Montenegro historical timeline

Montenegro's history is a long argument about whether a mountain can be conquered. What a visitor sees -- Venetian walls on the bay, a monastery in a cliff, a mausoleum on a summit -- is the record of the two answers.

Chronology

1. 1042 Stefan Vojislav's revolt wins independence for Duklja, the principality covering the southern half of modern Montenegro; by the 13th century the realm is called Zeta, and the name Crna Gora appears in the 15th.
2. 1452 Venetian sailors from Perast find an icon on a rock in the bay and begin the islet church of Our Lady of the Rocks; Kotor's fortifications, built between the 9th and 19th centuries, take their Venetian form.
3. 1484 Ivan Crnojević moves his court to Cetinje under Lovćen and endows a monastery there, the first Renaissance buildings in the country.
4. 1496 Large parts of Zeta fall under Ottoman rule, which lasts until 1878; Venice holds the coast, and Kotor is besieged in 1538 and 1657, plagued in 1572 and nearly destroyed by earthquakes in 1563 and 1667.
5. 1516 The prince-bishops, vladikas, of Cetinje become the rulers, a theocracy that lasts until 1852; from 1697 the office is held by the House of Petrović-Njegoš, which rules until 1918.
6. 1878 The Congress of Berlin recognises Montenegro's independence; Petar II Petrović Njegoš, the poet prince-bishop of The Mountain Wreath, had died in 1851 and is later entombed on Lovćen.
7. 1910 Montenegro becomes a kingdom; after the First World War it is absorbed into Yugoslavia.
8. 1919 Part of the former Montenegrin army, still loyal to the king, rebels against the country's amalgamation into Yugoslavia on 7 January -- the Christmas Uprising. It failed, but the split it marks, between Montenegrins who saw themselves as a separate nation and those who saw themselves as Serbs, runs through the next hundred years of Montenegrin politics and is still audible in conversation.
9. 1941 Italy occupies Montenegro and annexes the area around Kotor, where a small Venetian-speaking population lived, setting up a puppet Kingdom of Montenegro. According to some historians the first armed uprising in Nazi-occupied Europe happened here on 13 July 1941. Three factions then fought each other as well as the occupiers -- the monarchist Greens, the Chetniks and the Partisans -- which is why war memorials in Montenegro are often contested rather than shared.
10. 1945 One of six republics of socialist Yugoslavia until 1992, then half of a federation with Serbia; the 1979 earthquake is the last serious one on a seismically active coast.
11. 1991 During the Croatian and Bosnian wars of 1991 to 1995, Montenegrin police and military forces join Serbian troops in the attacks on Dubrovnik under orders from President Momir Bulatović and Interior Minister Pavle Bulatović. The Montenegrin general Pavle Strugar was convicted for his part in the bombing of the city. Anyone making the common day trip north from Kotor is crossing that border.
12. 1999 Targets in Montenegro are bombed by NATO during Operation Allied Force, from 24 March to 10 June, though the attacks were limited in both time and area. Montenegro joined NATO itself eighteen years later, in 2017.
13. 2006 A referendum on 21 May leads to independence declared on 3 June; the country adopts the euro without joining the eurozone, joins NATO, and has been negotiating EU membership since 2012, with all 33 chapters opened by 2024.

What survived, and how

Kotor survived earthquakes twice and rebuilt within its walls, which is why the town is World Heritage. Cetinje survived as a capital because it was too high and poor to be worth taking. The monasteries survived the Ottomans by being where nobody wanted to climb -- Ostrog is in a cliff.

What did not survive is a single national story: the country's censuses still record no ethnic majority, and the argument over who Montenegrins are is the live politics.