ABSTRACT
The Ottoman Empire had its heyday in the sixteenth century, during which it not only conquered most of the Arab Moslem world, most of Hungary (including Croatia and Transylvania), Azerbaijan, Georgia and numerous Mediterranean islands but also inflicted heavy naval defeats on Venice, Genoa and Spain. In 1521 the capture of Belgrade, the major fortress at the confluence of the middle Danube and several important tributaries, opened the way to the conquest of Hungary (1526-44) and an unsuccessful siege of Vienna (1529) by Sultan Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’ (1520-66). The Austrian Habsburgs refused to renounce their rival claim to the Hungarian throne (vacant since the decisive Ottoman victory over the Hungarians at the battle of Mohacs in 1526). But in Austria the Ottomans encountered an opponent displaying a more tenacious ‘will and capacity to resist’ and, with over-extended supply lines, the Ottomans were ‘campaigning at the limit of their operational capacity’ (Coles 1968:82-7, 103). Indeed, from the 1530s onwards the Austrians encouraged and assisted Orthodox Serb refugees from Ottoman-ruled Serbia to settle in a semi-autonomous ‘Military Frontier’ zone (known as the ‘Vojna Krajina’ in Serbo-Croat) along the shifting border between the Habsburg and Ottoman dominions (and also, not unrelatedly, between Catholic and Orthodox Europe). Over several centuries this contributed to the growth of belligerent Serb populations in Croatia and Vojvodina (then part of southern Hungary). That was how the so-called ‘Krajina’ (‘Frontier’) region of Croatia came to be populated largely by Serbs. It was also the origin of the gradual Serbianization of Vojvodina, which has continued to unnerve and alienate the remaining Hungarian inhabitants, who now feel that they are an underprivileged Catholic minority discriminated against in ‘their’ province.
