Croatia history

In the fourth century AD the Roman Empire was partitioned and become the Eastern and western empires. In the Balkans the boundary between the two stretched from the Montenegrin coast up the river Drina to the confluence of the river Sava and the Danube, and then further north.

This boundary has remained more or less unchanged in overall European perception for a full 1,500 years. The European west ended and the east began, and vice versa, on south Slav territory. Frontier changes, economic contacts and cultural influences may have been of no great importance for Europe as a whole, but they had a crucial impact on the destiny of small Slav peoples who lived in the area between what is today Italy and Austria, and Greece.

There were and still are ethnic similarities between the peoples on the two sides of the divide, but their culture and history are fundamentally different. Regional developments have often focused on the Croats and Croatia, traditionally linked with the present-day Hungarian, Italian and German regions, and with Western Europe. Croatia is also a Mediterranean country whose shores have been strongly influenced by the rhythmo Mediterranean events.

Over the centuries different territories have been called 'Croatia' in historical sources. In the early Middle ages the name designated the area in the hinterland of the central Dalmatian cities of Split, Trogir and Zadar, although the Slav tribe of Croats settled a much wider region, including Pannonia and probably what is today Montenegro .

Later the territory called Croatia broadened to include areas to the north and west, but after the Ottoman conquest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was restricted to a narrow belt between Slavonia in the west, the vast Ottoman empire in the east, the Drava river and the Hungarian border in the north, and the Adriatic sea in the south .

 As the Ottoman withdraws from Europe, Croatia regained its former territory.Croatian history unfolded under various kinds of foreign influence - there were Greek colonists in the fourth century BC, Arabian and Ottoman conquests, and Italians, Normans, Hungarians, Austrians, Germans and French. Their influence in different provinces varied, creating marked regional differences.

Today Croatia includes Istria, which for centuries was under the rule of various Habsburg or Italian masters, and the territory of Dubrovnik, which was long an independent republic. Croats, who inhabited Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Serbian provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, also belong to the Croatian ethnic corpus, but their history and circumstances under which they live are very different from conditionsin Croatia.

Political regionalism also developed as a result of different climatic and economic circumstances, the location of traffic routes, and historical influence.

If You have any questions or need assistance, please do not hesitate to visit our Croatia-Official Forum