Jovan Nenad
| Jovan Nenad | |
|---|---|
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| Emperor of the Serbs | |
| Reign | 1526-1527 |
| Born |
c. 1492 Lipovo, Banate of Severin, Kingdom of Hungary (now Romania) |
| Died | 26 July 1527 Sedfal field, near Szeged |
| Religion | Eastern Orthodoxy |
Jovan Nenad (Serbian Cyrillic: Јован Ненад; ca. 1492 – 26 July 1527), known as the Black was a Serb military commander in the service of the Kingdom of Hungary who took advantage of a Hungarian military defeat at Mohács and subsequent struggle over the Hungarian throne to carve out his own state in the southern Pannonian Plain. He styled himself emperor (tsar).
Jovan Nenad is attributed by Serbian historians as the founder of Vojvodina and the leader of the last independent Serbian state before the Ottoman conquest.
A Serb, he was born ca. 1492 in Lipova near the Mureş River in northern Banat (today in Romania). Other facts about his origins are uncertain; he himself claimed to be "a descendant of Serbian and Byzantine rulers", although other contemporaries thought that he was descending of the Serbian despots or that he was a man of low rank. He was of medium height, slender, and highly moral and pious. His contemporaries called him "the Black Man" because of a strange birthmark which many considered a divine mark: "he had a dark stripe, one finger wide, starting at the right temple of his head and running in a straight line over his body down to his right foot".
In the Battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526, the Ottoman Empire destroyed the army of Hungarian-Czech King Louis Jagellion, who was killed on the battlefield. After this battle, the Kingdom of Hungary became divided in three parts: Royal Hungary in the north and west became a Habsburg province, Transylvania in the east became an independent state, while the former central and southern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary were absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. As King Louis had no children, Hungary was divided into two parties: one elected John Zápolya, a respected Hungarian noble, while the other declared for the King of Hungary a Habsburg, Ferdinand, Louis' brother-in-law. A part of this struggle was the leader of Serb mercenaries, Jovan Nenad.
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