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Đorđe Petrović (; ; – ), known by the sobriquet Karađorđe (; ), was a Serbian revolutionary leader who led a struggle against the Ottoman Empire during the First Serbian Uprising. He held the title of Grand Vožd of Serbia from 14 February 1804 to 3 October 1813.
Born into an impoverished family in the Šumadija region of Ottoman Serbia, Karađorđe distinguished himself during the Austro-Turkish War of 1788–1791 as a member of the Serbian Free Corps, a militia of Habsburg and Ottoman Serbs, armed and trained by the Austrians. Fearing retribution following the Austrians' and Serb rebels' defeat in 1791, he and his family fled to the Austrian Empire, where they lived until 1794, when a general amnesty was declared. Karađorđe subsequently returned to Šumadija and became a livestock merchant. In 1796, the rogue governor of the Sanjak of Vidin, Osman Pazvantoğlu, invaded the Pashalik of Belgrade, and Karađorđe fought alongside the Ottomans to quash the incursion.
In early 1804, following a massacre of Serb chieftains by renegade Ottoman Janissary known as Dahije, the Serbs of the Pashalik rebelled. Karađorđe was unanimously elected to lead the uprising against the Dahis at an assembly of surviving chiefs in February 1804. Within six months, most of the Dahi leaders had been captured and executed by Karađorđe's forces, and by 1805, the final remnants of Dahi resistance had been crushed. Karađorđe and his followers demanded far-reaching autonomy, which Sultan Selim III interpreted as but the first step towards complete independence. Selim promptly declared jihad against the rebels and ordered an army to march into the Pashalik. The Ottomans suffered a string of defeats at the hands of Karađorđe's forces. By 1806, the rebels had captured all the major towns in the Pashalik, including Belgrade and Smederevo, and expelled their Muslims inhabitants. Burdened by the demands of the Russo-Turkish War of 1806–1812, Selim offered the Serbs extensive autonomy. However, Karađorđe refused in light of Russia's avowal to aid the rebels should they continue fighting.
Frequent infighting, together with Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, weakened the rebels, and the Ottomans were able to reverse many of their gains. Karađorđe was forced to flee Serbia in October 1813 and Belgrade fell later that month, bringing the First Serbian Uprising to a close. He and his followers sought refuge in the Austrian Empire, but were arrested and detained. Despite Ottoman requests for extradition, the Austrians handed Karađorđe over to the Russians, who offered him refuge in Bessarabia. There, he joined the Greek secret society known as Filiki Eteria, which planned to launch a pan-Balkans uprising against the Ottomans. Karađorđe returned to Serbia in secret in July 1817, but was killed shortly thereafter by agents of Miloš Obrenović, a rival rebel leader, who was concerned that Karađorđe's reappearance would cause the Ottomans to renege on the concessions they had agreed to following the Second Serbian Uprising of 1815. Karađorđe is considered the founder of the house of Karađorđević, which ruled Serbia in several intervals during the 19th and 20th centuries. His murder resulted in a violent, decades-long feud between his descendants and those of Obrenović, with the Serbian throne changing hands several times.
Petrović worked for several landlords across Šumadija until 1787, when he and his family left the region and settled in the Austrian Empire, fearing persecution at the hands of the Ottoman Empire janissaries. It is said that as they were preparing to cross the Danube into Austria, Petrović's father began to have second thoughts about leaving Šumadija. Knowing that the entire family would be put in jeopardy if his father stayed behind, Petrović either took his father's life or arranged for someone to kill him instead.
The Austrians and Serb rebels briefly succeeded in liberating a strip of land east and south of Belgrade, which in Serbian historiography came to be known as Koča's Frontier (), after one of the senior rebel leaders, Koča Anđelković. In 1791, the Austrians and Ottomans signed the Treaty of Sistova. The Austrians agreed to return all the territory that they and the Serbs had captured south of the Danube in exchange for minor territorial concessions in northern Bosnia, effectively abandoning the Serbs and leaving them to resist the Ottomans on their own. The rebels were crushed by 1792 and most of their leaders executed. Unwilling to surrender, Petrović became a hajduk and briefly fought the Ottomans as an outlaw. He and his family once again sought refuge in the Austrian Empire, this time finding sanctuary in the Krušedol Monastery, at the foot of Fruška Gora, where Petrović worked as a forester.
In 1793, Hadji Mustafa Pasha was appointed governor of the Pashalik of Belgrade. He declared a general amnesty for former rebels and announced that Muslims would no longer serve as tax-collectors in areas where Christians formed a majority of the population. These changes were part of a plan devised by Sultan Selim III aimed at improving relations with the Pashalik's Christian population. Sensing that it was safe, Petrović returned to Šumadija in 1794, together with his family. He settled in Topola, where he became a livestock merchant and traded with the Austrians. His business dealings led him to establish connections with many Habsburg Serbs. In 1796, Osman Pazvantoğlu, the renegade governor of the Sanjak of Vidin, who had rejected the authority of the Sublime Porte, launched an invasion of the Pashalik of Belgrade. Overwhelmed, Mustafa Pasha formed a Serbian national militia to help stop the incursion. Petrović joined the militia and became a boluk-bashi (), leading a company of 100 men.
In return for their service, the Serbs of the Pashalik were granted a number of privileges. They were allowed to bear arms and raise autonomous military units. After the Serb militias joined the war on Mustafa Pasha's side, Pazvantoğlu suffered a string of defeats. He retreated to Vidin, which was subsequently besieged. The war against Pazvantoğlu marked the first time that Petrović distinguished himself in the eyes of the Ottomans, who bestowed him with the sobriquet "Black George" (; ), partly because of his dark hair and partly because of his sinister reputation. Karađorđe's service in the Serbian militia resulted in him becoming well acquainted with Ottoman military doctrine.
The power vacuum caused by Mustafa Pasha's murder resulted in a period of infighting between the Dahis that would last until 1802. By this time, four senior Dahi commanders emerged triumphant and agreed to share power within the Pashalik. The Serbs were stripped of the privileges that they had been granted under Mustafa Pasha. Dahi bands roamed the countryside, killing peasants, looting property and setting homes on fire. Thousands of villagers were displaced and forced to flee into the mountains, where over the next several years, the able-bodied men formed ad hoc guerrilla bands.
In mid-July 1803, Karađorđe obtained arms and munitions from Habsburg Serb merchants in Zemun. Later that month, he dispatched couriers through Šumadija calling for a meeting of Serbian notables to devise a strategy for resisting the Dahis. The flow of arms from the Austrian Empire into the Pashalik, combined with their inability to crush the guerrillas in the countryside, made the Dahi leadership increasingly uneasy. In January and February 1804, the Dahis launched a pre-emptive assault against the Pashalik's Serbian chieftains (known as knezovi, or "princes"), killing between 70 and 150 of them. The killings outraged the Serbian rayah, the Pashalik's tax-paying lower class. By this time, Karađorđe was a well known and well respected figure in Šumadija. He narrowly escaped being killed in the two-month massacre, which came to be known as the Slaughter of the Knezes (). Upon killing the chieftains, the Dahis impaled their severed heads on wooden stakes and put them on public display.
On Candlemas, , the surviving chieftains assembled in the village of Orašac, near Aranđelovac, to decide on a course of action. They agreed to launch a rebellion against the Dahis and Karađorđe was elected without opposition to lead it. It is said that he twice refused to lead the uprising, arguing that his violent temper would make him unsuitable for the role. Karađorđe's initial refusal only reinforced the chieftains' convictions that he was the only suitable candidate, and eventually, he agreed to lead the rebels. This event marked the beginning of the First Serbian Uprising, the opening phase of what would come to be known as the Serbian Revolution.
By the start of the revolt, the Pashalik of Belgrade had a population of about 400,000, 10 percent of which was Muslim. Its Serb population was roughly 250,000. At first, the rebels numbered around 30,000 men. In this initial stage, they were joined by a significant amount of the Pashalik's Muslim population, whom the rebels dubbed the "Good Turks". Karađorđe and his followers appealed to Sultan Selim for assistance against the Dahis, who had since rejected the authority of the Porte. Austria sent weapons and supplies to the rebels, while Russia lobbied on their behalf, encouraging the Porte to grant the Serbs further autonomy following the Dahis' removal. In May, Selim ordered a 7,000-strong army under of the command of Bekir Pasha, the governor of Bosnia, to march into the Pashalik. The Serbs welcomed Bekir Pasha and his men as liberators, and the Dahis were soon defeated through the joint efforts of Bekir Pasha's army and the rebels. By late August, the most prominent Dahi leaders had been captured by Karađorđe's men, beheaded, and their severed heads sent to the Sultan as trophies.
The Dahis resisted for another year before they were completely defeated. Karađorđe and his followers then demanded that Serbia be granted autonomous status similar to that enjoyed by neighbouring Wallachia. Selim suspected that Karađorđe's demands for autonomy were but the first step towards complete independence. He responded by declaring a jihad against the rebels. Hafiz Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Niš, was then ordered to march into Šumadija and destroy Karađorđe's army.
Karađorđe was feared by enemies and allies alike because of his volatile temper. He considered executions to be the only way in which military infractions could be rectified, and according to the military historian Brendon A. Rehm, personally killed 125 people. In 1806, he ordered that his brother Marinko be hanged. According to one account, Marinko had been accused of raping a peasant girl. Another suggests that he had been attempting to seduce young women whose husbands were away at the front. Whatever the case, Karađorđe entertained senior rebel leaders in his home while his brother's lifeless body dangled from the front gate—a warning to others to refrain from the behaviour in which Marinko had been engaging. Muslims, combatants and non-combatants alike, were killed unremittingly, as illustrated in this contemporary account describing the capture of the village of Čučuge, near Ub, in April 1806:
Serbs who neglected to join the uprising were brutalized in equal measure. Males who could not produce an adequate excuse for why they were not fighting were killed and their houses torched. While most of the rebels were Serbs, the Pashalik's Romani people (Gypsy) residents, the majority of whom were Muslim, also fought on the rebel side. Some Albanians also pledged allegiance to Karađorđe and fought on his behalf.
In 1806, the rebels twice dispatched the diplomat Petar Ičko to Constantinople to negotiate with the Porte. The two parties eventually reached an understanding, which came to be known as Ičko's Peace, in which the Ottomans agreed to grant the rebels extensive autonomy. Due to the Balkans' poor communications and transport infrastructure, it took several months for news of the Porte's offer to reach the rebels. In August 1806, the rebels defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Mišar. Later that month, they scored another victory at the Battle of Deligrad. Smederevo was captured in November and made the capital of Karađorđe's revolutionary state. Belgrade, with the exception of its imposing fortress, fell in early December. The outbreak of the Russo-Ottoman War that month, compounded by Russia's avowal to provide extensive materiel and financial support to the rebels should they continue fighting, convinced Karađorđe not to accept anything short of complete independence. He promptly refused to accept the terms of the agreement negotiated by Ičko.
In March 1807, Karađorđe issued a promise to Suleiman Pasha, the Governor of Belgrade, that he and his garrison would be granted safe passage if they vacated the city's besieged fortress. When Suleiman and his garrison emerged from the fortress, they were ambushed. Adult men were killed on the spot, women and girls were forcibly converted to Orthodox Christianity and made to marry their captors, and young children were placed in the care of Orthodox Christian families. One contemporary account suggests that as many as 3,000 non-Christians – mostly Muslims, but also Jews – were forced to convert to Orthodox Christianity. Jews that resisted conversion were either killed or expelled. Belgrade's were either destroyed or turned into churches.
In May 1809, the rebels captured Sjenica. They repulsed an Ottoman attack on the village of Suvodol in early June, and seized Novi Pazar later that month, but failed to take its fortress. Minor clashes also took place in the north of Kosovo. Lacking numbers and adequate military training, the rebels failed to establish a corridor to Montenegro and gain access to the Adriatic Sea, which Karađorđe had described as one of his key aims. The rebels experienced further setbacks in Niš, where 3,000 were surrounded at Čegar Hill in May–June 1809. Knowing that he and his men would be impalement if captured, rebel commander Stevan Sinđelić fired at his entrenchment's gun powder magazine, setting off a massive explosion that killed him and everyone else in the vicinity. On the site of the battle, the Ottoman commander Hurshid Pasha built a Skull Tower with the skulls of Sinđelić and his fighters embedded in its walls as a warning to others who wished to rebel.
The fall of Čegar allowed the Ottomans to establish a land corridor extending along the Morava River valley from Niš to the Danube. Their advance was brought to a halt after the Russians crossed the Danube in September 1809 and attacked the Ottomans in northern Bulgaria, offering the rebels temporary respite. The rebels soon recaptured all the land they had lost but were exhausted by the fighting. Henceforth, they were continuously on the defensive. The rebel leaders quarrelled amongst themselves, blaming each other for the recent defeats. Karađorđe blamed the Russians for not intervening earlier on the rebels' behalf. He subsequently wrote Napoleon seeking military assistance, and in 1810, dispatched an emissary to France. Nothing came of these requests, as the French did not believe that the rebels had the military capacity to dislodge the Ottomans from the Balkans. As his battlefield setbacks mounted, Karađorđe's behaviour became more volatile. In late 1809, he shot and wounded one of his commanders, Petar Jokić, for making a poor military decision in the vicinity of Ćuprija.
In 1810, Dobrnjac mutinied against Karađorđe and nearly succeeded in dislodging him. He was joined in his revolt by Milenko Stojković. In June 1810, Russian troops entered Serbia for a second time, distributing weapons and supplies to Karađorđe and his followers. Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov took part in planning joint actions against both the Ottomans and the mutineers. By the following year, Dobrnjac and Stojković were defeated. Karađorđe attempted to placate the mutineers. In January 1811, he established the People's Governing Council (), a cabinet consisting of members who supported Karađorđe as well as those who opposed him. It consisted of twelve members, one for each of the nahiya (districts) of rebel Serbia. Karađorđe appointed Stojković as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nenadović as the Minister of the Interior, and Dobrnjac as the Minister of Justice. Also inducted into Karađorđe's cabinet were Mladen Milovanović, as the Minister of War; Dositej Obradović, as the Minister of Education; and Sima Marković, as the Minister of Finance. Dobrnjac and Stojković refused to accept the posts that were offered to them, fearing that their acceptance would legitimize Karađorđe and undermine their own position. Karađorđe accused them of insubordination and exiled them to Wallachia, replacing them with loyalists. The Governing Council soon recognized Karađorđe as Serbia's hereditary leader and pledged allegiance to his "lawful heirs".
Deprived of foreign assistance, the rebels were quickly routed by the Ottomans, whose units were manned primarily by Albanians and Bosnian Muslims. In early October, Karađorđe fled to the Austrian Empire. He was joined by around 100,000 other Serbs fleeing the Ottoman advance, including 50,000 from Belgrade and its environs alone. Belgrade fell later that month. The city's fall marked the end of the First Serbian Uprising. The Ottomans singled out men and boys over the age of 15 for execution, and sold women and children into slavery. Torture was used extensively and executions were particularly brutal. "Men were roasted alive, hanged by their feet over smoking straw until they asphyxiated, castrated, crushed with stones, and foot whipping," one eyewitness wrote. "Their women and children were raped and sometimes taken by force to . Outside Stambul Gate in Belgrade, there were always on view the corpses of impaled Serbs being gnawed by packs of dogs." Another account relays how infants and toddlers were boiled alive. In one day alone, 1,800 women and children were sold into slavery at a Belgrade market. Churches across the city were destroyed and mosques that had been converted into churches following the city's capture in 1806 were returned to their original use. Others were deliberately torched by the Ottomans for the purpose of inflicting suffering on the city's inhabitants. In one instance, several dozen Serb refugees seeking shelter in a mosque were burned alive inside.
In late October 1813, Hurshid Pasha declared a general amnesty for the rebels that had survived, though Karađorđe and some senior Orthodox clerics were specifically exempted. Many rebel leaders agreed to lay down their arms, the most notable of these being Miloš Obrenović, the rebel commander in Užice. A large number of Serb refugees subsequently returned to their homes, as did many of the Muslims that had been displaced in the fighting.
The Russians prohibited Karađorđe from returning to the Balkans to take part in the Second Serbian Uprising. Karađorđe objected and traveled to Saint Petersburg to plead his case, but was arrested and detained. Upon his release, he joined the Filiki Eteria, a Greek nationalist secret society that intended to launch a pan-Balkan uprising against the Ottomans. The Filiki Eteria promised Karađorđe a position of military leadership in the planned uprising and offered to smuggle him into the Pashalik of Belgrade. Karađorđe secretly entered the Pashalik on , crossing the Danube together with his servant, Naum Krnar. He then contacted his kum, Vujica Vulićević, who offered him an abode in the oak forest of Radovanje Grove, near Velika Plana. Unbeknownst to Karađorđe, Vulićević was on Obrenović's payroll. After escorting Karađorđe and his servant to a tent in the forest, Vulićević informed Obrenović of Karađorđe's whereabouts through a courier. Shortly thereafter, he received a letter from Obrenović telling him that Karađorde was to be killed. Vulićević enlisted one of his close confidantes, Nikola Novaković, to take Karađorđe's life. The following morning, just before sunrise, Novaković snuck into Karađorđe's tent and axed him to death while he slept. He then went to the riverside and shot Krnar with a rifle as he was gathering water. Karađorđe's lifeless body was beheaded. His severed head was taken to Belgrade and presented to Marashli Ali Pasha, who had been appointed the governor of the Pashalik two years prior. Ali Pasha had the head flayed, stuffed and sent to the Sultan himself.
Obrenović feared that Karađorđe's return would prompt the Ottomans to renege on the agreement reached by the Porte and Obrenović's followers in November 1815. By extension, Karađorđe's murder precluded the Serbs of the Pashalik from taking part in the Balkan-wide rebellion that the Filiki Eteria had been planning. In Constantinople, Karađorđe's head was impaled on a stake and left on public display for a week. His body was buried on Serbian soil, but his skull ended up in the hands of a Constantinople museum. It was stolen some years later and buried in Greece.
In order to tie himself to his grandfather's legacy, Peter commissioned a bronze crown cast from a piece of Karađorđe's first cannon. In addition, the Order of Karađorđe's Star was introduced as Serbia's highest state decoration. The first feature-length film to emerge from Serbia and the Balkans, whose plot revolves around Karađorđe and his actions before, during and after the First Serbian Uprising, was released in 1911. Work soon began on the construction of the Oplenac, a Karađorđević dynasty mausoleum at Oplenac, near Topola. In 1913, a monument to Karađorđe was unveiled at Kalemegdan Park. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Serbia, the monument was torn down by the Austro-Hungarian Army and destroyed.
In November 1918, Peter ascended the throne of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was later renamed Yugoslavia. Karađorđe's head was repatriated from Greece in 1923 and reunited with the rest of his body. His remains were buried in a white marble sarcophagus within the church in 1930. The Karađorđević dynasty ruled Yugoslavia until 1941, when its members were forced into exile by Nazi Germany's invasion and occupation of the country. The monarchy was abolished by Josip Broz Tito's communism government in 1945.
Misha Glenny, a journalist specializing in the Balkans, believes that the First Serbian Uprising "marked the beginning of modern history on the Balkan peninsula." The uprising kindled the flame of ethno-religious nationalism among the Christians of Southeastern Europe and inspired the subsequent Greek War of Independence. Karađorđe's struggle against the Ottomans also had an important influence on the Bosnian Muslim revolutionary Husein Gradaščević, who instigated the Great Bosnian Uprising. Karađorđe is viewed in a negative light by some modern Bosniaks. In 2011, the chief Mufti of the Islamic Community of Serbia, Muamer Zukorlić, filed a petition to rename a street in Sjenica named after Karađorđe. Zukorlić alleged that Karađorđe and his followers had indiscriminately targeted the town's residents in 1809, a notion disputed by Serbian historians. The historian Ivo Banac surmises that "there would be no Bosnian Muslims today" had Karađorđe extended his uprising west of the Drina.
Karađorđe's exploits were popularized across Europe by the linguist and folklorist Vuk Karadžić, who recorded and published the of the blind gusle player and epic poet Filip Višnjić, many of which pertained to the First Serbian Uprising. Karađorđe is referenced in a number of works of 19th-century fiction. While he was still alive, the Hungarian dramatist wrote a stage play about him, titled Black George, which premiered in August 1812. Several years later, the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin penned a ballad about Karađorđe titled The Song of George the Black. The Irish poet George Croly also wrote a ballad about him. Karađorđe is mentioned in Honoré de Balzac's 1842 novel A Start in Life, as the grandfather of one of the book's main characters. The Montenegrin prince-bishop and poet Petar II Petrović-Njegoš dedicated his 1847 epic poem The Mountain Wreath to "the ashes of the Father of Serbia", a reference to Karađorđe. The surname Karamazov, used in the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, is believed to have partially been inspired by Karađorđe, whose exploits popularized the use of the prefix "kara" to mean "black" within Russia.
Karađorđe's likeness was featured on the obverse of five-million Yugoslav dinar banknotes issued by the National Bank of Yugoslavia in 1993 and 1994. The anniversary of the First Serbian Uprising's commencement, 15 February, is celebrated annually in Serbia as Statehood Day. A monument to Karađorđe stands in front of Belgrade's Church of Saint Sava, within the eponymous Karađorđe's Park.
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