Bosnian Church

The Bosnian Church (Serbo-Croatian: Crkva bosanska/Црква

Bosnian Church
босанска) was a Christian church in medieval Bosnia and
Herzegovina that was independent of and considered heretical by Crkva bosanska
both the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox hierarchies.

Historians traditionally connected the church with the Bogomils,

although this has been challenged and is now rejected by the
majority of scholars. Adherents of the church called themselves
simply Krstjani ("Christians") or Dobri Bošnjani, Usorani,
Humljani... ("Good Bosnians, Usorans, Humlians..."). The
church's organization and beliefs are poorly understood, because
few if any records were left by church members and the church is
mostly known from the writings of outside sources — primarily
Catholic ones.[2] Ban Kulin's tablet
Type Independent
The monumental tombstones called stećak that appeared in church
medieval Bosnia, as well as Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, are
sometimes identified with the Bosnian Church. Classification Chalcedonian
Christianity

Background Governance Episcopal

Djed Ratko II
Headquarters Mile
Schism
Territory Kingdom of
Christian missions emanating from Rome and Constantinople Bosnia
started pushing into the Balkans in the 9th century, Christianizing Kingdom of
the South Slavs, and establishing boundaries between the Croatia
ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the See of Rome and the See of Kingdom of
Constantinople. The East–West Schism then led to the Serbia
establishment of Catholicism in Croatia and most of Dalmatia,
Independence 11th century
while Eastern Orthodoxy came to prevail in Serbia.[3] Lying in-
between, the mountainous Bosnia was nominally under Rome,[3] Separated from Roman Catholic
but Catholicism never became firmly established due to a weak Diocese of
church organization [3] and poor communications. [4] Medieval Bosnia[1]
Bosnia thus remained a "no-man's land between faiths" rather than
a meeting ground between the two Churches,[4] leading to a unique religious history and the emergence of
an "independent and somewhat heretical church".[3]

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.[5] 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
the Church Slavonic language.[5]

Abjuration and crusade

Vukan, ruler of Dioclea, wrote to Pope Innocent III in 1199 that Kulin, ruler of Bosnia, had become a
heretic, along with his wife, sister, other relatives, and 10,000 other Bosnians. The Archbishop of Spalato,
vying for control over Bosnia, joined Vukan and accused the Archbishop of Ragusa of neglecting his
suffragan diocese in Bosnia. Emeric, King of Hungary and supporter of Spalato, also seized this
opportunity to try to extend his influence over Bosnia.[6] Further accusations against Kulin, such as
harbouring heretics, ensued until 1202. In 1203, Kulin moved to defuse the threat of foreign intervention. A
synod was held at his instigation on 6 April. Following the abjuration of Bilino Polje, Kulin succeeded in
keeping the Bosnian Diocese under the Ragusan Archdiocese, thus limiting Hungarian influence. The
errors abjured by the Bosnians in Bilino Polje seem to have been errors of practice, stemming from
ignorance, rather than heretical doctrines.[7]

History
The bid to consolidate Catholic rule in Bosnia in the 12th to 13th
centuries proved difficult. The Banate of Bosnia held strict trade
relations with the Republic of Ragusa, and Bosnia's bishop was
under the jurisdiction of Ragusa. This was disputed by the
Hungarians, who tried to achieve their jurisdiction over Bosnia's
bishops, but Bosnia's first Ban Kulin averted that. In order to
conduct a crusade against him, the Hungarians turned to Rome,
complaining to Pope Innocent III that the Kingdom of Bosnia was
a centre of heresy, based on the refuge that some Cathars (also
known as Bogomils or Patarenes) had found there. To avert the Medieval monumental tombstones
Hungarian attack, Ban Kulin held a public assembly on 8 April (Stećci) that lie scattered across
1203 and affirmed his loyalty to Rome in the presence of an envoy Bosnia and Herzegovina are
of the Pope, while the faithful abjured their mistakes and committed historically associated with the
to following the Catholic doctrine.[8] Yet, in practice this was Bosnian Church
ignored. After the death of Kulin in 1204, a mission was sent to
convert Bosnia to Rome but failed.[9]

On 15 May 1225, Pope Honorius III spurred the Hungarians to undertake the Bosnian Crusade. That
expedition, like the previous ones, turned into a defeat, and the Hungarians had to retreat when the
Mongols invaded their territories. In 1234, the Catholic Bishop of Bosnia was removed by Pope Gregory
IX for allowing supposedly heretical practices.[9] In addition, Gregory called on the Hungarian king to
crusade against the heretics in Bosnia.[10] However, Bosnian nobles were able to expel the Hungarians
once again.[11]

In 1252, Pope Innocent IV decided to put Bosnia's Bishop under the Hungarian Kalocsa jurisdiction. This
decision provoked the schism of the Bosnian Christians, who refused to submit to the Hungarians and
broke off their relations with Rome.[12] In that way, an autonomous Bosnian Church came into being, in
which many scholars later saw a Bogomil or Cathar church, whilst more recent scholars such as Noel
Malcolm and John Fine maintain that no trace of Bogomilism, Catharism, or other dualism can be found in
the original documents of the Bosnian Christians.[13]
It was not until Pope Nicholas' Bull Prae Cunctis in 1291 that the Franciscan-led Inquisition was imposed
on Bosnia.[14] Bogomilism was eradicated in Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century, but
survived in Bosnia and Herzegovina until the Ottoman Empire gained control of the region in 1463.

The Bosnian Church coexisted with the Catholic Church (and with the few Bogomil groups) for most of
the Late Middle Ages, but no accurate figures exist as to the numbers of adherents of the two churches.
Several Bosnian rulers were Krstjani, while others adhered to Catholicism. Stjepan Kotromanić shortly
reconciled Bosnia with Rome, while ensuring at the same time the survival of the Bosnian Church.
Notwithstanding the incoming Franciscan missionaries, the Bosnian Church survived, although weaker and
weaker, until it disappeared after the Ottoman conquest.[15]

Outsiders accused the Bosnian Church of links to the Bogomils, a stridently dualist sect of Gnostic
Christians heavily influenced by the Manichaean Paulician movement. The Bogomil heretics were at one
point mainly centered in Bulgaria and are now known by historians as the direct progenitors of the Cathars.
The Inquisition reported the existence of a dualist sect in Bosnia in the late 15th century and called them
"Bosnian heretics", but this sect was according to some historians most likely not the same as the Bosnian
Church. The historian Franjo Rački wrote about this in 1869 based on Latin sources, but the Croatian
scholar Dragutin Kniewald in 1949 established the credibility of the Latin documents in which the Bosnian
Church is described as heretical.[16] It is thought today that the Bosnian Church's adherents, who were
persecuted both by the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, predominantly converted to Islam upon
the arrival of the Ottomans, thus adding to the ethnogenesis of the modern-day Bosniaks.[15] According to
Bašić, the Bosnian Church was dualist in character, and so was neither a schismatic Catholic nor Orthodox
Church.[17] According to Mauro Orbini (d. 1614), the Patarenes and the Manicheans[18] were two
Christian religious sects in Bosnia. The Manicheans had a bishop called djed and priests called strojnici
(strojniks), the same titles ascribed to the leaders of the Bosnian Church.[19]

The religious centre of the Bosnian Church was located in Moštre, near Visoko, where the House of
Krstjani was founded.[20] Some historians contend that the Bosnian Church had largely disappeared before
the Ottoman conquest in 1463. Other historians dispute a discrete terminal point.

Organization and characteristics

The Bosnian Church used Slavic language in liturgy.[21]

Djed

The church was headed by a bishop, called djed ('grandfather'), and

had a council of twelve men called strojnici. The monk missionaries
were known as krstjani or kršćani ('adherents of the cross' or
'christians').[21] Some of the adherents resided in small monasteries,
known as hiže (hiža, 'house'), while others were wanderers, known as
gosti (gost, 'guest').[21] It is difficult to ascertain how the theology
differed from that of the Orthodox and Catholic.[21] The practices
were, however, unacceptable to both.[21]

The Church was mainly composed of monks in scattered monastic

houses. It had no territorial organization and it did not deal with any
secular matters other than attending people's burials. It did not involve
Batalo's Gospel with 28 names of itself in state issues very much. Notable exceptions were when King
djed of Bosnian Church Stephen Ostoja of Bosnia, a member of the Bosnian Church himself,
had a djed as an advisor at the royal court between 1403 and 1405, and an occasional occurrence of a
krstjan elder being a mediator or diplomat.

Hval's Codex

Hval's Codex, written in 1404 in Cyrillic, is one of the most famous

manuscripts belonging to the Bosnian Church in which there are some
iconographic elements which are not in concordance with the
supposed theological doctrine of Christians (Annunciation, Crucifixion
and Ascension). All the important Bosnian Church books (Nikoljsko
evandjelje, Sreckovicevo evandelje, the Manuscript of Hval, the
Manuscript of Krstyanin Radosav) are based on Glagolitic Church
books.

Studies
The phenomenon of Bosnian medieval Christians attracted scholars'
attention for centuries, but it was not until the latter half of the 19th
century that the most important monograph on the subject, "Bogomili i
Patareni" (Bogomils and Patarens), 1870, by eminent Croatian
historian Franjo Rački, was published. Rački argued that the Bosnian
Church was essentially Gnostic and Manichaean in nature. This A miniature from Hval's Codex
interpretation has been accepted, expanded and elaborated upon by a
host of later historians, most prominent among them being Dominik
Mandić, Sima Ćirković, Vladimir Ćorović, Miroslav Brandt, and Franjo Šanjek. However, a number of
other historians (Leo Petrović, Jaroslav Šidak, Dragoljub Dragojlović, Dubravko Lovrenović, and Noel
Malcolm) stressed the impeccably orthodox theological character of Bosnian Christian writings and claimed
the phenomenon can be sufficiently explained by the relative isolation of Bosnian Christianity, which
retained many archaic traits predating the East-West Schism in 1054.

Conversely, the American historian of the Balkans, John Fine, does not believe in the dualism of the
Bosnian Church at all.[22] Though he represents his theory as a "new interpretation of the Bosnian
Church", his view is very close to J. Šidak's early theory and that of several other scholars before him.[23]
He believes that while there could have been heretical groups alongside of the Bosnian Church, the church
itself was inspired by Papal overreach.

Some Protestants have attempted to look back on the Bosnian church as their forerunner.[24][25][26]

References
1. Lovrenović, Dubravko (2006). "Strast za istinom moćnija od strasti za mitologiziranjem" (http
s://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=40259) (pdf available for read/download).
STATUS Magazin za političku kulturu i društvena pitanja (in Croatian) (8): 182–189.
ISSN 1512-8679 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/1512-8679). Retrieved 29 June 2018.
2. Malcolm, Noel (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. New York: New York University Press.
pp. 27–42.
3. Fine 1994, p. 8.
4. Fine 1994, p. 17.
5. Fine 1994, p. 18.
 6. Fine 1994, p. 45.
7. Fine 1994, p. 47.
8. Thierry Mudry, Histoire de la Bosnie-Herzégovine faits et controverses, Éditions Ellipses,
1999 (chapitre 2: La Bosnie médiévale p. 25 à 42 et chapitre 7 : La querelle
historiographique p. 255 à 265). Dennis P. Hupchick et Harold E. Cox, Les Balkans Atlas
Historique, Éditions Economica, Paris, 2008, p. 34
9. Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus, (Edward
Arnold Ltd, 1977), 143.
10. Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, C. 650-c. 1450, ed. Janet Hamilton,
Bernard Hamilton, Yuri Stoyanov, (Manchester University Press, 1998), 48-49.
11. Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy:Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus, 143.
12. Mudry 1999; Hupchick and Cox 2008
13. The issue of the Bogomil hypothesis is dealt with by Noel Malcolm (Bosnia. A Short History)
as well as by John V.A. Fine (in Mark Pinson, The Bosnian Muslims)
14. Mitja Velikonja, Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
transl. Rang'ichi Ng'inga, (Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 35.
15. Davide Denti, L’EVOLUZIONE DELL’ISLAM BOSNIACO NEGLI ANNI ‘90, tesi di laurea in
Scienze Internazionali, Università degli Studi di Milano, 2006
16. Denis Bašić. The roots of the religious, ethnic, and national identity of the Bosnian-
Herzegovinan [sic] Muslims. University of Washington, 2009, 369 pages (p. 194). (https://boo
ks.google.com/books?id=RivPTByg2rMC&q=The+roots+of+the+religious)
17. Denis Bašić, p. 186.
18. The Paulicians and Bogomils have been confounded with the Manichaeans. L. P. Brockett,
The Bogomils of Bulgaria and Bosnia - The Early Protestants of the East. Appendix II,
http://www.reformedreader.org/history/brockett/bogomils.htm
19. Mauro Orbini. II Regno Degli Slav: Presaro 1601, p.354 and Мавро Орбини, Кралство
Словена, p. 146.
20. Old town Visoki declared as national monument (http://www.aneks8komisija.com.ba/main.p
hp?id_struct=6&lang=1&action=view&id=2409) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2007
0220011943/http://www.aneks8komisija.com.ba/main.php?id_struct=6&lang=1&action=view
&id=2409) February 20, 2007, at the Wayback Machine. 2004.
21. Stoianovich 2015, p. 145.
22. Fine, John. The Bosnian Church: Its Place in State and Society from the Thirteenth to the
Fifteenth Century: A New Interpretation. London: SAQI, The Bosnian Institute, 2007. ISBN 0-
86356-503-4
23. Denis Bašić, p. 196.
24. Markowitz, AvFran (2010). Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope.
25. Dedijer, Vladimir (1961). The Beloved Land (https://books.google.com/books?id=3cEMAAA
AIAAJ&q=Bosnian+church+forerunner). Simon & Schuster. "But within a short time both
Rome and Constantinople had excommunicated the Bosnian Church , which claimed to
represent the true form of Christianity . ... The Bosnian faith was , in a way , the forerunner of
the great Reformation"
26. Bringa, Tone (2020-09-01). Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a
Central Bosnian Village (https://books.google.com/books?id=JGDwDwAAQBAJ&dq=Bosni
an+church+forerunner&pg=PA234). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-5178-2.
"The Bosnian Church has, however, been described primarily as a heretic Catholic sect. It
has furthermore been seen as a forerunner to the Protestants"
Sources
Fine, John Van Antwerp Jr. (1994) [1987]. The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from
the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (https://books.google.com/books?id=LvV
bRrH1QBgC). Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-08260-4.
Fine, John Van Antwerp Jr. (1975). "The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation. A Study of
the Bosnian Church and its Place in State and Society From the 13th to the 15th Centuries"
(https://archive.org/details/bosnianchurchnew0000fine). East European Quarterly. East
European Monographs. New York and London: Columbia University Press. 10. ISBN 0-
914710-03-6 – via Internet Archive.
Lambert, Malcolm D. (1977). Medieval heresy: popular movements from Bogomil to Hus.
Holmes & Meier Publishers.
Stoianovich, Traian (2015). Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe (https://books.google.
com/books?id=lKVzCQAAQBAJ). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-47615-3.

External links
Crkva Bosanska (http://www.crkvabosanska.org/) - Kršćanska zajednica u BiH
L. P. Brockett, The Bogomils of Bulgaria and Bosnia - The Early Protestants of the East (htt
p://www.reformedreader.org/history/brockett/bogomils.htm)

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