Le passé des territoires : Kosovo - Metohija (Xle-XVIIe siècle)

Abstract

Kosovo and Metohija represent the territory in the central part of the
Balkan Peninsula with natural borders in the south, west and partly in the
north-west, while from its adjacent regions in the east and north east this
territory is not separated by mountain barriers but only by some morphology
distinctions and the terrain characteristics. Their present names originate from
the late Medieval Age. As Serbia expanded its territories towards the southeast
to the disadvantage of Byzantine Empire, during the 11th and particularly
in the 12th century, these regions became the border area between Serbia and
Byzantine Empire. During the 13th and 14th century they represented the
central part of the Serbian medieval state, its administrative and religious
center, its economic, mining, agricultural, commercial and cultural most developed
areas with dense road network and a relatively large number of significant
and big urban, religious and cultural centres. From the end of the 14th
century, Kosovo was the border area between the Ottoman Empire and Serbia
and finally in the middle of the 15th century it fell into the Sultan’s hands.
The establishment of Turkish administration on the whole territory of
Kosovo and Metohija in the middle of the 15th century introduced the period
of crucial changes in the economic, cultural, social and ethnical structures in
this region, that resulted in gradual Islamization of the local population that,
with the progressive influx of the Turkish and Albanian elements, lost its
relative uniformity that had existed in the end of the Medieval Age. The big
wars in the 17th century intensified the old financial and legal insecurity even
more and culminated in the large-scale ethical and confessional restructuring
that took place after the Turkish-Austrian war in the end of the century. Since
that time Kosovo and Metohija have experienced the long period of confessional
and ethnical stratification that has directed the development of social
relations on this territory in this century and the modern history of this part of
the Balkan Peninsula.