How the Serbs spread with Ottomans into Bosnia

[ANurega]

They came with Ottomans.

There are signs in the earliest defters
of groups of Christian herdsmen, identifiable
as Vlachs, being settled in devastated areas of
eastern Hercegovina. In the defters
of the 1470s and 1480s they can be seen
spreading into central and north-central
Bosnia, in the regions round Visoko
and Maglaj: soon after 1476, for example,
roughly 800 Vlach families were settled
in the Maglaj district, accompanied by
two Ortodox priests. The number of
Vlachs in north-central north-east Bosnia
continued to grow over the next fifty years,
and they began to spread into north-west
Bosnia too. During the wars of the early
sixteenth century more areas of northern Bosnia
became depopulated as Catholics fled
into Habsburg territory. Since it was
particularly important for the Ottomans
not to leave land empty close to the military
border, there were large new influxes
of Vlach settlers from Hercegovina
and Serbia. Further movements into this area
took place throughout the sixteenth
century; plague, as well as war, left demographic
gaps which needed to be filled.

As early as 1530, when the Habsburg official Benedict kuripesic travelled through Bosnia, he was able to report that the country
was inhabited by three peoples. One was the Turks, who ruled with great tyranny over the Christians.
Another was the old Bosnians who are of the Roman Catolic faith. And the third were the Serbs
who call themselves Vlacs ... They came from Smederevo and Belgrade.

There has been little mention so far of the Serbian Orthodox Church.This is for the simple reason that , until the Ottoman period, the Orthodox Church was barely active in the territory
of Bosnia proper; only in Hercegovina was it an important presence. In its early medieval history,
Hercegovina (Hum) had been part of the cultural and political world of the Serb zupe and princedoms, with Zeta (Montenegro) and Raska (South-west Serbia). Most of the nobility of Hercegovina was Orthodox during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and so, probably was the majority of its population. During the century of Catholic activity before the Turkish conquest, significant gains were made there by the Catholic church, which set up four Franciscan monasteries on
Hercegovina soil: but some of these gains were lost, especially in the eastern part of Hercegovina, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By 1624 there were still fourteen Catholic parish churches in eastern Hercegovina; fifteen years later the total had sunk to eleven, of which four were said to be almost in ruins. The Banate or Kingdom ofBosnia, on the other hand, seems to have contained no organized activity by the Serbian Orthodox Church until
its territory wasextended by King Tvrtko in the 1370s to include the upper Drina valley (south-east of Sarajevo) and parts of modern Montenegro and Serbia including the Orthodox monastery at Milesevo. Although Tvrtko had himself crowned at Milesevo, he was and remained a Catholic, like all the Bosnian kings after him (with the possible exception of Ostoja, who may have been a member of the Bosnian church). Away from the upper Drina valley, there are no clear signs of Orthodox church buildings in pre-Ottoman Bosnia.

In terms of church organization, the Serbian Orthodox Church remains virtually invinsible on the territory of modern Bosnia proper in the pre-Ottoman period.

After the arrival of the Turks, however, the picture begins to change quite rapidly.
From the 1480s onwards, Orthodox priests and believers are mentioned in many parts of
Bosnia where they were never mentioned before. Several Orthodox monasteries are known to have been
builtin the sixteenth century (Tavna, Lomnica, Papraca,Ozren and Gostovic), and the important
monastery of Rmanj, in north-west Bosnia, is first mentioned in 1515. These new foundations
are particularly striking when one considers that the kanun-i raya forbade the construction
of any new church buildings: clearly, specific permission had been given each time by the Ottoman authorities. Although the Orthodox suffered a fair share of indignities and oppressions, it is no exaggeration to say
that the Orthodox Church was favored by the Ottoman regime.

Bosnia: a short history

[Colonel Frank Grimes]

How many accounts have you had?