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404 CHAPTER 23 174 Defining Bosnia Of the three groups denoted by the acronym BCS, the Bosnians are the hardest to define. In part, this is because one must usually approach the idea Bosnian – at least within the context of the former Yugoslavia – in the context of the ideas Serbian and Croatian. Each of the three groups traces its history back to an independent medieval kingdom of distinction. The Croatian state flourished in the 10th and 11th centuries, while the Serbian and Bosnian medieval states each came to power in the late 12th century and survived through the mid-15th century, up until the final Ottoman conquest of each. Although all three medieval states professed the Christian faith, they were nevertheless distinguished even then by religion, partly because the schism between the eastern and western branches of the Christian church (formalized only in the mid-11th century) cut through the future Yugoslav lands. Croatia lay firmly on the western, Catholic side of the boundary; indeed, Croatia’s strong adherence to the Catholic faith was a major factor in its decision to come voluntarily under the Hungarian crown in 1102. Medieval Serbia, on the other hand, wavered between the eastern and western branches of Christianity before finally opting for Orthodoxy (and not before being granted the right to establish its own independent, or autocephalous , Orthodox church). Bosnia lay between the two, in terms of both geography and religious confession. Where other Christian states made a clear alliance with either mainstream Catholicism or mainstream Orthodoxy, Bosnia was able to remain aloof within its relatively inaccessible mountainous region and to develop its own individual form of Christianity, one with a much simpler theology and a much less politically defined structure. The extent to which the Bosnian church was identified with an ill-understood spiritual movement called Bogomilism is unclear, though some Bosnians now claim to trace their roots to this movement. The more important point is that the Bosnian church, though Christian, was neither markedly Catholic nor markedly Orthodox. This, together with the structure of local spiritual practices, helped facilitate large-scale conversions to Islam within Bosnia once the Ottoman Turkish occupation became established reality. Not all inhabitants chose Islam, of course; a great many remained Christian and became (or continued to be) allied with one of the two established Christian churches. Those who did accept Islam took on the beliefs and the cultural practices of that religion, but continued to speak their native Slavic tongue and to maintain life patterns similar to their Christian neighbors. This continuity of language and non-religious cultural practices, however, did not prevent their Christian neighbors from identifying them with the conqueror: they applied the epithet Turk to those of their brethren who had converted to Islam. When a number of these same Bosnian Muslims fled to Turkey proper during the decline of the Ottoman state, the ethnic Turks living there applied the name boşnak to any immigrant who continued to speak his or her native Slavic tongue, and this word was borrowed back into Slavic as bošnjak, in the general meaning “inhabitant of Bosnia”. It is only since 1991 that this term has taken on the exclusive meaning “Bosnian Muslim”. But the Muslims are only one part of Bosnia, a land which has been throughout the centuries a functioning multi-faith, multicultural society with a strong awareness of place. Indeed, this CHAPTER 23 405 sense of geographical rootedness is one of the major distinctions between Serbs and Croats on the one hand and Bosnians on the other. While the former saw their medieval kingdoms shift borders and then cease to exist altogether during the long Ottoman occupation, the political unit called Bosnia kept both its name and its territorial integrity over a continuous period of more than 700 years. Medieval Bosnia lasted from roughly 1190 up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1463; near the end of this time (in 1448), Herzeg (= Duke) Stjepan established his dukedom as the independent unit which came to be known as Herzegovina. When the Ottomans took the region, they divided their holdings into smaller political units, two of which they named Bosnia and Herzegovina . The term for this political unit was a sanjak (the word is spelled sancak in Turkish, and sandžak in BCS, where it is now better known as the name of an area in southwestern Serbia). As the core Bosnian lands grew to be the center of what was called “Turkey in Europe”, these...

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