ABSTRACT
Preceding the region’s early modern and modern history, dominated first by the Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman empires and then by native state-buildings efforts, there was about half a millennium of overlapping forms of internal political rule and intrusion from outside. Native regimes emerged as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire was losing much of its hold over Southeastern Europe. The region’s mixed populations evolved under a series of shifting religious and political borders from the tenth into the sixteenth centuries after a millennium of migration and moving settlement, Roman advance and retreat. Armed conflicts that were responsible for shifting borders rarely pitted the native regimes against each other and were never generated by conscious ethnic antagonism. The initial warfare came from internal disputes or confrontation with the hegemony of the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and then the Latin Hungarian kingdom. But none of these native polities survived the expansion of Ottoman, Habsburg, and Venetian political and religious authority from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Their three-sided Balkan Wars, as detailed by David Tracy (2016), centered on the Ottoman advance across Bosnia and its reduction of Croatian lands under Hungarian oversight. Aiding the advance was an Ottoman alliance, mainly for trade, with the Venetian enclaves on the Dalmatian coast.
