wing extremists, as no such party got into parliament. The new prime minister declared that members of the party were in those lines that were pushing for system-change within the state party, and had the intention of going forward. After its disappointing result in the election, leadership of the Fidesz changed it from a liberal to a conservative party. This caused a severe split in the membership, many members left for the other liberal party, the SzDSZ. The SzDSz formed a coalition with the socialists, which resulted in a more than two-third mayority.

The MSZP, whose politics was as much determined by the socialism of PM Gyula Horn and a large part of the base, as by the economic focus of its technocrats (educated with a Western orientation in seventies-eighties) and ex-cadre entrepreneur supporters, and its liberal coalition partner SzDSz, facing threat of state bankruptcy initiated economic reforms and agressive privatization of state enterprises to multinational companies, sometimes with the stated expectation for investment: reconstruction, expansion and modernization from them, and adopted a fiscal austerity program, the Bokros plan in 1995, which had dramatic consequences on social stability, quality of life and social transpassability. The government introduced tuition fees, partly privatized different state services, but supported science with funds directly and with the relations to the private sector indirectly. The government pursued a foreign policy of integration with Euro-Atlantic institutions and reconciliation with neighboring countries. Dissatisfaction over quality of life and lack of ability to navigate for future lifeline plans due to the chaos in both private and state-services sphere, closing of public service buildings, rising crime, physical dismantling of companies by some of the new owners, the attempt to re-start the unpopular program of building a dam in the Danube, and cases of government corruption, some especially regarding privatization convinced voters to propel center-right parties into power following national elections in May 1998.

Fidesz got the plurality of parliamentary seats and forged a coalition with the Smallholders and the Democratic Forum. The new government, headed by 35-year-old Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, promised to stimulate faster growth, curb inflation, and lower taxes. It inherited an economy with great macro-economic indicators, like export-surplus growing on a faster-increasing curve than inner consumption, and people overworked till limit. It abolished tuition fees, greatly increasing social transpassability. The government’s aim was to create good market possibilities for small businesses and make possible of creation of logistic chains and large enterprises from national sources. The Orbán administration sustained continuity in foreign policy, and continued to pursue Euro-Atlantic integration as its first priority. It was a more vocal advocate of minority rights for ethnic Hungarians abroad than the previous government. In 1999 Hungary joined, based on the referendum of 1997, NATO. In 2002, as a result of the legislative work and the work of the discussing delegation in Brussels, it was decided that Hungary, together with 9 other countries was to join the European Union on 1 January 2004.

Fidesz, mainly due to a style and leadership managing described as messianistic, exclusive and demonizing by almost everyone not their supporters, generating from their presentation of history and themselves as the sole creators and heirs of the system-change and present warranty of democracy, fighting heirs of bolsheviks and harmful nation-betrayer corrupt privatizers, due to holding national assembly meetings once in three weeks instead of weekly, lack of cooperation with the other parliamentary parties or non-fidesz supporter extra-parliamentary representatives, strategical connections to extreme right-wing parties, and accusations of building media- think-thank- and private-industry empire from corruption, is supposed to lost the election. The MSZP and its liberal ally SzDSz 51% won over Fidesz and its ally MDF 48% in a fierce fight, where turnout was record-high 73%.

Under the socialist-liberal government the macroeconomic balance of the Hungarian economy started a downfall, while quality of life, infrastructure and technology boosted. On 12 April 2003 Hungary voted for joining the European Union, where 83% of the votes said “Yes” to EU (45% of the population voted). Since the EU already accepted Hungary as a possible member, the 4 leading political parties (MSZP, Fidesz, SZDSZ and MDF) agreed to establish the required prerequisites and policies and to work together to prepare the country for the accession with the least possible harm to the economy and people while maximising the positive effects on the country. On 1 May 2004 Hungary became a member of the EU.

In the elections of April 2006, Hungary decided to keep its government in place for the first time in the history of the Third Hungarian Republic. The left-wing strengthened its positions, with the coalition of the Social Democrats (MSZP) and the Liberals (SZDSZ) reaching 54 percent of the votes, gaining 210 seats as opposed to the previous 198. The parties of the former term (Fidesz, MDF, SzDSz, MSZP) got into parliament again. The new Parliament assembled in late May 2006, and the new government was formed in June 2006.

After the new government presented plans to reach balance and sustainable growth by stopping growth of quality of life, which it didn’t mention in campaign, there were mass protests against the social-liberal Gyurcsány government between 17 September and 23 October 2006. It was the first sustained protest in Hungary since 1989. From 2007, when increased inflation caused by tax increases decreased quality of life, complete restructuring of the state-administration, energy sector, relation towards private economy, health sector and welfare supports took place, which members of affected professional unions described as lacking discussion, uncompromising, and impossible to be done right in dictated tempo, the opposition as dictatoric and wrong in direction, independent political analysts and later members of the Socialist party as hastly, confrontative, partly flawed and made in a style of enlightened absolutism. In 2008, the coalition broke up over the disagreement whether the insurance side of the health sector should be owned in mayority and therefore decided in policies by state or by private companies. This and a won public referendum initiated by Fidesz for eliminating reinstated university tuition fees, direct payments at visitations of doctors by insured patients, and daily fees at hospital by insured patiens, led health care restructuring stop at the insurance point, remaining completly publicly owned. European Union funds for required (area sterilizing, sewer-building, transport, school and hosptital reconstruction and modernization, communication- and administration modernizing, etc.) goals were transferred for approved plans, the country joined Schengen Area at the end of 2007.

The 2008 financial crisis caused further budgetary constraints. After Gyurcsány’s resignation with declaring he had intention of assuring to find a government with greater political capital while avoiding the opposition he called populist and secrecive therefore unforecastable in economic policy forming government, in 2009 March a Government of Experts supported by the Socialists took place, which didn’t apply for inner restructuring of subsistems of the state, only for making macroeconomic decisions. A notable program was the expansion of initiatives ‘Job instead of Aid’, which only gave aid to people who were unable to do any work, others were offered job mediation and training, if that failed job and training at the local government not below two levels of the participant’s qualification, for example working on a tomato field founded by the local government for those with or without general education.

In 2010, the centre-right Fidesz won more than two thirds the spring general elections, in the autumn municipal elections won mayority in all assemblies apart from a few exceptions, and apart from exceptions gave all mayors. The liberal party which criticized the government on the basis of not strong-handed and fast enough could nominee noone nowhere. In the Hungarian Parliament, Fidesz has 263, the socialist 59, the newly founded self declared radical and right-wing Jobbik (Righter, in Hungarian the two meanings are ‘even more on the right side’ and ‘better’) 47, and the newly founded LMP (Politics can be Different) 16, and one independent has seats.

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History of Poland
This article is part of a series
Chronology List of Polish monarchs
Prehistory and protohistory
Stone Age
Bronze and Iron Age
Antiquity
Middle Ages
Early Middle Ages
Kingdom of the Piasts (966–1385)
Kingdom of the Jagiellons (1385–1569)
Early Modern
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795)
Modern
Partitions – Duchies – Kingdoms (1795–1918)
World War 1 (1914-1918)
Second Republic (1918–1939)
World War 2 (1939–1945)
People’s Republic (1945–1989)
Contemporary
Third Republic (1989–present)
Poland Portal  v • d • e

The History of Poland is rooted in the arrival of the Slavs, who gave rise to permanent settlement and historic development on Polish lands. During the Piast dynasty Christianity was adopted in 966 and medieval monarchy established. The Jagiellon dynasty period brought close ties with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, cultural development and territorial expansion, culminating in the establishment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569. The Commonwealth in its early phase constituted a continuation of the Jagiellon prosperity. From the mid-17th century, the huge state entered a period of decline caused by devastating wars and deterioration of the country’s system of government. Significant internal reforms were introduced during the later part of the 18th century, but the reform process was not allowed to run its course, as the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy through a series of invasions and partitions terminated the Commonwealth’s independent existence in 1795. From then until 1918 there was no independent Polish state. The Poles had engaged intermittently in armed resistance until 1864. After the failure of the last uprising, the nation preserved its identity through educational uplift and the program called “organic work” to modernize the economy and society. The opportunity for freedom appeared only after World War I, when the partitioning imperial powers were defeated by war and revolution. The Second Polish Republic was established and existed from 1918 to 1939. It was destroyed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union by their Invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II. Millions of Polish citizens perished in the course of the Nazi occupation. The Polish government in exile kept functioning and through the many Polish military formations on the western and eastern fronts the Poles contributed to the Allied victory. Nazi Germany’s forces were compelled to retreat from Poland as the Soviet Red Army advanced, which led to the creation of the People’s Republic of Poland. The country’s geographic location was shifted to the west and Poland existed as a Soviet satellite state. Poland largely lost its traditional multi-ethnic character and the communist system was imposed. By the late 1980s Solidarity, a Polish reform movement, became crucial in causing a peaceful transition from a communist state to the capitalist system and parliamentary democracy. This process resulted in the creation of the modern Polish state.

Contents [hide] 1 Prehistory and protohistory 2 Piast dynasty 3 Jagiellon dynasty 4 Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1648) 5 Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in decline (1648-1764) 6 Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, reforms and loss of statehood (1764-1795) 7 Partitioned Poland, period of armed resistance (1795-1864) 8 Partitioned Poland, formation of modern Polish society under foreign rule (1864-1918) 9 Second Republic 10 World War II 11 People’s Republic of Poland 12 Third Republic 13 See also 14 Maps 15 References 16 Further reading 16.1 Published in Poland 17 External links

[edit] Prehistory and protohistory

Further information: Prehistory and protohistory of Poland

Humans have lived in the glaciation disrupted environment of north Central Europe for a long time. In prehistoric and protohistoric times, over the period of at least 800,000 years,^[1] the area of present-day Poland went through the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age stages of development, along with the nearby regions. Settled agricultural people have lived there for the past 7500 years, since their first arrival at the outset of the Neolithic period. Following the earlier La Tène and Roman influence cultures, the Slavic people have been in this territory for over 1500 years. They organized first into tribal units, and then combined into larger political structures.^[2]

[edit] Piast dynasty

Further information: Poland during the Piast dynasty

Władysław I the Elbow-high

Poland during the Piast dynasty is the period of the formation and establishment of Poland as a state and a nation. The historically recorded Polish state begins with the rule of Mieszko I of the Piast dynasty in the second half of the 10th century. Mieszko chose to be baptized in the Western Latin Rite in 966. Mieszko completed the unification of the West Slavic tribal lands fundamental to the new country’s existence. Following its emergence, the Polish nation was led by a series of rulers who converted the population to Christianity, created a strong kingdom and integrated Poland into the European culture. Mieszko’s son Bolesław I Chrobry established a Polish Church province, pursued territorial conquests and was officially crowned in 1025, becoming the first King of Poland. This was followed by a collapse of the monarchy and restoration under Casimir I. Casimir’s son Bolesław II the Bold became fatally involved in a conflict with the ecclesiastical authority, and was expelled from the country. After Bolesław III divided the country among his sons, internal fragmentation eroded the initial Piast monarchy structure in the 12th and 13th centuries. One of the regional Piast dukes invited the Teutonic Knights to help him fight the Baltic Prussian pagans, which caused centuries of Poland’s warfare with the Knights and then with the German Prussian state. The Kingdom was restored under Władysław I the Elbow-high, strengthened and expanded by his son Casimir III the Great. The western provinces of Silesia and Pomerania were lost after the fragmentation, and Poland began expanding to the east. The consolidation in the 14th century laid the base for, after the reigns of two members of the Angevin dynasty, the new powerful Kingdom of Poland that was to follow.^[3]

[edit] Jagiellon dynasty

Further information: Poland during the Jagiellon dynasty

Wawel Castle Renaissance courtyard

Beginning with the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila (Władysław II Jagiełło), the Jagiellon dynasty (1386–1572) formed the Polish–Lithuanian union. The partnership brought vast Lithuania-controlled Rus’ areas into Poland’s sphere of influence and proved beneficial for the Poles and Lithuanians, who coexisted and cooperated in one of the largest political entities in Europe for the next four centuries. In the Baltic Sea region, Poland’s struggle with the Teutonic Knights continued and included the Battle of Grunwald (1410) and in 1466 the milestone Peace of Thorn under King Casimir IV Jagiellon; the treaty created the future Duchy of Prussia. In the south, Poland confronted the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Tatars, and in the east helped Lithuania fight the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Poland was developing as a feudal state, with predominantly agricultural economy and an increasingly dominant landed nobility component. The Nihil novi act adopted by the Polish Sejm (parliament) in 1505, transferred most of the legislative power from the monarch to the Sejm. This event marked the beginning of the period known as “Golden Liberty“, when the state was ruled by the “free and equal” Polish nobility. Protestant Reformation movements made deep inroads into the Polish Christianity, which resulted in unique at that time in Europe policies of religious tolerance. The European Renaissance currents evoked in late Jagiellon Poland (kings Sigismund I the Old and Sigismund II Augustus) an immense cultural flowering. Poland’s and Lithuania’s territorial expansion included the far north region of Livonia.^[4][5]

[edit] Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569-1648)

Further information: History of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1648)

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at its greatest extent, after the Truce of Deulino (Dywilino) of 1619

The Union of Lublin of 1569 established the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a more closely unified federal state. The Union was largely run by the nobility, through the system of the central parliament and local assemblies, but led by elected kings. The beginning of the Commonwealth coincided with the period of Poland’s great power, civilizational advancement and prosperity. The Polish–Lithuanian Union had become an influential player in Europe and a vital cultural entity, spreading the Western culture eastward. In the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a huge state in central-eastern Europe, with an area approximating one million square kilometers. The Catholic Church embarked on an ideological counteroffensive and Counter-Reformation claimed many converts from Protestant circles. The Union of Brest split the Eastern Christians of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, assertive militarily under King Stephen Báthory, suffered from dynastic distractions during the reigns of the Vasa kings Sigismund III and Władysław IV. The Commonwealth fought wars with Russia, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, dealt with a series of Cossack uprisings. Allied with the Habsburg Monarchy, it did not directly participate in the Thirty Years’ War.^[6]

[edit] Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in decline (1648-1764)

John III Sobieski led the Commonwealth to its last victories

Further information: History of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1648–1764)

Beginning in the middle of the 17th century, the nobles’ democracy, subjected to devastating wars, falling into internal disorder and then anarchy, gradually declined, making the once powerful Commonwealth vulnerable to foreign intervention. From 1648, the Cossack Khmelnytsky Uprising engulfed the south and east, and was soon followed by a Swedish invasion, which raged through core Polish lands. Warfare with the Cossacks and Russia left Ukraine divided, with the eastern part, lost by the Commonwealth, becoming the Tsardom‘s dependency. John III Sobieski, fighting protracted wars with the Ottoman Empire, revived the Commonwealth’s military might once more, in process helping decisively in 1683 to deliver Vienna from a Turkish onslaught. From there, it all went downhill. The Commonwealth, subjected to almost constant warfare until 1720, suffered enormous population losses as well as massive damage to its economy and social structure. The government became ineffective because of large scale internal conflicts (e.g. Lubomirski’s Rokosz against John II Casimir and rebellious confederations), corrupted legislative processes and manipulation by foreign interests. The nobility class fell under control of a handful of powerful families with established territorial domains, the urban population and infrastructure fell into ruin, together with most peasant farms. The reigns of two kings of the Saxon Wettin dynasty, Augustus II and Augustus III, brought the Commonwealth further disintegration. The Great Northern War, a period seen by the contemporaries as a passing eclipse, may have been the fatal blow destined to bring down the Noble Republic. The Kingdom of Prussia became a strong regional power and took Silesia from the Habsburg Monarchy. The Commonwealth-Saxony personal union however gave rise to the emergence of the reform movement in the Commonwealth, and the beginnings of the Polish Enlightenment culture.^[7]

[edit] Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, reforms and loss of statehood (1764-1795)

Further information: History of Poland (1569–1795), Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

In 1791 the Great or Four-Year Sejm adopted the May 3 Constitution at Warsaw‘s Royal Castle

During the later part of the 18th century, the Commonwealth attempted fundamental internal reforms. The reform activity provoked hostile reaction and eventually military response on the part of the neighboring powers. The second half of the century brought improved economy and significant growth of the population. The most populous capital city of Warsaw replaced Danzig (Gdańsk) as the leading trade center, and the role of the more prosperous urban strata was increasing. The last decades of the independent Commonwealth existence were characterized by intense reform movements and far-reaching progress in the areas of education, intellectual life, art, and especially toward the end of the period, evolution of the social and political system. The royal election of 1764 resulted in the elevation of Stanisław August Poniatowski, a refined and worldly aristocrat connected to a major magnate faction, but hand-picked and imposed by Empress Catherine II of Russia, who expected Poniatowski to be her obedient follower. The King accordingly spent his reign torn between his desire to implement reforms necessary to save the state, and his perceived necessity of remaining in subordinate relationship with his Russian sponsors. The Bar Confederation of 1768 was a szlachta rebellion directed against Russia and the Polish king, fought to preserve Poland’s independence and in support of szlachta’s traditional causes. It was brought under control and followed in 1772 by the First Partition of the Commonwealth, a permanent encroachment on the outer Commonwealth provinces by the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and Habsburg Austria. The “Partition Sejm” under duress “ratified” the partition fait accompli, but in 1773 also established the Commission of National Education, a pioneering in Europe government education authority.^[8]

Kościuszko Uprising began with Tadeusz Kościuszko taking the oath, Kraków 1794

The long-lasting sejm convened by Stanisław August in 1788 is known as the Great, or Four-Year Sejm. The sejm‘s landmark achievement was the passing of the May 3 Constitution, the first in modern Europe singular pronouncement of a supreme law of the state. The reformist but moderate document, accused by detractors of French Revolution sympathies, soon generated strong opposition coming from the Commonwealth’s upper nobility conservative circles and Catherine II, determined to prevent a rebirth of the strong Commonwealth. The nobility’s Targowica Confederation appealed to the Empress for help and in May 1792 the Russian army entered the territory of the Commonwealth. The defensive war fought by the forces of the Commonwealth ended when the King, convinced of the futility of resistance, capitulated by joining the Targowica Confederation. The Confederation took over the government, but Russia and Prussia in 1793 arranged for and executed the Second Partition of the Commonwealth, which left the country with critically reduced territory, practically incapable of independent existence. The radicalized by the recent events reformers, in the still nominally Commonwealth area and in exile, were soon working on national insurrection preparations. Tadeusz Kościuszko was chosen as its leader; the popular general came from abroad and on March 24, 1794 in Cracow (Kraków) declared a national uprising under his supreme command. Kościuszko emancipated and enrolled in his army many peasants, but the hard-fought insurrection, strongly supported also by urban plebeian masses, proved incapable of generating the necessary foreign collaboration and aid. It ended suppressed by the forces of Russia and Prussia, with Warsaw captured in November. The third and final partition of the Commonwealth was undertaken again by all three partitioning powers, and in 1795 the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth effectively ceased to exist.^[9]

[edit] Partitioned Poland, period of armed resistance (1795-1864)

Further information: History of Poland (1795–1918)

The three Partitions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1772, 1793, and 1795)

While there was no separate Polish state at all, the idea of Polish independence was kept alive throughout the 19th century and led to more Polish uprisings and other warfare against the partitioning powers. Military efforts after the Partitions were first based on Polish alliances with post-revolutionary France. Henryk Dąbrowski’s Polish Legions fought in French campaigns outside of Poland, hoping that their involvement and contribution result in liberation of their Polish homeland. The Duchy of Warsaw, a small, semi-independent Polish state, was created in 1807 by Napoleon Bonaparte, following his defeat of Prussia. The Duchy’s military forces, led by Józef Poniatowski, participated in numerous campaigns, including the Polish–Austrian War of 1809, the French invasion of Russia in 1812, and the German campaign of 1813. After the defeat of Napoleon, a new European order was established at the Congress of Vienna. Adam Czartoryski became the leading advocate for the Polish national cause. The Congress implemented a new partition scheme, which took into account some of the gains realized by the Poles during the Napoleonic period. The Duchy of Warsaw was replaced with the Kingdom of Poland, a residual Polish state in personal union with the Russian Empire, ruled by the Russian tsar. East of the Kingdom, large areas of the former Commonwealth remained directly incorporated into the Empire; together with the Kingdom they were part of the Russian partition. There was a Prussian partition, with a portion of it separated as the Grand Duchy of Posen, and an Austrian partition. The newly-created Republic of Kraków was a tiny state under a joint supervision of the three partitioning powers. “Partitions” were the lands of the former Commonwealth, not actual administrative units.^[10]

Poniatowski‘s leap into the Elster to some epitomized Poland’s fate

The increasingly repressive policies of the partitioning powers led to Polish conspiracies, and in 1830 to the November Uprising in the Kingdom. The uprising developed into a full-scale war with Russia, but the leadership was taken over by the Polish conservative circles reluctant to challenge the Empire, and hostile to broadening the independence movement’s social base through measures such as land reform. Despite the significant resources mobilized and self-sacrifice of the participants, a series of missteps by several successive unwilling or incompetent chief commanders appointed by the Polish government ultimately led to the defeat of the insurgents by the Russian army. After the fall of the Uprising, thousands of former Polish combatants and other activists emigrated to Western Europe, where they were initially enthusiastically received. This element, known as the Great Emigration, soon dominated the Polish political and intellectual life. Together with the leaders of the independence movement, the exile community included the greatest Polish literary and artistic minds, including the Romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Cyprian Norwid, and composer Frédéric Chopin. Within the occupied and repressed Poland, some sought progress through self-improvement oriented activities known as organic work, others, in cooperation with the emigrant circles, organized conspiracies and prepared for the next armed insurrection.^[11]

Romuald Traugutt, the last “dictator” of the January Uprising

The planned national uprising, after authorities in the partitions had found out about secret preparations, ended in a fiasco in early 1846. In its most significant manifestation, the Kraków Uprising of February 1846, patriotic action was combined with revolutionary demands, but the result was the incorporation of the Republic of Kraków into the Austrian partition. Peasant discontent was taken advantage of by the Austrian authorities, who incited the villagers against noble-dominated insurgent units; it led to the Galician slaughter, a violent anti-feudal rebellion, beyond the intended scope of the provocation. A new wave of Polish military and other involvement, in the partitions and in other parts of Europe, soon took place in the context of the 1848 Spring of Nations revolutions. In particular, the Berlin events precipitated the Greater Poland Uprising, where prominent role was played by the by then largely enfranchised in Prussia peasants. A renewal of popular liberation activities took place in 1860-1861; during the large scale demonstrations in Warsaw the Russian forces inflicted numerous casualties on the civilian participants. The “Red”, or left-wing conspiracy faction, which promoted peasant enfranchisement and cooperated with Russian revolutionaries, became involved in immediate preparations for a national uprising. The “White”, or right-wing faction, inclined to cooperate with the Russian authorities, countered with partial reform proposals. The conservative leader of the Kingdom’s government Aleksander Wielopolski, in order to cripple the manpower potential of the Reds, arranged for a partial selective conscription of young Poles for the Russian army, which hastened the outbreak of the hostilities. The January Uprising, joined and led after the initial period by the Whites, was fought by partisan units against an overwhelming enemy advantage. The warfare was limited to the Kingdom and lasted from January 1863 to the spring of 1864, when Romuald Traugutt, the dedicated last supreme commander of the insurgence, was captured by the tsarist police.^[12]

On March 2, 1864, the Russian authority — compelled by the uprising to compete for the loyalty of Polish peasants — officially published an enfranchisement decree in the Kingdom, along the lines of an earlier insurgent land reform proclamation. The act created the conditions necessary for the development of the capitalist system on central Polish lands. At the time when the futility of armed resistance without external support was realized by most Poles, the various segments of the Polish society were undergoing deep and far-reaching social, economic and cultural transformations.^[13]

[edit] Partitioned Poland, formation of modern Polish society under foreign rule (1864-1918)

Further information: History of Poland (1795–1918)

Maria Konopnicka was one of the authors representative of the socially engaged attitudes of the times

Following the failure of the last January Uprising of 1863, the Polish nation, subjected within the territories under the Russian and Prussian administrations to still stricter controls and increased persecution, preserved its identity in nonviolent ways. After the Uprising Congress Poland, downgraded in official usage from the Kingdom of Poland to the Vistula Land, was more fully integrated into Russia proper, but not entirely obliterated. The Russian and German languages were respectively imposed in all public communication and the Catholic Church was not spared from severe repression. On the other hand the Galicia region in western Ukraine and southern Poland, economically and socially backward, but under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy rule increasingly allowed limited autonomy, experienced gradual relaxation of authoritarian policies and even a Polish cultural revival. Positivism replaced Romanticism as the leading intellectual, social and literary trend.^[14]

“Organic work” social activities consisted of self-help organizations that promoted economic advancement and worked on improving competitiveness of Polish-held business entities, whether industrial, agricultural, or other. New commercial methods and ways of generating higher productivity were discussed and implemented through trade associations and special interest groups, while Polish banking and cooperative financial institutions made necessary business loans available. The other major area of organic work concern was education and intellectual development of the common people. Many libraries and reading rooms were established in small towns and villages, and numerous printed periodicals reflected the growing interest in popular education. Scientific and educational societies were active in a number of cities.^[15]

19th century factory building in Łódź, a great textile manufacturing center

Economic and social changes, such as land reform and industrialization, combined with the effects of foreign domination, altered the centuries old social structure of the Polish society. Among the newly emergent strata were wealthy industrialists and financiers, distinct from the old but still strong landed aristocracy, the intelligentsia, an educated, professional or business middle class, often originating from gentry alienated from their rural possessions and from urban people, and industrial proletariat, the new underprivileged class, usually poor peasants or townspeople forced by deteriorating conditions to migrate and search for work in urban centers in countries of their origin or abroad. Millions of residents of the former Commonwealth of various ethnic backgrounds worked or settled in Europe and in North and South America.^[14]

Roman Dmowski exerted strong ideological influence, but political power was to be monopolized by Józef Piłsudski

The changes were partial and gradual, and the degree of the fast-paced in some areas industrialization and capitalist development on Polish lands lagged behind the advanced regions of western Europe. The three partitions developed different economies, and were economically integrated with their mother states more than with each other. In the 1870s-1890s, large scale socialist, nationalist and agrarian movements of great ideological fervor and corresponding political parties became established in partitioned Poland and Lithuania. The major minority ethnic groups of the former Commonwealth, such as Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarusians or Jews, were getting involved in their own national movements and plans, which met with disapproval on the part of those ethnically Polish independence activists, who counted on an eventual rebirth of the Commonwealth. Around the turn of the century the Young Poland cultural movement, centered on Galicia and taking advantage of the conducive to liberal expression milieu there, was the source of Poland’s finest artistic and literary productions.^[14]

The 1905 Russian Revolution arose new waves of Polish unrest, political maneuvering, strikes and rebellion, with Roman Dmowski and Józef Piłsudski active as leaders of the nationalist and socialist factions respectively. As the authorities reestablished control within the Empire, the revolt in the Kingdom, placed under martial law, had withered as well, leaving some tsarist concessions in the areas of national and workers’ rights, including Polish representation in the newly-created Russian Duma. Many of the acquired gains were however soon rolled back, which coupled with intensified Germanization in the Prussian partition, left the Austrian Galicia as the most amenable to patriotic action territory.^[14]

“The Commandant” – Piłsudski with his men in 1915

After the outbreak of World War I, which confronted the partitioning powers against each other, Piłsudski’s paramilitary units stationed in Galicia were turned into the Polish Legions, and as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Army fought on the Russian front.^[16]

World War I and the political turbulence that was sweeping Europe in 1914 offered the Polish nation hopes for regaining independence. On the outbreak of war the Poles found themselves conscripted into the armies of Germany, Austria and Russia, and forced to fight each other in a war that was not theirs. Although many Poles sympathized with France and Britain, they found it hard to fight for their ally, Russia. They also had little sympathy for the Germans. Total deaths from 1914–18, military and civilian, within the 1919–1939 borders, were estimated at 1,128,000.^[17] By the end of World War I Poland had seen the defeat or retreat of all three partitioning powers.^[16]

As the area of Congress Poland became occupied by the Central Powers, with the act of November 5, 1916 the Kingdom of Poland (Królestwo Regencyjne) was recreated by Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary on formerly Russian-controlled territory. This new puppet state existed until November 1918, when it was replaced by the newly established Republic of Poland. The independence of Poland had been campaigned for in the West by Dmowski and Ignacy Paderewski. With Woodrow Wilson’s support, Polish independence was officially endorsed by the Entente Powers, on whose fronts sizable armies of Polish volunteers had been mobilized and fought, in June 1918. On the ground in Poland in October-November the final upsurge of the push for independence was taking place, while Germany decided to withdraw its forces from Warsaw and released imprisoned Piłsudski, who arrived in Warsaw on November 10.^[16]

[edit] Second Republic

Further information: History of Poland (1918–1939), Second Polish Republic

Polish–Soviet War, defenses near Warsaw, August 1920

After more than a century of rule by its neighbors, Poland regained its independence in 1918, internationally recognized in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles. The Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles treaty that followed resolved the issue of Poland’s western border with Germany, including the Polish Corridor, which gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea, and the separate status of the Free City of Danzig. Plebiscites in southern East Prussia^[18] and Upper Silesia were provided for, while the issues of other northern, eastern and southern borders remained undetermined, inviting military action.^[19]

Of the several border-settling conflicts that ensued, the Polish–Soviet War of 1919-1921 was the confrontation fought on a very large scale. Piłsudski had entertained far-reaching anti-Russian cooperative designs for Eastern Europe, and in 1919 the Polish forces pushed eastward into Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine (previously a theater of the Polish–Ukrainian War), taking advantage of the Russian preoccupation with the civil war. By June 1920, the Polish armies were past Vilnius, Minsk and (allied with the Directorate of Ukraine) reached Kiev,^[20] but then the massive Bolshevik counteroffensive moved the Poles out of most of Ukraine and on the northern front arrived at the outskirts of Warsaw. The seemingly certain disaster was averted in August by the combination of Piłsudski’s military skills and a dedicated national defense effort.^[19]

Wincenty Witos (right) and Ignacy Daszyński headed a wartime cabinet in 1920. Witos was an agrarian party leader and a centrist politician, later persecuted under the Sanation regime.

The Russian armies were separated, defeated and pushed back, which forced Lenin and the Soviet leadership to abandon for the time being their strategic objective of linking up with the German and other European revolution-minded comrades (Lenin’s hope of generating support for the Red Army in Poland had already failed to materialize). Piłsudski’s seizure of Vilnius in October 1920 poisoned the Polish-Lithuanian relations for the remainder of the interwar period.^[21] Piłsudski’s planned East European federation of states was incompatible with his assumption of Polish domination and with the encroachment, at the time of rising national movements, on the neighboring peoples’ lands and aspirations; as such it was doomed to failure.^[22][23] A larger federated structure was also opposed by Dmowski’s National Democrats. Their representative at the Peace of Riga talks opted for leaving Minsk area on the Soviet side of the border, not wanting the ethnically Polish element overly diluted.^[24] The successful outcome of the war gave Poland a false sense of being a major and self-sufficient military power, and the government a justification for trying to resolve international problems through imposed unilateral solutions.^[22][25] The interwar period’s Polish territorial and ethnic policies contributed to bad relations with most of Poland’s neighbors and to uneasy cooperation with the more distant centers of power, including France, Britain and the League of Nations.^[22][25] The Treaty of Riga of 1921 settled the eastern border, preserving for Poland, at the cost of partitioning the ethnic Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, a good portion of the old Commonwealth‘s eastern lands.^[19]

Funeral of President Gabriel Narutowicz

The rapidly growing population of Poland within the new boundaries was ¾ agricultural and ¼ urban, with Polish being the primary language of ⅔ of the inhabitants. A constitution was adopted in 1921. Due to the insistence of the National Democrats, worried about the potential power of Piłsudski if elected, it introduced limited prerogatives for the presidency.^[19]

What followed was the Second Republic’s short (1921–1926) and turbulent period of constitutional order and parliamentary democracy. The legislature remained fragmented and lacking stable majorities, governments changed frequently, corruption was commonplace. The open-minded Gabriel Narutowicz was constitutionally elected president by the National Assembly in 1922, but deemed not pure enough by the nationalist right wing, was assassinated. Poland had suffered under a plethora of economic calamities, but there were also signs of progress and stabilization (Władysław Grabski‘s economically competent government lasted for almost two years).^[26] The achievements of the democratic period, such as the establishment, strengthening or expansion of the various governmental and civil society structures and integrative processes necessary for normal functioning of the reunited state and nation, were too easily overlooked. Lurking on the sidelines was the disgusted army upper corps, not willing to subject itself to civilian control, but ready to follow its equally dissatisfied, at that time retired, legendary chief.^[27]

Piłsudski’s May Coup of 1926 defined Poland’s political reality for the years leading to World War II

On May 12, 1926, Piłsudski, prompted by mutinous units loyal to him and intent on preventing the three-time prime minister Wincenty Witos of the peasant Polish People’s Party from forming another coalition, staged a military overthrow of the Polish government, confronting President Stanisław Wojciechowski and overpowering the troops loyal to him. Piłsudski was supported by several leftist factions, who ensured the success of his coup by blocking during the fighting the railway transportation of government forces, but the authoritarian “Sanation” regime that he was to lead for the rest of his life and that stayed in power until World War II, was neither leftist, nor overtly fascist. Political institutions and parties were allowed to function, which was combined with electoral manipulation and strong-arming of those not willing to cooperate into submission. Eventually persistent opponents of the regime, many of the leftist persuasion, were subjected to long staged trials and harsh sentences, or detained in camps for political prisoners. Rebellious peasants, striking industrial workers and nationalist Ukrainians became targets of ruthless military pacification, other minorities were harassed.^[28] Piłsudski, conscious of Poland’s precarious international situation, signed non-aggression pacts with the Soviet Union in 1932 and with Nazi Germany in 1934.^[29]

Krasiński Square in prewar Warsaw

The mainstream of the Polish society was not affected by the repressions of the Sanation authorities, many enjoyed the relative prosperity (the economy improved between 1926 and 1929)^[30] and supported the government. Polish independence had boosted the development of thriving culture and intellectual achievement was high, but the Great Depression brought huge unemployment and increased social tensions, including rising antisemitism. The reconstituted Polish state had had only 20 years of relative stability and uneasy peace between the two wars. A major economic transformation and national industrial development plan led by Minister Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski, the main architect of the Gdynia seaport project, was in progress at the time of the outbreak of the war.^[31] The lack of sufficient domestic or foreign investment funding precluded by that time the level of industrial development necessary for creating modern armed forces for successful self-defense. The regime of Piłsudski’s “colonels” left in power after the marshal’s death had neither the vision nor resources to cope with the deteriorating situation in Europe. The government (foreign policy conduct was the responsibility of Józef Beck) undertook opportunistic hostile actions against Lithuania and Czechoslovakia, while it failed to control the increasingly fractured situation at home, where fringe groups and extreme nationalist circles were getting more outspoken (one Camp of National Unity was connected to the new strongman, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły).^[32] In 1939 the Polish government rejected the German and Soviet offers of forming alliances on terms which would amount to an end or severe curtailment of Poland’s sovereignty; Hitler abrogated the Polish-German pact.^[33] Before the war broke out Poland entered into a full military alliance with Britain and France; the western powers had insufficient resources and lacked the will to confront Nazi Germany. On August 23, 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, which secretly provided for the dismemberment of Poland into Nazi and Soviet-controlled zones.^[34]

[edit] World War II

Further information: History of Poland (1939–1945)

German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelling Westerplatte on September 1, 1939

On September 1, 1939 Hitler ordered his troops into Poland. Poland had signed a pact with Britain and France and the two western powers soon declared a war on Germany, but remained rather inactive and extended no aid to the attacked country. On September 17, the Soviet troops moved in and took control of most of the areas of eastern Poland having significant Ukrainian and Belarusian populations under the terms of the German-Soviet agreement. While Poland’s military forces were fighting the invading armies, Poland’s top government officials left the country. Among the military operations that held out the longest (until late September/early October) were the Defense of Warsaw, the Defense of Hel and the resistance of the Polesie Group.

Fighting the initial “September Campaign” of World War II was the most significant Polish contribution to the allied war effort. The nearly one million Polish soldiers mobilized significantly delayed Hitler’s attack on Western Europe, planned for 1939. When the Nazi offensive did happen, the delay caused it to be less effective, a possibly crucial factor in the case of the defense of Britain.^[35]

No. 303 Fighter Squadron pilots became famous for fighting the Germans during the Battle of Britain

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Poland was completely occupied by German troops.

The Poles formed an underground resistance movement and a Polish government in exile, first in Paris and later in London, which was recognized by the Soviet Union. During World War II about 300,000 Poles fought under the Soviet command, and about 200,000 went into combat on western fronts in units loyal to the Polish government in exile.^[36]

In April 1943, the Soviet Union broke relations with the Polish government in exile after the German military announced that they had discovered mass graves of murdered Polish army officers at Katyn, in the USSR. The Soviets claimed that the Poles had insulted them by requesting that the Red Cross investigate these reports.

Occupied Warsaw in 1943 was the scene of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, fought by desperate Jewish insurgents, whose people were being removed and exterminated, against impossible odds.

General Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of the Polish Government in Exile and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, shortly before his death

At the time of the western Allies’ increasing cooperation with the Soviet Union, the standing and influence of the Polish government in exile were seriously diminished by the death of its most prominent leader — Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski — on July 4, 1943.

In July 1944 the Soviet Red Army and the People’s Army of Poland controlled by the Soviets entered Poland, and through protracted fighting in 1944 and 1945 defeated the Germans, losing 600,000 of their soldiers. Initially a communist-controlled “Polish Committee of National Liberation” was established in Lublin.

The greatest single instance of armed struggle in the occupied Poland and a major political event of World War II was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The uprising, in which most of the Warsaw population participated, was largely instigated by the underground Armia Krajowa, the Home Army, in an attempt to establish a non-communist Polish administration ahead of the approaching Red Army. The uprising was planned with the expectation that the Soviet forces, who had arrived in the course of their offensive and were waiting on the other side of the Vistula River in full force, would help in battle over Warsaw. However, the Soviets stopped their advance at the Vistula and were mostly passive as the Germans brutally suppressed the forces of the pro-western, loyal to the government in exile Polish underground.

Jewish prisoners liberated by Polish soldiers in the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising

The bitterly fought uprising lasted for two months and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and expelled. After a hopeless surrender on the part of the Poles, the Germans carried out Hitler’s order that “there not be two bricks standing” in Warsaw, systematically leveling the city. They retreated only in January 1945 when the Soviets resumed their offensive.

Modern research indicates that during the war about 5 million Polish citizens were killed, including 3 million Polish Jews.^[37] According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 1.9 to two million ethnic Poles and 3 million Polish Jews were killed,^[38] and 2.5 million were deported to Germany for forced labor or to German extermination camps such as Auschwitz. This Jewish loss of life, together with the numerically less significant waves of displacement during the war and emigration after the war and following the 1968 Polish political crisis, put an end to several centuries of large scale, well-established Jewish settlement and presence in Poland.

Polish generals on the Eastern Front

From 1939 to 1941, 1.45 million people inhabiting Eastern Poland (Kresy) were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles and 7.4% were Jews. Recently Polish historians, based mostly on queries in Soviet archives, estimated the number of Polish citizen deaths at the hands of the Soviets at about 350,000. In 1941–1943 Ukrainian nationalists (OUN and Ukrainian Insurgent Army) massacred more than 100,000 Poles in Galicia and Volhynia.

The Soviet government retained most of the territories captured as a result of the 1939 German-Soviet pact (now western Ukraine, western Belarus and part of Lithuania around Vilnius). Poland was compensated with parts of Silesia including Breslau (Wrocław), of Pomerania including Stettin (Szczecin), and of East Prussia, along with Danzig (Gdańsk), collectively referred to as the “Recovered Territories“, which were incorporated into the reconstituted Polish state. Most of the German population there was expelled to Germany.

Approximately 90% of Polish war losses (Jews and Gentiles) were the victims of prisons, death camps, raids, executions, annihilation of ghettos, epidemics, starvation, excessive work and ill treatment. So many Poles were sent to concentration camps that virtually every family had someone close to them who had been tortured or murdered there.

Warsaw destroyed, January 1945

There were one million war orphans and over 500,000 war disabled. The country lost 38% of its national assets (Britain lost 0.8%, France 1.5%). Half the prewar Poland was expropriated by the Soviet Union, including the two great cultural centers of Lwów and Wilno. Many Poles could not return to the country for which they had fought because they belonged to the “wrong” political group, or came from prewar eastern Poland incorporated into the Soviet Union (see Polish population transfers (1944–1946)), or having fought in the West were warned not to return because of the high risk of persecution. Others were arrested, tortured and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for belonging to the Home Army (see Cursed soldiers), or persecuted because of having fought on the western front.^[39] Although technically “victors”, they were not allowed to partake in victory celebrations.

With Germany’s defeat, as the reestablished Polish state was shifted west to the area between the Oder-Neisse and Curzon lines, the Germans who had not fled were expelled. Of those who remained, many chose to emigrate to post-war Germany. Of the surviving Jews, many chose or felt compelled to emigrate. Many Ukrainians remaining in Poland were forcibly moved to Soviet Ukraine (see Repatriation of Ukrainians from Poland to the Soviet Union), and to the new territories in northern and western Poland under Operation Vistula. The emerging communist Poland ended up with a mainly homogeneous, ethnically Polish population. The remaining members of the minorities were not encouraged, by the authorities or by their neighbors, to emphasize their ethnic identity.

[edit] People’s Republic of Poland

Further information: History of Poland (1945–1989), People’s Republic of Poland

At the end of World War II, the gray territories were transferred from Poland to the Soviet Union, and the pink territories from Germany to Poland. The post-war Poland consists of the white and pink portions.

In June 1945, following the February Yalta Conference, a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity was formed; the United States recognized it the next month. A national referendum arranged for by the communist Polish Workers’ Party was used to legitimize its dominance and claim widespread support for the party’s policies.^[40] Although the Yalta agreement called for free elections, those held in January 1947 were controlled by the communists. A Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa) was created under the communist Polish United Workers’ Party rule after a brief period of coalition government. During the most oppressive Stalinist period, many thousands of perceived opponents of the regime were arbitrarily tried and large numbers executed. The People’s Republic was led by discredited Moscow‘s operatives such as Bolesław Bierut and Konstantin Rokossovsky.^[41][42] The government’s economic high priority was the development of militarily useful heavy industry. State-run institutions, collectivization and cooperative entities were imposed, while even small-scale private enterprises were being eradicated. Great strides however were made in the areas of universal public education (including elimination of adult illiteracy), health care and recreational amenities for working people.^[43] Many historic sites, including central districts of war-destroyed Warsaw and Gdańsk (Danzig), were rebuilt at a great cost.^[44] The Polish government in exile existed until 1990, although its influence was degraded.

Władysław Gomułka‘s communist career was interrupted when he was removed and imprisoned by the Stalinist authorities

In October 1956, after the 20th Soviet Party Congress in Moscow ushered in de-Stalinization and riots by workers in Poznań ensued, there was a shakeup in the communist regime. While retaining most traditional communist economic and social aims, the regime led by the Polish Communist Party‘s First Secretary Władysław Gomułka began to liberalize internal life in Poland.

In 1965, the Conference of Polish Bishops issued the Letter of Reconciliation of the Polish Bishops to the German Bishops. In 1966, the celebrations of the 1,000th anniversary of the Baptism of Poland led by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński and other bishops turned into a huge demonstration of the power and popularity of the Polish Catholic Church.

Sophisticated cultural life developed under Gomułka and his successors, even if the creative process had often been compromised by state censorship. Significant productions were accomplished in fields such as literature, theater, cinema and music, among others. Journalism of veiled understanding and native varieties of popular trends and styles of western mass culture were well represented. Uncensored information and works generated by émigré circles were conveyed by a variety of channels, the Radio Free Europe being of foremost importance.^[45]

In 1968, the liberalizing trend was reversed when student demonstrations were suppressed and an anti-Zionist campaign initially directed against Gomułka supporters within the party eventually led to the emigration of much of Poland’s remaining Jewish population. In August 1968, the Polish People’s Army took part in the infamous Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Communist aspirations were symbolized by the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw

In 1970, the governments of Poland and West Germany signed a treaty which normalized their relations and in which the Federal Republic recognized the post-war de facto borders between Poland and East Germany.^[46]

In December 1970, disturbances and strikes in the port cities of Gdańsk (Danzig), Gdynia, and Szczecin (Stettin), triggered by a price increase for essential consumer goods, reflected deep dissatisfaction with living and working conditions in the country. Edward Gierek replaced Gomułka as First Secretary.

Fueled by large infusions of Western credit, Poland’s economic growth rate was one of the world’s highest during the first half of the 1970s. But much of the borrowed capital was misspent, and the centrally planned economy was unable to use the new resources effectively. The growing debt burden became insupportable in the late 1970s, and economic growth had become negative by 1979. The Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) established in 1976 consisted of dissident intellectuals willing to openly support industrial workers struggling with the authorities.^[47]

In October 1978, the Archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Józef Wojtyła, became Pope John Paul II, head of the Roman Catholic Church. Polish Catholics rejoiced at the elevation of a Pole to the papacy and greeted his June 1979 visit to Poland with an outpouring of emotion.

On July 1, 1980, with the Polish foreign debt at more than $20 billion, the government made another attempt to increase meat prices. A chain reaction of strikes virtually paralyzed the Baltic coast by the end of August and, for the first time, closed most coal mines in Silesia. Poland was entering into an extended crisis that would change the course of its future development.

1980 strike at Gdańsk Shipyard, birthplace of Solidarity

On August 31, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, led by an electrician named Lech Wałęsa, signed a 21-point agreement with the government that ended their strike. Similar agreements were signed at Szczecin and in Silesia. The key provision of these agreements was the guarantee of the workers’ right to form independent trade unions and the right to strike. After the Gdańsk Agreement was signed, a new national union movement “Solidarity” swept Poland.

The discontent underlying the strikes was intensified by revelations of widespread corruption and mismanagement within the Polish state and party leadership. In September 1980, Gierek was replaced by Stanisław Kania as First Secretary.

Alarmed by the rapid deterioration of the PZPR’s authority following the Gdańsk agreement, the Soviet Union proceeded with a massive military buildup along Poland’s border in December 1980. In February 1981, Defense Minister Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski assumed the position of Prime Minister, and in October 1981, was named First Secretary of the Communist Party. At the first Solidarity national congress in September–October 1981, Lech Wałęsa was elected national chairman of the union.

Pope John Paul II in Poland in 1987

On December 12–13, the regime declared martial law, under which the army and ZOMO riot police were used to crush the union. Virtually all Solidarity leaders and many affiliated intellectuals were arrested or detained. The United States and other Western countries responded to martial law by imposing economic sanctions against the Polish regime and against the Soviet Union. Unrest in Poland continued for several years thereafter.

Having achieved some semblance of stability, the Polish regime in several stages relaxed and then rescinded martial law. By December 1982, martial law was suspended, and a small number of political prisoners (including Wałęsa) were released. Although martial law formally ended in July 1983 and a general amnesty was enacted, several hundred political prisoners remained in jail.

In July 1984, another general amnesty was declared, and two years later, the government had released nearly all political prisoners. The authorities continued, however, to harass dissidents and Solidarity activists. Solidarity remained proscribed and its publications banned. Independent publications were censored.

The government’s inability to forestall Poland’s economic decline led to waves of strikes across the country in April, May and August 1988. With the Soviet Union increasingly destabilized, in the late 1980s the government was forced to negotiate with Solidarity in the Polish Round Table Negotiations. The resulting Polish legislative elections in 1989 became one of the important events marking the fall of communism in Poland.

[edit] Third Republic

Further information: History of Poland (1989–present), Politics of Poland

Round-table negotiations 1989

The “round-table” talks with the opposition began in February 1989. These talks produced the Round Table Agreement in April for partly-open National Assembly elections. The failure of the communists at the polls produced a political crisis. The agreement called for a communist president, and on July 19, the National Assembly, with the support of a number of Solidarity deputies, elected General Wojciech Jaruzelski to that office. However, two attempts by the communists to form governments failed.

On August 19, President Jaruzelski asked journalist/Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to form a government; on September 12, the Sejm (national legislature) voted approval of Prime Minister Mazowiecki and his cabinet. For the first time in more than 40 years, Poland had a government led by noncommunists.

Territory and border changes of Germany and Poland during the 20th century

In December 1989, the Sejm approved the government’s reform program to transform the Polish economy rapidly from centrally planned to free-market, amended the constitution to eliminate references to the “leading role” of the Communist Party, and renamed the country the “Republic of Poland.” The Polish United Workers’ (Communist) Party dissolved itself in January 1990, creating in its place a new party, Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland.

In October 1990, the constitution was amended to curtail the term of President Jaruzelski.

In the early 1990s, Poland made great progress towards achieving a fully democratic government and a market economy. In November 1990, Lech Wałęsa was elected president for a five-year term. In December Wałęsa became the first popularly elected President of Poland.

Poland’s first free parliamentary elections were held in 1991. More than 100 parties participated, and no single party received more than 13% of the total vote. In 1993 parliamentary elections the “post-communist” Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) received the largest share of votes. In 1993 the Soviet Northern Group of Forces finally left Poland.

In November 1995, Poland held its second post-war free presidential elections. SLD leader Aleksander Kwaśniewski defeated Wałęsa by a narrow margin—51.7% to 48.3%.

Castle Square in Warsaw‘s rebuilt Old Town

In 1997 parliamentary elections two parties with roots in the Solidarity movement — Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) and the Freedom Union (UW) — won 261 of the 460 seats in the Sejm and formed a coalition government. In April 1997, the new Constitution of Poland was finalized, and in July put into effect, replacing the previously used amended communist statute.

Poland joined NATO in 1999.

In the presidential election of 2000, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the incumbent former leader of the SLD, was re-elected in the first round of voting. After September 2001 parliamentary elections SLD (a successor of the communist party) formed a coalition with the agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL) and the leftist Labor Union (UP).

Current president Bronislaw Komorowski as the Marshal of the Sejm

Poland joined the European Union in May 2004. Both President Kwaśniewski and the government were vocal in their support for this cause. The only party decidedly opposed to EU entry was the populist right-wing League of Polish Families (LPR).

After the fall of communism the government policy of guaranteed full employment had ended and many large unprofitable state enterprises were closed or restructured. This and other economic woes of the transition period caused the unemployment to be at times as high as 20%. With the EU access, the gradual opening of West European labor markets to Polish workers, combined with the domestic economic growth, led to marked improvement in the employment situation (currently at about 10%) in Poland.^[48]

September’s 2005 parliamentary election was expected to produce a coalition of two center-right parties, PiS (Law and Justice) and PO (Civic Platform). During the bitter campaign PiS overtook PO, gaining 27% of votes cast and becaming the largest party in the Sejm, ahead of PO with 24%. In the presidential elections in October the early favorite, Donald Tusk, leader of the PO, was beaten 54% to 46% in the second round by the PiS candidate Lech Kaczyński. Coalition talks ensued simultaneously with the presidential elections, but negotiations ended up in a stalemate and the PO decided to go into opposition. PiS formed a minority government which relied on the support of smaller populist and agrarian parties (Samoobrona, LPR) to govern. This became a formal coalition, but its deteriorating state made early parliamentary elections necessary.

Poles hope for historically unprecedented stability within the European Union

In the 2007 parliamentary elections, the Civic Platform was most successful and the government of Donald Tusk, the chairman of PO, was formed. PO governs in a parliamentary majority coalition with the smaller Polish People’s Party (PSL).

In the current great worldwide economic downturn, triggered and exemplified in particular by the 2008 USA collapse and bailout of the banking system, the Polish economy has weathered the crisis, in comparison with many European and other countries, relatively unscathed.^[49]

The social price paid by the Poles for the implementation of liberal free market economic policies has been the sharply more inequitable distribution of wealth and the associated impoverishment of large segments of the society.^[50]

Poland’s president Lech Kaczyński and all aboard were killed in a plane crash on April 10, 2010 in western Russia. President Kaczyński and other prominent Poles were on the way to the Katyn massacre anniversary commemoration.

In the second final round of the Polish presidential election on July 4, 2010, Bronisław Komorowski, Acting President, Marshal of the Sejm and a Civic Platform politician, defeated Jarosław Kaczyński by 53% to 47%.

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History of Albania
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Origins
Illyricum (Roman province)
Albania in the Middle Ages
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Principality of Arbër
Kingdom of Albania
Albanian Principalities in Middle Ages
League of Lezhë
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Massacre of the Albanian Beys
Albanian National Awakening
Albanian Revolts of 1833-1839
Albanian Revolt of 1843–1844
Albanian Revolt of 1847
League of Prizren
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Albanian Declaration of Independence
Provisional Government of Albania
Albania during the Balkan Wars
Principality of Albania
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The History of Albania emerges from the prehistoric stage from the 4th century BC, with early records of Illyria in Greco-Roman historiography. The modern territory of Albania has no counterpart in antiquity, comprising parts of the Roman provinces of Dalmatia (southern Illyricum), Macedonia (particularly Epirus Nova), and Moesia Superior. The territory remained under Roman (Byzantine) control until the Slavic migrations of the 7th century, and was integrated into the Bulgarian Empire in the 9th century.

The territorial nucleus of the Albanian state forms in the Middle Ages, as the Principality of Arbër and the Kingdom of Albania. The first records of the Albanian people as a distinct ethnicity also date to this period. The area was conquered in the 15th century by the Ottoman Empire and remained under Ottoman control as part of the Rumelia province until 1912, when the first independent Albanian state was declared. The formation of an Albanian national consciousness dates to the later 19th century and is part of the larger phenomenon of rise of nationalism under the Ottoman Empire. A short-lived monarchy (1914–1925) was succeeded by an even shorter-lived first Albanian Republic (1925–1928), to be replaced by another monarchy (1928–1939), which was conquered into Fascist Italy during World War II. After the collapse of the Axis powers, Albania became a communist state, the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania, which for the most part of its duration was dominated by Enver Hoxha (d. 1985). Hoxha’s political heir Ramiz Alia oversaw the disintegration of the “Hoxhaist” state during the wider collapse of the Eastern Bloc in the later 1980s.

The communist regime collapsed in 1990, and the Republic of Albania was founded in 1991 and the former communist party was routed in elections March 1992, amid economic collapse and social unrest. Further crisis during the 1990s, peaking in the 1997 Lottery Uprising, led to mass emigration of Albanians, mostly to Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Germany and to North America during the 1990s. Albania became a full member of NATO in 2009. The country is applying to join the European Union.

Contents [hide] 1 Prehistory 2 Antiquity 3 Roman Era 4 Christianization 5 Middle Ages 5.1 Barbarian invasions and Early Middle Ages 5.2 Late Middle Ages 6 Ottoman rule 6.1 Birth of nationalism 7 20th century 7.1 World War I and its effects 7.2 World War II and the rise of communism 7.3 Communist rule 7.4 1990s 8 Recent history (2001 to present) 9 See also 10 References 11 External links

[edit] Prehistory

Main article: Prehistoric Balkans

The Illyrians derive from early Indo-European presence in western Balkan Peninsula. Their formation can be assumed to coincide with the beginning Iron Age in the Balkans, during the early 1st millennium BC.^[1]

Archaeologists associate the Illyrians with the Hallstatt culture, an Iron Age people noted for production of iron, bronze swords with winged-shaped handles, and domestication of horses. It is impossible to delineate Illyrian tribes from Paleo-Balkans in a strict linguistic sense, but areas classically included under “Illyrian” for the Balkans Iron Age include the area of the Danube, Sava, and Morava rivers to the Adriatic Sea and the Shar Mountains.

[edit] Antiquity

Main articles: Illyria and Illyrians

The territory of Albania in antiquity was mainly inhabited by Illyrian tribes,^[2] who, like other ancient people, were subdivided into tribes and clans.^[3]The region was also inhabited by Bryges,^[4] a Phrygian people and the Chaones, an ancient Greek people.

The Illyrians (Ancient Greek: Ἰλλυριοί; Latin: Illyrii or Illyri) were a group of tribes who inhabited the Western Balkans during classical antiquity. The territory the tribes covered came to be known as Illyria to Greek and Roman authors, corresponding roughly to the area between Adriatic sea in west, Drava river in North, Morava river in east and the mouth of Vjosë river in south.^[5][6]The first account of Illyrian peoples comes from Periplus or Coastal passage an ancient Greek text of the middle of the 4th century BC.^[7]

[edit] Roman Era

Main articles: Macedonia (Roman province) and Illyricum

The Roman province of Illyricum or^[8][9] Illyris Romana or Illyris Barbara or Illyria Barbara replaced most of the region of Illyria. It stretched from the Drilon river in modern Albania to Istria (Croatia) in the west and to the Sava river (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in the north. Salona (near modern Split in Croatia) functioned as its capital.The regions which it included changed through the centuries though a great part of ancient Illyria remained part of Illyricum. South Illyria became Epirus Nova, part of the Roman province of Macedonia. In 357 AD the region was part of the Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum one of four large praetorian prefectures into which the Late Roman Empire was divided. By 395 AD dioceses in which the region was divided were the Diocese of Dacia (as Pravealitana), and the Diocese of Macedonia (as Epirus Nova). Most of the region of modern Albania corresponds to the Epirus Nova.

[edit] Christianization

Christianity came to Epirus nova, then part of the Roman province of Macedonia.^[10] Since the first and second century AD, Christianity had become the established religion in Byzantium, supplanting pagan polytheism and eclipsing for the most part the humanistic world outlook and institutions inherited from the Greek and Roman civilizations.

When the Roman Empire was divided into eastern and western halves in A.D. 395, Illyria east of the Drinus River (Drina between Bosnia and Serbia), including the lands that now form Albania, were administered by the Eastern Empire but were ecclesiastically dependent on Rome. But, though the country was in the fold of Byzantium, Christians in the region remained under the jurisdiction of the Roman pope until 732. In that year the iconoclast Byzantine emperor Leo III, angered by archbishops of the region because they had supported Rome in the Iconoclastic Controversy, detached the church of the province from the Roman pope and placed it under the patriarch of Constantinople. When the Christian church split in 1054 between the East and Rome,the region of southern Albania retained its ties to Constantinople while the north reverted to the jurisdiction of Rome. This split in marked the first significant religious fragmentation of the country.

After the formation of the Slav principality of Dioclia (modern Montenegro), the metropolitan see of Bar was created in 1089, and dioceses in northern Albania (Shkodër, Ulcinj) became its suffragans. Starting in 1019, Albanian dioceses of the Byzantine rite were suffragans of the independent Archdiocese of Ohrid until Dyrrachion and Nicopolis, were re-established as metropolitan sees. Thereafter, only the dioceses in inner Albania (Elbasan, Krujë) remained attached to Ohrid. In the 13th century during the Venetian occupation, the Latin Archdiocese of Durrës was founded.

[edit] Middle Ages

Main article: Albania in the Middle Ages

[edit] Barbarian invasions and Early Middle Ages

After the region fell to the Romans in 168 BC it became part of Epirus nova that was in turn part of the Roman province of Macedonia.Later it was part of provinces of the Byzantine empire called Themes.

In the first decades under Byzantine rule (until 461), Epirus nova suffered the devastation of raids by Visigoths, Huns, and Ostrogoths. Not long after these barbarian invaders swept through the Balkans, the Slavs appeared. Between the 6th and 8th centuries they settled in Roman territories. In the 4th century, barbarian tribes began to prey upon the Roman Empire. The Germanic Goths and Asiatic Huns were the first to arrive, invading in mid-century; the Avars attacked in A.D. 570; and the Croatian tribes invaded in the early 7th century. In general, the invaders destroyed or weakened Roman and Byzantine cultural centers in the lands that would become Albania.^[11]

[edit] Late Middle Ages

Albanian migrations in 1300-1350 AD

Ethnographic map of the Balkans by G. Lejean, 1861

The territory of modern Albania was part of the Bulgarian Empire during certain periods in the Middle Ages, and parts of what is now eastern Albania were populated and ruled by the Bulgarians for centuries. The Serbs occupied parts of northern and eastern Albania toward the end of the 12th century. In 1204, after Western crusaders sacked Constantinople, Venice won nominal control over Albania and the Epirus region of northern Greece and took possession of Durrës. During the Serbian Occupation the first Albanian state of the Middle Ages was created. The proclamation of the Principality of Arbër of Arberia, in northern Albania, with Kruja as the capital, took place in 1190. The founder of this state was Progoni, who was succeeded by Gjini and then by Dhimiter. After the fall of the Principality of Arber in territories captured by the Despotate of Epiros, the Kingdom of Albania was established by Charles of Anjou. He took the title of King of Albania in February, 1272. In the mid 14th century, Albania was entirely independent save for Durrës which was part of the Serbian Empire.

In History written in 1079-1080, Byzantine historian Michael Attaliates referred to the Albanoi as having taken part in a revolt against Constantinople in 1043 and to the Arbanitai as subjects of the duke of Dyrrachium. It is disputed, however, whether that refers to Albanians in an ethnic sense.^[12]

[edit] Ottoman rule

Main article: Ottoman Albania

Ethnographic map of the Balkans in the end of the 19th century

Ethnic composition map of the Balkans by the pro-Greek ^[13] A. Synvet of 1877, a French professor of the Ottoman Lyceum of Constantinople.

Ottoman supremacy in the Balkan region began in 1385 with the Battle of Savra but was briefly interrupted in the 15th century, when Gjergj Kastrioti Skënderbeu, an Albanian who had served as an Ottoman military officer, renounced Ottoman service, allied with some Albanian chiefs and fought off Turkish rule from 1443-1478. Upon the Ottomans’ return, a large number of Albanians fled to Italy, Greece and Egypt and maintained their Arbëresh identity. Many Albanians won fame and fortune as soldiers, administrators, and merchants in far-flung parts of the Empire. As the centuries passed, however, Ottoman rulers lost the capacity to command the loyalty of local pashas, which threatened stability in the region. The Ottoman rulers of the nineteenth century struggled to shore up central authority, introducing reforms aimed at harnessing unruly pashas and checking the spread of nationalist ideas. Albania would be a part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century.

[edit] Birth of nationalism

Main articles: National awakening and the birth of Albania and League of Prizren

Further information: Albanian nationalism

By the 1870s, the Sublime Porte’s reforms aimed at checking the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration had clearly failed. The image of the “Turkish yoke” had become fixed in the nationalist mythologies and psyches of the empire’s Balkan peoples, and their march toward independence quickened. The Albanians, because of the higher degree of Islamic influence, their internal social divisions, and the fear that they would lose their Albanian-populated lands to the emerging Balkan states–Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Greece were the last of the Balkan peoples to desire division from the Ottoman Empire.^[14]

Albanian leaders formed the League of Prizren in 1878 with the backing of sultan Abdulhamid II, through which they pressed for territorial autonomy and defense of the Albanian lands from the onslaught of their neighbours, but internal issues within the League of Prizren prevented Albanians to reach unity and the League efforts failed in 1881.

[edit] 20th century

Distribution of Races in the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor in 1923, William R. Shepherd Atlas

Further information: Albanian declaration of independence, Treaty of London (1913), Occupation of Albania (1912–1913), and Balkan Wars

In 1912, after three decades of unrest, a major uprising exploded in the Albanian-populated Ottoman territories, on the eve of the First Balkan War. When Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece laid claim to Albanian lands during the war, the Albanians declared independence.^[14]

The European Great Powers endorsed an independent Albania in 1913, after the Second Balkan War leaving outside the Albanian border more than half of the Albanian population and their lands, that were partitioned between Montenegro,Serbia and Greece. They were assisted by Aubrey Herbert, a British MP who passionately advocated their cause in London. As a result, Herbert was offered the crown of Albania, but was dissuaded by the British prime minister, H. H. Asquith, from accepting. Instead the offer went to William of Wied, a German prince who accepted and became sovereign of the new Principality of Albania.^[15]

The young state, however, collapsed within weeks of the outbreak of World War I.^[14] Before this, Albanians rebelled against the German prince and declared the independence of their country from the jurisdiction of the great powers and established throughout the country a Muslim regime under the leadership of a local warrior, Haji Qamil. Meanwhile in the country’s south the local Greek population, revolted against the incorporation of the area into the new Albanian state and declared the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus at February 28.^[16][17]

This situation did not last for a long time as World War I erupted and Albania was invaded by Montenegro, Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Greece, Italy, and France. After World War I, Albania was still under the occupation of Serbian and Italian forces. It was a rebellion of the respective populations of Northern and Southern Albania that pushed back the Serbs and Italians behind the recognized borders of Albania.

[edit] World War I and its effects

Main article: History of Albania (1919–1939)

Albania achieved a degree of statehood after World War I, in part because of the diplomatic intercession of the United States. The country suffered from a debilitating lack of economic and social development, however, and its first years of independence were fraught with political instability. Unable to survive a predatory environment without a foreign protector, Albania became the object of tensions between Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the later Yugoslavia), which both sought to dominate the country.^[18]

In late 1924 Ahmed Bey Zogu, then Albanian founding father and politician emerged victorious from an internal political power struggle against Prime Minister Fan Noli using Yugoslav military assistance. Zogu, however, quickly turned his back on Belgrade and looked instead to Benito Mussolini‘s Italy for patronage.^[18] Under Zogu, Albania joined the Italian coalition against Yugoslavia of Kingdom of Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria in 1924-1927. After the United Kingdom’s and France’s political intervention in 1927 with the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the alliance crumbled. In 1928 the country’s parliament declared Albania a kingdom and Zogu King.^[18] King Zog remained a conservative, but initiated reforms, for example, in an attempt at social modernisation the custom of adding one’s region to one’s name was dropped. Zog also made donations of land to international organisations for the building of schools and hospitals.^[19] Mussolini’s forces overthrew King Zog when Italy invaded Albania in 1939.^[18]

[edit] World War II and the rise of communism

See also: Albania under Italy, Albania under Nazi Germany, and Military history of Albania during World War II

The National Liberation War of the Albanian people started with the Italian invasion in Albanian in April 7, 1939 and ended in November 28, 1944. During the antifascist national liberation war, the Albanian people fought against Italy and Germany, which occupied the country. In the 1939-1941 period, the antifascist resistance was led by the National Front nationalist groups and later by the Communist Party. The Albanian communists supported the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and did not participate in the antifascist struggle until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The communists turned the so-called war of liberation into a civil war, especially after the discovery of the Dalmazzo-Kelcyra protocol, signed by the Balli Kombetar. The communist forces liberated Albania from the German forces by pursuing the German army till Višegrad, Bosnia (then Yugoslavia) in collaboration with the Yugoslav communist forces.

After having taken over power of the country, the Albanian communists launched a tremendous terror campaign, shooting intellectuals and arresting thousands of innocent people. Some died due to suffering torture.

[edit] Communist rule

Main article: Socialist People’s Republic of Albania

Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu emerged as communist leaders in Albania. They began to concentrate primarily on securing and maintaining their power base by killing all their political adversaries, and secondarily on preserving Albania’s independence and reshaping the country according to the precepts of Stalinism so they could remain in power forever. Throughout all rule, Hoxha engineered an elaborate cult of personality that elevated him to the status of a blood-thirsty idol. When he died in 1985, grandiose and ridiculous mourning ceremonies were organized, where people were trained to cry.^[20]

Soon after Hoxha’s death, voices for change emerged in the Albanian society and the government began to seek closer ties with the West in order to improve economic conditions, and initial democratic reforms were introduced including multi-party elections in 1991. Pursuant to a 1991 interim basic law, Albanians ratified a constitution in 1998, establishing a democratic system of government based upon the rule of law and guaranteeing the protection of fundamental human rights. But the question was other. The power fell on hands of communists, with the force of weapons, that blockaded all reforms and gave pretext to rise the corruption. Private property were recognized and returned to their owner. The political prisoners were not compensated for their years of condemnation. The Europeans didn’t intervene to oblige the last governments to apply the reforms on that sense.

[edit] 1990s

Main article: History of post-Communist Albania

Since 1992 Albania has been seeking a closer relationship with the West. In 1992 the Democratic Party of Albania took control of the country through democratic elections. What followed were deliberate programs of economic and democratic reform, but Albanian inexperience with capitalism led to the proliferation of pyramid schemes – which were not banned due to the corruption of the government. Anarchy in late 1996 to early 1997, as a result of the collapse of these pyramid schemes, alarmed the world and prompted international mediation.

In 1995, Albania was accepted into the Council of Europe and requested membership in NATO. The workforce of Albania has continued to emigrate to Western countries, especially Greece and Italy.

In the 1997 unrest in Albania the general elections of June 1997 brought the Socialists and their allies to power. President Berisha resigned from his post, and Socialists elected Rexhep Meidani as president of Albania. Albanian Socialist Party Chairman Fatos Nano was elected Prime Minister, a post which he held until October 1998, when he resigned as a result of the tense situation created in the country after the assassination of Azem Hajdari, a prominent leader of the Democratic Party. Pandeli Majko was then elected Prime Minister, and he served in this post until November 1999, when he was replaced by Ilir Meta. Albania approved its constitution through a popular referendum which was held in November 1998, but which was boycotted by the opposition. The general local elections of October 2000 marked the loss of control of the Democrats over the local governments and a victory for the Socialists.

[edit] Recent history (2001 to present)

Further information: Politics of Albania, Albanian diaspora, and Timeline of Albanian history from 1994

Although Albania has made strides toward democratic reform and maintaining the rule of law, serious deficiencies in the electoral code remain to be addressed, as demonstrated in the June 2001 parliamentary elections.^{[citation needed]}

International observers judged the 2001 elections to be acceptable, but the Union for Victory Coalition, the second-largest vote recipient, disputed the results and boycotted parliament until January 31, 2002. The Socialists re-elected Ilir Meta as Prime Minister in August 2001, a post which he held till February 2002, when he resigned due to party infighting. Pandeli Majko was re-elected Prime Minister in February 2002. In the June of 2005, the democratic coalition formed a government with prime minuster Sali Berisha. After Alfred Moisiu, in 2006 Bamir Topi was elected President of Albania until 2010.

Despite the political situation, the economy of Albania grew at an estimated 5% in 2007. The Albanian lek has strengthened from 143 lekë to the US dollar in 2000 to 92 lekë in 2007. In 2008 Albania officially joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization

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Part of a series on History of Bulgaria
Prehistoric Bulgaria
Karanovo culture · Vinča culture Varna Necropolis · Thrace Odrysian kingdom · Moesia
Medieval Bulgaria
Bulgarian Empire Portal Bulgars · South Slavs Old Great Bulgaria First Bulgarian Empire Second Bulgarian Empire Tsardom of Vidin · Principality of Karvuna
Ottoman Bulgaria
Early Ottoman Bulgaria National Awakening April Uprising Ilinden–Preobrazhenie Uprising
Modern Bulgaria
Principality of Bulgaria · Eastern Rumelia Kingdom of Bulgaria People’s Republic of Bulgaria Republic of Bulgaria
Bulgaria Portal  v • d • e

The history of Bulgaria as a separate country began in 681 AD.

In 632 the Bulgars, originally from Central Asia,^[1] formed under the leadership of Kubrat an independent state that became known as Great Bulgaria. Its territory extended from the lower course of the Danube to the west, the Black Sea and the Azov Sea to the south, the Kuban River to the east, and the Donets River to the north.^[2] Pressure from the Khazars led to the subjugation of Great Bulgaria in the second half of the 7th century. Kubrat’s successor, Asparukh, migrated with some of the Bulgar tribes to the lower courses of the rivers Danube, Dniester and Dniepr (known as Ongal), and conquered Moesia and Scythia Minor (Dobrudzha) from the Byzantine Empire, expanding his new kingdom further into the Balkan Peninsula.^[3] A peace treaty with Byzantium in 681 and the establishment of the Bulgarian capital of Pliska south of the Danube mark the beginning of the First Bulgarian Empire. (At the same time one of Asparuh’s brothers, Kuber, settled with another Bulgar group in present-day Macedonia.^[4])

A country in the middle of the ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria has seen many twists and turns in its long history and has been a prospering empire, stretching to the coastlines of the Black, Aegean and Adriatic Seas. The First and Second Bulgarian Empires served as cultural centres of Slavic Europe, but the land was also dominated by foreign states twice in its history, once by the Byzantine Empire (1018–1185) and once by the Ottoman Empire (1396 – 1878).

Contents [hide] 1 Prehistory and origins 1.1 The Thracians 1.2 The Slavs 1.3 Bulgars 1.4 Old Great Bulgaria 2 First Bulgarian Empire 3 Byzantine Bulgaria 4 Second Bulgarian Empire 5 Ottoman Bulgaria 6 National awakening 7 Kingdom of Bulgaria 8 Balkan Wars 9 World War I 10 Interwar years 11 World War II 12 People’s Republic of Bulgaria 13 Republic of Bulgaria 14 See also 15 References 15.1 Surveys 15.2 Pre 1939 15.3 1939–89 15.4 Contemporary 15.5 Other 16 External links

[edit] Prehistory and origins

Main article: Prehistory of Southeastern Europe

Prehistoric cultures include the neolithic Hamangia culture and Vinča culture (6th to 3rd millennia BC), the eneolithic Varna culture (5th millennium BC, Varna Necropolis) and the Bronze Age Ezero culture. The Karanovo chronology serves as a gauge for the prehistory of the wider Balkans region.

[edit] The Thracians

Main article: Thracians

Prehistoric cultures in the Bulgarian lands include the Neolithic Hamangia culture and Vinča culture (6th to 3rd millennia BC), the eneolithic Varna culture (5th millennium BC; see also Varna Necropolis), and the Bronze Age Ezero culture. The Karanovo chronology serves as a gauge for the prehistory of the wider Balkans region.

A golden rhyton, one of the items in the Thracian Panagyurishte treasure, dating from the 4th to 3rd centuries BC

The Thracians, one of the three primary ancestral groups of modern Bulgarians, left lasting traces throughout the Balkan region despite the tumultuous subsequent millennia. The Thracians lived in separate tribes until King Teres united most of them around 500 BC in the Odrysian kingdom, which later peaked under the leadership of King Sitalces (reigned 431–424 BC) and of King Cotys I (383–359 BC). Thereafter the Macedonian Empire incorporated the Odrysian kingdom^[5] and Thracians became an inalienable component in the extra-continental expeditions of both Philip II and Alexander III (the Great). In 188 BC the Romans invaded Thrace, and warfare continued until 45 AD when Rome finally conquered the region. Thus by the 4th century the Thracians had a composite indigenous identity, as Christian “Romans” who preserved some of their ancient pagan rituals.

[edit] The Slavs

Main article: South Slavs

The Slavs emerged from their original homeland (most commonly thought to have been in Eastern Europe) in the early 6th century and spread to most of eastern Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans, thus forming three main branches – the West Slavs, the East Slavs and the South Slavs. The easternmost South Slavs settled on the territory of modern Bulgaria during the 6th Century.

A portion of the eastern South Slavs assimilated the Thracians before the Bulgar élite incorporated them into the First Bulgarian Empire.^[6]

[edit] Bulgars

Main article: Bulgars

The Bulgars (also Bolgars or proto-Bulgarians^[7]) were a semi-nomadic people of Iranic peoples descent, originally from Central Asia, who from the 2nd century onwards dwelled in the steppes north of the Caucasus and around the banks of river Volga (then Itil). A branch of them gave rise to the First Bulgarian Empire. The Bulgars were governed by hereditary khans. There were several aristocratic families whose members, bearing military titles, formed a governing class. Bulgars were monotheistic, worshipping their supreme deity Tangra.

[edit] Old Great Bulgaria

Main article: Old Great Bulgaria

Great Bulgaria and adjacent regions, c. 650 AD

In 632 Khan Kubrat united the three largest Bulgarian tribes: the Kutrigur, the Utugur and the Onogonduri, thus forming the country that now historians call Great Bulgaria (also known as Onoguria). This country was situated between the lower course of the Danube river to the west, the Black Sea and the Azov Sea to the south, the Kuban river to the east and the Donets river to the north. The capital was Phanagoria, on the Azov. In 635 Kubrat signed a peace treaty with emperor Heracluis of the Byzantine Empire, expanding the Bulgarian kingdom further into the Balkans. Later Kubrat was crowned with the title Patrician by Heracluis. The kingdom never survived Kubrat’s death. After several wars with the Khazars the Bulgars were finally defeated and they migrated to the south to the north and mainly to the west into the Balkans where most of the other Bulgar tribes were living in a state vassal to the Byzantine Empire since the 5th century AD.

One of the successors of Khan Kubrat, Kotrag led nine Bulgarian tribes to the north along the banks of the river Volga in what is today Russia, creating the Kingdom of the Volga Bulgars in the late 7th century. This kingdom later became the trade and cultural center of the north, because it stood on a very strategic position creating a monopoly over the trade among the Arabs, the Norse and the Avars. The Volga Bulgars were the first to ever defeat the Mongolic horde and protected Europe for decades, but after countless Mongol invasions the Kingdom of the Volga Bulgars was destroyed and most of its citizens slaughtered or sold as slaves in Asia.

Another successor of Khan Kubrat, Asparuh (Kotrag’s brother) moved west, occupying today’s southern Bessarabia. After a successful war with Byzantium in 680, Asparuh’s khanate conquered initially Scythia Minor and was recognised as an independent state under the subsequent treaty signed with the Byzantine Empire in 681. That year is usually regarded as the year of the establishment of present-day Bulgaria and Asparuh is regarded as the first Bulgarian ruler. Another Bulgar horde, led by Asparuh’s brother Kuber, came to settle in Pannonia and later into Macedonia.^[8]

[edit] First Bulgarian Empire

Main article: First Bulgarian Empire

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The First Bulgarian Empire’s greatest territorial extent during the reign of Tsar Simeon

During the late Roman Empire several Roman provinces covered the territory that comprises present-day Bulgaria: Scythia (Scythia Minor), Moesia (Upper and Lower), Thrace, Macedonia (First and Second), Dacia (Coastal and Inner, both south of Danube), Dardania, Rhodope (Roman province) and Haemismontus, and had a mixed population of Byzantine Greeks, Thracians and Dacians, most of whom spoke either Greek or variants of Vulgar Latin. Several consecutive waves of Slavic migration throughout the 6th and the early 7th centuries led to a dramatic change of the demographics of the region and its almost complete Slavicisation.

In the beginning of 8th century the throne was taken by Asparuh’s son – Tervel (700-721) from the Dulo dynasty. In 704 the Byzantine emperor Justinian II who was exiled in the Crimean peninsula asked Khan Tervel to help him get his throne back. The Bulgarian khan answered Justinian’s plead and in the winter of 704 besieged Constantinople with an army of 20,000. Tervel slaughtered Justinian’s opponents and the fallen emperor got his throne back. For this khan Tervel was given the Byzantine title “khessar”, which stands for “next to emperor”. The Bulgarians received generous gifts of gold, linen, silk and silver. Also the region “Zagore” was given to the Bulgarian country. Unfortunately, seven years later in 708 emperor Justinian II felt confident and strong enough, broke the peace treaty and attacked Bulgaria to get back the lands of Zagore. The treacherous Emperor’s plans didn’t work and his army was crushed in the batlle of Anchialus in 708. Justinian’s humiliation didn’t end with that. In 711 he became a victim of a coup d’atat and again asked the Bulgarian khan for help. The Empire was torn up by political conflicts, civil unrest and other foreign invaders like Arabs. This forced Byzantium to sign a new peace treaty with Bulgaria in 716. The treaty expanded the Bulgarian borders further south into the Strandzha mountain. The Byzantite empire was forced to pay a regular tribute to the Bulgarians. The two countries also agreed to help each other in case of an attack. In 718 the Arabs besieged Constantinople. Bound by the treaty of 716 khan Tervel arrived at the walls of the Empire’s capital to find the city on the brink of crumbling besieged by an army of 60,000. Although vastly outnumbered the Bulgarians and the Byzantines defeated the Arabs and forever stopped their further conquest into Europe through the Balkans. After this battle khan Tervel was given the title “savior of Europe”.

The Bulgarian throne was taken by Tervel’s son, Komersius (721-738) and then his nephew Sevvar (738-753). Little is known about these two rulers, but few sources tell us that they kept the treaty with The Empire and brought stability to Bulgaria. Sevvar was the last member of the Dulo dynasty. Later the throne was taken by khan Kormisosh of Bulgaria(753-756) probably by a coup. Khan Kormisosh broke the treaty with the Byzantines and launched many attacks and raids against the Empire some of which even reached the Anastasian Wall. Kormisosh was defeated by the new emperor Constantine V Kopronymos who had won a series of victories against the Umayyads and the Abbasids. Known for his fierceness and strongly continuing his family’s tradition of Iconoclasm, Constantine inaugurated a long series of nine successful campaigns against the Bulgarians in the next year, scoring a victory over Kormisosh’s successor Vinekh at Marcelae. However, three years later he was defeated in the battle of the Rishki Pass but the Bulgarians did not exploit their success. In 763, the emperor sailed to Anchialus with 800 ships carrying 9,600 cavalry and 10,000 infantry. Constantine’s victories, including that at Anchialus in 763 caused considerable instability in Bulgaria, where in the span of fifteen years six monarchs lost their crowns on account of their failures.

During these campaigns Bulgaria was severely weakened and torn by internal conflicts, and in these times it was common khans to get assassinated or run away in Constantinople with their families seeking safety. In 775, Constantine was persuaded to reveal to the Bulgarian ruler Telerig, the identities of his agents and spies in Bulgaria, in order for Telerig to use them and run away in Constantinople with his family. Instead the Bulgarian khan Telerig promptly eliminated them; thus, Constantine began preparations for a new campaign against the Bulgarians – during which he died on September 14, 775 after a defeat by the Bulgarian army in Sakkar mountain.

Under the warrior Khan Krum (802-814) Bulgaria expanded northwest and south, occupying the lands between the middle Danube and Moldova rivers, all of present-day Romania, Sofia in 809 and Adrianople in 813, and threatening Constantinople itself. Krum implemented law reform intending to reduce poverty and strengthen social ties in his vastly enlarged state.

Khan Krum was the first member of a new dynasty. During the rule of this dynasty Bulgaria reached its zenith. Taking advantige of the weakened by the franks avar country to the northwest, the warrior Khan conquered what is today Transilvania in 805. The next year Khan Krum organised a huge army, made a military pact with three slavic tribes and attacked the remnants of the Avar country. In 806 he conquered the town of Pesta (Budapest) and most of the territories of what is present day Hungary thus destroying the Avaric country. The following years were marked by minor skirmishes with the Frankish empire from which the Bulgarians arose victorious. In 807 the Bulgarians and the Franks signed a peace treaty in which they split the territories of the conquered avar country. That marks the beginning of the good diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and the Holy Roman Empire.

Khan Krum then turned his eyes to Macedonia and Thrace to solidify the southern borders of his country. In 809 Krum organised an army of 10,000 and conquered the town of Serdica. The Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I Logothetes was determined to put an end to the Bulgarians harassing his northern frontiers. He launched a massive invasion against Bulgaria with an army of 60,000. He crossed Stara Planina defeated the Bulgarian army twice and ignored the Khan’s offer for peace. Nikephoros then sacked the Bulgarian capital Pliska, burned down Krum’s palace and it’s said that over 50% of the population of the city was mercilessly massacred. The emperor arrogantly declared that Bulgaria was destroyed. Enraged by the atrocities done to his people Krum assembled an army from Macedonia, Moesia, Scythia and Thrace, he even armed the women. While returning victorious to Constantinople, Nikephoros’ army was ambushed in the Varbishki Pass and his entire army slaughtered on July 26 – 811. Nikephoros was killed in the battle, the second Roman emperor to suffer this fate since Valens in the Battle of Adrianople (August 9, 378). The Byzantine chronist Theophanes notes “All the beauty of christiendom perished that day”. The Emperor’s son Stavrakis, badly wounded in the chest, was able to retreat to Adrianople with a small group of 250 men, but later died because of his wounds. Krum is said to have made a drinking cup from Nikephoros’ skull.

After this battle, Kuber’s Bulgarians of Macedonia and Pannonia, and the slavs from Illyria were joined in the Bulgarian country. This wasn’t enough for khan Krum though. In the Autumn of 812 he conquered the city of Odessos, using a new generation of siege technology and siege towers, then resettled it’s population northern of the Danube river. In 813 an army of 20,000 Bulgarians 5,000 avars and 7,000 magyars reached the walls of Constantinople. Peace negotiations began, but emperor Leo V attempted to assassinate the Bulgarian Khan. The Empire’s treachery was brutally punished. A large part of the Anastasian Wall was demolished, most of the fortresses between Adrianople and the Capital were rased to the ground and their inhabitants resettled in different parts of Bulgaria. The khan then began a new campaign against the great city. He gathered an army of 40,000 but mysteriously died on the 13 of April 814. The Bulgarians lost a mighty ruler and Byzantines had time to catch a breath.

During the reign of Khan Omurtag (814-831), the northwestern boundaries with the Frankish Empire were firmly settled along the middle Danube. A magnificent palace, pagan temples, ruler’s residence, fortress, citadel, water mains and baths were built in the Bulgarian capital Pliska, mainly of stone and brick. For this Omurtag is known as “The Builder Khan”.

In the beginning of the IX-th century a thirty years peace treaty was signed. Both countries were so exhausted from all the wars, both sides wanted peace so badly that when signing the treaty the Bulgarian ambassadors swore in the holy cross and the Byzantine aristocracy committed pagan tengrinistic rituals.

After securing the southern borders, khan Omurtag decided that it was time to expand his empire to the north. He led a successful campaign against the Khazar Khaganate and finally defeated them near the river of Dnepr in 821, expanding the borders to the northeast. He crushed the revolt of three separatist slavic tribes in the northwestern parts of the kingdom and after a conflict with the franks about the territories around the upper course of the river Danube, the khan signed a peace treaty with them. Also Omurtag swiftly prevented an alliance between the Byzantine and the Frankish Empire, which would pose a danger to Bulgaria. Although being a wise and benevolent ruler, Omurtag is known for his hatred against Christians and unlike his tolerant predecessors, he began a persecution of Christians. Perhaps the reason for this violent act is the fact that his firstborn son Enravota converted to Christianity. Khan Omurtag dies in 831 and the throne was taken by his third son Malamir.

Khan Malamir came to the throne when he was only sixteen years old, and being the third male child of the previous monarch he defied the Bulgarian laws, which stated that the throne must be taken by the firstborn. Unfortunately khan Omurtag’s firstborn Enravota was exiled, because he accepted the Christian faith and his second son Zvinitsa died at a very young age. So the only one who could take the throne was Omurtag’s third son Malamir. Despite all expectations khan Malamir proved to be a capable ruler and a successful strategist. The Byzantine Emperor had died and the new emperor Theophilus (829-842) broke the peace treaty and launched an invasion against southern Bulgaria. He conquered many fortresses in the Thracian valey. He took cities of Adrianople and Philippoupolis. The young khan and his loyal kavkhan(regent) Isbul, quickly reacted and created a counterattack on the Byzantines, taking these fortresses back. After the empire was defeated yet again, peace negotiations began. Aegean Thrace and the Rhodope mountains were given to the Bulgarian country as a reparation.

The rule of Malamir is also marked by a demographic growth and cultural development. Important is the role of the kavkhan Isbul who ordered the construction of many sewer systems, public baths and aqueducts in the capital Pliska and in most of the major cities.

At the end of his reign, Malamir was forced by the bolyar aristocracy to execute his older brother Enravota and his brother’s best friend, the Byzantine war captive, Kinam, because of their Christian faith. The bolyars believed that Christianity is the faith of their biggest enemies – the Byzantines and that it would be best to clung to their deity Tangra or else they risked direct influence in Bulgaria’s affairs from the Empire and that Christianity posed a great danger to the unity of Bulgaria. Malamir pleaded many times Enravota and Kinam to denounce themselves from the foreign faith and save their lives, but after their solid refusal they were executed. A legend says that before his death Enravota told his brother Malamir that despite his death in time Bulgaria will be a Christian state.

After Malamir’s early death in 836, his nephew Presian (836-852) ascended the throne. Presian was an energatic young ruler that continued the military campaign of his predecessors against the Empire. In 837 backed by the rebelous slavic tribe “smolyani” in southern Macedonia around the city of Thessaloniki, Presian conquered many lands, but failed to take the city itself. Nonetheless, the khan turned to the west and conquered entire Macedonia, which had a dominant slavic population, asserting the cities of Ohrid, Skopie and Drach under his rule. Many cities freely joined the Bulgarian Empire. During the reign of khan Presian is lead the first war in history with the young kingdom of Serbia. The war lasted four years (839-842), and though the Serbians were victorious, no territorial changes were made. The reasons for this war were unknown.

The reign of Boris I (852–889) began with numerous setbacks. For ten years the country fought against the Byzantine and Eastern Frankish Empires, Great Moravia, the Croats and the Serbs[45] forming several unsuccessful alliances and changing sides. In August 863 there was a period of 40 days of earthquakes and there was a lean year, which caused famine throughout the country. To cap it all, there was an incursion of locusts.

In 864 the Byzantines under Michael III invaded Bulgaria on suspicions that Khan Boris I prepared to accept Christianity in accordance with the Western rites. Upon the news of the invasion, Boris I started negotiations for peace.[46] The Byzantines returned some lands in Macedonia and their single demand was that he accept Christianity from Constantinople rather than Rome. Khan Boris I agreed to that term and was baptised in September 865 assuming the name of his godfather, Byzantine Emperor Michael, and became Boris-Mihail.[47] The pagan title “Khan” was abolished and the title “Knyaz” assumed in its place. The reason for the conversion to Christianity, however, was not the Byzantine invasion. The Bulgarian ruler was indeed a man of vision and he foresaw that the introduction of a single religion would complete the consolidation of the emerging Bulgarian nation, which was still divided on a religious basis. He also knew that his state was not fully respected by Christian Europe and its treaties could have been ignored by other signatories on religious basis.

Тhe Byzantines’ goal was to achieve with peace what they were unable to after two centuries of warfare: to slowly absorb Bulgaria through the Christian religion and turn it into a satellite state, as naturally, the highest posts in the newly founded Bulgarian Church were to be held by Byzantines who preached in the Greek language. Knyaz Boris I was well aware of that fact and after Constantinople refused to grant autonomy of the Bulgarian Church in 866, he sent a delegation to Rome declaring his desire to accept Christianity in accordance with the Western rites along with 115 questions to Pope Nicolas I[48][49]. The Bulgarian ruler desired to take advantage of the rivalry between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople as his main goal was the establishment of an independent Bulgarian Church in order to prevent both the Byzantines and the Catholics from exerting influence in his lands through religion. The Pope’s detailed answers to Boris’ questions were delivered by two bishops heading a mission whose purpose was to facilitate the conversion of the Bulgarian people. However, Nicolas I and his successor Pope Adrian II also refused to recognize an autonomous Bulgarian Church, which cooled the relations between the two sides, but Bulgaria’s shift towards Rome made the Byzantines much more conciliatory. In 870, at the Fourth Council of Constantinople, the Bulgarian Church was recognized as an Autonomous Eastern Orthodox Church under the supreme direction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. It was the first Church officially accepted, apart from the Churches of Rome and Constantinople. Eventually, in 893, the Old Bulgarian language became the third official language, recognized by the Churches and used during services and in Christian literature.

Although the Bulgarian Knyaz succeeded in securing an autonomous Church, its higher clergy and theological books were still Greek, which impeded the efforts to convert the populace to the new religion. Between 860 and 863 the Byzantine monks of Greek origin[50] Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius created the Glagolitic alphabet, the first Slavic alphabet by order of the Byzantine Emperor, who aimed to convert Great Moravia to Orthodox Christianity. However, these attempts failed and in 886 their disciples Clement of Ohrid, Naum of Preslav and Angelarius, who were banished from Great Moravia, reached Bulgaria and were warmly welcomed by Boris I. The Bulgarian Knyaz commissioned the creation of two theological academies to be headed by the disciples where the future Bulgarian clergy was to be instructed in the local vernacular. Clement was sent to Ohrid[51] in Southwestern Bulgaria, where he taught 3,500 pupils between 886 and 893. Naum established the literary school in the capital Pliska, moved later to the new capital Preslav. In 893, Bulgaria adopted the Glagolitic alphabet and Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) language as official language of the church and state, and expelled the Byzantine clergy. In the early 10th century the Cyrillic alphabet was created at the Preslav Literary School.

By the late 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Bulgaria extended to Epirus and Thessaly in the South, Bosnia in the West and controlled the whole of present-day Romania and Eastern Hungary to the North. With Byzantine support, a Serbian state came into existence in the mid-9th century as a response to the Bulgarian expansion West of the Morava[52]. Switching loyalties between Bulgaria and the Byzantines, the Serb rulers successfully resisted several Bulgarian invasions until 924 A.D., when it was fully subordinated under the general and possibly Count of Sofia Marmais. Under Tsar Simeon I (Simeon the Great), who was educated in Constantinople, Bulgaria became again a serious threat to the Byzantine Empire and reached its greatest territorial extension[53]. Simeon I hoped to take Constantinople and fought a series of wars with the Byzantines throughout his long reign (893–927). The border close to the end of his rule reached the Northern limits of Attica in the South. Simeon I styled himself “Emperor (Tsar) of the Bulgarians and Autocrat of the Greeks”, a title which was recognized by the Pope, but not of course by the Byzantine Emperor nor the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was recognized “Emperor (Tsar) of the Bulgarians” by the Byzantine Emperor and the Patriarch only at the end of his rule.

Between 894 and 896 he defeated the Byzantines and their allies the Magyars[54] in the so called “Trade War” because the pretext of the war was the shifting of the Bulgarian market from Constantinople to Solun[55][56]. In the decisive battle of Bulgarophygon the Byzantine army was routed[57] and the war ended with favourable for Bulgaria peace which was, however, often violated by Simeon I[58]. In 904 he captured Solun which was previously looted by the Arabs and returned it to the Byzantines only after Bulgaria received all Slavic-populated areas in Macedonia and 20 fortress in Albania, including the important town Drach[59].

After the unrest in the Byzantine Empire that followed the death of Emperor Alexander in 913, Simeon I invaded Byzantine Thrace, but was persuaded to stop in return for official recognition of his Imperial title and marriage of his daughter to the infant Emperor Constantine VII[60][61]. Simeon I was supposed to become regent of the Emperor and temporary to rule the Byzantine Empire. However, after a plot in the Byzantine court, the mother of Emperor Constantine VII, Empress Zoe, rejected the marriage and Simeon’s title, and both sides prepared for a decisive battle. By 917 Simeon I broke every attempts of his enemy to form an alliance with the Magyars, the Pechenegs and the Serbs, and Byzantines were forced to fight alone. On 20 August the two armies clashed at Anchialus in one of the greatest and bloodiest battles in the Middle Ages[62]. The Byzantines suffered an unprecedented defeat leaving 80,000 killed on the battlefield. The pursuing Bulgarian forces defeated the reminder of the enemy armies at Katasyrtai[63]. However, Constantinople was saved by a Serb attack from the West; the Serbs were thoroughly defeated, but that gave precious time for the Byzantine admiral and later Emperor Romanos Lakepanos to prepare the defense of the city. In the following decade the Bulgarians gained control of the whole Balkan peninsula with the exception of Constantinople and Pelopones.

After Simeon’s death, however, Bulgarian power slowly declined. In a peace treaty in 927 the Byzantines officially recognized the Imperial title of his son Peter I and the Bulgarian Patriarchate. Peace with Byzantium, however, did not bring prosperity to Bulgaria. In the beginning of his rule the new Emperor had internal problems and unrest with his brothers, and in the 930s was forced to recognize the independence of Rascia[64]. The biggest blow came from the North: between 934 and 965 the country suffered five Magyar invasions[65]. In 944 Bulgaria was attacked by the Pechenegs, who looted the Northeastern regions of the Empire. Under Peter I and Boris II the country was divided by the egalitarian religious heresy of the Bogomils[66].

In 968 the country was attacked by the Kievan Rus, whose leader, Svyatoslav I, took Preslav[67] and established his capital at Preslavets[68]. Three years later, Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes interfered in the struggle and defeated Svyatoslav at Dorostolon. Boris II was captured and ritually divested of his imperial title in Constantinople,[69] and eastern Bulgaria was proclaimed a Byzantine protectorate.

After the Byzantine betrayal the lands to the West of the Iskar River remained in Bulgarian hands and resistance against the Byzantines was headed by the Comitopuli brothers. By 976, the fourth brother, Samuil concentrated all power in his hands after the deaths of his eldest brother. When the rightful heir to the throne, Roman, escaped from captivity in Constantinople, he was recognized as Emperor by Samuil in Vidin[70] and the later remained the chief commander of the Bulgarian army. A brilliant general and good politician, he managed to turn the fortunes to the Bulgarians. The new Byzantine Emperor Basil II was decisively defeated in the battle of the Gates of Trajan in 986 and barely escaped[71][72]. Five years later he eliminated the Serbian state of Rascia[73]. In 997, following the death of Roman, who was the last heir of the Krum dynasty, Samuil was proclaimed Emperor of Bulgaria[74]. However, after 1001 the war turned in favor of the Byzantines who captured the old capitals Pliska and Preslav in the same year, and beginning ub 1004 launched annual campaigns against Bulgaria. The Byzantine further benefited from a war between Bulgaria and the newly established Kingdom of Hungary 1003[citation needed]. The Byzantine victories of Spercheios and Skopje decisively weakened the Bulgarian army, and in annual campaigns, Basil methodically reduced the Bulgarian strongholds. Eventually, at the Battle of Kleidion in 1014, the Bulgarians were completely defeated.[1] The Bulgarian army was captured, and it is said that 99 out of every 100 men were blinded, with the remaining hundredth man left with one eye so as to lead his compatriots home. When Tsar Samuil saw the broken remains of his army, he suffered a heart attack and died. By 1018, the last Bulgarian strongholds had surrendered, and the First Bulgarian Empire was abolished.

[edit] Byzantine Bulgaria

For more details on this period, see Byzantium under the Komnenoi.

Byzantium ruled Bulgaria from 1018 to 1185, subordinating the independent Bulgarian Orthodox Church to the authority of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople but otherwise interfering little in Bulgarian local affairs.

No evidence remains of major resistance or any uprising of the Bulgarian population or nobility in the first decade after the establishment of Byzantine rule. Given the existence of such irreconcilable opponents to Byzantium as Krakra, Nikulitsa, Dragash and others, such apparent passivity seems difficult to explain. Some historians^[9] explain this as a consequence of the concessions that Basil II granted the Bulgarian nobility to gain their allegiance. In the first place, Basil II guaranteed the indivisibility of Bulgaria in its former geographic borders and did not officially abolish the local rule of the Bulgarian nobility, who became part of Byzantine aristocracy as archons or strategoi. Secondly, special charters (royal decrees) of Basil II recognised the autocephaly of the Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ohrid and set up its boundaries, securing the continuation of the dioceses already existing under Samuil, their property and other privileges.^[10]

After the death of the soldier-emperor Basil II the empire entered into a period of instability. There were rebellions against Byzantine rule in 1040-41 at the wars with the Normans and the 1070s and the 1080s, at the time of the wars with the Seljuk Turks. After that the Komnenos dynasty came into succession and reversed the decline of the empire. During this time the empire experienced a century of stability and progress, though it was the time of the Crusades.

In 1180 the last of the capable Komnenoi, Manuel I Komnenos, died and was replaced by the relatively incompetent Angeloi dynasty, allowing Bulgarians to regain their freedom.

[edit] Second Bulgarian Empire

Main article: Second Bulgarian Empire

In 1185 Peter and Asen, leading nobles of supposed and contested Bulgarian, Cuman, Vlach or mixed origin, led a revolt against Byzantine rule and Peter declared himself Tsar Peter II (also known as Theodore Peter). The following year the Byzantines were forced to recognize Bulgaria’s independence. Peter styled himself “Tsar of the Bulgars, Greeks and Vlachs“.

Resurrected Bulgaria occupied the territory between the Black Sea, the Danube and Stara Planina, including a part of eastern Macedonia and the valley of the Morava. It also exercised control over Wallachia and Moldova. Tsar Kaloyan (1197–1207) entered a union with the Papacy, thereby securing the recognition of his title of “Rex” although he desired to be recognized as “Emperor” or “Tsar“. He waged wars on the Byzantine Empire and (after 1204) on the Knights of the Fourth Crusade, conquering large parts of Thrace, the Rhodopes, as well as the whole of Macedonia. In the Battle of Adrianople in 1205, Kaloyan defeated the forces of the Latin Empire and thus limited its power from the very first year of its establishment. The power of the Hungarians and to some extent the Serbs prevented significant expansion to the west and northwest. Under Ivan Asen II (1218–1241), Bulgaria once again became a regional power, occupying Belgrade and Albania. In an inscription from Turnovo in 1230 he entitled himself “In Christ the Lord faithful Tsar and autocrat of the Bulgarians, son of the old Asen”. The Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarchate was restored in 1235 with approval of all eastern Patriarchates, thus putting an end to the union with the Papacy. Ivan Asen II had a reputation as a wise and humane ruler, and opened relations with the Catholic west, especially Venice and Genoa, to reduce the influence of the Byzantines over his country.

Emperor Theodore Svetoslav (reigned 1300–1322) restored Bulgarian prestige from 1300 onwards, but only temporarily. Political instability continued to grow, and Bulgaria gradually began to lose territory. This led to a peasant rebellion led by the swineherd Ivaylo, who eventually managed to defeat the Emperor’s forces and ascend the throne.

However, weakened 14th-century Bulgaria was no match for a new threat from the south, the Ottoman Turks, who crossed into Europe in 1354. In 1362 they captured Philippopolis (Plovdiv), and in 1382 they took Sofia. The Ottomans then turned their attentions to the Serbs, whom they routed at Kosovo Polje in 1389. In 1393 the Ottomans occupied Turnovo after a three-month siege. It is thought that the south gate was opened from inside and so the Ottomans managed to enter the fortress. In 1396 the Kingdom (Tsardom) of Vidin was also occupied, bringing the Second Bulgarian Empire and Bulgarian independence to an end.

[edit] Ottoman Bulgaria

Main article: History of Ottoman Bulgaria

In 1393, the Ottomans captured Tarnovo, the capital of the Second Bulgarian Empire, after a three-month siege. In 1396, the Vidin Tsardom fell after the defeat of a Christian crusade at the Battle of Nicopolis. With this the Ottomans finally subjugated and occupied Bulgaria.^[11][12][13] A Polish–Hungarian crusade commanded by Władysław III of Poland set out to free the Balkans in 1444, but the Turks emerged victorious at the battle of Varna.

The new authorities dismantled Bulgarian institutions and merged the separate Bulgarian Church into the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople (although a small, autocephalous Bulgarian archbishopric of Ohrid survived until January 1767).

The Ottomans reorganised the Bulgarian territories as the Beyerlik of Rumili, ruled by a Beylerbey at Sofia. This territory, which included Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia, was divided into several sanjaks, each ruled by a Sanjakbey accountable to the Beylerbey. Significant part of the conquered land was parcelled out to the Sultan‘s followers, who held it as feudal fiefs (small timars, medium ziyamet and large hases) directly from him. That category of land could not be sold or inherited, but reverted to the Sultan when the fiefholder died. The rest of the lands were organized as private possessions of the Sultan or Ottoman nobility, called “mülk”, and also as economic bases for religious foundations, called “vakιf”. Bulgarians regularly paid taxes as a tithe (“yushur”), a capitation tax (“dzhizie”), a land tax (“ispench”), a levy on commerce and so on and also various group of irregularly collected taxes, products and corvees (“avariz”). Turkish authorities destroyed most of the medieval Bulgarian fortresses to prevent rebellions. Large towns and the areas where Ottoman power predominated remained severely depopulated until the 19th century.^{[14][page needed]}

The Ottomans did not normally require the Christians to become Muslims. Nevertheless, there were many cases of forced individual or mass islamization, especially in the Rhodopes. Non-Muslims did not serve in the Sultan’s army. The exception to this were some groups of the population with specific statute, usually used for auxiliary or rear services, and the famous “tribute of children” (or blood tax), also known as the “devsirme”, whereby every fifth young boy was taken to be trained as a warrior of the Empire. These boys went through harsh religious and military training that turned them into an elite corps subservient to the Sultan. They made up the corps of Janissaries (yenicheri or “new force”), an elite unit of the Ottoman army. Bulgarians who converted to Islam, the Pomaks, retained Bulgarian language, dress and some customs compatible with Islam.^{[12][13][page needed]}. The origin of the Pomaks remains a subject of debate.^[15][16])

Vasil Levski (1837-1873), one of the key figures of the Bulgarian liberational movement of the 19th century and the national hero of Bulgaria

The theocratic^{[citation needed]} Ottoman system started to decline by the 17th century and at the end of the 18th had all but collapsed. Central government weakened over the decades and this had allowed a number of local Ottoman holders of large estates to establish personal ascendancy over separate regions.^[17] During the last two decades of the 18th and first decades of the 19th centuries the Balkan Peninsula dissolved into virtual anarchy. Bulgarian tradition calls this period the kurdjaliistvo: armed bands of Turks called kurdjalii plagued the area. In many regions, thousands of peasants fled from the countryside either to local towns or (more commonly) to the hills or forests; some even fled beyond the Danube to Moldova, Wallachia or southern Russia.^[12][18]

After that, 19th century conditionsgradually improved in certain areas. Some towns — such as Gabrovo, Tryavna, Karlovo, Koprivshtitsa, Lovech, Skopie — prospered. The Bulgarian peasants actually possessed their land, although it officially belonged to the sultan. The 19th century also brought improved communications, transportation and trade. The first factory in the Bulgarian lands opened in Sliven in 1834 and the first railway system started running (between Rousse and Varna) in 1865.

Throughout the five centuries of Ottoman rule the Bulgarian people organized many attempts to re-establish their own state. The National awakening of Bulgaria became one of the key factors in the struggle for liberation. The 19th century saw the creation of the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee and the Internal Revolutionary Organisation led by liberal revolutionaries such as Vasil Levski, Hristo Botev, Lyuben Karavelov and many others.

[edit] National awakening

Main article: National awakening of Bulgaria

Bulgarian nationalism emerged in the early 19th century under the influence of western ideas such as liberalism and nationalism, which trickled into the country after the French Revolution, mostly via Greece. The Greek revolt against the Ottomans which began in 1821 (see History of Ottoman Greece) also influenced the small Bulgarian educated class. But Greek influence was limited by the general Bulgarian resentment of Greek control of the Bulgarian Church and it was the struggle to revive an independent Bulgarian Church which first roused Bulgarian nationalist sentiment. In 1870 a Bulgarian Exarchate was created by a Sultan edict and the first Bulgarian Exarch (Antim I) became the natural leader of the emerging nation. The Constantinople Patriarch reacted by excommunicating the Bulgarian Exarchate, which reinforced their will for independence.

In April 1876 the Bulgarians revolted in the so-called April Uprising. The revolt was poorly organized and started before the planned date. It was largely confined to the region of Plovdiv, though certain districts in northern Bulgaria, in Macedonia and in the area of Sliven also took part in it. The uprising was crushed with cruelty by the Ottomans, who also brought irregular Ottoman troops (bashi-bazouks) from outside the area. Countless villages were pillaged and tens of thousands of people were massacred, the majority of them in the insurgents towns of Batak, Perushtitsa and Bratsigovo in the area of Plovdiv. The massacres aroused a broad public reaction led by liberal Europeans such as William Ewart Gladstone, who launched a campaign against the “Bulgarian Horrors”. The campaign was supported by a number of European intellectuals and public figures. The strongest reaction, however, came from Russia. The enormous public outcry which the April Uprising had caused in Europe provoked the 1876-77 Constantinople Conference of the Great Powers, and Turkey’s refusal to implement the conference decisions gave the Russians a long-waited chance to realise their long-term objectives with regard to the Ottoman Empire.

Having its reputation at stake, Russia had no other choice but to declare war on the Ottomans in April 1877. The Bulgarians also fought alongside the advancing Russians. The Coalition was able to inflict a decisive defeat on the Ottomans at the Battle of Shipka Pass and at Pleven and by January 1878 they had liberated much of the Bulgarian lands.

[edit] Kingdom of Bulgaria

Main article: History of Bulgaria (1878–1946)

Borders of Bulgaria according to the Preliminary Treaty of San Stefano and the subsequent Treaty of Berlin

The Treaty of San Stefano of March 3, 1878 provided for an independent Bulgarian state, which spanned over the geographical regions of Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia. However, trying to preserve the balance of power in Europe and fearing the establishment of a large Russian client state on the Balkans, the other Great Powers were reluctant to agree to the treaty.

As a result, the Treaty of Berlin (1878), under the supervision of Otto von Bismarck of Germany and Benjamin Disraeli of Britain, revised the earlier treaty, and scaled back the proposed Bulgarian state. An autonomous Principality of Bulgaria was created, between the Danube and the Stara Planina range, with its seat at the old Bulgarian capital of Veliko Turnovo and including Sofia. This state was to be under nominal Ottoman sovereignty but was to be ruled by a prince elected by a congress of Bulgarian notables and approved by the Powers. They insisted that the Prince could not be a Russian, but in a compromise Prince Alexander of Battenberg, a nephew of Tsar Alexander II, was chosen. An autonomous Ottoman province under the name of Eastern Rumelia was created south of the Stara Planina range. The Bulgarians in Macedonia and Eastern Thrace were left under the rule of the Sultan. Some Bulgarian territories were also given to Serbia and Romania. A revolutionary organization was created in Eastern Rumelia, called “VMORO” (which stands for Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization). VMORO worked in collaboration with the kingdom and managed to unite the kingdom and Rumelia on September 6, 1885. There was military response from Serbia against the union a few days later, but it was soon defeated and the union was admitted. The Bulgarians left outside the newly united kingdom continued their fight to join Bulgaria and the result was the uprising in 1903. The uprising managed to add some territories populated with Bulgarians to the kingdom. Most of the Bulgarians who were still under Ottoman empire emigrated to Bulgaria. In 1908 Bulgaria was recognized as an independent country.

[edit] Balkan Wars

Main article: Balkan Wars

Balkan Wars boundaries

In 1911 the Nationalist Prime Minister Ivan Geshov formed an alliance with Greece and Serbia to jointly attack the Ottomans. In February 1912 a secret treaty was signed between Bulgaria and Serbia and in May 1912 a similar treaty with Greece. Montenegro was also brought into the pact. The treaties provided for the partition of Macedonia and Thrace between the allies, although the lines of partition were left dangerously vague. After the Ottomans refused to implement reforms in the disputed areas, the First Balkan War broke out in October 1912. The allies defeated the Ottomans.

Bulgaria sustained the heaviest casualties of any of the allies and so felt entitled to the largest share of the spoils. The Serbs in particular did not agree and refused to vacate any of the territory they had seized in northern Macedonia (that is, the territory roughly corresponding to the modern Republic of Macedonia), saying that the Bulgarian army had failed to accomplish its pre-war goals at Adrianople (to capture it without Serbian help) and that the pre-war agreement on the division of Macedonia had to be revised. Some circles in Bulgaria inclined toward going to war with Serbia and Greece on this issue.

In June 1913 Serbia and Greece formed a new alliance against Bulgaria. The Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pasic told Greece it could have Thrace if Greece helped Serbia keep Bulgaria out of Serbian part of Macedonia and the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos agreed. Seeing this as a violation of the pre-war agreements, and discretely encouraged by Germany and Austria-Hungary, Tsar Ferdinand declared war on Serbia and Greece and the Bulgarian army attacked on June 29. The Serbian and the Greek forces were initially on the retreat on the western border, but soon took the upper hand and forced Bulgaria to retreat. The fighting was very harsh, with many casualties, especially during the key Battle of Bregalnitsa. Soon Romania entered the war and attacked Bulgaria from the north. The Ottoman Empire also attacked from the south-east.

The war was now definitely lost for Bulgaria, which had to abandon most of its claims of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece, while the revived Ottomans retook Adrianople. Romania took southern Dobruja.

[edit] World War I

Main article: Bulgaria during World War I

In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars Bulgarian opinion turned against Russia and the western powers, whom the Bulgarians felt had done nothing to help them. The government of Vasil Radoslavov aligned Bulgaria with the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, even though this meant becoming an ally of the Ottomans, Bulgaria’s traditional enemy. But Bulgaria now had no claims against the Ottomans, whereas Serbia, Greece and Romania (allies of Britain and France) held lands perceived in Bulgaria as Bulgarian.

Bulgaria sat out the first year of World War I recuperating from the Balkan Wars. When Germany promised to restore the boundaries of the Treaty of San Stefano, Bulgaria, which had the largest army in the Balkans, declared war on Serbia in October 1915. Britain, France and Italy then declared war on Bulgaria.

Main article: Serbian Campaign (WWI)

In alliance with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans, Bulgaria won military victories against Serbia and Romania, occupying much of Macedonia (taking Skopje in October), advancing into Greek Macedonia, and taking Dobruja from Romania in September 1916.

But the war soon became unpopular with most Bulgarians, who suffered great economic hardship and also disliked fighting their fellow Orthodox Christians in alliance with the Muslim Ottomans. The Agrarian Party leader Aleksandur Stamboliyski was imprisoned for his opposition to the war. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 had a great effect in Bulgaria, spreading anti-war and anti-monarchist sentiment among the troops and in the cities. In June Radoslavov’s government resigned. Mutinies broke out in the army, Stamboliyski was released and a republic was proclaimed.

[edit] Interwar years

In September 1918, Tsar Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his son Boris III in order to head off anti-monarchic revolutionary tendencies. Under the Treaty of Neuilly (November 1919) Bulgaria ceded its Aegean coastline to Greece, recognized the existence of Yugoslavia, ceded nearly all of its Macedonian territory to that new state, and had to give Dobrudzha back to Romania. The country had to reduce its army to no more than 22,000 men and pay reparations exceeding $400 million. Bulgarians generally refer to the results of the treaty as the “Second National Catastrophe”.^[19][20]

Elections in March 1920 gave the Agrarians a large majority and Aleksandar Stamboliyski formed Bulgaria’s first peasant government. He faced huge social problems, but succeeded in carrying out many reforms, although opposition from the middle and upper classes, the landlords and officers of the army remained powerful. In March 1923, Stamboliyski signed an agreement with the Kingdom of Yugoslavia recognising the new border and agreeing to suppress Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), which favoured a war to regain Macedonia from Yugoslavia. This triggered a nationalist reaction and the Bulgarian coup d’état of 9 June 1923 eventually resulted in Stamboliykski’s assassination. A right-wing government under Aleksandar Tsankov took power, backed by the army and the VMRO, which waged a White terror against the Agrarians and the Communists. In 1926, the Tsar persuaded Tsankov to resign, a more moderate government under Andrey Lyapchev took office and an amnesty was proclaimed, although the Communists remained banned. A popular alliance, including the re-organised Agrarians, won the elections of 1931 under the name “Popular Bloc”.

In May 1934 another coup took place, removing the Popular Bloc from power and establishing an authoritarian military régime headed by Kimon Georgiev. A year later, Tsar Boris managed to remove the military régime from power, restoring a form of parliamentary rule (without the re-establishment of the political parties) and under his own strict control. The Tsar’s regime proclaimed neutrality, but gradually Bulgaria gravitated into alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

[edit] World War II

Main article: Bulgaria during World War II

Upon the outbreak of World War II, the government of the Kingdom of Bulgaria under Bogdan Filov declared a position of neutrality, being determined to observe it until the end of the war, but hoping for bloodless territorial gains, especially in the lands with a significant Bulgarian population occupied by neighbouring countries after the Second Balkan War and World War I.^{[citation needed]} But it was clear that the central geopolitical position of Bulgaria in the Balkans would inevitably lead to strong external pressure by both sides of World War II.^{[citation needed]} Turkey had a non-aggression pact with Bulgaria.^{[citation needed]}

Bulgaria succeeded in negotiating a recovery of Southern Dobruja, part of Romania since 1913, in the Axis-sponsored Treaty of Craiova on 7 September 1940, which reinforced Bulgarian hopes for solving territorial problems without direct involvement in the war.

However, Bulgaria was forced to join the Axis powers in 1941, when German troops that were preparing to invade Greece from Romania reached the Bulgarian borders and demanded permission to pass through Bulgarian territory. Threatened by direct military confrontation, Tsar Boris III had no choice but to join the fascist bloc, which was made official on 1 March 1941. There was little popular opposition, since the Soviet Union was in a non-aggression pact with Germany.^[21] However the king refused to hand over the Bulgarian Jews to the Nazis, saving 50,000 lives.^{[citation needed]}

Euxinograd, once a summer palace of the Bulgarian tsars.

In September 1944 Soviet troops reached Bulgaria and the country then changed sides and joined the Allies.

[edit] People’s Republic of Bulgaria

Main article: People’s Republic of Bulgaria

During this time (1944–1989), the country was known as the “People’s Republic of Bulgaria” (PRB) and was ruled by the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). The BCP transformed itself in 1990, changing its name to “Bulgarian Socialist Party“.

Although communist leader Dimitrov had been in exile, mostly in the Soviet Union, since 1923, he was everything but a Soviet puppet. He had shown great courage in Nazi Germany during the Reichstag Fire trial of 1933 and had later headed the Comintern during the period of the Popular Front. He was also close to the Yugoslav Communist leader Tito and believed that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, as closely related South Slav peoples, should form a federation. This idea was not favoured by Stalin and there have long been suspicions that Dimitrov’s sudden death in July 1949 was not accidental, although this has never been proven. It coincided with Stalin’s expulsion of Tito from the Cominform and was followed by a “Titoist” witch hunt in Bulgaria. This culminated in the show trial and execution of Deputy Prime Minister Traicho Kostov. The elderly Prime Minister Kolarov died in 1950 and power then passed to a Stalinist, Vulko Chervenkov.

Bulgaria’s Stalinist phase lasted less than five years. Under his leadership, agriculture was collectivised, peasant rebellions were crushed, and a massive industrialisation campaign was launched. Labor camps were set up and at the height of the repression housed about 100,000 people.^{[citation needed]} The Orthodox Patriarch was confined to a monastery and the Church placed under state control. In 1950 diplomatic relations with the U.S. were broken off. But Chervenkov’s support base even in the Communist Party was too narrow for him to survive long, once his patron Stalin was gone. Stalin died in March 1953 and in March 1954 Chervenkov was deposed as Party Secretary with the approval of the new leadership in Moscow and replaced by Todor Zhivkov. Chervenkov stayed on as Prime Minister until April 1956, when he was finally dismissed and replaced by Anton Yugov.

During the 1960s, Zhivkov initiated reforms and passed some market-oriented policies on an experimental level.^[22] By the mid 1950s standards of living rose significantly, and in 1957 collective farm workers benefited from the first agricultural pension and welfare system in Eastern Europe.^[23] Lyudmila Zhivkova, daughter of Todor Zhivkov, promoted Bulgaria’s national heritage, culture and arts on a global scale.^[24] On the other hand, an assimilation campaign of the late 1980s directed against ethnic Turks resulted in the emigration of some 300,000 Bulgarian Turks to Turkey,^[25][26] which caused a significant drop in agricultural production due to the loss of labor force.^[27]

[edit] Republic of Bulgaria

Main article: History of Bulgaria since 1989

By the time the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev‘s reform program in the Soviet Union was felt in Bulgaria in the late 1980s, the Communists, like their leader, had grown too feeble to resist the demand for change for long. In November 1989 demonstrations on ecological issues were staged in Sofia and these soon broadened into a general campaign for political reform. The Communists reacted by deposing the decrepit Zhivkov and replacing him by Petar Mladenov, but this gained them only a short respite. In February 1990 the Party voluntarily gave up its claim on power monopoly and in June 1990 the first free elections since 1931 were held, won by the Communist Party, ridden of its hardliner wing and renamed the Bulgarian Socialist Party. In July 1991 a new Constitution was adopted, in which the system of government was fixed as parliamentary republic with a directly elected President and a Prime Minister accountable to the legislature.

President Georgi Parvanov (left) with former Russian president Vladimir Putin, 2008

Like the other post-Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria found the transition to capitalism more painful than expected. The anti-Communist Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) took office and between 1992 and 1994 carried through the privatisation of land and industry through the issue of shares in government enterprises to all citizens, but these were accompanied by massive unemployment as uncompetitive industries failed and the backward state of Bulgaria’s industry and infrastructure were revealed. The Socialists portrayed themselves as the defender of the poor against the excesses of the free market.

The negative reaction against economic reform allowed Zhan Videnov of the BSP to take office in 1995. By 1996 the BSP government was also in difficulties and in the presidential elections of that year the UDF’s Petar Stoyanov was elected. In 1997 the BSP government collapsed and the UDF came to power. Unemployment, however, remained high and the electorate became increasingly dissatisfied with both parties.

On 17 June 2001, Simeon II, the son of Tsar Boris III and himself the former Head of state (as Tsar of Bulgaria from 1943 to 1946), won a narrow victory in elections. The Tsar’s party — National Movement Simeon II (“NMSII”) — won 120 of the 240 seats in Parliament. Simeon’s popularity declined quickly during his four-year rule as Prime Minister and the BSP won the elections in 2005, but could not form a single-party government and had to seek a coalition. In the parliamentary elections in July 2009, Boyko Borisov‘s right-centrist party GERB won nearly 40% of the votes.

Since 1989 Bulgaria has held multi-party elections and privatized its economy, but economic difficulties and a tide of corruption have led over 800,000 Bulgarians, including many qualified professionals, to emigrate in a “brain drain“. The reform package introduced in 1997 restored positive economic growth, but led to rising social inequality. The political and economic system after 1989 virtually failed to improve both the living standards and create economic growth. According to a 2009 Pew Global Attitudes Project survey, 76% of Bulgarians said they were dissatisfied with the system of democracy, 63% thought that free markets did not make people better off and only 11% of Bulgarians agreed that ordinary people had benefited from the changes in 1989.^[28] Furthermore, the average quality of life and economic performance actually remained lower than in the times of communism well into the early 2000s.^[29]

Bulgaria became a member of NATO in 2004 and of the European Union in 2007 and is generally accepted as having good freedom of speech and human rights record.^[30] In 2010 it was ranked 32nd (between Greece and Lithuania) out of 181 countries in the Globalization Indexthe end @copyright Dr Iwan suwandy 2010 .^[31