Originally Posted by
Dunai
It's weird to constantly see both Croatians and Serbians claim Bosnians as part of their nation, however both sides fail to understand that Bosnians are a very old, distinct Medieval entity in the Western Balkans, often caught in a feud between Kingdom of Hungary and the Byzantine Empire. They are their own nation, which only in modern times was separated into 3 different parts, because of religious divisions. But Medieval Bosnia even had their own Church, separate from both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ones.
"The Bosnian Church was a Christian church in medieval Bosnia that was independent of and considered heretical by both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox hierarchies.
The East–West Schism then led to the establishment of Roman Catholicism in Croatia and most of Dalmatia, while Eastern Orthodoxy came to prevail in Serbia. Lying in-between, the mountainous Bosnia was nominally under Rome, but Catholicism never became firmly established due to a weak church organization and poor communications. Medieval Bosnia thus remained a "no-man's land between faiths" rather than a meeting ground between the two Churches, leading to a unique religious history and the emergence of an "independent and somewhat heretical church".
Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy predominated in different parts of what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina; the followers of the former formed a majority in the west, the north and in the center of Bosnia, while those of the latter were a majority in most of Zachlumia (present-day Herzegovina) and along Bosnia's eastern border. This changed in the mid-13th century, when the Bosnian Church began eclipsing the Roman. While Bosnia remained nominally Catholic in the High Middle Ages, the Bishop of Bosnia was a local cleric chosen by Bosnians and then sent to the Archbishop of Ragusa solely for ordination. Although the Papacy already insisted on using Latin as the liturgical language, Bosnian Catholics retained Church Slavonic language."
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