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Updated: June 3, 2025
The conversion of the Bosniaks to Islam was effected by force, on the conquest of the country in 1463, by Mohammed II., the only instance in the career of Turkish conquest in which the injunction of the Prophet against compulsory proselytism has been violated; but they have always held the faith, thus forced on them, with the zeal of renegades, and are now the most fanatic and bigoted Moslems in the empire.
The large majority were Slavs either Poles, Croats or Bosniaks, and these got on much better with the populace than the Magyars or Germans, of whom I met a few. The mistake of the Government was in trying to go too fast. A leap in twenty-eight years from the twelfth century or thereabouts to the twentieth was too much. The peasant intensely conservative by nature resented every change.
Stripped of his numerous waistcoats his chest measurement, as the military doctors informed me, is so poor that a larger percentage of Bosniaks were rejected from the army than in most of the other recruiting districts of Austria-Hungary. As in all South Slav lands, tuberculosis raged. "Thirty per cent, affected, without counting an apex" as a Bosnian doctor told me.
Many Turkish and Albanian costumes lighten up the crowd with their brilliant colours and quaint shapes, Bosniaks and Montenegrins are occasionally seen, and a fair number of Morlacchi, though fewer than lower down the coast. The weather-beaten Chioggian fishermen, too, with their red caps and waist-scarves, black curly hair and great rings in their ears, are very picturesque, though less unusual.
The Porte now directed an invasion of Servia by a mingled force of forty thousand Turks and Bosniaks; but the Moslem army was totally overthrown near Shabatz, Aug. 8, 1806, by seven thousand foot and two thousand horse under Kara George, and driven across the Drina with the loss of their commander and many other chiefs.
But Bogumilism lasted into the nineteenth century, possibly into the twentieth, for a case was reported to me in 1911. Those Christians who objected to Turkish rule fled south into Montenegro, especially from the Herzegovina, which was finally overthrown by the Turks in 1484. Nor did the enmity between the Bosniaks and the Serbs cease now that they were under a common foe.
Religion in the Middle Ages was a far greater force than race. Nationality was hardly developed. Bosnia, into which the Orthodox faith seems to have penetrated but little, if at all, was thus cut off from the Serb Empire, for the bulk of the Bosniaks were either Bogumil or Roman Catholic. We find a great many monuments of the Bogumils scattered through Bosnia and the Herzegovina.
My previous experience in Serbia caused me to go in search of a new-laid Serbian visa also, in case I wished to cross the frontier. Militchevitch this time was very friendly, joked about the awful bill for cypher telegrams which I had run up for the Serbian Government in 1902, and promised to send me some introductions to leading Bosniaks. At Trieste great events were in progress.
They clearly lacked commitment and conviction, or even the military ability to become the guardians of this new order. Clearly its inhabitants were intent on re-drawing borders and securing ethnic homogeneity. Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Kosovars were all busy altering maps and ethnically cleansing minorities.
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