How one outline outlasted every state that governed Bosnia

How the medieval Bosnian state took shape

The first written mention of the name is a single phrase. In the mid tenth century the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus described "Bosona" as a district in "baptized Serbia", and Britannica notes that the district he meant was far smaller than the modern country and centred on the Bosna River. The passage has been read several ways. Serb national writers have used it to argue that Bosnia was originally a Serb land; other scholars reply that it reflects a temporary Serbian rule over the district at the time, and that the translation of the key sentence is itself disputed.

For two more centuries the area passed between Byzantium, Croatian and Serbian rulers and Hungary. After the emperor Manuel I Comnenus died in 1180, Byzantine rule fell away and neither Croatia nor Hungary restored its own, and a Bosnian territory became an independent entity for the first time. Wikipedia's account of the kingdom dates the Banate of Bosnia, ruled by local bans, from at least 1154.

The state grew in two steps. Ban Stjepan Kotromanić, who ruled from 1322 to 1353, took in the principality of Hum to the south, which is the land later called Herzegovina. His successor Tvrtko I pushed further south to a stretch of the Dalmatian coast and in 1377 had himself crowned king. Where that happened is recorded two ways: Wikipedia's main article on the country places the coronation at Mile near Visoko in the Bosnian heartland, while its article on the kingdom places it at the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Mileševa, before the relics of Saint Sava.

Cut off from Rome, the Bosnian church elected its own leaders from the heads of monastic houses, and neighbours accused it of heresy from the 1190s. At Bilino Polje in 1203 Ban Kulin's church leaders signed a promise of reform. Nineteenth-century historians took the accusations at face value and called the church dualist; Britannica reports that later scholarship found its members used the sign of the cross, the mass and church buildings, all things dualists rejected. Franciscans worked against it from 1340, and in 1459 King Stjepan Tomaš ordered its clergy to convert to Roman Catholicism or leave. Most converted.

The stone record of the period survives in the stećci, carved limestone tombstones laid out in rows in cemeteries dating from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. UNESCO lists 28 of those cemeteries as one serial property spread across Bosnia and Herzegovina, western Serbia, western Montenegro and Croatia, so the medieval kingdom and the modern outline were never the same shape.

How the Ottoman conquest made Bosnia a province

The kingdom ended in stages. Ottoman forces took the area around Vrhbosna in 1448 and developed the settlement into Sarajevo. In 1463 they conquered most of Bosnia proper and killed its last king, Stephen Tomašević, and on 26 December of the same year Hungarian troops under Matthias took the royal capital, Jajce; parts of Herzegovina and the north stayed under Hungary until the 1520s. The last fortress in Herzegovina fell in 1482. Herzegovina carries the name of the nobleman Stefan Vukčić, who ruled Hum in those decades and gave himself the title herceg, duke.

What followed kept the name and the unit. Wikipedia's account says the Ottomans incorporated Bosnia as a province "with its historical name and territorial integrity", and Britannica records that in 1580 a broad area covering modern Bosnia and parts of what are now Croatia and Serbia received the full status of an eyalet, a constituent province of the empire, which it held for the rest of the Ottoman period. A vizier governed it through pashas and local judges, land was held as military fiefs, and non-Muslims paid a graduated poll tax.

Conversion to Islam went slowly. In Britannica's account it took more than a hundred years for Muslims to form an absolute majority, with no mass conversion at the start and no mass settlement from Anatolia. Bosnia had two competing churches that worked only out of monastic houses, and a third, the Serbian Orthodox, in Herzegovina, so no one church held territory the way the Serbian church did next door. Life in Sarajevo and Mostar, both mainly Muslim, required conversion for full civic standing. The Albanian priest Pjetër Mazreku reported in 1624 that there were 450,000 Muslims, 150,000 Catholics and 75,000 Orthodox Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Orthodox population came largely with Ottoman policy. Britannica finds no definite evidence of any Orthodox church building in central, northern or western Bosnia before 1463; settlers from Serbia and Herzegovina, many of them Vlachs with military skills, were brought in to fill the depopulated north and west, and Orthodox monasteries were built there during the sixteenth century. Some of those settlers became Muslims as well. The three communities of modern Bosnia and Herzegovina were all present by the 1620s, living inside one province.

How frontier wars drew the modern outline

For most of the Ottoman period Bosnia faced Austria, Hungary and Venice, and Britannica counts a major war affecting it almost every two generations. The Habsburg-Ottoman war of 1593 to 1606 began with fighting around Bihać. In 1697 Prince Eugene of Savoy marched a small Austrian army into Sarajevo, burned it and left, taking thousands of Catholic Bosnians with him. The Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699 made Bosnia the empire's westernmost province.

The two treaties that followed drew lines that are still on the map. At Passarowitz in 1718 Venetian Dalmatia was allowed to extend inland to a line that has since formed part of Bosnia's southwestern border. At Belgrade in 1739 Austria gave up its claim south of the Sava, and that settlement, in Britannica's words, "formed the basis of the northern border of modern Bosnia". Austria invaded again in 1788 and handed its gains back in 1791.

The same wars moved power inside the province. The viziers left Sarajevo in the 1690s and governed from Travnik with limited authority, while hereditary captains, the kapetans, an office found only in the Bosnian eyalet, took local control. Those captains resisted the sultans' reforms. In 1831 one of them, Husein Gradaščević, imprisoned the vizier and marched 25,000 men into Kosovo to demand autonomy for Bosnia; the grand vizier split him from Ali-aga Rizvanbegović of Herzegovina, and Herzegovina was detached as a separate territory under Rizvanbegović as the reward. Omer-paša Latas crushed a rebellion in 1850 and 1851 and revoked that separation, and in 1866 Topal Osman-paša divided the province into seven sanjaks with a consultative assembly.

Why Austria-Hungary ruled a province it did not own

A peasant revolt against tax collectors began in Nevesinje in 1875, spread across Bosnia and drew Serbia, Montenegro and then Russia into war with the Ottomans. The Congress of Berlin settled it in 1878 with an arrangement that had no precedent: Bosnia and Herzegovina stayed notionally under Ottoman sovereignty and was occupied and governed by Austria-Hungary. Austro-Hungarian troops overcame what Britannica calls vigorous local resistance and also garrisoned the sanjak of Novi Pazar, one of the seven Bosnian sanjaks of the late Ottoman period, from which they withdrew in 1908.

Inside the monarchy the province fitted nowhere. Copernico's article on the period notes that after 1867 the Hungarian lands were called Transleithania and all the others Cisleithania, with Bosnia and Herzegovina excluded from both. It came under the monarchy's joint financial administration. Vienna officially denied that it held colonies, yet Copernico counts 522 interpellations and speeches using the words colony or colonisation in the Hungarian House of Representatives between 1878 and 1914, and concludes that government and opposition members there agreed Bosnia was a colony and argued only about whether it was being run well.

The administration codified laws, built industry and tried to blunt Serb and Croat claims by encouraging a Bosnian or Bosniak identity. Annexation came on 6 October 1908, and Russia and Serbia were compelled to accept it in March 1909. Franz Joseph granted a constitution and a parliament in 1910. On 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb in the Young Bosnia movement, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. In the repression that followed, about 5,500 Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina were arrested, between 700 and 2,200 died in prison, 460 were executed and about 5,200 Serb families were expelled.

Why the Yugoslav kingdom erased the old boundary

In 1918 Bosnia and Herzegovina became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where Britannica says it "had no formal status of its own". Land reform fell hardest on Muslim landowners: an Austro-Hungarian survey of 1910 had recorded Muslims owning 91.1% of the property, and the reforms took 1,175,305 hectares of agricultural and forest land from them.

The boundary itself survived the first redrawing by negotiation. The kingdom split the country into 33 oblasts, and Bosnian politicians led by Mehmed Spaho ensured that the six carved out of Bosnia and Herzegovina corresponded to the six Ottoman sanjaks, so the old outline held as a sum of its parts. In 1929 the state became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and its new banovinas replaced every Bosnian unit and took geographical names. The Cvetković-Maček Agreement of 1939, which created a Croatian banate, amounted in Wikipedia's reading to a partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia.

Germany invaded on 6 April 1941 and the whole territory was handed to the Independent State of Croatia, run by the Ustaše. Wikipedia records an estimated 209,000 Serbs killed on Bosnian territory during the war, 16.9% of the Serb population there. Chetnik forces killed about 30,000 of the 75,000 Muslims who died, and between 64,000 and 79,000 Bosnian Croats were killed from April 1941 to May 1945. On 12 October 1941 a group of 108 prominent Muslims in Sarajevo signed a resolution condemning the Ustaše persecution of Serbs.

What the Partisans restored at Jajce

The communist Partisans under Josip Broz Tito fought both the Axis and the Chetniks, and much of that fighting took place in Bosnia. On 29 November 1943 the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia met at Jajce, the royal capital lost in 1463, and re-established Bosnia and Herzegovina as a republic of the federation "in its Habsburg borders". Of the Bosnian Partisans over the whole war, 64.1% were Serbs, 23% Muslims and 8.8% Croats. More than 300,000 people died in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, over a tenth of its population.

The constitution of 1946 made it one of the six republics of the new federation. Its position in the middle of Yugoslavia made it the base for the defence industry, which concentrated weapons and military personnel there, and it hosted foreign manufacturers from the 1960s and the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984.

The republic also produced a new category. The abolition of Qurʾānic schools, charitable foundations and dervish orders hit its Muslim institutions hard, but policy turned in the 1960s: the census of 1961 used the phrase "Muslim in the ethnic sense", and in 1968 the Bosnian Central Committee decreed that "the Muslims are a distinct nation". Britannica reports that in the 1991 census Muslims made up more than two-fifths of the population, Serbs slightly less than a third and Croats a sixth, out of 4,369,319 people counted that year. From the mid-1990s Bosnian Muslims have called themselves Bosniaks.

How independence was voted and then fought over

Multi-party elections on 18 and 25 November 1990 produced a coalition of three parties, one for each community. It lasted less than a year. Wikipedia reports that Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman are believed to have agreed on a partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1991; Britannica says partition had been discussed. Serb deputies left the assembly and formed their own on 24 October 1991, the Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia was proclaimed on 18 November, and a Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was declared on 9 January 1992, renamed Republika Srpska that August.

The referendum on 29 February and 1 March 1992 was boycotted by most Serbs. Turnout was 63.4% and 99.7% of those voting chose independence, which was declared on 3 March. European Community plans to divide the republic into ethnic cantons were rejected in turn by each of the three main parties. Recognition followed in April and United Nations membership on 22 May 1992.

Britannica records that within six weeks of recognition a coordinated offensive by the Yugoslav army, paramilitaries and Bosnian Serb forces held roughly two-thirds of the territory, and that towns with large Bosniak populations such as Zvornik, Foča and Višegrad were attacked first and most of their Bosniak inhabitants expelled. It also records crimes by Croat forces and a Croat-Bosniak war in 1993 and 1994, ended by the Washington Agreement of March 1994. The Old Bridge at Mostar, built in 1566, was destroyed by artillery in 1993.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica, a UN-declared safe area since 1993, and killed its Bosniak men and boys. Wikipedia gives the number as more than 8,000 and Britannica as more than 7,000. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found that the killings constituted genocide, first in the case of General Radislav Krstić. The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo recorded 101,040 dead or disappeared across the whole war in its 2012 figures, 61.4% of them Bosniaks, 24.7% Serbs and 8.3% Croats; more than two million people were displaced.

What Dayton kept and what it divided

The conference at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton ran from 1 to 21 November 1995 and followed, by one count, 34 failed ceasefires. The agreement was initialled on 21 November and signed in Paris on 14 December, and a NATO-led force deployed on 20 December.

Its Annex 4 is the constitution. Article I states that the Republic "shall continue its legal existence under international law as a state, with its internal structure modified as provided herein and with its present internationally recognized borders". Everything inside was rebuilt. The state consists of two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, and neither may set up controls at the line between them. The presidency has three members, a Bosniak and a Croat elected from the Federation and a Serb elected from Republika Srpska. Three of the nine judges of the Constitutional Court are chosen by the President of the European Court of Human Rights, and the first governor of the central bank was appointed by the International Monetary Fund. The split of territory was set at 51% for the Federation and 49% for Republika Srpska, against about 46% held by Bosnian Serb forces just before the agreement. Supporters have praised the settlement for ending the war; critics, cited in Wikipedia's account, argue that it entrenched the results of ethnic cleansing and produced a system that deadlocks on every major issue.

How Brčko came to belong to both entities

One piece of the internal line was left undrawn. Negotiations on Brčko, the town on the Serb-held corridor along the Sava that connects the two halves of Republika Srpska, broke down as the Dayton conference closed, and the question went to an arbitral tribunal. The Federation argued that the municipality had been mainly Bosniak and Croat before the war and was captured and cleansed; Republika Srpska argued that the corridor was its only connection between east and west.

The tribunal issued awards in February 1997 and March 1998 and a final award on 5 March 1999. It found that about 26,000 displaced Serbs were then housed in Brčko, most in homes belonging to Bosniaks and Croats who had been driven out, and that returns in either direction had been negligible in the town itself. Its answer was to give the whole pre-war municipality to neither side. Brčko District, created in 2000, sits under the exclusive sovereignty of the state and is held, in the award's word, in "condominium": the territory of each entity covers all of it, and neither governs any of it.

The arrangement echoes 1878, when the Congress of Berlin left the whole province under one sovereign on paper and another in practice. It was the last internal line the Dayton process drew, and the outline around it stayed where the treaties of 1718 and 1739 had put it. Bosnia and Herzegovina: politics covers how the institutions built inside that outline now work, and Croatia: history traces the same frontier from the Croatian side.