If you think my oversimplified abbreviated summary of Balkan history provided some degree of clarity about the region, prepare to be tossed back into a whirlpool of chaos because today we’re starting our journey to the triangular shaped country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We’ll first stop in Mostar (actually, it’s Neum but I’ll get to that shortly) before continuing to Sarajevo where we’ll spend three nights and two full days.
Here’s the underlying premise of all that follows on this ride: Everything about this country from its name, to the maps (old and new), to determining its ethnic makeup, to its governing structure is a swirling, tangled Ball of Confusion.
I’ve selected a few choice explanatory tidbits but I’m not sure it will ever entirely make sense. I’ll start with the name. The official name of the country is Bosnia and Herzegovina. (Henceforth I will cite it as B&H because it’s just too darn long to type.) If you think this is because B&H represents a union of two previously independent entities, you’d mostly be wrong. Herzegovina is, and always has been, a region in Bosnia. Here’s the story:
What’s in a name, part deux.
In 1419, a fellow named Stjepan Vukčić Kosača together with his father Vukac and uncles Sandalj and Vuk were admitted to the nobility of the Republic of Ragusa (which, you recall, is synonymous with Dubrovnik). Stjepan was 18 at the time. By 1435, his father and uncles had all died and Stjepan inherited all their land essentially making him the most powerful vassal of King Tvrtko II of Bosnia.
Well, Tvrtko had the poor sense to die in 1443 and name his cousin Tomaš as his heir. This didn’t sit well with Stjepan because he was a staunch follower of the Orthodox Church and Tomaš had converted to Catholicism. So, we have seeds of conflict and dispute. Remember that by the 15th century the Ottoman Turks had made substantial inroads into the territory of today’s B&H. Stjepan actually supported Tomaš’ exiled brother Radivoj who had support from the Ottomans though they had their own reasons for preferring Radivoj.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Pope Julius II (called the Warrior Pope) wanted to push back against the expanding Ottoman Empire so he sent an envoy to Stjepan and Tomaš to see if they’d be willing to mount a counter offensive against the Turks. Unfortunately for the Pope, the two were too busy fighting each other until they managed to make peace in 1446.
Tomaš married Stjepan’s daughter and she converted to Catholicism. The Ottomans weren’t happy with this for two main reasons. First, they wanted to continue splitting the region and this alliance made that more difficult. Also, two years earlier Stjepan had entered into a military alliance with King Alfonso of Aragon resulting in an agreement in which he’d pay tribute to the king of Aragon rather than the Ottoman sultan.
There are many more threads to this tale but for now, we’ll cut to the chase and say that in 1448, Stjepan, feeling his oats, declared himself Herzog of the southern part of what is now B&H. (Herzog is a German hereditary title held by someone who rules a territorial duchy.) Generally, a Herzog ranks below a king but above a count. Thus it was, that the unstable and unruly Stjepan’s decision to give himself a German title gave rise to the region being called Herzegovina and, for no particular reason, it remains so to this day.
The source of the Bosnia part of the nation’s name is almost certainly much simpler and more straightforward. It likely comes from the Bosna River which has its source near Sarajevo and flows for 271 kilometers through the country’s industrial center.
By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea.
Let’s move on to another B&H oddity. If you use a computer mapping program or GPS to obtain driving directions from Dubrovnik to Mostar, it will show that the drive requires roughly two and a half hours even using the Jadranska Magistrala. The time might be accurate were it not for a small quirk in the geography of Croatia and B&H. Take a close look at this map of the roughly triangular shaped B&H from the University of Texas Library:.
I’ll deal with why the map shows those green and yellow blobs later. For now, you need to look slightly to the northeast of the words Adriatic Sea to spot a tiny green strip where 20 km of B&H splits two counties of Croatia. Thus, even if your intent was to stay on the Adriatic coast and drive from say Dubrovnik to Split, you’d have to cross the border into B&H pass through these roughly 20 km including the little town of Neum and return to Croatia. In order for our bus to reach Mostar we had to make not only those two border crossings but a third to return to B&H so the trip can require considerably more than two and a half hours.
Are you wondering how this odd arrangement came to be? Even if you’re not, I’m going to tell you because it’s a long bus ride to Mostar. (But you already knew I was going to do that, didn’t you?)
To fish out this bit of history, we need cast a long enough line into the historical eddy to take us back a mere 317 years to 1699. Recall that there was considerable tension between the maritime republics of Venice and Ragusa and, if you look at the map of the Ottoman Empire in that history lesson, you’ll notice that by the 17th century the empire was expanding more to the east because in the west, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs were rising and thwarting this expansion. You might have heard of the period for 1683-1699 referred to as the Great Turkish War or, as the War of the Holy League.
The Turks had long sought to capture Vienna and nearly did in 1683 but, after a two-month siege of the city, they were defeated by troops led by King John III Sobieski in a two-day battle in September of that year. The Ottoman defeat at Vienna marked the beginning of the decline of their rule over southeastern Europe. The war finally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Karlowitz on 22 January 1699 resulting in the transfer of most of Ottoman Hungary to the Habsburgs while Venice gained control over Dalmatia and the Peloponnese Peninsula. It also prompted a more defensive military policy by the Ottomans in the following century.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Ragusa, which had been allied with the Ottomans (remember they began paying a tribute to their Sultan in the middle of the 15th century) looked at this territorial settlement and saw the very real possibility that Venice could press down on them from the north. With the threat of Venetian attack by land looming large in the remaining parts of the republic plus a Venetian blockade of the borders, the Ragusans did what they had always done – they negotiated a sale. In the Treaty of Karlowitz, Dubrovnik gave up a small piece of its northern end (called Neum-Klek) and southern end (Herceg-Novi on the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro) to the Ottoman Empire. In doing so, they surrounded their land borders with Ottoman protection and insulated themselves from Venice. This suited the Ottomans because it gave them another outlet to the Adriatic.
These borders were reaffirmed in the Treaty of Požarevac in 1718. Time passed and, in an attempt to expand their maritime access, the Ottomans made a small territorial grab in the middle of the 18th century recovering some territory in the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade that ended the Austro-Russian-Turkish War. The Venetian Empire fell in 1797 and the Vienna Congress of 1815 confirmed Austrian control of the Dalmatian coast and Dubrovnik but left the Ottomans in control of the little strip of land that included the port of Neum. The Habsburgs, who controlled the rest of the Dalmatian coast, tried to buy back the territory from the Ottomans but were rebuffed. Instead, they stationed warships to blockade the port of Neum until the 1878 Treaty of Berlin which gave Vienna all of B&H. But the story doesn’t end here and the history lesson continues in the next post.