The history of Serbia

Serbia lies in the central Balkans, where the Danube, Sava and Morava rivers meet. Its land held some of Europe's earliest farming cultures, then Roman provinces that produced more than a dozen emperors, before Slavs settled there and the Nemanjić dynasty built a medieval kingdom and briefly an empire. After four and a half centuries of Ottoman rule, uprisings from 1804 created a principality that grew into an independent kingdom, then the core of Yugoslavia for most of the twentieth century. The wars that broke up Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the dispute over Kosovo that followed, still shape the country, which became a separate state again in 2006.

The Iron Gates gorge of the Danube, on today's border with Romania, sheltered one of Europe's most remarkable prehistoric sites. At Lepenski Vir, from about 9500 BCE, hunter-fishers built settlements of trapezoid houses and carved large boulder sculptures with fish-like faces. The Starčevo culture of early farmers was followed from around 5700 BCE by the Vinča culture, named after a mound on the Danube just east of Belgrade. Vinča people smelted copper at Rudna Glava and Belovode, among the earliest known sites of metalworking, and left thousands of clay figurines and pots marked with signs that a few scholars read as early writing.

In the Iron Age the land was home to Illyrian, Thracian and Dacian peoples. In the third century BCE a Celtic people, the Scordisci, settled at the confluence of the Sava and Danube, where they founded the fortress of Singidunum, the origin of Belgrade.

Rome pushed to the Danube in the decades around the turn of the eras, and the area became the province of Moesia Superior, with Pannonia to the north-west. Singidunum and Viminacium, near today's Kostolac, became legionary bases guarding the river frontier of the Roman Empire. Trajan cut a road through the Iron Gates and bridged the Danube for his wars in Dacia.

From the third century the region became the empire's military heartland. Soldiers from the Danube provinces rose to the throne, and more than a dozen emperors were born in what is now Serbia, among them Constantine I, born at Naissus (Niš) around 272. Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica) was an imperial capital, and Galerius built his palace at Felix Romuliana. Christianity spread through the towns.

The frontier collapsed in the fifth century. Attila and the Huns sacked Viminacium, Singidunum, Naissus and Sirmium in the 440s. The Byzantine Empire reasserted its authority under Justinian I, who built the city of Justiniana Prima, in honour of his birthplace nearby. But in the late sixth and seventh centuries Avars and Slavs overran the Balkan interior, and Slavic communities settled throughout the region, mixing with the remaining Roman and Balkan population.

The tenth-century emperor Constantine VII recorded that the Serbs arrived in the Balkans in the seventh century. Their first known state, ruled by the Vlastimirović dynasty, appeared in the ninth century in the hilly region later called Raška, between the Byzantine world and the expanding First Bulgarian Empire. Serbs were converted to Orthodox Christianity under Byzantine influence in the later ninth century. Bulgaria conquered it in 924, and after a brief revival under Prince Časlav the region fell under Byzantine rule again when Basil II destroyed Bulgaria in 1018. In the eleventh century the centre of Serbian power shifted to Duklja on the Adriatic, in today's Montenegro, whose ruler Mihailo received a royal crown from the pope in 1077.

The medieval Serbian state took lasting shape under Stefan Nemanja, who became grand župan of Raška around 1166, united the Serbian lands and ended his life as a monk. His son Rastko, known as Saint Sava, in 1219 obtained from the patriarch in Nicaea an autocephalous Serbian archbishopric, while his brother Stefan was crowned king in 1217, earning the name Stefan the First-Crowned. The Nemanjić dynasty ruled for nearly two centuries. Its kings endowed the monasteries of Studenica, Žiča, Mileševa, Sopoćani and Gračanica, whose frescoes are among the finest of the Byzantine world, and grew rich from silver mines worked by Saxon miners.

The kingdom expanded southwards at Byzantium's expense, and Stefan Dušan conquered Macedonia, Albania, Epirus and Thessaly, had himself crowned emperor of the Serbs and Greeks at Skopje in 1346, raised the Serbian church to a patriarchate at Peć, and issued a law code. Dušan's empire did not survive him. After his death in 1355 the regional lords went their own way, and in 1371 the Ottoman Empire destroyed the armies of the southern Serbian lords at the Maritsa river.

In the north, Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović built a strong principality based on the Morava valley. On 28 June 1389 his coalition faced the army of Sultan Murad I on the Kosovo plain. Both rulers were killed, and although the battle was not a clear victory for either side at the time, Serbia soon became an Ottoman vassal. The battle and the legend of Lazar's sacrifice later became central to Serbian epic poetry and national identity, as described in the History of Kosovo.

Lazar's son Stefan Lazarević, given the Byzantine title of despot, held a Serbian Despotate as a vassal sometimes of the Ottomans and sometimes of Hungary. He made Belgrade his capital in 1403, and his successor Đurađ Branković built the huge fortress of Smederevo on the Danube. After Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans failed to take Hungarian-held Belgrade in 1456, but captured Smederevo in 1459, ending the medieval Serbian state. Belgrade itself fell to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1521.

For more than three centuries most of Serbia was part of the Ottoman Empire, as the sanjak of Smederevo and later the pashalik of Belgrade. Muslim towns with mosques and bazaars grew up, and some Serbs converted to Islam, while most peasants remained Orthodox Christians under the timar system. The restoration of the Patriarchate of Peć in 1557, helped by the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, himself born a Serb in Bosnia, gave the Serbs a church that preserved their identity and memory of the Nemanjić kings.

The wars between the Ottomans and the Habsburg Monarchy repeatedly devastated the country. When an Austrian advance of 1688 to 1690 collapsed, Patriarch Arsenije III led a great migration of Serbs into Habsburg Hungary, and another followed in 1737 to 1739. North of the Danube and Sava, in the regions now called Vojvodina, Serbs settled in large numbers as soldiers and peasants of the Habsburg Military Frontier. With their church centre at Sremski Karlovci and their merchants and schools in towns such as Novi Sad, the Habsburg Serbs became the nation's cultural leaders in the eighteenth century.

At the end of the eighteenth century renegade janissaries, the dahije, seized power in the pashalik of Belgrade and terrorised the population. In February 1804, after they murdered dozens of Serbian notables, Đorđe Petrović, called Karađorđe, led the First Serbian Uprising. The rebels, helped by Russia, held most of the pashalik for years, but the Ottomans crushed the revolt in 1813 once Russia made peace to face Napoleon. A Second Serbian Uprising in 1815, led by Miloš Obrenović, won autonomy by negotiation. Miloš had Karađorđe murdered in 1817, beginning a feud between the two dynasties that lasted nearly a century.

Ottoman decrees of 1830 made Serbia an autonomous hereditary principality under Miloš. The nineteenth century built the institutions of a small peasant nation-state: constitutions, schools, and the language reform of Vuk Karadžić. The last Ottoman garrisons left in 1867, and after war with the Ottomans in 1876 to 1878, the Congress of Berlin in 1878 recognised Serbia's full independence and enlarged it around Niš, an expansion accompanied by the expulsion of the region's Albanian population. Milan Obrenović proclaimed a kingdom in 1882. In May 1903 army officers murdered King Alexander Obrenović and Queen Draga, and the Karađorđević King Peter I began a more parliamentary reign that turned Serbia towards Russia and France.

Serbia's rivalry with Austria-Hungary sharpened with a tariff war from 1906 and Vienna's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. In the First Balkan War of 1912 Serbia joined Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro against the Ottomans and took Kosovo and much of Macedonia, and in the Second Balkan War of 1913 it defeated Bulgaria to keep its gains. On 28 June 1914 the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary, blaming Belgrade, declared war on 28 July, and the crisis escalated into the First World War.

The Serbian army defeated the first Austro-Hungarian invasions at Cer and the Kolubara in 1914, among the first Allied victories of the war. But in autumn 1915 Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria attacked together, and the army and government retreated across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania in winter to the Adriatic, losing tens of thousands to cold, hunger and disease before being evacuated to Corfu. Re-formed, it broke through on the Salonika front in September 1918. Serbia's losses from fighting, typhus and occupation were proportionally among the heaviest of any country in the war, often estimated at a quarter or more of its population.

On 1 December 1918 Serbia united with the South Slav lands of the former Habsburg empire, including Vojvodina, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under the Karađorđević dynasty. Many Croatians and others resented its centralism. After the Croatian leader Stjepan Radić was shot in parliament in 1928, King Alexander declared a personal dictatorship in January 1929 and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He was assassinated in Marseille in 1934 by a gunman working with the Croatian Ustaše.

In March 1941 Yugoslavia joined the Axis Tripartite Pact; two days later officers in Belgrade overthrew the regency amid mass protests. In response Nazi Germany bombed Belgrade on 6 April and invaded with its allies, and in the Second World War the country was partitioned. Serbia itself was placed under German military occupation with a collaborationist government under General Milan Nedić, while Hungary annexed Bačka, Bulgaria took the south-east and the Independent State of Croatia gained Syrmia. That Ustaše state carried out a genocide against Serbs, as well as Jews and Roma, killing hundreds of thousands, notably at the Jasenovac camp complex. In occupied Serbia the Germans answered resistance with mass reprisals, executing 100 hostages for every German soldier killed; in October 1941 thousands of civilians were shot at Kragujevac and Kraljevo. Serbia's Jews were murdered in the Holocaust at camps such as Sajmište and Banjica in Belgrade, the men largely by shooting in 1941 and the women and children in gas vans in 1942, and in the Hungarian-annexed north troops massacred Serbs and Jews in Novi Sad in January 1942.

Two resistance movements emerged, the royalist Chetniks of Draža Mihailović and the communist Partisans of Josip Broz Tito, and they soon fought each other as well as the occupiers, with some Chetnik units collaborating with the Axis against the Partisans and committing massacres of Muslims and Croats. The Partisans, with the Soviet Red Army, took Belgrade on 20 October 1944, and the communists then executed thousands of real and suspected opponents and expelled most of Vojvodina's large German minority.

Tito's federal Yugoslavia made Serbia one of six republics, with two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo. In 1948 Tito broke with Joseph Stalin, and during the Cold War Yugoslavia developed its own system of workers' self-management, while jailing Stalin's supporters on the island of Goli Otok. Belgrade hosted the first Non-Aligned summit in 1961. Industry and living standards grew quickly, though the one-party state repressed dissent. The 1974 constitution decentralised the federation and gave the provinces almost the powers of republics, which many Serbian politicians later resented.

After Tito's death in 1980 Yugoslavia faced debt, inflation and growing national tensions. Slobodan Milošević took control of the Serbian communist party in 1987 by appealing to Serbian grievances over Kosovo. Mass rallies in 1988 and 1989 brought down the leaderships of Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro, and in 1989 the provinces' autonomy was largely abolished. As Slovenia and Croatia moved towards independence after the revolutions of 1989, Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991.

Milošević's government backed Serb rebels in Croatia and Bosnia with arms, money and the Yugoslav army. In the wars that followed, Serb forces besieged Vukovar and Sarajevo and carried out campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and in July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladić murdered about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, which international courts have ruled a genocide; in 2007 the International Court of Justice found that Serbia had not committed the genocide but had failed to prevent it. Croatian and Bosnian forces also committed crimes, including against Serb civilians, and hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees fled to Serbia, particularly after Croatia retook the Krajina in 1995. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, formed by Serbia and Montenegro in 1992, suffered hyperinflation under UN sanctions.

In 1998 and 1999 war came to Kosovo, where Serbian forces fought the Kosovo Liberation Army; after the failure of peace talks, NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days from March 1999, killing hundreds of civilians, and Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo in June, leaving it under UN administration. Milošević lost the presidential election of September 2000, and when he refused to accept the result, huge crowds stormed the parliament in Belgrade on 5 October and forced him to concede. Extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, he died in custody in 2006 before a verdict. The reforming prime minister Zoran Đinđić, who had sent him to The Hague, was assassinated in 2003.

The federation became the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, and when Montenegrin voters chose independence in May 2006, Serbia declared itself a separate state on 5 June. Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 was rejected by Serbia, which regards the territory as its Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, a position supported by Russia, China and five EU members, while most Western states recognise Kosovo. Serbia handed the wartime Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Mladić to The Hague in 2008 and 2011, became a candidate for European Union membership in 2012 and opened accession talks in 2014, while keeping close ties with Russia and China and declining to join sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

The Serbian Progressive Party has governed since 2012, and Aleksandar Vučić served as prime minister from 2014 and president from 2017. International monitors such as Freedom House have reported an erosion of media freedom and political rights under his rule, which the government disputes. On 1 November 2024 the newly renovated concrete canopy of Novi Sad's railway station collapsed, killing 16 people. Student-led protests demanding accountability spread to hundreds of towns, culminating in the largest demonstration in Serbia's history in Belgrade on 15 March 2025; Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in January 2025 and was succeeded by Đuro Macut. In August 2026 Mladić died in custody in The Hague, and thousands attended his funeral in Belgrade. Vučić resigned the presidency on 27 September 2026 to head his party's list in early parliamentary elections called for 25 October 2026, with Ana Brnabić acting as president until a presidential election due by the end of the year.