Serbia dominates the Balkans under Stefan Dusan (1331-55), who conquers lands extending from Belgrade to present-day southern Greece.

He proclaims himself emperor, elevates the archbishop of Pec to the level of patriarch, and writes a new legal code combining Byzantine law with Serbian customs.

Dusan has ambitions toward a weakened Empire, but the emperor suspects his intentions and summons the Turks to restrain him.

Dusan repels assaults in 1345 and 1349 but is defeated in 1352.

He then offers to lead an alliance against the Turks and recognize the pope, but those gambits also are rejected.

The Ottoman Turks first focus their conversion campaigns on the Roman Catholic Albanians of the north and then on the Orthodox population of the south.

The authorities increase taxes, especially poll taxes, to make conversion economically attractive.

During and after a Christian counteroffensive against the Ottoman Empire from 1687 to 1690, when Albanian Catholics revolt against their Muslim overlords, the Ottoman pasha of Pec, a town in the south of present-day Kosovo, retaliates by forcing entire Albanian villages to accept Islam.

Albanian beys now move from the northern mountains to the fertile lands of Kosovo, which had been abandoned by thousands of Orthodox Serbs fearing reprisals for their collaboration with the Christian forces.

Ottoman conquest has not meant the end of armed resistance on the part of the Slavic peoples.

Poor harvests and a rapacious nobility have frequently brought on local revolts by the reaya; in addition, individuals accused of crimes or protesting injustice would characteristically head for the hills or forests to live the life of the haiduk, or outlaw.

Both of these forms of resistance had increased from the seventeenth century, when the territorial expansion of the Ottoman Empire is reversed and Ottoman warriors withdrawing toward the core of the empire find themselves in growing competition with one another for inelastic resources.

Christian forces have attempted to push the Turks from the Balkans from 1684 to 1689, inciting the Serbs to rebel against their Turkish overlords.

Armed uprisings by the peasantry are particularly common in northern areas such as the Morava River valley, where imperial control is weakest and the Janissaries least disciplined.

The greatest of these revolts takes place in 1690, when Serbs rise in support of the Austrian invasion.

The Habsburg forces, unable to sustain their advance, retreat back across the Sava, leaving the the Serbs south of the Sava River seriously exposed to Turkish reprisals.

Fearing these, the Serbian patriarch Arsenije III Carnojevic of Pec, a town in the south of present-day Serbia, leads a great migration of sixty thousand to seventy thousand families from “Old Serbia” and southern Bosnia across the Danube and Sava to ...