existed when the land was settled by the Slavs. A next major division came when the Roman part of the area converted to Roman Catholicism and the Greek part (Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and much of Bosnia-Herzegovina) converted to the Orthodox faith. Because it was a combination of three different cultural components, the Eastern Empire developed very differently from the Western Empire.
In the next few centuries, Slavic tribes split into individual tribes, such as Russians, Poles, Slovaks, Serbians, Croats, and Bulgarians, and started to settle in today's Yugoslavia. They also engaged continually in war--although these wars were neither religiously nor ethnically inspired, but rather territorially driven--until the war between the Turks and the Serbs ended in total Serbian defeat and their becoming vassals of the Ottoman empire. Many other Balkan states also fell to the invading Ottomans. The Turkish invasion was mainly possible because the Balkan states and their neighbors were not prepared to put aside their rivalries and join together to keep the Turks out of Europe.
The Turkish empire lasted from 1371 to 1912, when the first Balkan war was ended with the Treaty of London. By the end of World War I, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes formally came into being. The Serbs accepted the creation of the kingdom because it united all Serbs. However, they did not take any steps to become true Yugoslavs (Djilas, 1991, p. 59). The Croats, on the other hand, did not identify with the new state and immediately wanted concessions. As always, the Bosnian Muslims were caught in the middle. To avoid a Croat-Serb confrontation over them, the Bosnian Muslims decided to consider themselves Yugoslavs.
During World War II, Yugoslav partisans, under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, fought against the Germans while allying themselves with the Soviets. After the end of World War II, Tito became the leader of Yugoslavia, ...