Croatian history
Early Croatia In the fourth century AD the Roman Empire was partitioned and become the Eastern and western empires. In the Balkans the boundary between the two stretched from the Montenegrin coast up the river Drina to the confluence of the river Sava and the Danube, and then further north. This boundary has remained more or less unchanged in overall European perception for a full 1,500 years. The European west ended and the east began, and vice versa, on south Slav territory. Frontier changes, economic contacts and cultural influences may have been of no great importance for Europe as a whole, but they had a crucial impact on the destiny of small Slav peoples who lived in the area between what is today Italy and Austria, and Greece. There were and still are ethnic similarities between the peoples on the two sides of the divide, but their culture and history are fundamentally different. Regional developments have often focused on the Croats and Croatia, traditionally linked with the present-day Hungarian, Italian and German regions, and with Western Europe. Croatia is also a Mediterranean country whose shores have been strongly influenced by the rhythm of Mediterranean events.
