The Islamisation of Ottoman Bosnia: Myths and Matters

As Colin Heywood notes in his work on Ottoman Bosnia, the question of Islamisation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one ‘that historians approach at their peril’.1 He refers to the debates among scholars and nationalists regarding the causes, circumstances and effects of the process. While historians eschew nationalist debates, they generally agree that the Islamisation of Bosnia was remarkable. The primary reason is its comprehensiveness in comparison with the remainder of the Balkans, even when taking into account substantial Muslim populations in Albania and Kosovo (Figure 14.1). Various explanations have been posited for this comprehensiveness, but to contextualise them we should fi rst examine the pre-Ottoman history of the Kingdom of Bosnia.