Croatia is inhabited mostly by Croats (89.6%). Minority groups include Serbs (4.5%), Bosniaks (0.5%), Hungarians (0.4%) and others. The predominate religion is Catholicism (87.8%), with some Orthodox (4.4%) and Sunni Muslim (1.3%) minorities.
Ambroz Matija Gubec and other leaders of the mutiny raised peasants to arms in over sixty fiefs throughout the country in January 1573, but their uprising was crushed by early February. Matija Gubec and thousands of others were publicly executed shortly thereafter, in a rather brutal manner in order to set an example for others.
In the middle Paleolithic period, Neandertals lived in modern Zagorje, northern Croatia. Dragutin Gorjanovic-Kramberger discovered bones and other remnants of a Neandertal, subsequently named Homo krapiniensis, on a hill near the town of Krapina.
The main executive power of Croatian state is the Government (in Croatian: "vlada"), presided by the Prime Minister.
After that there was one more notable native King, Dmitar Zvonimir (1075-1089). His kinghood is carved in stone Baška Tablet, preserved to this day as the oldest written Croatian text, kept in the archaeological museum in Zagreb. Zvonimir's reign is remembered as a peaceful and prosperous time, during which the connection of Croats with the Pope was further affirmed, so much so that Catholicism would remain among Croats until the present day.
Curiously enough, the Croats were never obliged to use Latin - rather, they held masses in their own language and used the Glagolitic alphabet. This was officially sanctioned in 1248 by Pope Innocent IV, and only later did the Latin alphabet prevail. The Latin Rite prevailed over the Byzantine Rite rather early due to numerous interventions from the Holy See.
The President of the Republic (Predsjednik) is head of state and elected for a five-year term. In addition to being the commander in chief of the armed forces, the president has the procedural duty of appointing the Prime minister with the consent of the Parliament, and has some influence on foreign policy.
Regardless of different interpretations, the Croat tribes eventually settled in the area between the Drava river and the Adriatic sea, the western Roman provinces Pannonia and Dalmatia; western Balkans in modern usage. The Croat tribes had been organized into two dukedoms; the Pannonian duchy in the north and the Dalmatian duchy in the south.
With the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, its possessions in eastern Adriatic mostly came under the authority of France which passed its rights to Austria the same year. Eight years later they were restored to France as the Illyrian provinces, but won back to the Austrian crown by 1815. Though now part of the same empire, Dalmatia and Istria were part of Cisleithania while Croatia and Slavonia were under Hungary.
The most commonly accepted facts about the origin of the Croats are that they originate from Slavic tribes that lived in and around today's Poland. The early Croat people, as well as the Serb people, is believed to have been mixed Slavs and the Iranian-speaking Alans according to many modern scholars. It is unclear whether the Alans contributed much more than a ruling caste or a class of warriors; the evidence on their contribution is mainly philological and etymological.
The 1526 Battle of Mohács was a crucial event in which the rule of the Jagiellon dynasty was shattered by the death of King Louis II. The defeat emphasized the overall inability of the Christian feudal military to halt the Ottomans, who would remain a major threat for centuries.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Roman roads and the Illyrian population speaking Romance languages (such as Istro-Romanian or Dalmatian) remained. With the increasing amount of human migration, this population entrenched in the cities along the whole Dalmatian coast.
After the Bihac fort finally fell to the army of the Bosnian vizier Hasan-pasha Predojevic in 1592, only small parts of Croatia remained unconquered. The remaining 16,800 km² were referred to as the remnants of the remnants of the once great Croatian kingdom.