The Life on the Border : Conflicts and Communities on the Croatian-Slavonian Military Border in the Years 1568-1593
Abstract
The Military Border as a barrier against the Ottoman expansion to the West played a key role especially in the 16th and 17th Centuries. The main topic of this paper is the attempt to map and describe the border communities who lived in the croatian-slavonian borderzone i.e.
Military Border in the second half of the 16th Century. In the forefront is the migration of the fugitives from the Balkans who were settled in the border areas and for a specific set of privileges were prepared to defend the Habsburg border and the Christianity against the Ottoman expansion.
The refugees had slowly established their own communities that were predominantly agricultural and on the contrary to the local inhabitants who were subject of the lords, they were free and only limited by military service. The Military Border had a completely different social developtment than the regions around it.