The history of Kosovo

Kosovo is a small, landlocked territory in the central Balkans whose history has been shaped by the empires around it and by competing Serbian and Albanian claims to it. Home to the ancient Dardani, it was ruled in turn by Rome, Byzantium, Bulgaria and medieval Serbia, whose most important churches stand there, and then for more than four centuries by the Ottoman Empire, under which its population became largely Albanian and Muslim. Taken by Serbia in 1912, it was part of Yugoslavia until the war of 1998 and 1999, after which it was governed by the United Nations. Kosovo declared independence in 2008. Around 110 of the 193 UN member states recognise it as a sovereign state, while Serbia, and states including Russia, China and five members of the European Union, do not; Serbia considers it its Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija.

Kosovo's fertile basins, the Kosovo plain in the east and the Dukagjin or Metohija plain in the west, were settled early. Runik, in the west, was one of the first farming villages of the Starčevo culture, dated to around 6200 BCE, and later the Vinča culture left settlements and distinctive clay figurines, among them the seated Goddess on the Throne found near Pristina. Copper and later bronze working followed, using the rich ores of the region's hills.

In classical times the land belonged to the Dardani, a people whom ancient writers usually counted among the Illyrians, though some placed them closer to the Thracians. They formed a kingdom that raided and fought Macedon in the fourth and third centuries BCE. Modern historians and national traditions disagree about how the Dardani relate to later peoples; many Albanian scholars see them as ancestors of the Albanians, a link others regard as unproven.

Rome extended its power into the central Balkans after defeating Macedon and annexed Dardania in 28 BCE. The area was later part of the province of Moesia Superior, and under Diocletian it became a separate province called Dardania, with its capital at Naissus, today's Niš in Serbia, where Constantine I was born. Within the Roman Empire the region's mines of silver and lead were worked intensively, and the town of Ulpiana, near today's Gračanica, became a municipium and later a bishopric as Christianity spread.

The region remained part of the Byzantine Empire after the West fell. It suffered from Hunnic raids in the 440s, and Justinian I rebuilt Ulpiana as Justiniana Secunda after an earthquake. From the sixth century Slavs raided and then settled across the Balkans, and over the following centuries Slavic speech became dominant in much of the region, though how much of the earlier population survived in the mountains is debated.

In the ninth century the First Bulgarian Empire took the region under Khan Presian, and it stayed Bulgarian for about 150 years until Emperor Basil II restored Byzantine rule in 1018. Prizren is first mentioned under that name the following year. In the late twelfth century the Serbian ruler Stefan Nemanja began to take the area, and by the early thirteenth century it was firmly part of the medieval Serbian state of the Nemanjić dynasty.

Kosovo became the heart of that state. The seat of the Serbian archbishopric moved to Peć, which became the seat of a Serbian Patriarchate in 1346, and kings built the monasteries of Gračanica and Visoki Dečani and the church of the Virgin of Ljeviša in Prizren, now listed by UNESCO as Medieval Monuments in Kosovo. The silver mines of Novo Brdo, worked by Saxon miners and traded through Ragusa, were among the richest in Europe. Stefan Dušan, crowned emperor in 1346, often held court at Prizren. Albanians lived in the region too, especially in the west and in the towns, though their numbers in the Middle Ages are a matter of dispute between Serbian and Albanian historians.

After Dušan's death in 1355 his empire broke up among regional lords, while the Ottoman Empire advanced through the Balkans. On 28 June 1389 a coalition led by Prince Lazar of Serbia met the army of Sultan Murad I on the Kosovo plain. Both Lazar and Murad were killed; the battle was costly to both sides, and its immediate outcome was viewed differently even at the time, but Serbia soon became an Ottoman vassal. In Serbian tradition the battle later became a central symbol of sacrifice and national identity. A second battle on the same field in 1448, in which the Ottomans defeated the Hungarian regent John Hunyadi, sealed the region's fate, and in 1455 Mehmed II took Novo Brdo after a forty-day siege.

For more than 450 years Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire, divided into sanjaks centred on towns such as Prizren and Vushtrri. Conversion to Islam began in the towns and spread slowly over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, above all among Albanians, while the Serbian Orthodox Church, whose Patriarchate of Peć was restored in 1557, remained the focus of Serbian life. Mosques, bazaars, hammams and the Ottoman stone bridges of Prizren and Gjakova date from this period.

In 1689, during the war between the Ottomans and the Habsburg Monarchy, Austrian troops reached Kosovo and some Christians, both Serbs and Catholic Albanians, rose in support. When the Austrians retreated, Patriarch Arsenije III led tens of thousands of Serbs north into Habsburg Hungary in 1690, an event known as the Great Migration. Serbian historiography has seen this as the moment when Kosovo's population balance shifted towards Albanians; historians such as Noel Malcolm argue that the change was more gradual and that few of the migrants came from Kosovo itself. By the nineteenth century Albanians, mostly Muslim, were the majority.

The Ottoman province of Kosovo, created in 1877, took its name from the Kosovo plain, the "field of blackbirds". As Serbia and Montenegro expanded in 1877 and 1878, tens of thousands of Albanians were expelled from the area around Niš and many settled in Kosovo. In 1878 Albanian leaders met in Prizren and founded the League of Prizren to resist the transfer of Albanian-inhabited lands to neighbouring states, an important moment in the Albanian national movement, and a series of Albanian uprisings against Ottoman rule followed in 1910 to 1912.

In the First Balkan War of 1912 Serbia took most of Kosovo and Montenegro took the west, and the change was confirmed by the Treaty of London in 1913; the conquest was accompanied by massacres of Albanian civilians. During the First World War the Serbian army retreated through Kosovo and Albania in 1915, and the region was occupied by Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria until 1918, when it became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia. Between the wars the state settled Serb and Montenegrin colonists on Albanian land, banned Albanian-language schools and encouraged Albanians to emigrate, many of them to Turkey.

In the Second World War most of Kosovo was attached to Italian-controlled Albania, with smaller parts held by Germany and Bulgaria. Tens of thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins were expelled or fled, and killings took place on all sides. After the war the communist partisans of Josip Broz Tito restored the region to Serbia as an autonomous unit, crushing armed Albanian resistance. Albanians faced suspicion and repression in the early decades, especially under the security chief Aleksandar Ranković, and large numbers left for Turkey in the 1950s.

After Ranković's fall in 1966 policy changed. Protests in 1968 were followed by an Albanian-language University of Pristina in 1970, and the 1974 constitution made Kosovo an autonomous province with its own assembly, government and representation in the Yugoslav presidency, nearly equal to a republic. Albanians demanded full republic status, and in 1981 student protests in Pristina grew into riots across the province, which were suppressed by force. Kosovo remained the poorest part of Yugoslavia, and Serbs, whose share of the population was falling, complained of pressure to leave.

Slobodan Milošević rose to power in Serbia in the late 1980s partly on the issue of Kosovo, promising Kosovo Serbs in 1987 that no one would beat them. In 1989 Serbia's constitutional changes removed most of the province's autonomy, despite strikes and protests by Albanian miners and students; that June Milošević addressed a huge crowd on the Kosovo plain at the 600th anniversary of the battle. Tens of thousands of Albanians were dismissed from state jobs, and Albanian schooling moved into private homes. Led by the writer Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo, Albanians boycotted Serbian institutions, declared a Republic of Kosova recognised only by Albania, and ran a parallel state based on non-violent resistance.

When the Dayton agreement of 1995 ending the war in Bosnia ignored Kosovo, the armed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) gained support, attacking Serbian police and officials. From early 1998 Serbian and Yugoslav forces launched heavy counter-insurgency operations, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. After the killing of 45 Albanian villagers at Račak in January 1999 and the failure of talks at Rambouillet, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia on 24 March 1999 without authorisation from the UN Security Council. Yugoslav forces then expelled around 850,000 Kosovo Albanians from the province. About 13,500 people of all ethnicities were killed or went missing in the war. The bombing ended after 78 days with the Kumanovo Agreement of 9 June, under which Yugoslav forces withdrew.

UN Security Council Resolution 1244 placed Kosovo under the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), with the NATO-led KFOR force keeping security, while leaving its final status open. Albanian refugees returned, but tens of thousands of Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians fled reprisals; many Serbs who remained concentrated in the north around North Mitrovica and in enclaves. In March 2004 riots against Serbs left 19 people dead and destroyed hundreds of homes and dozens of Orthodox churches and monasteries. UN-led talks under the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari from 2006 produced a plan for independence under international supervision, which Serbia and Russia rejected.

On 17 February 2008 Kosovo's assembly declared independence, and a constitution took effect that June. The United States and most EU states recognised it; Serbia rejected the declaration as illegal, and Russia and China backed Serbia's position. In 2010 the International Court of Justice, asked for an opinion by the UN General Assembly at Serbia's request, found by ten votes to four that the declaration had not violated international law, though it did not rule on whether Kosovo is a state. Counts of recognition are themselves disputed, because some states have withdrawn or reversed recognition: independent tallies put the number at about 110 UN members, Kosovo claims more and Serbia fewer. Within the EU, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia do not recognise it. Kosovo is not a UN member, and in some forums it takes part under a footnoted name that leaves the status question open.

The EU has mediated a dialogue between the two sides. The Brussels Agreement of April 2013 brought the Serb-majority north under Kosovo's legal system while providing for an association of Serb municipalities, which has never been set up. Hashim Thaçi, a former KLA leader who served as prime minister and president, resigned in 2020 when he was indicted by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a court in The Hague set up to try crimes committed by KLA members during and after the war. The Vetëvendosje movement of Albin Kurti won the 2021 election, and Vjosa Osmani became president. Disputes over vehicle licence plates and documents caused roadblocks in the north in 2021 and 2022, and in November 2022 Serbs resigned en masse from Kosovo's institutions. Kosovo applied to join the EU in December 2022. In September 2023 armed Serb militants attacked Kosovo police at the village of Banjska, killing a police officer, before three of the attackers were killed and the rest withdrew to Serbia. Kosovo accused Belgrade of backing the attack, while Serbia's president blamed Kurti's government for the tensions.

Political deadlock in 2025 and 2026 led to repeated elections. After a vote in December 2025, Kurti formed a new government in February 2026, but the assembly's failure to elect a president triggered a snap election in June, again won by Vetëvendosje with 53 of 120 seats. On 16 September 2026 the Specialist Chambers convicted Thaçi and three co-defendants of war crimes, including the murder of political opponents and alleged collaborators, and sentenced him to 25 years in prison; his lawyers said they would appeal. In October the assembly elected the economist Justina Shiroka Pula as president, just before a deadline that would have forced yet another election. According to the 2024 census Kosovo has about 1.6 million people, the great majority of them Albanian, with Serb, Bosniak, Turkish, Roma and other communities.