The history of Montenegro

Montenegro is a small, mountainous country on the Adriatic, with a coast of fjord-like bays and a limestone interior that has always been hard to conquer. In antiquity it was Illyrian land, then part of the Roman and Byzantine worlds. In the Middle Ages the Slavic principality of Duklja, later called Zeta, became one of the first South Slav kingdoms, and when the Ottomans overran the lowlands the highland clans around Cetinje kept a large measure of self-rule under their prince-bishops. Recognised as independent in 1878, Montenegro joined Yugoslavia in 1918, stayed with Serbia through the wars of the 1990s, and became an independent state again by referendum in 2006.

The area was settled from the Old Stone Age, and the Crvena Stijena rock shelter near Nikšić holds layers of occupation stretching back tens of thousands of years. In the first millennium BCE the land belonged to Illyrian peoples. Greek colonists from the sixth century BCE traded along the coast, and Budva claims a Greek foundation, while Celtic groups arrived in the fourth century BCE.

In the third century BCE an Illyrian kingdom of the Ardiaei rose around Lake Skadar and the Bay of Kotor. Under Queen Teuta, who ruled from Rhizon, modern Risan, its ships raided Adriatic trade, which provoked Roman intervention in 229 BCE. The Roman Republic finally destroyed the kingdom in 168 BCE, when the last king, Gentius, was defeated and taken to Rome. The land was absorbed into the province of Illyricum and later Dalmatia. Under the Roman Empire the city of Doclea, near modern Podgorica, became the chief town of the interior, and around 300 CE Diocletian made the region a separate province, Praevalitana.

When the empire divided, the coast stayed with the Byzantine Empire. Slavs settled the region in the sixth and seventh centuries and formed a principality that took its name from the ruined city of Doclea: Duklja. Christianity spread among them, with the coast looking to Rome and the interior increasingly to Constantinople. For long periods Duklja was subject to Bulgarian or Byzantine overlords.

In 1042 Prince Stefan Vojislav defeated a Byzantine army in the hills near Bar and won independence. His son Mihailo, who ruled from 1046 to 1081, was recognised as king by Pope Gregory VII in 1077, and Bar soon became the seat of an archbishop. Under Mihailo's son Constantine Bodin, Duklja briefly dominated the neighbouring Serb lands of Raška and Bosnia, but after his death in about 1101 it declined in civil wars.

In the 1180s Stefan Nemanja, grand prince of Raška, conquered Duklja, now usually called Zeta, and for nearly two centuries it was a crown land of the Nemanjić state of Serbia, often governed by the heir to the throne. After the Serbian empire fragmented in the 1360s, the local Balšić family made Zeta an independent lordship. Their rule ended in 1421 and Zeta passed to the Serbian Despotate, while the coastal towns, including Kotor, Budva and Bar, came under the Republic of Venice, which held much of the coast, as Venetian Albania, until 1797.

From the mid-fifteenth century the Crnojević family ruled the highlands. The name Crna Gora, "Black Mountain", which Venetians rendered as Montenegro, dates from about this time. Facing the advance of the Ottoman Empire, Ivan Crnojević moved his capital in 1482 to the remote valley of Cetinje beneath Mount Lovćen, where he founded a monastery. His son Đurađ set up a press there in 1493, one of the first in southeastern Europe, which printed Church Slavonic books in Cyrillic only four decades after Johannes Gutenberg. In 1496 the Ottomans took Zeta.

Ottoman rule over the mountains was always loose. The clans paid tribute but governed themselves, and from 1514 the region was a separate sanjak. In 1516 the clan chiefs elected Vavila, the bishop of Cetinje, as their leader, beginning a theocracy in which the Orthodox bishop, the vladika, was also political head of the tribes. For almost two centuries the vladikas were chosen by an assembly. In 1697 Danilo I made the office hereditary in his family, the Petrović-Njegoš, passing from uncle to nephew because the bishops could not marry. Danilo fought the Ottomans and, in the early eighteenth century, turned to Peter the Great's Russia, which became Montenegro's chief patron in place of Venice.

Petar I, who ruled from 1782 to 1830, defeated the forces of the Ottoman governor of Scutari at Martinići and Krusi in 1796, enlarged the territory and imposed a first written law code on the feuding clans. His nephew Petar II, known as Njegoš, ruled from 1830 to 1851. He created a senate and a central administration, introduced taxes, and was also the greatest poet of the South Slav lands, whose verse epic The Mountain Wreath, published in 1847, celebrates the struggle against the Ottomans. His successor, Danilo, broke with tradition: in 1852 he gave up the bishopric, married and ruled as secular prince.

Danilo issued a legal code in 1855 and in 1858 his brother Mirko won a major victory over the Ottomans at Grahovac. After Danilo was assassinated in Kotor in 1860, his nephew Nikola I began a reign of 58 years. Montenegro fought the Ottomans in 1861 to 1862 and again from 1876 to 1878, in alliance with Serbia and the Russian Empire. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 recognised Montenegro's independence and roughly doubled its territory, giving it the port of Bar and an outlet to the sea.

Nikola modernised slowly, granting a constitution in 1905, and in 1910 proclaimed himself king. He married his daughters into the royal houses of Italy, Serbia and Russia, earning the nickname "father-in-law of Europe". In the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 Montenegro won land in the north and east, but the great powers forced it to give up Scutari, which it had captured after a long siege, to the new state of Albania.

Montenegro entered the First World War beside Serbia in August 1914. At Mojkovac in January 1916 its army held off the forces of Austria-Hungary long enough to cover the Serbian army's retreat, but the country was overrun and King Nikola went into exile. In November 1918 an assembly at Podgorica deposed the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty and voted for union with Serbia, which on 1 December entered the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Supporters of the king and of a separate Montenegro, known as the Greens, rose in the Christmas Uprising of January 1919, and guerrilla resistance continued for several years. The division between those who saw Montenegrins as Serbs and those who saw them as a distinct nation has remained a central fault line of the country's politics.

In interwar Yugoslavia Montenegro had no separate status. From 1929 it formed the core of the Zeta Banovina, governed from Cetinje.

Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, and Italy, under Benito Mussolini, occupied Montenegro, annexed the Bay of Kotor and planned a puppet kingdom. On 13 July 1941 a mass uprising freed most of the country for a time, one of the first large revolts in occupied Europe. It was soon crushed, and the rebels split into communist Partisans and royalist Chetniks, who fought each other as well as the occupiers. After Italy's surrender in 1943 Germany took over, and the Partisans liberated Podgorica in December 1944. Montenegrins made up a large share of Josip Broz Tito's fighters and officers.

In the federal Yugoslavia of 1945 Montenegro became one of six republics, with Podgorica, renamed Titograd, as its capital. After Tito's break with Joseph Stalin in 1948, many pro-Soviet communists from Montenegro were imprisoned on the island camp of Goli Otok. The republic was among the poorer parts of Yugoslavia, but the coast developed a major tourist industry and Bar became a significant port. A powerful earthquake in April 1979 caused heavy damage along the coast.

In January 1989 street protests brought a new generation of leaders allied to Slobodan Milošević to power, among them Momir Bulatović and Milo Đukanović, whose Democratic Party of Socialists won the first multi-party election in 1990. When Yugoslavia broke apart, Montenegro stayed with Serbia, forming the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in April 1992. Montenegrin reservists and units of the Yugoslav army took part in the attack on the Croatian coast around Dubrovnik in 1991 and 1992, for which Montenegro's government later apologised to Croatia. Under United Nations sanctions smuggling became a major part of the economy.

In 1997 Đukanović broke with Milošević, and Montenegro drifted away from Belgrade, keeping out of the Kosovo war as far as it could, though NATO struck military targets on its territory in 1999. It adopted the German mark, and later the euro, as its currency. In 2003 the federation was reorganised as the loose union of Serbia and Montenegro. In the referendum of 21 May 2006, independence won 55.5 percent of the vote, just over the 55 percent threshold set by the European Union, and parliament declared independence on 3 June.

Montenegro joined the United Nations in June 2006, applied for membership of the European Union in 2008 and opened accession talks in 2012. On election day in October 2016 the authorities announced that they had foiled an alleged coup attempt, and in June 2017 the country joined NATO, a step opposed by much of its pro-Serbian population. A 2019 law on religious property, seen by the Serbian Orthodox Church as a threat to its monasteries, set off months of protest. In the election of August 2020 Đukanović's party lost power for the first time since the introduction of multi-party politics.

The years since have brought a succession of short-lived coalition governments. Jakov Milatović defeated Đukanović in the presidential election of 2023, and Milojko Spajić of the Europe Now movement became prime minister in October 2023. The former royal capital of Cetinje suffered mass shootings in August 2022 and on 1 January 2025, the second of which killed thirteen people besides the gunman. Montenegro is the most advanced of the candidates for European Union membership: by October 2026 it had provisionally closed 21 of the 33 negotiating chapters, with membership targeted for 2028, though a planned intergovernmental conference in September 2026 did not take place.