Croats

• 1. Croats

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  On the 15th of March each year, a community in Te Tai Tokerau, New Zealand's northernmost region, celebrates Tarara Day. Tarara is the Māori word for Croatian. The people who observe this holiday trace their ancestry to Croatian immigrants and to the Ngāpuhi, a Māori people of the north. Their existence points to something remarkable. The Croats, a South Slavic ethnic group native to the eastern Adriatic, have spread to become one of the most widely distributed peoples on earth.

  In Croatia itself, 3.9 million people identify as Croat, constituting about 90.4% of the population. Another 553,000 live in Bosnia and Herzegovina as one of three recognized constituent ethnic groups. Beyond those homelands, 4 to 4.5 million more Croats live in diaspora, scattered across Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific. Their name may reach back to Sarmatian stone inscriptions older than Christianity. The kingdoms they built on the Adriatic coast lasted for centuries before foreign powers absorbed them. Their story begins with a name whose origins scholars are still debating, and it continues in Croatian communities spread across six continents.

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• 2. A Name from Sarmatian Stone

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  Inscriptions on the Tanais Tablets, dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries, record the name Khoroáthos in several alternate spellings. Tanais lay in Scytho-Sarmatian territory, far east of the Adriatic, making these ancient stones the earliest proposed connection to the Croatian name. Scholars trace a linguistic chain from Common Slavic *Xorvat through North-West Slavic Xərwate into Medieval Latin Croāt. The chain arrives finally at the English word "Croat." The native form, Hrvati, most likely derives from Proto-Ossetian or Alanian roots meaning "one who guards." That meaning, guardian or protector, suggests a military or sentinel identity attached to the earliest bearers of the name. The origin of the ethnonym remains uncertain, and a proposed link between the Croats and the ancient Goths was more rooted in 20th-century Ustaše political aspirations than in historical evidence.

  In Croatian territory, the name first appears on stone and in documents during the 8th and 9th centuries. Those early records mark the moment when Croat rulers began consolidating power across Dalmatia. Within a century, a pope would write to one of those rulers and address him as king.

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• 3. The Kingdom Rises

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  The Croatian Prince Mislav, who ruled from 835 to 845, built a formidable navy along the Adriatic coast. In 839, he signed a peace treaty with Pietro Tradonico, the doge of Venice. His successor, Prince Trpimir I, ruled from 845 to 864. In 854, Trpimir's forces clashed with the Bulgarian army in a major battle; neither side won, and the two parties exchanged gifts and established peace. Trpimir organized his territories into counties, an administrative method borrowed from the Franks. The first known written mention of the Croats dates from the 4th of March 852, appearing in a statute issued by Trpimir. He founded the Trpimirović dynasty, which ruled Croatia, with interruptions, from 845 until 1091.

  Prince Domagoj, who ruled from 864 to 876, rebuilt the Croatian navy and helped the coalition of Emperor Louis II and the Byzantine Empire take the city of Bari in 871. After Domagoj's death, Venetian chronicles called him "the worst duke of Slavs," while Pope John VIII had addressed him in letters as "Famous duke." Duke Branimir, who ruled from 879 to 892, received a formal blessing from Pope John VIII during a service at St. Peter's church in Rome in 879. That blessing, recorded in letters recognizing Branimir as Dux Chroatorum, established Croatia's alignment with Rome over Byzantium.

  Duke Tomislav succeeded Muncimir in Dalmatia around 910. By 925, a letter from Pope John X addressed him as rex Chroatorum, king of the Croats. That letter is the chief surviving evidence for Tomislav's coronation. On the 27th of May 927, his forces faced the Bulgarian army under the commander Alogobotur at the battle of the Bosnian Highlands. The Croats won decisively, halting the westward expansion of Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria. The central town of the Duvno field was later named Tomislavgrad in his honor. In 1097, the last native king Petar Snačić was killed at the Battle of Gvozd Mountain, fighting against King Coloman I of Hungary. By 1102, Coloman had negotiated with Croatian feudal lords, joining the Hungarian and Croatian crowns under a single dynasty.

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• 4. Frontier of Christendom

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  Pope Leo X formally designated Croatia the forefront of Christianity, using the Latin phrase Antemurale Christianitatis, in 1519. That title reflected more than a century of nearly continuous warfare against Ottoman expansion. The toll was already severe: at the Battle of Krbava field in Lika in 1493, Croatian forces suffered a devastating defeat that began decades of steady territorial loss. Eventually, the remaining Croatian lands shrank to roughly 16,800 square kilometers. Contemporary observers called this rump territory reliquiae reliquiarum, meaning the remnants of remnants of what had once been a great kingdom.

  Ban Petar Berislavić won a notable victory at Dubica on the Una river in 1513, one of the few Croatian successes in this period. Petar Kružić, captain of Senj and prince of Klis, defended the Klis Fortress for nearly 25 years. In 1532, captain Nikola Jurišić used a much smaller force to deter a far larger Turkish army marching toward Vienna. Ban Nikola IV Zrinski helped save Pest from occupation in 1542 and fought at the Battle of Szigetvár in 1566. During the Ottoman conquests, tens of thousands of Croats were taken as slaves into Ottoman territory.

  The tide began to turn at the Battle of Sisak in 1593, exactly 100 years after the disaster at Krbava field. Croats stopped the Ottoman advance there, and the Long Turkish War ended with the Peace of Zsitvatorok in 1606. Croatian negotiators tried to recover their lost territory but succeeded in restoring only a small area. The boundary that remained after those negotiations still shapes the border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina today.

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• 5. Conspiracy and Revival

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  On the 30th of April 1671, four Croatian and Hungarian noblemen were executed in Wiener Neustadt. Among them were Croatian ban Petar Zrinski and his co-conspirator Fran Krsto Frankopan. The two had led a wide-ranging plot against Habsburg rule, negotiating secretly with Louis XIV of France, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and the Republic of Venice. They even approached the Ottoman Empire. Imperial spies uncovered the conspiracy before it could succeed. The estates of the two most powerful Croatian noble houses were confiscated, their families relocated and eventually extinguished. Between 1670 and the revolution of 1848, only two Croatian bans were of Croatian nationality.

  By the early 18th century, Croatia was one of the crown lands that supported Emperor Charles VI's Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. It also backed Empress Maria Theresa in the War of the Austrian Succession of 1741-48. Habsburg centralization and Germanization steadily eroded Croatian autonomy. The Sabor, the assembly of Croatian nobles, lost significance, and Croatia was reduced to a single seat in the governing council of Hungary. Hungarian political pressure added another layer, as Magyars pushed to absorb Croatia into a unified Hungarian state.

  The Croatian national revival began in the 1830s with the Illyrian movement. Ljudevit Gaj, its leading champion, reformed and standardized the Croatian language. Until 1847, the official language of Croatia had been Latin. On the 25th of March 1848, Croatian activists issued a political petition known as "Zahtijevanja naroda," a program of thirty national, social, and liberal principles. These included Croatian national independence, annexation of Dalmatia and the Military Frontier, freedom of speech, and the abolition of serfdom. The abolition of serfdom reduced the power of major landowners and, as arable land subdivided, pushed many Croats to seek their futures abroad.

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• 6. Language and Letters

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  On the island of Krk, in the Church of Saint Lucy in Jurandvor, a stone tablet was carved around 1100. Known as the Baška tablet, it stands as the most important early monument of Croatian literacy. Written mostly in the Chakavian dialect using angular Glagolitic script, it mentions the king Zvonimir. Until the end of the 11th century, Croatian medieval texts appeared in three different scripts: Latin, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic. They were composed in three languages as well: Croatian, Latin, and Old Slavonic. The earliest known Croatian Church Slavonic Glagolitic texts are the Vienna Folios, from the late 11th or early 12th century.

  Chakavian dialect texts first appeared in the 13th century, roughly a century before the first Shtokavian vernacular writings. Croatian speakers also use a third dialect, Kajkavian, spoken in the continental northwest. Two significant Chakavian documents from the 13th century survive: the Istrian Land Survey of 1275 and the Vinodol Codex of 1288. Later important manuscripts include the Missal of Duke Novak from the Lika region in northwestern Croatia, dated 1368, and the Evangel from Reims, dated 1395. In 1483, the first book printed in Croatian appeared: the Glagolitic Missale Romanum Glagolitice.

  Marko Marulić marked the beginning of a new chapter in Croatian literature during the Renaissance. Renaissance playwright Marin Držić and Baroque poet Ivan Gundulić helped carry the tradition forward. In the 20th century, the expressionist Miroslav Krleža and novelist Ivo Andrić reached worldwide recognition. Standard Croatian is mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, all of which rest on the Shtokavian dialect. Beyond Croatian borders, the language holds recognized minority status in Montenegro, Burgenland, Molise, Vojvodina, and villages in Romania.

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• 7. Faith and Symbols

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  Pope John IV, who led the Church from 640 to 642, was himself a Dalmatian. He sent an abbot named Martin to Dalmatia and Istria to ransom prisoners and recover relics of early Christian martyrs. That mission established the foundation for future relations between Rome and the Croats. Christianization of the Croats began in the 7th century, reaching initially only the elite, and was completed mainly by the 9th century. Unlike most Catholic peoples, the Croats were never required to conduct masses in Latin. They held services in their own language using the Glagolitic alphabet, a practice that continued into the middle of the 19th century. In 1886, this Glagolitic liturgical tradition reached the Principality of Montenegro; the Kingdom of Serbia accepted it in 1914, and Czechoslovakia in 1920.

  A census of Croatia recorded roughly 16,600 ethnic Croats adhering to Eastern Orthodoxy, roughly 8,000 as Protestants, roughly 10,500 describing themselves as other Christians, and roughly 9,600 as followers of Islam.

  The Croatian coat of arms features a red and white checkerboard pattern. Its earliest confirmed dated use appears from 1495, in Innsbruck, during the reign of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. The first coat of arms combining the emblems of the kingdoms of Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia dates to 1610. Croatia has twelve entries on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. These include klapa multipart singing from Dalmatia and the traditional knights' competition known as the Alka of Sinj. Another entry is the Zvončari bell-ringers' carnival from the Kastav area. The Croatian interlace, known as pleter or troplet, originated in monasteries built between the 9th and 12th centuries. It remains visible today in Croatian military and police insignia.

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• 8. A People Dispersed

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  The Ottoman conquest of Croatian territory was the first major force to scatter Croats into neighboring European countries. Catholic Croatians moved into Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Germany, and Hungary. Economic hardship drove the next wave: at the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th, large numbers emigrated to the Americas. Another group traveled to the Northland of New Zealand to work on Kauri gum plantations. After World War II, both those associated with the Ustasha regime and those unwilling to live under communism fled to the Americas and Oceania. In the 1960s and 1970s, Croatian guest workers moved to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Their remittances gave Yugoslavia a significant source of foreign exchange income. The Yugoslav Wars of 1991-1995 produced the final large wave, swelling Croatian communities on multiple continents.

  The United States recorded 414,714 people identifying as Croatian in its 2010 census, concentrated mostly in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and California. Australia counted 133,268 people of Croatian background in its 2016 census, with concentrations in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Canada recorded 133,965 in its 2016 census, mainly in Southern Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. Various estimates put the total number of Americans and Canadians with some Croatian ancestry at around 2 million. South America's Croatian population is harder to count precisely; estimates range from 150,000 to 500,000, with the largest communities in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. Both Gabriel Boric, president of Chile, and Javier Milei, president of Argentina, are of Croatian descent.

  Among the most diminished of these scattered communities are the Janjevci of Kosovo, who numbered 8,062 before 1991; after the war, only 270 remained. A 2023 archaeogenetic study found that Croats today carry roughly 66.5% Central-Eastern European early medieval Slavic ancestry. That genetic signature traces back to the migrations of the 6th century, when a small population moved into vast regions of low population density. Fifteen centuries later, that population is still moving, in every direction.

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