Bosnian Church


The Bosnian Church was an autonomous Christian church in Bosnia and [Herzegovina in the Middle Ages|medieval Bosnia and Herzegovina].
Historians traditionally connected the church with the Bogomils, although this connection has been challenged, and is now rejected by the majority of scholars. Adherents of the church called themselves simply Krstjani or Dobri Bošnjani. The church's organization and beliefs are poorly understood, because few if any records were left by church members; the church is mostly known from the writings of outside — primarily Catholic — sources.
The monumental tombstones called stećak that appeared in medieval Bosnia, as well as Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, are sometimes identified with the Bosnian Church.

Background

Schism

Christian missions from Rome and Constantinople were sent into the Balkans in the 9th century, Christianizing the South Slavs, and establishing boundaries between the ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the See of Rome and the See of Constantinople. The East–West Schism then led to the establishment of Catholicism in Croatia and most of Dalmatia, while Eastern Orthodoxy came to prevail in Serbia. Lying in-between, the mountainous Bosnia was nominally under Rome, but Catholicism never became firmly established due to a weak church organization and poor communications. Medieval Bosnia thus remained a "no-man's land between faiths" rather than a meeting ground between the two Churches, leading to a unique religious history and the emergence of an "independent and somewhat heretical church".
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 and along Bosnia's eastern border. This changed in the mid-13th century, when the Bosnian Church began eclipsing the Roman. 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.

Abjuration and crusade

In 1199 the ruler of Duklja, Vukan Nemanjić, wrote to Pope Innocent III that Bosnian ruler Kulin and his family and 10,000 other Bosnians had become heretics. 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], a supporter of Spalato, also seized this opportunity to try to extend his influence over Bosnia. 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.

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 had found there. To avert the Hungarian attack, Ban Kulin held a public assembly on 8 April 1203 and affirmed his loyalty to Rome in the presence of an envoy of the Pope, while the faithful abjured their mistakes and committed to following the Catholic doctrine. Yet, in practice this was ignored. After the death of Kulin in 1204, a mission was sent to convert Bosnia to Rome but failed.

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. In addition, Gregory called on the Hungarian king to crusade against the heretics in Bosnia. However, Bosnian nobles were able to expel the Hungarians once again.
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. 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.
It was not until Pope Nicholas' Bull Prae Cunctis in 1291 that the Franciscan-led Inquisition was imposed on Bosnia. 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 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.
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. 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. According to Bašić, the Bosnian Church was dualist in character, and so was neither a schismatic Catholic nor Orthodox Church.
The religious centre of the Bosnian Church was located in Moštre, near Visoko, where the House of Krstjani was founded. Some historians contend that the Bosnian Church had largely disappeared before the Ottoman conquest in 1463.

Organization and characteristics

The Bosnian Church used Slavic language in liturgy.
The church was headed by a bishop, called djed, and had a council of twelve men called strojnici. The monk missionaries were known as krstjani or kršćani. Some of the adherents resided in small monasteries, known as hiže, while others were wanderers, known as gosti. It is difficult to ascertain how the theology differed from that of the Orthodox and Catholic. The practices were, however, unacceptable to both.
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 itself in state issues very much. Notable exceptions were when King 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.

Origin

There are several conclusions made by scholars regarding the origin and formation of the Bosnian Church.
  • According to Dragojlović, the organization, teachings and rituals could only be understood in the frame of theological mysticism in the Eastern Church, which the believers adopted from domestic monks and not from dualistic heretics whose organization and teachings are unknown in krstjani sources. The organization, teachings and rituals of the Bosnian Church show that it sprung from the older unreformed hermitic monasticism that developed outside the Byzantine sphere, rather than being an affiliation of the Eastern Bogomilism or Western Catharism. The older hermitic monasticism in the other South Slavic lands were put under Orthodox Church control in the late 12th- and beginning of 13th century through erecting churches and introducing monastic rules, adapting into Cenobitic monasticism. The hierarchy, internal organization and teachings prove its origin in this type of monasticism. Catholic sources called the krstjani heretics "monks", while native sources used the terms redovi, redovnici, sveti ljudi, božiji ljudi, terms used in the Eastern Church for hermit monks. The hierarchy ranks of "elder" and gost originated in Eastern monasticism. The krstjani held monasticism as the highest sacrament, edited from Eastern monasticism.
  • According to Minczew, the Bosnian Church received some influence from Balkan Bogomilism, seen in elements found in the Srećković Gospel. The krstjani did not build churches and called temples "inns", while the Bogomils held a negative view to temples, calling them "crossroads" and "belonging to the Devil". The scarce sacral archaeology and icon painting of medieval Bosnia points to the krstjani aversion to temples, according to him. Both the krstjani and Bogomils rejected the Eucharist. The krstjani rejected the sacrament of confession to a priest, viewing it as a sin, while the Bogomils confessed to each other. The Srećković Gospel disparagingly calls St. John a "water-bearer", while the Bogomils viewed John as an associate of Satan for baptizing Jesus with water. Some similarities may however be typological.

Beliefs and teachings

The krstjani, based on their writings, believed in "one All-Mighty God", understood in the Trinity of father, son and holy spirit – "one Lord Jesus Christ", son of the "Holy Bogorodica", the Creator "of all that exists", "without whom nothing existed that existed" and in "one holy and undividable Trinity". This is opposed to dualistic teachings.
The Bosnian Church counted the Old Testament Patriarchs and Prophets among "God's People", while the medieval dualistic sects viewed those as the "servants of the Devil". The krstjani adopted the mystical dualism from the Eastern Church regarding the Devil.

Rituals

As the hermit monks, the krstjani prayed in the open. They buried their dead and put up gravestones, and prayed for them. Their books were illustrated with crosses, Jesus Christ, Virgin Mary, Old Testament prophets, apostles and saints.

Hierarchy

The title djed was used of the head of the indigenous Bosnian Church from the late 13th century into the 15th. The first twelve names on the list below are found in a single column in Batalo's Gospel, a manuscript made for the Bosnian nobleman Batalo in 1393 and often called Red gospodina Rastudija. They are listed in reverse order, with the name of the incumbent djed Rastudije first followed by his predecessors back to Ratko in the late 13th century. The list does not have dates for their reigns, but a few of them are known from other acts. If the list was complete at the time it was written down, then Ratko was either the first to use the title djed or represents a break in the history of the Bosnian church.
  • Ratko I
  • Boleslav
  • Miroslav
  • Radoslav I
  • Radoslav II
  • Povržen
  • Dragost
  • Hlapoje
  • Radovan I
  • Radovan II
  • Radoje
  • Rastudije
  • Radomir
  • Miloje
  • Ratko II

Batalo's other list

Another list, containing 16 names, appears in a column to the left of the list of djed in Batalo's Gospel. This has sometimes been taken for a list of Ratko's predecessors, but it does not line up with known data and how it should be read in relation to the other column is not clear. Three of the names—Dragič, Ljubin and Dražeta—are known from the abjuration of Bilino Polje in 1203, so the list is perhaps a list of revered Bosnian monks.
  • Jeremija
  • Azarija
  • Kukleč
  • Ivan
  • Godin
  • Tišemir
  • Didodrag
  • Bučina
  • Krač
  • Bratič
  • Budislav
  • Dragoš
  • Dragič
  • Ljubin
  • Dražeta
  • Tomiša

Manuscripts

  • 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.
  • Batalo's Gospel, written in 1394 in Cyrillic, by Stanko Kromirijanin for Bosnian magnate Batalo. Includes a list of names believed to have been hierarchs.
  • Radosav's Gospel, written in the mid-15th century in Glagolithic, by krstjanin Radosav for krstjanin Gojsav.
  • Srećković Gospel, includes marginal glosses regarding krstjani teachings and beliefs.

Studies

The Bosnian Church has attracted scholars' attention for centuries, with Croatian historian Franjo Rački publishing the first monograph on the subject, Bogomili i Patareni, in which it is argued that the Bosnian Church was essentially Gnostic and Manichaean in nature. This interpretation was supported and elaborated upon by a host of historians, most prominently Dominik Mandić, Sima Ćirković, Vladimir Ćorović, Miroslav Brandt, and Franjo Šanjek. However, a number of other historians argued that the theology of Bosnian Christian writings was impeccably orthodox, and claimed the phenomenon can be sufficiently explained by the relative isolation of Bosnian Christians, which retained many archaic traits predating the East-West Schism in 1054.
Conversely, American historian of the Balkans, John Fine Jr., does not believe in the dualism of the Bosnian Church at all. Though he represents his theory as a "new interpretation of the Bosnian Church", his view is very close to the theories of J. Šidak and several other scholars before him. He believes that while there could have been heretical groups alongside the Bosnian Church, the group was inspired by Papal overreach.
The Bosnian Church has been described by some authors as a forerunner of Protestantism.