Kosovo (Albanian Kosova, Serbian Kosovo i Metohija), a landlocked country of high basins in the middle of the Balkans, between Serbia, North Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro, is made up of two plains, the Kosovo plain in the east and the Dukagjin plain, called Metohija in Serbian, in the west, divided by hills and ringed by the Šar Mountains and the Accursed Mountains (Bjeshkët e Nemuna, Prokletije). Farmers of the Starčevo culture settled at Runik in Drenica about 6200 BCE, Vinča-culture villages such as Fafos and Tjerrtorja followed, and the terracotta figure called the Goddess on the Throne is the best-known prehistoric find. In antiquity the land belonged to the Dardani, whose kings Longarus, Bato and Monunius fought Macedon and allied with Rome; Rome annexed Dardania in 29–28 BCE, made it part of Moesia and later a province of its own, and Justinian rebuilt the city of Ulpiana as Justiniana Secunda before Avar and Slav attacks ended Roman urban life in the early 7th century.

After centuries of Byzantine and Bulgarian rule, ended by Basil II's reconquest of 1018, Stefan Nemanja took Kosovo for Serbia in the 1180s, and for two centuries it was the heartland of the Nemanjić kings and of the Serbian Church: Milutin built Gračanica and the Church of the Virgin of Ljeviš, Stefan Dečanski founded Visoki Dečani, the Patriarchate of Peć was proclaimed under Emperor Dušan in 1346, and the mines of Novo Brdo and Trepča, worked by Saxon miners and traded by merchants from Ragusa, made it one of the richest lands of the Balkans. On 28 June 1389 Prince Lazar and Sultan Murad I fought on the Kosovo plain; both rulers were killed, historians usually regard the battle as inconclusive, and in Serbian memory it became a founding legend, while Albanian tradition remembers the Ottoman wars through other names. The Branković lords held Kosovo until Mehmed II took Novo Brdo in 1455.

Under the Ottomans, from 1455 to 1912, Kosovo was divided among the sanjaks of Vučitrn, Prizren and Dukagjin and, from 1877, formed a vilayet of its own. Pristina, Prizren, Peja/Peć and Gjakova/Đakovica gained mosques, hammams and bridges, the towns became largely Muslim while the countryside stayed mostly Christian, the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was restored in 1557 and abolished in 1766, and the highland clans kept the customary law known as the Kanun. The Habsburg campaign of 1689 and the Great Migration of the Serbs of 1690 changed the population, Albanian clans were resettled in emptied lands, and in the 19th century the Tanzimat, the Serbian wars of 1876–1878 and the League of Prizren of 1878 brought Albanians and Serbs into open political rivalry. In the First Balkan War of 1912 Serbian and Montenegrin armies took Kosovo from the Ottomans, a conquest remembered in Serbia as a liberation and among Albanians as an occupation marked by killings that the Carnegie commission of 1914 documented. Kosovo became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, was divided among Axis occupiers in 1941 with most of it joined to Italian-ruled and then German-occupied Albania, and was retaken by the Partisans in 1944–1945.

In Tito's Yugoslavia Kosovo was an autonomous region of Serbia from 1946, an autonomous province from 1963 and, under the constitution of 1974, a unit with powers close to those of a republic, with its own university at Pristina; the student demonstrations of 1981 and the nationalism of the late 1980s ended in the revocation of its autonomy in 1989. Kosovo Albanians built a parallel state of schools, clinics and institutions under Ibrahim Rugova, the Kosovo Liberation Army began an insurgency in 1996, and the war of 1998–1999, with mass expulsions of Albanians and NATO's 78-day air campaign, ended with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244 of 10 June 1999, which placed Kosovo under UNMIK and the NATO-led KFOR while reaffirming Yugoslav sovereignty. Status talks led by Martti Ahtisaari failed, and on 17 February 2008 the Assembly of Kosovo declared independence; it is recognised by many states but not by Serbia, which regards Kosovo as its Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, nor by several others, and the International Court of Justice found in 2010 that the declaration did not violate international law. Belgrade and Pristina have talked under EU auspices since 2011, and the 2024 census counted 1,585,566 residents. Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.