Serbian

The Serbs are a South Slavic people who settled the central Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries, building early principalities in Ras and other lands. The Nemanjić dynasty, founded by Stefan Nemanja in 1166, united Serb lands: Stefan the First-Crowned took the royal title in 1217, and Saint Sava secured an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church in 1219, giving the Serbs a lasting faith and hierarchy.

In 1337 the young Stefan Dušan had just inherited the kingdom, and his Byzantine conquests made him Emperor of the Serbs and Greeks in 1346, ruling from Skopje an empire from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth. The empire fragmented after his death; defeat at Kosovo in 1389 and the fall of Smederevo in 1459 brought the Serb lands under Ottoman rule.

The Patriarchate of Peć kept Serbian consciousness alive through the Ottoman centuries, and failed uprisings in 1689 and 1737 triggered the Great Migrations into Habsburg lands. Uprisings in 1804 and 1815 reopened the path to an autonomous principality, recognized within the Ottoman Empire in 1830.