First Serbian Uprising
Serbian villagers rose against their own Ottoman garrison in 1804 and ended with a principality. The rising was not initially against the sultan. The janissaries of the Belgrade pashalik had murdered the reforming governor, seized the province against Istanbul's authority, and in January 1804 killed some seventy Serbian village headmen and notables in a single night to forestall resistance. The survivors met in a forest and elected Karađorđe, a livestock dealer and former Habsburg soldier of a violent temper, as their leader. The sultan initially regarded them as loyal subjects suppressing rebels. That lasted about two years. The insurgents took Belgrade in 1806, refused an offer of autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty because Russia was at war with the Ottomans and promised more, and declared for independence. They ran a state for nine years with an assembly, a council and a legal code, and were destroyed in 1813 when Russia made peace at Bucharest and withdrew its support. Karađorđe fled to Austria. The second uprising in 1815 under Miloš Obrenović was more modest in its demands and better timed, and produced negotiated autonomy in 1817 and a recognised principality by 1830. Miloš then had Karađorđe murdered in his sleep and sent his head to the sultan. The two families alternated on the Serbian throne for the next ninety years, deposing and assassinating each other, which is the pattern that ended with the murders of 1903. The first rising also produced a written culture. Vuk Karadžić, who took part in it, spent the following decades reforming the Serbian alphabet and collecting the epic poems that the insurgents had sung, which is where the modern literary language comes from.
- Year: 1804 CE
- Category: Political
