Karađorđe
Karađorđe was a pig-dealer with a violent temper whom the Serbs of the Belgrade pashalik elected in a forest in February 1804 to lead them against the janissaries who had been killing their headmen, and who for nine years led the first successful rising of a Balkan Christian people against the Ottomans, until it was crushed and he fled; the man who led the second rising had him murdered in his sleep, and their two families took turns on the throne until 1903. He was born Đorđe Petrović in 1768 in Šumadija, had killed a Turk and fled to Austria as a young man, served in the Habsburg free corps against the Ottomans in 1788, and came home to trade livestock. The name means Black George and was for his temper and his colouring both. The four renegade janissary chiefs who had seized the pashalik against the sultan's orders massacred the Serbian village elders in January 1804 to prevent exactly what followed. The survivors met at Orašac and chose him, since the man they wanted first had refused. In two years the rebels, fighting at first in the sultan's name against his mutinous garrison, took the whole pashalik, Belgrade in December 1806, and were fighting the sultan himself. A Governing Council was set up, the first schools opened, and in 1811 Karađorđe made himself hereditary supreme leader over the objections of the other captains, several of whom he had shot. Russia, which had been at war with the Porte, made peace at Bucharest in 1812 to face Napoleon and left the Serbs to a clause the Ottomans ignored. Three Ottoman armies came in 1813 and in October the leader crossed into Austria with the treasury and the rising collapsed in massacre. He went to Russia. Miloš Obrenović's second rising of 1815 got autonomy by negotiation, and when Karađorđe came back secretly in July 1817 to start again, Miloš had him killed with an axe while he slept and sent the head, stuffed, to the sultan. His grandson Peter became king in 1903 after the Obrenović line was murdered in its turn, and his descendants were kings of Yugoslavia until 1945.
- Lived: 1768 CE – 1817 CE
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: revolutionary, monarch
