Bosnian Church

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The Bosnian Church was the autonomous Christian church of the medieval Bosnian state, organized outside the authority of both Rome and the Greek East, and attested from the thirteenth century until the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463. Its members called themselves simply krstjani — Christians — and its clergy were headed by a djed, the “grandfather” or chief bishop, beneath whom stood ranks of gosti and starci, elders attached to scattered monastic houses rather than to a network of parishes.

What the church actually taught is one of the most argued questions in Balkan medieval history, and the difficulty is built into the evidence. Almost nothing written by the krstjani themselves about doctrine survives; what does survive is a small body of manuscript Gospels and the testimony of hostile outsiders — papal letters, inquisitorial reports, the polemics of Catholic friars sent to convert or suppress them. From the later Middle Ages onward those sources, and the scholars who followed them, identified the church with Bogomilism: the dualist movement that had spread from Bulgaria across the Balkans, holding the material world to be the work of an evil power and rejecting the cross, the sacraments, and the Old Testament. On this reading the Bosnian Church was a dualist heresy that had captured a whole kingdom.

That picture held for a long time and still circulates widely. Much modern scholarship has pulled away from it. The surviving Bosnian manuscripts are orthodox Gospels, copied with reverence and ornamented with the cross; the stećci, the great carved tombstones long pointed to as Bogomil monuments, turn out to belong to Christians of every confession in the region and carry no clearly dualist program. On this account the church was schismatic rather than heretical — a monastic body that drifted out of Roman obedience, irregular in organization and doctrinally conservative, whose enemies found it convenient to brand as Manichaean. The debate is not settled. Some historians still read the inquisitorial record as evidence of real dualist belief, at least among part of the membership, and caution that absence of dualist texts is not proof of orthodox ones.

The stakes of the argument run past the church itself. For nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists the “Bosnian Bogomils” became a founding myth — a native, anti-Roman faith whose followers were said to have welcomed Islam and converted en masse after 1463, giving Bosnia’s Muslims a medieval pedigree. Historians now treat that story with great caution; the conversion was slower and more ordinary than the legend allows. What remains certain is narrow and real: that for two centuries Bosnia sustained a church answerable to no one outside itself, and that the truth of what it believed was already being contested by the people writing it down.

→ Related: Bogomilism · Gnosis · Middle Ages