A History of Yugoslavia, Part One
By Russell Shortt

Yugoslavia is a difficult country to pin down, follow successive maps across the twentieth century and you see it move around, becoming smaller and smaller as the decades roll by. The country was a confusing melting pot consisting of many different peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. Ancient peoples had inhabited the lands that made up yugoslavia for thousands of millennia before the Roman Empire took control of the region in the first century CE. Slavic tribesmen breached the Empire's borders during the fifth and sixth centuries, they then allied themselves with the Avars, reaching as far as Constantinople and thus precipitating the arrival of Serbs and Croats into the region. In the subsequent centuries Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia and Albania had virtually independent histories. Slovenia was consecutively under Frankish (eight century), Bavarian (ninth century) and Austrian (fourteenth century) rule until 1918.

A Serbian empire emerged in the thirteenth century but was brought under Turkish rule in the fourteenth century and remained so until the nineteenth century. A Croatian kingdom had emerged in the tenth century, however it was conquered by Hungary and remained part of the Hungarian empire until the end of the First World War. Montenegro had remained an independent principality, resisting Turkish incursions until 1499 when it eventually succumbed. It was granted independence by the Ottoman Empire in 1799. Similarly Bosnia emerged in the medieval period but was overran by the Ottomans in the mid-fifteenth century before falling to the Austro-Hungarians in 1878 and remaining so until the end of World War One. Likewise the Macedonians were overran by the Ottoman Empire and were subsequently annexed to Serbia in the post war treaties. Finally Albania remained in Ottoman hands until the sick old man of Europe passed away in 1918.

Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.net
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