The Habsburgs began to retreat, prompting thousands of Serb villagers to leave their homes and flee north fearing Ottoman reprisals.[3] In Serbian historiography, this event came to be known as the Great Serb Migration.[4] Between 30,000 and 40,000 Serb refugees streamed into Habsburg-held Vojvodina, north of the Danube River, and settled there.[5] The migrants would come to call the regions they had formerly inhabited Old Serbia, and dubbed their adopted homeland "new Serbia".[6] Tim Judah, a journalist specializing in the Balkans, describes the exodus as one of the most traumatic events in Serbian history.[2]