The acquisition of Croatia in 1527 further expanded the Hapsburg frontiers to Bosnia, dividing the Balkans into a Catholic northwest and an Orthodox Christian and Muslim southeast.

Internally, however, the Hapsburgs treated each region differently. The “border marches” of Carinthia, Carniola and Styria were important military bulwarks against the Hungarians, and the Hapsburgs attached them directly to the crown and divided the Slovene lands between them.

The Croatian territories, on the hand, had a nominal autonomy. The Croatian council of nobles, the ban, and its parliament, the Sabor, continued to function, having elected the Austrian Hapsburgs to the Croatian throne.

But the Hapsburgs also clipped the Croatian territories, and the powers of the ban and Sabor, by establishing a Military Frontier (Militargrenze or Vojna Krajina) along the Ottoman border, which was directly administered by the Habsburg war council.

Map B.4: Austria-Hungary 1878 - 1914 (click to enlarge)

To ensure direct control over the Military Frontier, the Hapsburgs invited Serbian refugees from Ottoman territories to settle in it after the Habsburg-Ottoman war of 1683-99. During the war the patriarchate of Pec, the head of the Serbian millet under the Ottoman Empire, switched sides to Vienna, and thousands of Serbs fled to the Croatia-Slavonia frontier. After the war ended with the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, under which Hungary, Slavonia, and Transylvania reverted to the Habsburg crown, the Austrians invited the Serbs, who had been their recent allies, to settle in the Military Frontier as Habsburg frontier guards. In return, the Serbs were allowed similar self-rule rights as they had under the Ottomans.

These Serbian settlers, together with the Vlachs that the Ottomans had settled on their Bosnian border, formed a kind of human buffer between the Habsburg territories of Croatia-Slavonia and the Bosnian frontiers of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1718, the Hapsburgs regained more Croatian lands from the Ottomans, and in 1815, after defeating Napoleon, they wrested Dalmatia from Venice. But they did not incorporate these newly won territories into Croatia. Instead, some were used to thicken the Military Frontier, and others were turned into separate provinces, such as Dalmatia.

In 1804, Francis II, the last of the Holy Roman emperors, declared himself emperor of Austria and converted the Hapsburg territories into the Austrian Empire, only to lose many of the Slovene lands, along with Dalmatia, Trieste and parts of Croatia, to Napoleon. Between 1809-1814 these territories were part of the Illyrian Provinces of the French Empire.

Brief though it was, French occupation had a deeply radicalizing influence on the area. This was the first time that the northwestern Balkans came under a single administrative rubric, and France’s encouragement of local development, such as the use of Slovene as an official language, inspired an “Illyrian” ideal amongst intellectuals. The Illyrians emphasized a shared South Slav linguistic and cultural identity, and aspired towards a shared political identity.

Though Austria revoked most of France’s reforms when it regained the northwestern Balkans after the Napoleonic Wars of 1814-15, this only increased support for the Illyrians in Slovenia, and led to the spread of their ideas to the Croatian territories.

The 1848 revolutions in Europe further radicalized Austrian subjects. In the east, the Hapsburgs crushed a Magyar uprising in 1848-9 with the help of the Serbs, and rewarded them with a semiautonomous Duchy of Vojvodina, which was created by looping off border territories of Hungary and Transylvania that held large Hungarian as well as Serbian populations.

To the west, the Hapsburgs had less difficulty in crushing Slovene demands for autonomy within the empire, but the demand resurfaced in the 1860s, this time under the patronage of Croatian leaders, who proposed a unified state of the South Slavs (Yugoslavia) as part of a federal Habsburg empire.

With rising aspirations in the eastern territories, and a war with Prussia in 1866 that ended with Austria’s expulsion from the German Confederation, Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph was forced to seek new allies for the defense of his empire. He had, in any case, to come to terms with the rebellious Hungarians, whose territories were too large to be held by brute force. The result was a pact with the king of Hungary for a joint empire of Austria-Hungary, the Ausgleich (agreement) of February 8, 1867.

Highlights of the 1867 Ausgleich A single empire of Austria-Hungary under the Dual Monarchy of the Austrian and Hungarian thrones. The empire to be a loosely federated state with its powers largely limited to defense and foreign affairs. Austrian emperor to be head of state, but Hungary to have full autonomy. Northwestern Balkans to be divided again: Croatia and Slavonia to be ruled by Hungary instead of Austria; Dalmatia, Istria and the Military Frontier to remain with Austria. Semiautonomous Serbian Duchy of Vojvodina to go to Hungary. Austria and Hungary to have a customs union and common accounts, to be revised every ten years.

Though the return of Croatia and Slavonia to Hungarian rule unified the Croatian territories that had been divided between Austria and Hungary, it also subjected both to the aggressive campaign of Magyarization that the Hungarian monarchy had embarked on in the early 19th century.

Croatian nationalists, already up in arms over the imposition of Hungarian as the official language in Magyar held territories in the 1830s, were joined by Croatian Illyrians. The result was that Croatian nationalism was divided between supporters of Croatian unification, and supporters of a wider Yugoslav union.

The Hungarians employed their own tactics of “divide and rule” amongst their new subjects. They abolished the Military Frontier in 1881, bringing the Serbs into Croatia, but granted the Serbs special concessions that set them apart from the Croats. To the east, however, after Vojvodina lost its autonomy, Serbs living in the multiethnic former Duchy were subjected to same Magyarization as the Croats.

The Hungarian kingdom attempted to re assimilate Vojvodina through development programs aimed at Hungarian migration. Lands were expropriated and handed over to Hungarian landowners; new roads and railways construction brought Hungarian entrepreneurs, technicians, officials and labor. Large estates were rapidly commercialized, and Vojvodina became a modern oasis surrounded by poorer lands.

The 1878 Treaty of Berlin to settle the Serbian-Russian war with Turkey marked the final phase of Austrian expansion in the Balkans. Bosnia and Herzegovina were placed under Austrian administration and Austria was allowed to garrison troops in the Sandzak of Novi Pazar. Austria planned to build a railway through Novi Pazar to Constantinople that would enable it to dominate the entire peninsula.

But Novi Pazar bordered Kosovo and Metohija, where the patriarchate of Pec lay, and where the Serbian army had lost to the Ottomans in 1389. Re conquering Kosovo was a central goal of Serbian nationalism, which came closer when the 1878 Treaty of Berlin allocated a part of Macedonia, on the other side of Kosovo, to Serbia.

Austria’s plans threatened Serbian aspirations to integrate Kosovo, and Austria’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908 brought Austria-Hungary to Serbia’s western border.

Austria had fulfilled the goal of eastward expansion within fifty years of its adoption, only to face the same internal conflicts that had led the Austrian Empire to convert itself into Austria-Hungary. The annexation of Bosnia & Herzegovina stimulated the local nationalism that Austria encouraged as a way of keeping Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims divided.

As in Croatia, divide and rule could not subsume the rigors of imperial rule and its veto on internal cultural or political autonomy. In Bosnia & Herzegovina, local Serbian nationalists developed close ties with Serbia, further straining the deteriorating relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

In the Hungarian administered lands of the empire, Croatian nationalists and Yugoslavists joined forces against the denial of autonomy. While Albanian nationalists, on the other hand, viewed Austria’s presence in Novi Pazar as threatening their hopes of autonomy within the Ottoman Empire.

Meantime, the Young Turk revolution of 1908, unseating the Ottoman dynasty, created further volatility in the region. Scenting the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse Austria-Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria all eyed the remaining Ottoman territories in the Balkans. But the wars that followed destroyed both the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.

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