Moslems of Europe:    Albania | Bosnia | Bulgaria | England | France | Germany

On June 28, 1389, on Kosovo’s Field of Blackbirds, Prince Lazar of Serbia was killed by the Turks. Through centuries of Ottoman occupation he became a saintly, almost Christlike figure, sacrificing his life so that Serbia might one day rise again. And the sagas of his passion invariably included a Judas: Vuk Brankovic, who betrayed his lord, his people, and the Christian religion to the forces of Islam. Before long Brankovic’s treachery became identified with the Serbs who converted to Islam … particularly those Moslem Serbs living in the provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina. They were seen as “made Turks,” people who had betrayed their heritage and religion for temporal gain and sided with the enemy, as old religious enmities – built atop even deeper and older schisms – returned to haunt the Balkans.

For centuries Bosnia had been the center of the Bogomils, a religious movement which combined Christianity with elements of Gnosticism and Manichean dualism. The movement’s forebears and close cousins – the Cathari, the Albignensians, the Waldensians – had finally been suppressed in southern France and throughout the Balkans. In Bosnia the Bogomils had been protected not only by the foreboding Adriatic Alps but by sympathetic local rulers… until Roman Catholic Croatian and Orthodox Serbian leaders alike decided to stamp out this heresy once and for all. In 1325 the Pope told a Catholic Bosnian leader to “exterminate the heretics in thy dominions;” in 1408 King Sigismund of Hungary, encouraged by the Pope, destroyed the Bosnian Army and had 126 high-ranking Bosnian “heretics” beheaded.

The Ottomans cared little about whether the Bogomils denied the validity of sacraments or accepted the Pope; they cared a great deal about maintaining public order, and protected Bogomils from Catholic and Orthodox raids. The Bogomils already rejected Christ’s divinity, and had little difficulty seeing him as, per the Moslem conception, as a prophet and wise man. Bogomil nobles, whose lands were coveted and claimed by Catholic and Orthodox alike, could retain their property and feudal privileges by conversion. Those less fortunate could find employment within the vast Ottoman bureaucracy merely by stating before witnesses “there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Whatever the reasons, by 1600 the majority of Bosnia’s population was Moslem.

Much of Eastern Europe languished under Ottoman rule; the prosperous Bosnian towns were an exception. Their architecture combined the best of Turkish, Oriental, and European design, while Sarajevo’s strategic position ensured a steady stream of merchants from Istanbul, Venice and Dubrovnik. Many of Bosnia’s Moslems became prosperous merchants and landlords; this only served to fuel resentment among the Orthodox and Catholic peasants who equated Islam with rent and taxes. Still, Bosnia was generally known for its tolerance. Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition found a home in Sarajevo, and many Sufi Orders like the Bektashi fled persecution to find a home in Bosnia. Nonetheless, the resentment remained to resurface with the Christian decline. In 1914 Gavrilo Princip, member of a radical Serbian group seeking to annex Bosnia from Austria, assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Sarajevo, thereby triggering the First World War. Tito, creator and dictator of Yugoslavia, was able to keep things under control in the best Ottoman fashion, by iron-fisted rule. His death left a power void which resulted in the current Balkan chaos.

It is a misnomer to refer to the Bosnian conflict as an “ethnic” war – Serbs, Croatians and Bosniaks [Moslems] are all of the same Slavic stock and speak the same language, although they use different alphabets. Serbs and Croats frequently refer to their Moslem countrymen as “Turks,” and some even claim the Bosnian Moslems are descendents of Ottoman invaders and not native to “Greater Serbia” … but there is no more ethnic or racial difference between a Serb and a Bosnian than there is between a Northern Irish Protestant and an Irish Catholic. This does not ameliorate the atrocities which have been committed on all sides. Bosnia gave the English language a new term – “ethnic cleansing.” At present it exists as a fragile truce between the Moslem/Catholic Bosnia-Croat Federation and the Serb Republic of Bosnia. Unemployment is estimated at over 40% and the country remains dependent upon foreign aid as it struggles to recover from a war which killed some 250,000 people and produced over 1 million refugees. Given the region’s bloody history, we can only hope that the current uneasy peace continues.