Bosnian Church - History

History

Bosnia was on the boundary between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The Croats to the West and Hungarians to the North embraced Roman Catholicism, while the Serbian lands to the east embraced Eastern Orthodoxy.

During the later Middle Ages most of Bosnia was partly Roman Catholic as well, but no accurate figures exist as to the numbers of adherents of the two churches. The Bosnian Church coexisted uneasily with Roman Catholicism for much of the later Middle Ages. Part of the resistance of the Bosnian Church was political; during the 14th century, the Roman Church placed Bosnia under a Hungarian bishop, and the schism may have been motivated by a desire for independence from Hungarian domination. Several Bosnian rulers were Krstjani, but some of them embraced Roman Catholicism for political reasons.

Outsiders accused the Bosnian Church of links to the Bogomils, a stridently dualist sect of dualist-gnostic Christians (self-entitled) heavily influenced by the Manichaean Paulician movement and also to the Patarene heresy (itself only a variant of the same belief system of Manichean-influenced dualism). The Bogomili heretics at one point mainly were centered in Bulgaria and are now known by historians as the direct lineal progenitors of the Cathari. The Inquisition reported about 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. It is thought today that the Bosnian dualists, who were persecuted by both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, were entirely converted to Islam thus contributing to the ethnogenesis of the modern-day Bosniaks. The Bosnian Church was dualist in character, and so was neither a schismatic Catholic nor Orthodox Church. According to Mauro Orbini (d.1614), the Patarenes and the Manicheans 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. The church left a few traditions by those who converted to Islam, one of which is having mosques built out of wood because many Bogomilian churches were primarily built of wood. Another tradition is having the imam stay at the grave of a deceased person which is something not found in other Islamic communities.

Some historians now believe that the Bosnian Church had largely disappeared before the Turkish conquest in 1463. Other historians dispute a discrete terminal point.

The religious centre of the Bosnian Church was located in Moštre, near Visoko, where the house of krstjani was founded.