What is Kosovos history?
Kosovo occupies a mostly mountainous corner of Yugoslavia bordering Albania and Macedonia. For centuries, it has been a crossroads for cultures and a point of conflict. During the Ottoman Empire, it was a favored enclave because of its high conversion rate to Islam. The Albanian-speaking population began to dominate in the 16th and 17th centuries as the defeated Christian Orthodox Serbs increasingly migrated north out of Ottoman territory. Serbia seized Kosovo, which had been the center of the Serbian kingdom in the Middle Ages, from the Ottoman Turks during the First Balkan War in 1912. European powers formally accepted Serbian control the following year. During World War II, Kosovo was occupied by Italians and briefly consolidated with Albania. But it returned to Yugoslavia in 1945 and gradually earned autonomous status under the Yugoslav leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito. After Tito’s death in 1980, Serb nationalists cracked down on Albanian student protests and chipped away at Kosovo
