Serb Uprising of 1848–49

Serb uprising of 1848–49

Part of the Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire

Frontlines

Date	6 June 1848 — 4 October 1849
Location	southern Kingdom of Hungary (now Vojvodina, Serbia)
Result	Serbian autonomy

Belligerents

Serbs (Austrian Empire)

Serbian volunteers

Austrian aid

Hungary

Commanders and leaders

Strength

21,084 soldiers
104 artillery guns

The Serb uprising of 1848–49, also known as the Serb revolution of 1848–49, took place in what is today Vojvodina, Serbia, and was part of the Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire. During the Hungarian Revolution, Hungarians achieved significant military successes, but were defeated after Russian intervention. Serbs led fierce battles against the Hungarians, with the help of volunteers from the Principality of Serbia. The outcome of the uprising was the establishment of Serbian Vojvodina (then Voivodeship of Serbia and Banat of Temeschwar), a special autonomous region under the Austrian crown. However, the Voivodeship failed certain expectations that Serbian patriots had expressed at the May Assembly (1848). Serbs did not constitute an absolute majority of the population, while the administration was largely in the hands of German officials and officers. The Voivodeship was abolished in 1860, however, some rights were kept by the Serb community. The Serbian Patriarchate was renewed, while the uprising had increased national awareness of the Serb people north of the Sava and Danube in the struggle for freedom.

The autocratic methods of chancellor Metternich turned the Austrian Empire into a police state. It systematically suppressed any open-minded movement that would in some way undermined the blessed order. Metternich was conservative by nature and by conviction. The Austrian Empire, made up of various nationalities, was a remnant of the old political conjuncture and it had hard to get used to the new time. In the 16th century there were still various small nations and states connected to Austria, which halted the larger community to better successfully resist the Ottoman threat. However, after the suppression of the Ottomans the needs of a centralized state disappeared. In its place, the awakening of national consciousness from the beginning of the 19th century, the Austrian community had increasingly aspired to enter into the framework of national states. The Italians, until then scattered, began to work on their national unification; the same movement occurred in the Germans. In both nations the realization of these plans could be achieved only at the expense of the estates of the Austrian Empire and the prestige of the Habsburg dynasty. Even then, in the mid-19th century, there was a lot of worries in Vienna that a free Serbian state in the Balkans could become an attractive point for its South Slavic subjects. The whole movement to strengthen mutual Slavic bonds, dubbed Pan-Slavism, was viewed with much suspicion as a pure political action under the leadership of Russia and with a view that it would ultimately serve her. The nationalist activity of Hungarians, very lively and impulsive in the first half of the 19th century, gradually received the character of a national struggle for full independence from Vienna. There was fighting on all sides. Metternich was aware of this, and as his only means for maintaining the state, he clamped down on the rebels. He did not manage to do anything notable to channel the currents with the previous measures, nor managed to rely on the part of the population that sincerely sought change in the system, but which had not yet come out of the frame of the state union.

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