[69] Farlati, Ep. Bosn.
[70] Waddingus, Annales Minorum, tom. xiii. sub anno 1462.
[71] See Farlati, Ep. Bosn.; and Spicilegium, &c. de Regno Bosniæ.
[72] Raynaldus, Annal. Eccles. sub anno 1450.
[73] Laonicus, de Rebus Turc. lib. x.; Gobelinus, lib. ii.; and Johannes Leunclavius. The Sultan is said to have made use of the authority of the captured king to obtain the seventy cities, but the account given of the betrayal of Bobovac shows that the Bogomiles were the real cause of the quick submission.
[74] I have already noticed the early branching off of a Bogomilian church which rejected Dualism pure and simple. Herr Jireček remarks this compromising tendency, and observes that an Italian adherent of the sect, Giovanni di Lugio, taught the real humanity of Christ and accepted the Old Testament: while others conceded free will.
[75] Waddingus, Annales Minorum, sub anno 1478. There is also a curious passage in Raphael of Volaterra, who appears to have written his Geographia towards the end of the fifteenth century. He says (Geog. p. 244, ed. Lyons, 1599), ‘In Bosnia, Rascia, and Serbia the sect of the Manichees is still followed. They say there are two Principia Rerum—one good, one evil. Nor do they acknowledge the Roman Pope, nor Christ “Omousion.” They have monasteries (cœnobia) in hidden mountain valleys, where go matrons who have escaped from certain diseases.’ These matrons say that for a certain period they act as menials to holy men in accordance with a vow: ‘Atque ita inter monachos mixtæ una vivunt; quæ quidem labes adhuc durat.’
[76] Besides the evidence on this point which I have gathered from other sources, I may notice a most interesting allusion to the Bogomiles or Patarenes who had turned renegades, and a direct testimony that they went over wholesale to Islâm, in J. Bapt. Montalbano, Rerum Turcarum Commentarius, written certainly before the year 1630 (when it was published in the Elzevir Turci Imperii Status). After mentioning the Catholic inhabitants, the writer goes on to say, ‘Est aliud eo in regno (sc. Bosnæ) hominum genus Potur appellatum, qui neque Christiani sunt, neque Turcæ, circumciduntur tamen, pessimique habentur.’ ‘Potur’ is evidently a Sclavonised form of Patarene. The writer goes on to say of these ‘Poturs’ that they, ‘to the number of many thousand,’ offered to renegade from the Christian faith to that of Mahomet if Sultan Soliman would grant them indemnity, and release them from tribute. Soliman, says the writer (a Bolognese Doctor), thereupon doubled their tribute, and enrolled their children among the Janissaries, and ‘hence they are despised by both Turks and Christians.’ But this whole account evidently bears witness to the wholesale renegation of the Bogomiles. Further on the same writer, who had visited the country, bears witness to the continuance of Protestantism in Turkish Bosnia in the sixteenth century. ‘Eos inter,’ says he, of the inhabitants, ‘Calvinistæ Arrianique multi.’
[77] I am indebted for this fact to Mr. W. J. Stillman, the excellent correspondent of the Times in the Herzegovina, who gives an account of these refugees in a letter from Ragusa dated Oct. 19, 1875, which I may be allowed to quote as illustrating the more recent sufferings of this interesting sect, and the sad case of the Christian refugees of Bosnia and the Herzegovina generally. ‘The people of Popovo were tranquilly engaged in their fields and houses, when the troops—Regulars and Bashi-Bazouks—came up; the latter killed the first they came upon where they found them (one of them, the brother of a villager who had appealed successfully to the Pashà at Trebinje against the extortions of the Agas some months ago, being cut to pieces alive), and all the rest fled in panic. The good curé of Ossonich is doing all he can for them; but there are only eighty-five houses in this village, and he has 2,125 souls of the Popovites on his register for succour. Of these 300 were out on the mountain-side on the night of the worst storm we have had this season. One woman with a new-born babe was so exhausted in her flight that she went to sleep, sitting on a rock nursing her child, fell off in her sleep, and was found by one of the other peasants next morning still sleeping, with her babe at her bosom, in a pool of water which had fallen during the storm. The curé tells me that these people are mainly Bogomilites, remains of an ancient sect once widely spread in Bosnia and identical with the Albigenses.’ I observe that Jireček, quoting Kosanović (Glasnik 29, (1871), 174), alludes to a rumour that in the valley of the Narenta and near Creševo, ‘there are still Christians who neither submit to Franciscans, nor Popes, nor Imâms, but govern themselves according to old traditions, which an Elder delivers to the rest.’ I hope at some future period to be able to say more on the present state of the Bogomiles.
[78] See [p. 214]. There seems, however, to be some discrepancy as to dates. According to Schimek (op. cit. p. 76), Czar Dūshan only annexed Bosnia in 1347, whereas the date of the Armorial is 1340. The Ban, Stephen Kotromanović, retained a small part of his dominions on the Hungarian frontier. Dūshan placed the rest under the despot Lazar of Rascia. On Dūshan’s death in 1355 the Ban recovered the whole of Bosnia, including a part of Serbia beyond the Drina and the grave of St. Sava at Mileševo, where he built a Franciscan Monastery, and where he himself was buried in 1357.