Realm
Country in Southeastern Europe (1882–1918)
The Kingdom of Serbia was a monarchy located in Southeastern Europe which was created when the ruler of the Principality of Serbia, Milan I, was proclaimed king in 1882.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Kingdom of Serbia”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Kingdom of Serbia was a monarchy located in Southeastern Europe which was created when the ruler of the Principality of Serbia, Milan I, was proclaimed king in 1882.
Since 1817, the Principality was ruled by the Obrenović dynasty (replaced by the Karađorđević dynasty for a short time). The Principality of Serbia, under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, de facto achieved full independence when the very last Ottoman troops left Belgrade in 1867. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 recognized the formal independence of the Principality of Serbia, and in its composition Nišava, Pirot, Toplica and Vranje districts entered the South part of Serbia.
In 1882, Serbia was elevated to the status of a kingdom, initially maintaining a foreign policy friendly to Austria-Hungary before turning to the Russian Empire and France following a coup d'état in 1903. Between 1912 and 1913, Serbia greatly enlarged its territory through engagement in the First and Second Balkan Wars – Sandžak-Raška, Kosovo Vilayet and Vardar Macedonia were annexed. At the end of World War I in 1918 it united with Vojvodina and the Kingdom of Montenegro, and in December 1918 it merged with the newly created State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later known as Kingdom of Yugoslavia) under the continued rule of the Karađorđević dynasty.
The Principality of Serbia was a state in the Balkans that came into existence as a result of the Serbian revolution which lasted between 1804 and 1817. Despite brutal oppression and retaliation by the Ottoman authorities, the revolutionary leaders, first Karađorđe and then Miloš Obrenović, succeeded in their goal to liberate Serbia after centuries of Turkish rule.
At first, the principality included only the territory of the former Pashaluk of Belgrade, but in 1831–1833 it expanded to the east, south, and west. In the first decades of the principality, the population was about 85% Serb and 15% non-Serb. Of those, most were Vlachs, and there were some Turkicized Muslim Albanians, which were the overwhelming majority of the Muslims that lived in Smederevo, Kladovo and Ćuprija. The new state aimed to homogenize its population, especially after two Great Migrations of the Serbs also known as the Great Exoduses of the Serbs, in 1690 and in 18th century, between 1718 and 1739, from various territories under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, particularly the Kosovo Vilayet, to the Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy. As a result, from 1830 to 1876, it has been estimated that up to 150,000 Albanians that lived in the territories of the Principality of Serbia emigrated or were expelled.
In 1867 the Ottoman army garrisons retreated from the Principality, securing its de facto independence. Serbia expanded further to the south-east in 1878, when it won full international recognition at the Congress of Berlin.
After the 1877–1878 expansion, in the new areas (present-day Jablanica, Toplica and parts of Nišava District) an estimated 49,000–130,000 Albanians were expelled (Expulsion of the Albanians 1877–1878), settling mainly in Kosovo. These events marked the beginning of the Serbian-Albanian conflict.
The elite of Serbia was divided into two camps, the liberals vs. the conservatives, which corresponded to the similar division in the Russian intelligentsia between the "Westernizers" vs. the "Slavophiles". Many of the terms and ideas used in the debate in Serbia were borrowed directly from the Russian debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers. The conservatives wanted an society dominated by the Orthodox Church, were suspicious of Western values, looked back towards an idealized version of the medieval Serbian empire and generally preferred to preserve the predominately rural Serb society. The liberals looked towards the West as a model; wanted less power for the Orthodox Church; looked forward to the future, and favored reforms designed to transform Serbia into a modern industrial, urbanized society. By the beginning of the 1880s, Serbia along with Montenegro were the only European nations that had no railroads. The lack of railroads sparked a bitter debate in the parliament with the liberals pressing for a railroad while the conservatives were opposed, warning that the changes that would be introduced by the railroad would be the end of traditional Serb society. One conservative deputy warned that building railroads would cause Serbia to "suffer the same fate of the Indians following the discovery of America...Columbus brought European culture to America, but with it also the chains of slavery". There was also the question of independence vs. dependence as Serbia was very much in the Austrian sphere of influence both politically and economically until 1903, and Serbia had been bullied into signing a series of trade agreements with the Austrian empire that were highly disadvantageous from the Serb viewpoint. Unable to generate much economic growth, Serbia was forced into debt with the Serb national debt raising from 16.5 million francs in 1880 to 903.8 million francs in 1914. The two most popular political parties, the Progress Party and the Radical Party, both represented the liberal tendency in Serb politics. However, the idea of "progress" generated fears of a loss of national identity and that all that made Serbia unique would disappear forever, which was expressed in novels by writers such as Laza Kostić, Đura Jakšić and Stevan Sremac. An editorial in the Belgrade newspaper Dnevni List (Daily Newspaper) stated: "Nowhere else in the world can one see the miraculous and absurd situation that the modern ideas of political and social progress are advocated in parliament by village cash-loan givers, former municipal cops, and illiterate bench-sitters and chicken sellers".
Serbia was a predominately agrarian society with most Serbs living in an extended family unit known as the zadruga. Serbia had one of the highest birthrates in Europe with the population increasing by 71.3% between 1880 and 1914. At least part of the population increase was due to the structure of the zadruga, which provided for sharing the burden of child-rearing while also ensuring that young men could marry without first owning land or learning a craft as was the norm in Western Europe. Serb couples tended to marry young. Serb society was extremely patriarchal with fathers and husbands having absolute authority over their wives and children. Legally, a man remained a minor until his father died, and it was common for a zadruga to be dominated by grandfathers who exercised absolute power over their sons and grandsons along with the women in the zadruga. The German historian Marie-Jannine Calic wrote: "The zadruga represented a community of property, life, work, and authority. Private property did not exist, not even money". In the late 19th century, the zadruga started to break down in part because family units of about 20-40 people were too large to share the same plot of land; in part because of the coming of a market economy in place of the previous barter economy, which made it possible for a couple to break away from a zadruga without suffering economic ruin; and in part because of a tendency of many young men to learn a trade or a craft in order to escape the patriarchal zadruga. In the Ottoman era, the majority of the land was owned by Muslim pashas or beys, and in the aftermath of independence, the feudal estates of the Muslim aristocracy were broken up. Serbia was one of the few places in Eastern Europe at the time where the peasantry owned their own land instead of working in a feudal estate owned by some nobleman. However, land was owned by the zadruga instead of by individuals, and legally land owned by a zadruga could only be divided in exceptional conditions. Poverty was extreme in rural Serbia owing to the small size of the farms vs. the large zadrugas, and between 1910 and 1914 two-thirds of Serb farmers were not able to make an existential minimum. Surveys revealed that half of Serb farmers did not own a yoke of oxen while a third did not own plows or even beds. By October of each year, about 28% of rural Serbs suffered from food insecurity, and by the time of January–February about 46% of rural Serbs suffered from food insecurity. The increasing population along with the poverty led to a tendency to increase farmland instead of increasing yields as it was common for farmers to turn woods and meadows into grain fields alongside a tendency to switch from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet. The upper and middle classes in Serbia represented a small percentage of the population. Besides for the royal family, Belgrade had only six millionaires in 1900. In the cities such as Belgrade, people started to discard the traditional clothing in favor of Western style clothing by the 1890s as a symbol of modernity and progress.
The Serbo-Bulgarian War erupted on 14 November 1885, and lasted until 28 November of the same year. The war ended in defeat for Serbia, as it had failed to capture the Slivnitsa region which it had set out to achieve. Bulgarians successfully repelled the Serbs after the decisive victory at the Battle of Slivnitsa and advanced into Serbian territory taking Pirot and clearing the way to Niš.
When Austria-Hungary declared that it would join the war on the side of Serbia, Bulgaria withdrew from Serbia leaving the Serbo-Bulgarian border precisely where it had been prior to the war. The peace treaty was signed on 19 February 1886, in Bucharest. As a result of the war, European powers acknowledged the act of Unification of Bulgaria which happened on 6 September 1885.
Negotiations between Russia, Serbia and Bulgaria led to the Serbian-Bulgarian Treaty of Alliance of March 1912, which aimed to conquer and to divide the Ottoman held Macedonia. In May, a Serbian-Greek alliance was reached and in October 1912, a Serbia-Montenegro alliance was signed.
After the war started, Serbia, together with Montenegro, conquered Pristina and Novi Pazar. At the Battle of Kumanovo Serbs defeated the Ottoman army and proceeded to conquer Skopje and the whole of Kosovo vilayet. The region of Metohija was taken by Montenegro. At Bitola and Ohrid Serbian army units established contact with the Greek army. Populations of ethnic Serbs and Albanians tended to shift following territorial conquests. As a result of the multi-ethnic composition of Kosovo, the new administrations provoked a mixed response from the local population. Serbs considered this a liberation.
On 29 November 1913, the Drač County of the Kingdom of Serbia was established on the part of the territory of Albania taken from the Ottoman Empire during the First Balkan War. Serbian Drač County had four districts (Serbian: срез): Drač (Durrës), Lješ (Lezhë), Elbasan and Tirana.
After the First Balkan War of 1912, territories of Kosovo and north-western Macedonia were internationally recognised as a part of Serbia and northern Metohija as a part of Montenegro at the Treaty of London of May 1913. In a report to Rome, Lazër Mjeda, Archbishop of Skopje, estimated that 25,000 Albanians were killed by Serbian forces during and after the conflict.
The old disagreements regarding the territory of Macedonia among the members of the Balkan League and primarily Serbia and Bulgaria, led to the Second Balkan War. Here, Serbia, Greece, Romania, the Ottoman Empire, and Montenegro fought against Bulgaria in 1913.
The final borders were ratified at the Treaty of Bucharest of 1913. Serbia came to control the land which became known as Vardar Macedonia, and today stands independent as the Republic of North Macedonia but land-locked Serbia was prevented from gaining access to the Adriatic Sea by the newly established Principality of Albania.
As the result of these wars, Serbia's population increased from 2.9 million to 4.5 million and territory increased by 81%.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo (then part of Austria-Hungary) brought the tensions between Austria-Hungary and Serbia to a head. Behind the assassination in Sarajevo was the secret Serbian officers organization Black Hand. The assassins were supported by an "underground railroad" of Serbian civilians and military officers that provided transportation and hid them; members of the Serbian military that trained them, encouraged them, and provided weapons, maps, and other information. After the assassination, the conspirators were arrested in Bosnia-Herzegovina and tried in Sarajevo in October 1914.
The political objective of the assassination was to break the southern Slav provinces off from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered a chain of international events that embroiled Russia and the major European powers in the conflict.
On 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Kingdom of Serbia”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.