Jovan Nenad (; or ; ca. 1492 – 26 July 1527), known as the Black was a Serb military commander in the service of the Kingdom of Hungary who took advantage of a Hungarian military defeat at Mohács and subsequent struggle over the Hungarian throne to carve out his own state in the southern Pannonian Plain. He styled himself emperor (tsar). Jovan Nenad is attributed by Serbian historians as the founder of Vojvodina and the leader of the last independent Serbian state before the Ottoman conquest. Origin An ethnic Serb, he was born ca. 1492 in Lipova near the Mureş River in northern Banat (present-day Romania). Other facts about his origins are uncertain; he himself claimed to be "a descendant of Serbian and Byzantine rulers", although other contemporaries thought that he was a descendant of the Serbian despots or that he was a man of low rank. He was of medium height, slender, and highly moral and pious. His contemporaries called him "the Black Man" because of a strange birthmark which many considered a divine mark: "he had a dark stripe, one finger wide, starting at the right temple of his head and running in a straight line over his body down to his right foot". Military career In the Battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526, the Ottoman Empire destroyed the army of Hungarian-Czech King Louis Jagellion, who was killed on the battlefield. After this battle, the Kingdom of Hungary became divided in three parts: Royal Hungary in the north and west became a Habsburg province, Transylvania in the east became an independent state, while the former central and southern parts of the Kingdom of Hungary were absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. As King Louis had no children, Hungary was divided into two parties: one elected John Zápolya, a respected Hungarian noble, while the other declared for the King of Hungary a Habsburg, Ferdinand, Louis' brother-in-law. A part of this struggle was the leader of Serb mercenaries, Jovan Nenad. Right after Mohács, Jovan Nenad appeared between Tisza and Danube as a leader of a Serb regiment. He quickly drove the Ottomans from Bačka and parts of Banat and Syrmia, which he then ruled independently. At first he sided with the Zapolyai, however, after the Hungarian nobility of Bačka estranged him from John Zápolya (who also refused to acknowledge Nenad's territory), he decided to support the Habsburg pretender, Ferdinand, in