The ancient Croats were a tribe or tribes of Southern Slavs who began settling on the Balkan Peninsula by the seventh century c. E.
Origins
There is not as yet a consensus concerning the location of the original homeland of the Croats. A mid-10th-century account by Constantine Porphyrogenitus (the Byzantine emperor Constantine vii), one of whose informants lived in the region of Dalmatia (Adriatic coastal parts of modern Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia), writes that Croats and Serbs settled there in the reign of Heraclius in the first half of the seventh century; Heraclius invited them there, provided they convert to Christianity, as allies against the Avars. There are several problems with Constantine’s account, however. A settlement of Croats and Serbs at this time would antedate any known Slavic archaeological remains in the Balkans (some sites and material, including that of the “Old Croat Culture” in Hungary, which initially were given early dates, have been reexamined and found to be not earlier than the mid-seventh century). Given the scarcity of any signs at all of the Slavs in the Balkans in this century, however, the early settlement by Croats and Serbs is not at all impossible.
Some of the material in this text has features that make it appear more like a legend than a straightforward account, with elements characteristic of Slavic folktales, such as the tale of the five Croat brothers, and there are duplications suggesting it may have been simply a compilation of earlier material—different versions of the same story, as in many medieval annals and histories, which often are collections of oral tradi-tions—with no attempt at verification. Second versions of the story are given both for the Croats and for the Serbs, and they are similar. Both emphasize that the Croats and Serbs settled in the Balkans at the behest of the emperor; this material may be from a Byzantine source, who emphasized that the emperor had given the Croats and Serbs the land so as to establish promoting imperial claims of suzerainty over them, a political motivation that casts some doubt on the veracity of the account. Each story also locates the homelands of the Croats and Serbs in, respectively, “White Croatia” and “White Serbia,” both located near Bavaria on the border of the kingdom of the Franks, giving rise to the name White Croats (also recorded as Belocroati or Bielo-Chorvats).
Other documents also refer to this homeland of the Croats, but they date from the ninth and 10th centuries and also—puzzlingly—the early fifth century, and the sources who mention it are graphically distant. One is the 10th-century Arab geographer Ibn Rusteh, another the fourth-fifth-century Iberian scholar Orosius, whose account of the matter is known only from a translation by Alfred the Great, and who was writing at a time 100 years before the Slavs are thought to have emerged as a distinct ethnic group; therefore it is highly improbable that he could have been referring to a Slavic people. It is also possible that Orosius was Ibn Rusteh’s source, because Iberia was under Muslim rule. Thus it is difficult to know how much this account can be trusted. If Croats entered the Balkans from near Bavaria, their sojourn there must have been brief, because Slavic expansion westward from the Lower Danube region into southern Austria toward Bavaria had only begun in the sixth century. It is possible that Croats and Serbs were initially part of this movement up the Danube tributaries leading into the eastern Alpine region but then for unknown reasons broke away and headed southward into the Balkans. The movements of early Slavic groups are too little understood either to rule this out or to provide evidence for it.
The account may be referring to a tribal group called the Chorvati, who apparently lived in the northeast of the region of Bohemia (and were sometimes associated with the “White Croats”); other evidence places the Chorvati in the region of the Kievan Rus. There is debate as to whether these Chorvati lived in the region between southern Poland and southwest ukraine, or on the southeast borders of the Rus state. Possibly the Croats or Chorvati in these different areas had once been a united tribe that split. This phenomenon of tribes in different areas having the same name occurs with other Slavs—for example, the name Polane appears both in Poland and near Kiev. It may be that Slavs had common names or ways of naming tribes, analogous to the proliferation of certain modern family names such as Smith or Jones, most of them not actually related.
Some linguistic theories postulate that the name Croat is actually of Iranian Sarmatian origin and was later adopted by Slavs. However, this hypothesis has little convincing evidence to support it.
LANGUAGE
The Croatian dialect is part of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic language family, which includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian (with separate Serbian and Croatian dialects), Macedonian, Slovenian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. The last two were recently claimed by their national groups to be separate languages. All Slavic languages are similar enough that speakers of different languages can at least roughly understand one another. Thus the question of whether different Slavic tongues are fully separate languages or only dialects is often contentious and difficult to answer.
Migrations
At least by the seventh century, if not somewhat earlier, Croats were settling in the western Balkans, especially in Dalmatia, including the Dinaric Alps on the Adriatic side of the Balkans and in Pannonia (including parts of modern Hungary extending south and west into Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria) to the northeast. Dalmatia, where Slavs had begun raiding in about 550, had been the last surviving Western Roman province and was currently part of the Eastern Empire; by the time of the arrival of the Croats a significant number of the Romanized multiethnic population remained there. Over time as rapprochement between the Croats and the Dalmatians (mostly Illyrians) took place, the latter’s culture had a strong effect on the Croats, perhaps greater than in any other Slavic territory. Slavs and Avars increasingly penetrated this area after the fall of Sirmium gave them access to the western Balkans, from the 570s to the 590s destroying towns and settlements all the way to the coast.
Croats, as did other Southern Slavs, continued to be much affected by the Byzantines, since the whole region remained in the Byzantine sphere of influence even during periods when territories there had been wrested from direct imperial control by various invaders—Avars and BuLGARS. The Croat territory’s westerly position exposed them to influences from Western pow-ers—Italy and the Frankish kingdom—but the wealthy coastal towns of Dalmatia, which continued to have Byzantine cultural and political
Croats time line
CROATS
Location:
Ukraine; Croatia; neighboring parts of Balkan Peninsula
Time period:
Fifth century c. e. to present
Ancestry:
Slavic
Language:
Croatian (South Slavic)
C. E.
Seventh century Croats migrate to Balkan Peninsula.
Eighth century Croatian territory becomes organized into seven provinces.
C. 876-879 Several Croatian provinces unite to form a state.
C. 910-914 King Tomislav comes to power.
925 Pope John X recognizes Tomislav as first king of Croatia.
1102 Croatia is annexed by Hungary.
Affinities, remained extremely influential on the Croats as well. Western influences included the Latin alphabet and the Roman Catholic Church.
Reorganization
In the eighth century Croatian territory was organized into seven provinces. It bordered on the province of Ostmark, part of the Frankish territory. Croats managed to stave off threats of annexation by Charlemagne, and in about 876-879 several Croatian provinces united to form a state, which comprised Croatian lands on the Adriatic coast and an inland province in Pannonia called Slovenia. The most important early ruler was Tomislav, who gained power sometime from 910 to 914. In 924 or 925 he was crowned by a papal legate, thus gaining church sanction for his reign. Civil unrest followed his death in 928, however, weakening central authority. The territory that included part of modern Bosnia broke away from Croatia. Croatia was annexed by Hungary in 1102.
Enduring Identity
Croatian territory continued to be part of Hungary and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the latter’s collapse in 1918. At this time Croatia became part of the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later named Yugoslavia for “south Slavs.” Croatia declared its independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and gained international recognition the next year.
Large movements of Croats from elsewhere in the Balkans into Croatia took place in the late 20th century, making its ethnic makeup more than 90 percent Croat (see Croats: nationality). People who consider themselves Croats also live in a number of the modern states in the Balkans and neighboring regions in addition to Croatia. In order of Croatian population size, these are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, Hungary, Austria, Slovenia, Slovakia, and Moravia in the Czech Republic.
CULTURE (see also Slavs)
Art
A distinctive metalworking style that appeared in the 10th century was named Bialobrdo, after a site in Croatia. The style crystallized in part because of the settlement in the Carpathian basin (modern Hungary and neighboring Slovenia), of the Magyars, a steppe people, who combined their own styles with Croatian influences, as well as influences of the Avars and Moravians. Characteristic Bialobrdo jewelry included pieces made of plaited wire, sheetwork pendants, snake-headed bracelets, and S-shaped temple rings (used to ornament headbands). The style spread throughout Hungary, Slovakia, and part of Transylvania. Some of the elements of this style are still used in folk costumes.
Religion
According to their folk belief the Croats, like other Southern Slavs, were sometimes visited by demons or spirits called vila, beautiful naked warrior maidens armed with bows and arrows. The vila danced on mountaintops as supposedly witches and the valkyries did in Germanic lands. As late as the 13th century men left offerings for the vila, who lived in springs and caves and under trees and stones.
A divisive factor between the Croats and the Serbs to their east has been their religious affiliations: The Croats are Roman Catholic and the Serbs adhere to the Eastern Orthodox creed and liturgy.
The Croats, although they came under the rule of various powers, maintained their language and their sense of themselves as a distinct nationality to the present.
Further Reading
Ivo Goldstein. Croatia: A History (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000).
Marcus Tanner. Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
World History
