Kingdom of Bosnia

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Kingdom of Bosnia
Bosansko kraljevstvo
Босанско краљевство
1377–1463
Kraljevina Bosna footbridge
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Capital Visoko
Jajce
Bobovac
Form of government kingdom
Form of government feudalism
Head of state (1377-1391) Tvrtko I.
(1461-1463) Stjepan Tomašević
founding
  • October 26, 1377
  • June 5, 1463
Establishment of the Kingdom of
Ottoman Conquest
map
The Kingdom of Bosnia

The Kingdom of Bosnia ( Bosnian Bosansko kraljevstvo / Kraljevina Bosna / Босанско краљевство / Краљевина Босна ) was a short-lived South Slavic kingdom of the 14th and 15th centuries in the Balkans . It comprised only parts of the territory of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina , but in its greatest extent also areas of today's neighboring states. Both its formation and its almost 80-year existence were shaped by armed conflicts, almost constant territorial changes and changing alliances. The empire went under in the course of the Ottoman conquest of the region.

prehistory

The Kingdom of Bosnia emerged from the Banat of Bosnia, which is to be understood as a consolidated territory from the middle of the 12th century. In the period shortly before 1250 at the latest, the Princely House of Kotromanić took on the role of rulers of the Banat of Bosnia, which from then on is also referred to as the "Greater Banat". Already in the time of the Banat, Bosnian politics was essentially characterized by changing alliances and rapprochements with various, more powerful neighboring states, namely Byzantium , Hungary and Serbia .

In 1353, Stjepan Tvrtko Kotromanić succeeded his uncle Stjepan II as a 15-year-old . Kotromanić was the Grand Ban of Bosnia, whereby Tvrtko's father Vladislav initially acted as regent, but died the following year. Possibly the elevation to Ban is closely related to the marriage of Tvrtko's cousin Elisabeth of Bosnia to Ludwig I of Hungary , the dominant ruler of the region, in the same year . Elisabeth is said to have been very close to Tvrtko all her life.

Even under Stjepan II. Kotromanić, Bosnia was closely aligned with Hungary and opposed to Serbia , which was in decline . In the following years Tvrtko was awarded further territories by Ludwig. Soon, however, the relationship between the two worsened, especially because Tvrtko refused the military successes in the Hungarian-Venetian War (1356-1358). 1363 was followed by an open war between Louis and Tvrtko, the Hungarian perspective of the alleged protection of the Bosnian Bans for the respected as heretical religious community of Bogomil was founded. After remaining victorious, Tvrtko broke away from Hungary and took on the title of "by God's grace Ban all Bosnia". This triggered a nobility uprising that drove Tvrtko to flee to Hungary in 1366, where he submitted to Ludwig. With Hungarian help he put down the uprising, disempowered his brother Vuk, who had meanwhile become the sole ruler, and was finally reappointed ban by Ludwig.

Years of internal struggles followed, but above all of territorial conquests at the expense of Serbia. For this purpose, Tvrtko concluded an alliance with the Serbian prince Lazar Hrebeljanović in 1372 . Together they defeated the probably most important Serbian nobleman of the time, Nikola Altomanović, and divided almost all of his territory among themselves. In 1377 Tvrtko also appropriated the coastal regions from the former rulership of Altomanović, which in the meantime had fallen to Prince Đurađ I. Balšić of Zeta .

Establishment of royalty

Tvrtko relied on these areas, which had never been under Hungarian rule before, and on the increasing internal pacification of his territory, in his renewed attempt to make himself independent from Hungary:

The solemn coronation of the Catholic Tvrtko took place on October 26, 1377. The Mileševa monastery , which had only recently come under Bosnian rule, was traditionally considered the coronation site . Already in the first half of the 20th century, but especially after archaeological discoveries by Pavao Anđelić in the 1960s, the place was questioned. Since then, the central Bosnian Mile (now Arnautovići) near Visoko has been assumed to be the coronation site instead .

Tvrtko took over the Serbian court offices and titles and gave them to Bosnian nobles. However, his power-political interests were mainly directed to the west. The most important Serbian princes Lazar Hrebeljanović and Vuk Branković recognized Tvrtko's kingship. Ludwig I accepted the coronation as King of the Serbs, but emphasized that Tvrtko in Bosnia was just Ban. After Ludwig's death in 1382, however, Tvrtko was generally addressed as the Bosnian king.

The period from 1378 to 1381 was marked by disputes in Dalmatia, which developed particularly around the autonomy efforts of the port cities of Ragusa and Kotor . In 1382, Tvrtko had today's city of Herceg Novi built as a port in order to gain its own access to the lake and to damage Kotor and Ragusa. Soon after, however, the conflict was resolved. Attempts to build a fleet with Venetian help achieved little success.

After the death of Ludwig I in 1382, Tvrtko received guardianship over his cousin Elisabeth and her daughters. The ensuing involvement in internal Hungarian conflicts led to the acquisition of the towns of Livno , Duvno and Glamoč and the town of Kotor in 1385 .

In 1388 war broke out again against the new Hungarian King Sigismund, whom Tvrtko made responsible for the murder of Elizabeth. While these battles were taking place in Dalmatia, the Ottomans first attacked Bosnia, which the king repulsed on August 27, 1388 in the Battle of Bileća . In the battle of the Amselfeld the following year, Bosnian troops on the Serbian side were also involved under military leader Vlatko Vuković. As a result, Tvrtko lost its Serbian possessions to the Ottoman Empire. In 1390, however, the Bosnian king conquered all of Dalmatia from the Hungarians except for the city of Zadar . At the height of his power, Tvrtko carried the title of King of Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Zahumlje , Usora, Soli , Dalmatia and Donji Kraji .

religion

The population was divided among the Bosnian , Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. The aristocratic families, such as the Kosača , changed over time between the three denominations. Since Ban Stjepan II. Kotromanić , the Bosnian rulers were almost all of the Roman Catholic denomination . After the Ottoman conquest in 1463, a large part of the Bosnians converted to Islam .

Decline of the empire

After Tvrtko's death on March 10, 1391, his nephew Stjepan Dabiša succeeded him, because Tvrtko's son of the same name was still underage. In the following year, Stjepan managed to repel an Ottoman attack and in 1394 to make peace with Hungary. However, he had to return all of the territorial gains in Dalmatia and waive claims in Croatia. After Stjepan's death in 1395, his wife Jelena Gruba took over the title of king against the resistance of Hungary. It relied heavily on the Bosnian nobility, whereupon much of the territory slipped out of royal control. In 1398 the title of king went to Stjepan Ostoja, a brother of Tvrtkos I. In the years 1404 to 1409 and 1421 to 1443 Tvrtkos I son Tvrtko II held the title of king. In 1436 Bosnia became tributary to the Ottoman Empire. At the beginning of the 15th century, Herzegovina broke away from the kingdom under Großvojvode Stjepan Vukčić Kosača .

Stjepan Ostoja's illegitimate son Stjepan Tomaš ruled as King of Bosnia from 1443 to 1461. He rejoined Hungary more closely and persecuted the Bogomils resolutely. In 1446 he achieved that Kosača rejoined the kingdom with Herzegovina. After the death of the Hungarian administrator Johann Hunyadi in 1456, however, the Kingdom of Bosnia hardly received any Hungarian support against the ever stronger Ottoman power. After the death of the Serbian despot Lazar Branković in 1458, Stjepan Tomaš briefly secured Srebrenica and several other cities for Bosnia. Stjepan Tomaš's son Stjepan Tomašević became despot of Serbia for a few months through marriage in 1459, but then fled to Bosnia from the Ottomans, who conquered all of Serbia, and took over the royal throne from his father, who had recently died there, in 1461. Despite requests from the European powers, Stjepan Tomaš received little military support, and the Ottomans conquered Bosnia in 1463 within a few months. The king was captured in Kljuc, brought to Jajce and beheaded in what is still known as the "Tsar's Field". With that, the Bosnian kingdom ended.

Stjepan Vukčić Kosača and his sons stayed in Herzegovina until 1483. The previously Bosnian Banat Jajce in the north-west of the kingdom joined Hungary and was conquered by the Ottomans in 1528.

Title of the Bosnian ruler

Tvrtko I. designated himself in 1356 as the Ban of "the whole of Bosnia and all of Usora & Soli" ( čitave Bosne i čitave Usore i Soli ). After the proclamation of the Bosnian Kingdom, Soli entered the title of ruler separately from Usora. It read: " Kralj Srbljem, Bosni, Primorju, Hlmsci Zemli, Zapadnim Stranam, Dolnim Krajem, Usori, Soli, Podrinju ik tomu ".

List of Bane

Kings from the Kotromanić dynasty

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eastern Europe . ABC-CLIO, ISBN 978-1-57607-800-6 ( google.de [accessed January 1, 2018]).
  2. ↑ The mentioned document from Dubrovnik of April 10, 1378 speaks of a coronation "in the Serbian country" without giving a location. In his work Regno de gli Slavi (Kingdom of the Slavs) from 1601, the Dubrovnik Benedictine and historian Mavro Orbini names the Mileševa monastery as the coronation site. Cf. Srećko Matko Džaja : Denomination and nationality of Bosnia and Herzegovina: pre-emancipatory phase 1463–1804 (=  Southeast European work . No. 8 ). Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1984, ISBN 3-486-52571-9 , p. 227 (also dissertation).
  3. ^ A b Mustafa Imamović: Bosnia-Herzegovina until 1918 . In: Dunja Melčić-Mikulić (ed.): The Yugoslavia War: Handbook on Prehistory, Course and Consequences . Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-09609-2 , pp. 66 ( Online [accessed January 1, 2018]).
  4. ^ Holm Sundhaussen : Lexicon for the history of Southeast Europe . Ed .: Konrad Clewing, Holm Sundhaussen. Böhlau, Vienna et al. 2016, ISBN 978-3-205-78667-2 , Herzegovina, p. 386 .
  5. ^ Carl Bethke: Bosnia and Herzegovina . In: Online encyclopedia on the culture and history of Germans in Eastern Europe . 2015 ( online [accessed December 28, 2017]).
  6. ^ Zvonimir Banović: Solana 125 godina . Ed .: Solana dd, Prof. dr. sc. Izudin Kapetanović. Tuzla 2010, p. 69 (Bosnian, online [PDF; 8.2 MB ; accessed on May 22, 2019]).
  7. ^ Dragutin Pavličević : Kratka politička i kulturna povijest Bosne i Hercegovine . Ed .: Hrvatski informativni centar. (Croatian, hic.hr ).