Croatia

From Roman Dalmatia to the Adriatic republic, a nation forged between empires, partitioned and reborn through war.

Croatia's history runs along the meeting point of empires, faiths and seas. Its lands were the Roman provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia before Slavic Croats settled them in the early Middle Ages, and a native Croatian kingdom emerged whose ruler Tomislav was, by tradition, crowned the first king around 925. In 1102 the Croatian crown passed by personal union to the kings of Hungary, an association that endured for eight centuries, while the Dalmatian coast fell to Venice and the merchant city of Dubrovnik (Ragusa) thrived as an independent republic. The Ottoman wars carved away much of the land and gave rise to the Habsburg Military Frontier; the nineteenth century brought a national revival that imagined a community of South Slavs. The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 drew Croatia into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, an unhappy union broken by the Second World War and the murderous fascist Independent State of Croatia. After four decades within socialist Yugoslavia, Croatia declared independence in 1991 and fought a war to secure it, winning international recognition in 1992 and full control of its territory by 1998. It joined NATO in 2009 and the European Union in 2013, adopting the euro and entering the Schengen area in 2023.