Croatia, a crescent-shaped country of Pannonian plain, Dinaric mountains and a coast of more than a thousand islands, between Slovenia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and the Adriatic Sea, has been inhabited since Neanderthals sheltered in the rock overhang of Krapina about 130,000 years ago. Neolithic farmers of the Adriatic and the Sava valley, the Copper Age Vučedol culture and the Bronze and Iron Age Histri, Liburnians, Iapodes and Delmatae were followed by Greek colonists on Vis, Hvar and Korčula, by the Illyrian kingdom of Queen Teuta, and by Rome, whose province of Dalmatia gave the emperor Diocletian his palace at Split. After the fall of Salona in 614 the Croats, a Slavic people, settled between the Drava and the Adriatic beside the surviving Byzantine towns.

From about 800 Croatian dukes, vassals first of the Franks and then of Byzantium and Rome, built a Christian principality: Trpimir's charter of 852 names the Croats, and Pope John VIII blessed Duke Branimir in 879. Tomislav was addressed as king about 925, and the Trpimirović kings, Krešimir IV and Zvonimir among them, ruled Croatia and the Dalmatian towns until the dynasty died out and Coloman of Hungary was crowned in 1102. For four centuries the Kingdom of Croatia was bound to Hungary in a personal union, governed by a ban and by magnates such as the Šubić and the Frankopan, while Venice bought Dalmatia in 1409, Ragusa grew into an independent maritime republic, and the Ottoman advance, from Krbava Field in 1493 to Mohács in 1526, reduced the kingdom to what was called the remnants of the remnants.

In 1527 the Sabor at Cetin elected Ferdinand of Habsburg king, and the Military Frontier, settled by Croats, Serbs and Vlachs, became the bulwark of Christendom until the Ottomans were pushed back in 1683–1699. Venice held Dalmatia until 1797, Napoleon extinguished Ragusa and created the Illyrian Provinces, and the Illyrian movement of Ljudevit Gaj, the ban Josip Jelačić of 1848, Bishop Strossmayer's Yugoslav Academy and the Party of Rights shaped a modern nation under Habsburg and Hungarian rule, while the Settlement of 1868 left Croatia-Slavonia an autonomous but subordinate kingdom. In 1918 the Croats left Austria-Hungary and joined the Serbs and Slovenes, first in the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs and then in a Yugoslav kingdom in which Stjepan Radić's peasant movement and the Croatian question dominated politics until the autonomous Banovina of 1939.

The Independent State of Croatia of 1941–1945, an Axis puppet state run by the Ustaše, carried out the genocide of Serbs and Roma and the Holocaust in camps such as Jasenovac, while the Partisans of Josip Broz Tito, born in Croatia, built the resistance that made Croatia a republic of socialist Yugoslavia. The Croatian Spring of 1970–1971 was suppressed, Tito died in 1980, and after the first multiparty elections of 1990 Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, effective on 8 October 1991. The Homeland War against Serb insurgents and the Yugoslav army, with the sieges of Vukovar and Dubrovnik, ended with Operation Storm in 1995 and the peaceful reintegration of eastern Slavonia in 1998. Under Franjo Tuđman and his successors Croatia joined NATO in 2009, the European Union in 2013, and the euro and Schengen area in 2023; its population is now about 3.9 million. Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.