Jagodina

Jagodina stands on the Belica River in central Serbia. Its name appears in a letter to Princess Milica in 1399, and a Serbian assembly met here in 1411. After the Ottoman conquest the town grew as a stopping place on the road to Constantinople, with inns, mosques and a bath serving its inhabitants and travellers. In 1555 Dervish Bey Jahjapašić endowed a large mosque, and a German craftsman made a clock tower for the town. By the seventeenth century Jagodina also had a covered market. The Habsburgs made it a district centre after their war with the Ottomans in 1716–18, but Ottoman rule returned after the next war ended in 1739.