Realm of Jovan Nenad

Origins

After the Ottoman victory at Mohács in 1526, a Serbian adventurer known as Jovan Nenad, the Black Man, gathered an army of Serbian refugees and peasants in Bačka and Banat that may have numbered 15,000. He drove off Ottoman raiders, took control of the region and proclaimed himself tsar, setting up his court at Subotica.

Rule and society

His realm was a military regime resting on his army, which lived from the land and from requisitions on Hungarian nobles. In the contest for the Hungarian throne Jovan Nenad first backed John Zápolya, then switched to Ferdinand of Habsburg. His claim to a Serbian imperial title and his origins remain obscure, and contemporary accounts are partisan.

Decline and legacy

Zápolya's forces defeated Jovan Nenad in the summer of 1527, and he was killed soon afterwards near Szeged. His army dispersed and the region fell to the Ottomans within a few years. Serbian tradition remembers him as a forerunner of later Serbian autonomy in Vojvodina.