Due to its physical location in the East and close proximity to Italy in the West, Croatia has traditionally been a land with a split identity, straddling Europe’s political, cultural and religious divides.
Known as Dalmatia in ancient times, the region was conquered by the Romans in the 2nd century BC and added to the Empire. The Province of Dalmatia was the birthplace of Diocletian, one of the Empire’s most important later rulers, who returned to Split in his old age to build the palace that can still be seen today.
After the fall of Rome, the region saw the arrival of the Huns, Ostrogoths and Byzantines before the arrival of the Croats in 7th century. The Croats were a Slavic people who took part in what historians call the “Slavic Migration”, a slow process in which these peoples spread throughout the Balkans.
In 925, the first Croatian King, Tomislav, united the Croats. In the preceding centuries, the Croats had been converted to Christianity by missionaries from both the Latin West and the Greek East. In 925 a church council in Split decided to adopt the Latin language for services, foreshadowing Croatia’s future attachment to the Roman Catholic Church.
The Croatian Kingdom flourished in the late 11th century before being overrun by the expanding Kingdom of Hungary.
The Dalmatian Coast did not always follow the same development as inland Croatia, as Split was only wrested from the Byzantines in 1069 before being quickly subsumed by the newly-dominant Hungarians. In the succeeding centuries, the growth of trade in the Mediterranean brought renewed prosperity to the area. It also drew the covetous eye of the maritime city-state of Venice which longed to expand its dominance along the shores of the Adriatic. At first the Venetians contented themselves with conquering individual cities such as Zadar, but in 1401, taking advantage of the Hungarians’ preoccupation with the threat of Turkish invasion, they purchased the Dalmatian cities outright. Then in 1409, they followed up their success by annexing all of Dalmatia.
Venetian rule of the coastline lasted late into the 18th century and further cemented the region, culturally and religiously to the West. Venetian nobles were granted titles up and down the coast and their presence is responsible for the distinctly Italian feel of Croatia’s coastline.
After the fall of the Venetian Republic in the Napoleonic Wars, all of Croatia was awarded to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1815. The nationalistic currents circulating in 19th century Europe soon followed. Croatians, fearful of having their culture subsumed by the Empire’s dominant German and Magyar ethnic groups, developed strong separatist sentiments. Their dreams of an independent state were briefly realized with the break-up of the Austrian Empire in 1918.
However, the region quickly joined its Slavic neighbors to form Yugoslavia, a nation intended to overcome the region’s mixed ethnic identities with the embrace of its common Slavic heritage. While this confederation effectively fell apart during World War II, the victories of Tito and his partisans combined with Communist Russia’s influence in Eastern Europe managed to drive the region back together to create a post-war Communist state under Tito. During this time, Yugoslavia became one of Eastern Europe’s most prosperous countries.
However, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, extreme nationalists in Croatia and Serbia fanned the flames of ethnic differences leading to a bloody civil war lasting from 1991-95. Croatia emerged from the war as a separate democratic state, and is expected to join the EU in 2010.
