The area of Bihac was populated by the tribe of Iapydes (Japodes) as early as the 8th century B.C. The Iapydes left many remains that testify about their presence in this area.
During the 2nd century B.C. this area was populated by Romans. It's in this period that the river Una was given its name by a Roman soldier (Latin: una- one, unique). The only important remains left behind the Romans are roads. In the 6th century this area is populated by Slavs, an Indo-European group of people.
The name of Bihać was first mentioned as early as 1260 as property of a church in Topusko, Croatia in a document by the Hungarian-Croatian king Béla IV, and became a free city in 1262. Bihać was the temporary capital of the Croatian Kingdom. It lost its civic status in the 14th century following dynastic struggles in the kingdom, and became a property of the Frankopan nobles. In the 16th century it passed under direct royal rule, when battles with the Ottoman Empire had begun. The town of Bihać, in the region of the same name, withstood the Ottoman attacks until it fell with the Bosnia sanjak (in 1592).
The Bihać fort would become the westernmost fort taken by the Ottoman army over a hundred years later, in 1592 under the Bosnian vizier Hasan-pasha Predojević. The city was initially made the center of the Bihać sanjak, part of the Bosnian pashaluk. It was demoted in 1699 to become part of the sanjak of Bosnia, during the period of intense border wars between the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire. In 1865 it became the center of its own sanjak, but this lasted only until 1878, when all of Bosnia was occupied by Austria-Hungary.
A period of peace followed, marked by the 1888 bringing down of the fortress walls that separated the inner city from the outskirts. The new government had several schools and civic facilities built, which boosted the city's growth. It remained prosperous after the establishment of Yugoslavia, the center of the western
