Bey Weisskirchen im Banate (Neramündung)

Title

Bey Weisskirchen im Banate (Neramündung)

Description

View shows the city of Bela Crkva (German: Weißkirchen, Romanian: Biserica Albă). It is a small Serbian town in the Južni Banat district of Vojvodina near the border with Romania.Stahlstich aus Meyer's Universum

ca. 1850

Artist

Kunstanstalt Hildburghausen (1828-1874)

The German publishing company Bibliographisches Institut was founded 1826 in Gotha by Joseph Meyer, moved 1828 to Hildburghausen and 1874 to Leipzig. Its production over the years includes such well-known titles as Meyers Lexikon.

Historical Description

In all Serbian lands conquered by the Ottomans, the native nobility was eliminated and the peasantry was enserfed to Ottoman rulers, while much of the clergy fled or were confined to the isolated monasteries. Under the Ottoman system, Serbs, as well as Christians, were considered an inferior class of people and subjected to heavy taxes, and a portion of the Serbian population experienced Islamization. After the loss of statehood to the Ottoman Empire, Serbian resistance continued in northern regions (modern Vojvodina), under titular despots (until 1537), and popular leaders like Jovan Nenad (1526–1527). From 1521 to 1552, Ottomans conquered Belgrade and regions of Syrmia, Bačka, and Banat. One of the most significant was the Banat Uprising in 1594 and 1595, which was part of the Long War (1593–1606) between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. As the Great Serb Migrations depopulated most of southern Serbia, the Serbs sought refuge across the Danube River in Vojvodina to the north and the Military Frontier in the west, where they were granted rights by the Austrian crown under measures such as the Statuta Wallachorum of 1630. Much of central Serbia switched from Ottoman rule to Habsburg control (1686–91) during the Habsburg-Ottoman war (1683-1699). In 1718–39, the Habsburg Monarchy occupied much of Central Serbia and established the Kingdom of Serbia as crownland. Those gains were lost by the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739, when the Ottomans retook the region.