Turkish Croatia
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Turkish Croatia was the name used between the 16th and 19th centuries for the northwest territory of Bosnia, today known as Bosanska Krajina (Bosnian Frontier). In the European literature of the 18th and 19th century, the name Turkish Croatia was used to refer to the territories enclosed by the Sava, Una, and Vrbas rivers.
The name 'Turkish Croatia' was given to the area by the Ottoman Turks and accepted by Austrian, Italian, and German cartographers. In 1860 , the Vlach population of the area wanted that name abolished in favor of a new name: Bosanska Krajina (Bosnian Frontier). Bosanska Krajina first appears on maps in 1869.
Historically important towns in northwest Bosnia include Banja Luka, Jajce, Ključ, and Bihać.
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[edit] History
In the 6th century, northwestern Bosnia was part of the Roman province of Dalmatia. It fell under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Roman Empire. Shortly thereafter, Eurasian Avars and their Slavic subjects from northern Europe invaded Dalmatia and settled in what is now Turkish Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In the 7th century the Slavic Croats were invited by Roman emperor Heraclitus to drive the Avars out of Dalmatia. After several years of war, the Croats defeated most of the Avars and their subjects, and assimilated the rest. The Croats established two states in the Balkans: the Croatia of Dalmatia-Illyricum, and the Pannonian Croatia. Northwestern Bosnia became part of Pannonian Croatia, while most of the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina was included in Dalmatian-Illyricum Croatia.
Northwestern Bosnia, along with the rest of Pannonian Croatia, soon fell to the Franks. During this time many Croats were Christianized. The Croats scored several victories against the Franks; as a result, the Franks relinquished their claims on Pannonian Croatia. In the 10th century, Pannonian Croatia joined with other Croatian lands in an independent Croatian kingdom. Northwest Bosnia remained part of Pannonian Croatia until 1102 , when Croatia joined the Kingdom of Hungary.
Croatian prince Juraj Mikuličić, fearing the advancing Ottoman army, erected a fortress in Bužim, near Bihać. A glagolitic inscription on a tablet dating from the end of the 15th century, found in Bužim (now in Zagreb), in the Croatian language, writes of Prince Mikuličić and the brave defenders of Bužim. The tablet records: "U nu vrime va vsei hrvatskoj zemlji boljega covika ne bise..." (translation: "At that time there was not a better man in the whole Croatian land ...").
In 1520 , Croatian Ban and "defender of Croatia" Bishop Petar Berislavić was killed in a Turkish ambush near the Devil's Mountain in the Bihać area "... and Turks murdered Croatian Ban, Peter the bishop, near Bihać in the Devil's Mount, in the Devil's Grotto. And they severed his head. And the Bihać citizen Pavao Medosic found his head and his body, and brought them in Bihac."
The former Bosnian kingdom became a Turkish sanjak shortly after 1463 . In 1521 Sultan Beyzaid II appointed his grandson Gazi Husrev-beg as governor of the Sanjak of Bosnia. Husrev-beg's father was an Islamized Croat from Bosnia and his mother was of Turkish origin. Husrev-beg, a brilliant military strategist, desired to expand his Bosnian Sanjak and focused his attacks on the territory that would become Turkish Croatia. He gained much territory, beginning by conquering Udbina. In January of 1528 Jajce, Banja Luka and Ključ fell, followed by Krbava and Lika in the spring of that year.
In the 15th century, Croatia became part of the Austrian Habsburg Empire. The Austrians focused on Croatia and Bosnia to halt Turkish incursions. Ferdinand I of Austria erected fortresses at Senj and Klis which were manned by the infamous Croatian Uskoks. He entrusted the defense of the Empire to his uncle Charles of Styria. Charles and the Croatian bands cooperated closely and in 1579 Charles erected the new fortified city of Karlovac. In 1580 the Turks responded by declaring the Bosnian Pashaluk which unified all the Sanjaks, including territory in modern day Croatia.
In the 16th century, Bihać was the capital of Croatia. In 1592 the Turkish army of about 20,000 under Hasan-pasa Predojević, an Ottoman vizier and Islamized Croat, attacked and forcefully occupied Bihac. Records show that nearly 2,000 people died in defense of Bihac, and an estimated 800 Christian Croat children from Bihac were sent into servitude in Turkey, to be educated in Islam and become Yenicari. Hasan-pasa Predojevic pressed into Croatia to the town of Sisak near Zagreb in 1593 but was defeated in battle and killed.
The Ottoman Empire lost the war of 1683-1697 to Austria, and was required by the Treaty of Karlowitz to cede Slavonia and parts of Hungary to the Habsburg Empire. The western and northern borders of Bosnia became the boundary between the Ottoman and Austrian empires.
[edit] Demographic changes in Turkish Croatia
When Turkish troops marched on this part of Bosnia, they incorporated the assistance of Vlachs, mostly from Montenegro and Northern Albania. Most of the Vlachs were of Serbian Orthodox confession and are believed to be the ancestors of the majority of today's Bosnian Serbs living between the Una, Sava, and Vrbas rivers. The Vlachs were non-Slavic nomads, Protoromans and romanized Balkan Celts and Illyrians, who accepted the Orthodox faith. There were also Catholic Vlachs who settled in northwest Bosnia and central Croatia and became Croatized after the 16th century.
Most of the Vlachs fought on the Turkish side until the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Austrians also utilized the assistance of the Vlachs and Serbs and settled them along the present day Croatian-Bosnian border. Their enclaves in present day Croatia and Bosnia roughly follow the borders of the Turkish and Austrian empires set at the Treaty of Karlowitz.
According to Venetian patrician Sanudius, the author of "Diario", Turks had taken 600,000 men and women into slavery from Croatian lands as of 1533 . During the frequent wars between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, Croats in northwestern Bosnia, mostly Catholic in confession, left in large numbers for Croatia and Catholic lands in the Habsburg Empire. When the Treaty of Karlowitz was decided, the border between Austria and the Ottoman Empire was made roughly into the border of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina today. Islamized Slavs who had been left in Croatia moved to the Bosnian pashaluk, and Christian Croats in the Bosnian pashaluk populated Croatia, Slovenia, and other lands in the Habsburg Empire. There were frequent recorded cases of Christians in Turkish Croatia who converted to Islam. Turkish Croatia was depopulated of Catholics but subsequently repopulated by Vlachs and Serbs of Orthodox faith.
In 1696 , during the Habsburg-Turkish war (1683-1699), more than 100,000 Bosnian Catholics (Croats) had fled the Turkish oppression, crossed the Una and Sava rivers and found refuge in Croatia, according to the Franciscan Andrija Siprasic's testimony.
Many cases have been recorded of Catholics being converted to Orthodoxy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bosnia; it is clear that the spread of the Orthodox Church did not happen by conversion alone. In the areas where Orthodoxy made its most striking gains, especially in northern Bosnia, the same period saw a large influx of settlers from Orthodox lands. It was evidently deliberate policy on the part of the Ottomans to fill up territory which had been depopulated, either by war or by plague. There are signs in the earliest defters (Turkish tax records) of groups of Christian herdsman, identifiable as Vlachs, being settled in devastated areas of eastern Herzegovina. 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 Orthodox priests. The number of Vlachs in north-central and north-east Bosnia continued to grow over the next fifty years, and they began to spread into north-west Bosnia as well.
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 Herzegovina 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.
Those who had moved into northern and western Bosnia could not practise the tradition of long-distance transhumance. The evidence of sixteenth-century Ottoman decrees on the Vlachs of Bosnia and Herzegovina indicates that the majority of Vlachs were now sedentary, but their way of life still centered on stock-breeding and shepherding. Giovanni Lovrich noted in the 1770s that the Croatian Morlachs all had flocks of 200, 300 or 600 sheep, and when he asked why they were so reluctant to till the soil, they replied: "Our ancestors didn't do it, so neither shall we."
[edit] Terminology
As early as 1530 , when the Habsburg official and Slovene monk, Benedict Kuripesic traveled through Bosnia, he was able to report that the country was inhabited by three peoples - the Turks, who ruled "with great tyranny" over the Christians; "the old Bosnians, who are of the Roman Catholic faith"; and "Serbs, who call themselves Vlachs ... They came from Smederovo and Belgrade". So important was the Vlach element in the creation of this Bosnian Orthodox population that, three centuries later, the term "Vlach" was still being used in Bosnia to mean "member of the Orthodox Church."
Some writers, especially Serbians, have argued that the term "Vlach" was used to mean simply "shepherd" and did not imply any ethnic or linguistic difference, so that most of these people were really just Serbian shepherds. This view is rejected by the leading modern expert on Vlachs in the early Ottoman Balkans, who insists that they were regarded as a distinct population.[citation needed]
The Vlachs usually learned and spoke the language of the country where they resided. Vlachs in Bosnia learned Bosnian (or Serbo-Croatian).
Eventually the Vlachs and Serbs of the Orthodox confession became the dominant majority in Turkish Croatia. The name was changed to Bosnian Krajina in 1869 upon the insistence of the Serbian and Valachian populace.
