Kingdom of Croatia

Invited to fight the Avars

formationDrafted from Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911)

The Croats trace their own arrival in the region that still bears their name not to the Illyrians who lived there under Roman rule, but to a Slavic tribe that followed in the wake of the Lombards and Avars. Seton-Watson records the tradition that the Chrobati were invited into Illyria by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius around 634 specifically to drive the Avars out - and that, having done the job, they stayed on for generations as nominal vassals of Constantinople rather than moving on. A kindred Slavic people, the Serbs, settled at the same time farther east, taking the territory that would become Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro. Along the Dalmatian coast, meanwhile, Roman institutions and culture survived in the old maritime towns largely because Venice's own rise as a sea power kept the eastern Adriatic from drifting entirely out of the western world's orbit - without it, Seton-Watson judges, Rome would likely have lost the coast altogether once Byzantine authority there grew too shadowy to matter.

Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911) · Oton Iveković · Public domain

A liturgy Rome could not suppress

The defining tension of the Croats' own early history, in Seton-Watson's reading, was the pull between Latin and Byzantine culture - a division sharpened rather than resolved by the mission of Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs in the ninth century. Rome recognized their introduction of a Slavonic liturgy at first, then revoked the concession after Methodius's own death; but the practice never fully disappeared. Seton-Watson notes that the Glagolitic rite, built on that same Slavonic liturgy, was still in active use in several hundred parishes across Dalmatia, Istria and southern Croatia when the nineteenth-century national revival rediscovered it

• a thousand years of intermittent opposition from Rome that had never quite managed to extirpate it.

Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911) · Unknown scribe · Public domain

A century of kings nobody agreed on

expansionDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Duke Tomislav's assumption of the royal title, some time around 924 or 925, is one of the few facts about tenth-century Croatia that sources even attempt to date - and Fine is careful to note that even this rests on a single, disputed letter attributed to Pope John X. What came after is worse. Tomislav died around 928, and the sources that try to list his successors contradict each other completely: different chroniclers give different names, different numbers of intervening rulers, and different dates, to the point that Fine judges the entire question unresolvable and, more importantly, beside the point - a corrected list of names would still tell nothing about what any of these rulers actually did, since nothing else about them survives.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Oton Iveković · Public domain

A kingmaker, a civil war, and pirates who never really stopped

The one episode that does emerge clearly from the wreckage is a civil war in 949, in which the nobleman Pribina - ban of three districts and, by Fine's account, probably the strongest single military power left in the kingdom - overthrew and killed a ruler named Miroslav and put Miroslav's brother Kresimir II on the throne in his place. The unrest that followed let peripheral territories slip away: the Neretljani of the Dalmatian coast, never fully subdued to begin with, returned to piracy, and much of Bosnia was lost to a revived Serbia under Časlav. Croatia clawed some of it back once Časlav died around 960 and Serbia fell into its own disorder, letting Kresimir recover western Bosnia - proof, if nothing else, that the kingdom Tomislav had built could survive a civil war and a lost province and still pull itself back together.

Byzantine favor, a divided inheritance, and a Venetian hostage

Kresimir II's successor Stjepan Drzislav (969-97) went further, securing Byzantine recognition as head of the Dalmatian theme - a formal acknowledgment of exactly the kind of regional standing Tomislav's own generation had only claimed. It did not survive his death. Drzislav left his lands divided among three sons, and the division produced the same result a divided inheritance produced almost everywhere in this period: civil war, with Venice intervening against the eldest, Svetoslav, who ended up exiled to Hungary while his younger brothers Kresimir III and Gojislav split what remained. Kresimir III, caught between a hostile Venice and a nephew backed by Hungary, chose Byzantine protection instead - formally submitting to Basil II and receiving a patrician's title - and held on as a Byzantine client until the emperor's death in 1025 let him drop the pretense of submission and rule as an independent king again in fact as well as name.

Two reigns that quietly rebuilt what a century of chaos had cost

His son Stjepan I (1030-58) used that independence to expand rather than merely defend: a larger navy, real successes against both Venice and Byzantium, and the annexation of Carinthia in the northwest. Stjepan's own son, Petar Kresimir IV (1058-74/75), inherited a kingdom strong enough that Byzantium, increasingly distracted by the Seljuks in the east and the Normans in Italy, chose to court Croatia rather than contest it: in 1069 the empire formally made Kresimir its own representative over the Dalmatian theme, letting the existing Byzantine officials in cities like Zadar keep their posts while now nominally answering to him. It was the closest a Croatian king had come to uncontested regional supremacy since Tomislav's own reign a century and a half earlier - and it was under this same Kresimir that a young autonomous ruler of Slavonia named Zvonimir, son-in-law of the Hungarian king, agreed to bring his own territory under Croatian suzerainty in exchange for local independence, a leading role in state affairs, and the throne itself should the childless Kresimir die without an heir.

A crown that died with him

peakDrafted from Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911)

The kingship Tomislav had founded a century and a half earlier reached what Seton-Watson calls its most famous moment under one of the line of kings who followed him: Zvonimir, the Ban of Slavonia who had brought his own territory under Croatian suzerainty in exchange for a promised succession, received his own crown at Split in 1076 directly from the hands of the Legate of Pope Gregory VII - a second papal coronation confirming the same choice of allegiance Tomislav had made generations before. But the achievement proved personal rather than institutional.

"Zvonimir's greatness died with him," Seton-Watson writes bluntly, and no comparable king followed to carry the kingdom's own standing forward. Zvonimir left no son, and the native royal line he had crowned himself the most celebrated member of simply ran out - leaving Croatia's own future to be decided not by another coronation, but by the civil war that followed a dynasty's extinction.

Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb · Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911) · Unknown photographer · Public domain

A time of troubles

contractionDrafted from Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983)

Zvonimir died in 1089 or 1090 - legend, Fine notes, has him killed in a brawl during a council, though the story cannot be confirmed. He left a single young son by his Hungarian wife, and that boy, the last of the Trpimirovic dynasty Tomislav had founded, died within the year. With him died the line itself, and with the line died the one thing that had held the kingdom's centralizing nobles-versus-crown tensions in check. Zvonimir's own widow tried to hold the throne, but she was unpopular with a nobility that had already resented her husband's policies and was now free to reassert the local independence he had spent his reign curbing.

A Hungarian regency, and a king who pushed it out

Her brother, the King of Hungary, intervened at once to protect her interests - and his own ambitions along with them - occupying much of Croatia and part of Dalmatia before an attack on Hungary itself by raiders from the steppe forced a partial withdrawal. The Hungarians kept inland Pannonian Croatia, organizing it as a separate banovina under Almos, the king's own nephew, from 1091 to 1095, and establishing a bishopric at Zagreb answerable to a Hungarian archbishop rather than to Split. What remained of Croatia - Dalmatia and whatever of the interior Almos's banovina had not absorbed - was taken over by a ruler named Peter, based at Knin, who by 1095 had recovered enough ground to expel Almos outright.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · CroatianPalpatine · CC BY-SA 4.0

The last independent king

Peter's independence did not survive the new Hungarian king, Koloman, who succeeded to the Hungarian throne at the end of 1095 and sent his armies back into Pannonian Croatia the following year. Peter was killed fighting them on the mountain later renamed Petrova gora in his memory - the last king to rule an independent Croatia. Koloman followed the victory by occupying Biograd in 1097, giving Hungary the port on the Adriatic it had long wanted, and the remaining Dalmatian cities, alarmed at the Hungarian advance, turned instead to Venice for protection. A kingdom that six years earlier had still been ruled from within itself now had no king of its own left to rule it at all.

Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (1983) · Oton Iveković · Public domain

Conquest, inheritance and election

endDrafted from Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911)

A dozen years of Hungarian intervention, a brief and then extinguished native kingship under Peter, and the loss of Biograd had left Croatia without a king of its own by the time Coloman moved to settle the matter for good. In 1102 the Croat nobles resolved it by recognizing Coloman, King of Hungary, as their own sovereign. Coloman did not rest his claim on a single ground. Seton-Watson records him asserting "the triple claims of conquest, inheritance and election" together - his own armies had already completed work his uncle Ladislas I had left unfinished, the widowed queen of the childless Zvonimir had been a Hungarian princess giving Coloman a hereditary thread to pull on, and the nobles' recognition itself supplied the third leg the other two lacked on their own. Coloman sealed the whole arrangement with a coronation at Biograd and a new title that named all three of his crowns at once: Rex Hungariae, Croatiae atque Dalmatiae.

National Széchényi Library, Budapest · Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A union that respected what it absorbed

What followed was not, in Seton-Watson's own account, an outright annexation. He is careful to note that the precise relationship between Hungary and Croatia was not yet clearly defined under Coloman himself, but that the king - following what Seton-Watson calls the tolerant traditions of the House of Árpád - respected Croatia's own privileges and independent standing rather than folding the kingdom directly into Hungary's own administration. It was a personal union built on a claim assembled from three different kinds of legitimacy at once, and it proved durable enough to outlast the native Croatian kingship it replaced by many centuries - even as the crown Tomislav had first taken from a papal legate in 914, and Zvonimir had worn again in 1076, passed for good into a Hungarian king's own hands.