Croatia

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Croatia (Croatian: Hrvatska listen (help·info)), officially the Republic of Croatia (Republika Hrvatska), is a country in Europe at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Central Europe and the Balkans. Its capital is Zagreb. Croatia shares land borders with Slovenia and Hungary to the north, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro to the south, as well as a sea border with Italy to the west. It is a candidate for membership in the European Union and NATO.

History of Croatia

A tribe of Croats came to the Roman provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia in the 7th century and was ultimately assimilated into the larger native Illyro-Roman and recently arrived Slavic population which took the same name. Ruled by various Croatian rulers, these duchies were intermittently controlled by the Roman Empire at Constantinople and the Franks. Eventually Croatia became an independent kingdom in 925, when — by a decree of the Holy Catholic Church in Rome — King Tomislav was crowned first king of Croatia.

Croatia retained its independence until 1102 when, after decades of inner struggles, the country entered a dynastic union with Kingdom of Hungary under the name Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen. Croatian statehood was preserved through a number of institutions, notably the Sabor which served as an assembly of Croatian nobles, and the ban or viceroy. Furthermore, the Croatian nobles retained their lands and titles.

By the mid-1400s, the Hungarian kingdom was shaken by the Ottoman expansion as much of the mountainous country now known as Bosnia and Herzegovina fell to the Turks. At the same time, Dalmatia became mostly Venetian. Dubrovnik was a city-state that was, at first, Byzantine (Roman) and Venetian, but later, unlike other Dalmatian city-states, became independent as Republic of Dubrovnik, even though it was often under the suzerainty of neighbouring powers.

The Battle of Mohács in 1526 led the Croatian Parliament to elect the Habsburgs to the throne of Croatia. Habsburg rule eventually thwarted Ottoman expansion, and by the 18th century, much of the Croatian territories that had previously been Ottoman passed to the Austrians. The odd crescent shape of the Croatian lands remained as a mark, more or less, of the frontier to the Ottoman advance into Europe. Further south, Istria, Dalmatia and Dubrovnik all eventually passed to the Habsburg Monarchy between 1797 and 1815.

Following World War I, Croatia joined the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. Shortly thereafter, this joint state entered into a union with Serbia to form the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which eventually became Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. After Germany and its Axis allies invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Nazis permitted the extreme right-wing organization Ustaše, backed and sponsored by Italian fascists, to found the "Independent State of Croatia". The new regime was highly dependent upon German support for survival. Numerous concentration camps were established in Croatia between 1941 and 1945, when many Serbs, Jews, Gypsies anti-fascist Croats and others were murdered for racial, religious or political reasons. When the Axis powers were defeated in Croatia by the anti-fascists, the State Anti-Fascist Council of People's Liberation of Croatia (ZAVNOH) declared the People's Republic of Croatia, which became one of the six socialist republics within federal Yugoslavia.

Read more at Wikipedia.org