For long the history of what later became the Bosnian kingdom is indistinguishable from that of the rest of the Serbs. The whole Illyrian triangle was divided into a great number of small independent districts, somewhat answering to the Teutonic ‘Gaus,’ called Župy. Župa means ‘bond’[4] or confederation, and each Župa was simply a confederation of village communities, whose union was represented by a magistrate or governor, called a Župan. The Župans in turn seem to have chosen a Grand-Župan, who may be looked on as the President of the Serbian Federation. We know little about the early Županships of the Bosnian area, but a few of the petty commonwealths of the Serbian coastland, and what later on became the Herzegovina, are mentioned by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote about 950, and the names and situation of some in the Bosnian interior may be gathered from ecclesiastical diplomas. Here and there we read of a ‘Ban’ (translated, in Diocleas, by the Latin word ‘Dux’), who was rather higher than an ordinary Župan.
These Serbian ‘Archons,’ as the Byzantine historians speak of them, acknowledged the suzerainty of the Eastern Empire, and even, in some cases (though doubtless to a less extent than the Croats), accepted Byzantine dignities. Thus a Ban of Zachlumia accepted the titles of Proconsul and Patrician. Later on, when Czar Simeon erected the new Bulgarian Empire, Serbia was forced for a while to bow to the dominion of the conqueror of Leo Phocas. In the tenth century the Serbs shake off the Bulgarian yoke, and we now begin to hear of four Grand-Župans, whose jurisdictions answer to Serbia proper, Rascia, Dioclea, and Bosnia. The power of the lesser Župans was during this period being diminished for the benefit of these greater potentates, who in Bosnia are generally known as Bans. ‘The Bans,’ says the contemporary Serbian historian,[5] ‘ruled each of them in his own province, and subjugated the Župans, receiving from them the taxes which beforetime had been paid to the King,’ i.e. the sole Grand-Župan.
During the ninth and tenth centuries, while Bosnian-Serbian history is still so obscure, that of the Croats had achieved some prominence. The settlement of the Croats had, as we have seen, somewhat preceded the Serbian. They bordered on the coast-cities of Dalmatia, where Roman nationality and something of Roman civilization still lingered. Their relations with Byzantium were more defined, and they had also for a moment entered into the system of the renovated Empire of the West. Thus the Croats were earlier imbued with Christianity than the Serbs, and external influences were earlier at work to give their too acephalous government greater unity than their inland neighbours, still under the full sway of Sclavonic communism, could attain to. In the year 914 a Croatian Grand-Župan, Tomislav, who, in virtue of his relations to the Byzantine government and the Roman population of the Dalmatian cities, had assumed the title of ‘Consul,’ begins to be known to foreign princes as ‘King of the Croats.’ The successor of Tomislav is said to have conquered the neighbouring Serbian Banat, which from the principal river within its confines begins about this time to be known as Bosona, or Bosnia. It even became a constitutional principle in Croatia that, when the king died childless, a new king should be elected by the seven Bans of the crown-lands, one of whom was the Ban of Bosnia.[6]
But this Croatian suzerainty was, as yet, premature. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Greek Emperor Basil having completed the slaughter of the Bulgarians succeeded in subjugating the Croats, and the introduction of Byzantine Governors and Protospathars into Dalmatia threw back Bosnia on to the support of her Serbian neighbours.[7] The Bosnian Ban Niklas not only accepted the Serbian Grand-Župan Dobroslav as his overlord, but aided him most efficaciously in annihilating two Byzantine armies[8] in those gorges of the Black Mountain which, from time immemorial, have been so fatal to the ambition of Stamboul.
Thus down to nearly the middle of the twelfth century, Bosnia continued to own allegiance to her Serbian suzerains, and the claims of the Croats to Bosnia continued to be little more than nominal till their own country fell into hands more capable of enforcing them. But at the beginning of the twelfth century the Magyars overthrew the kingdom of the Croats, and in 1141 Geiza II. of Hungary completed the conquest of Bosnia, or, as it is generally known in the Hungarian annals, of Rama, from the little river of that name, flowing into the Narenta.[9] Still, the Hungarian dominion does not seem as yet to have been much more than a vague suzerainty. Bosnia, indeed, throughout the whole of this period, seems to have stood aloof from all its neighbours. It might own a nominal allegiance, now to Serbia, now to Croatia, now to Hungary, but it enjoyed a practical independence. Its general isolation from the main current of Serbian history may be gathered from the chronicler of Dioclea; and when Manuel Comnenus reduced Hungary to a temporary subjection, his historian Cinnamus was struck with the same phenomenon. ‘The Drina,’ says he, ‘divides Bosthna from the rest of Serbia. For Bosthna is not subject to the Grand-Župan of Serbia, but the people were at that time under their own magistrates, and used their own customs.’ The recent Russian historian of the Serbs and Bulgarians[10] traces many of the later misfortunes of Bosnia to this fatal estrangement from the other Sclavonic lands.
The Hungarian alliance now makes this alienation irrevocable. Cinnamus shows the close relations existing between Bosnia and Hungary at the date of Manuel’s invasion when he goes on to say that ‘Boritzes,[11] Exarch of Bosthna,’ aided the King of Hungary against the Greeks; and, indeed, we know from other sources that the Bosnian Ban was himself an illegitimate son of the Magyar king, Coloman. Manuel reduced Bosnia, with Croatia and other parts of Hungary, for a while; but the Ban was not long in recovering the province. The Hungarian connection was only cemented the more firmly, and on Borić’s death, in 1168, his son, the new Ban Culin, accepted his investiture from Bela III., and subscribed himself henceforth Fiduciarius Regni Hungariæ.
The rule of Ban Culin is justly regarded as the brightest period in the annals of Christian Bosnia. His first care on his accession was to surround himself with trustworthy Župans and Voivodes, and during the thirty-six years of his reign Bosnia enjoyed a profound peace. Under his auspices and protection the merchants of Ragusa began to plant their factories in Bosnia, and open out anew the rich mines which had been left unworked since the days of the Romans. The very year after Culin’s accession, two Ragusan brothers built a factory and opened mines on the site of what has since become the capital of Bosnia.[12] Other mines were shortly opened in the neighbourhood, and a fortress, called after the Sclavonic name of their mother city, Dubrovnik, was built by the same enterprising merchants to protect their industries. The same wise policy encouraged another immigration, this time, of Saxon miners, who, like the Ragusans, did much to lay bare the great mineral wealth of this and the other Serbian lands, and who have left their traces in several old German mining expressions still current among the miners and mountaineers of Bosnia. These Saxons, or Sasi, settled chiefly in the towns, where their influence was valuable in instilling something of the civic unity of the free Teutonic burghs into the loosely compacted aggregation of hovels that clustered round the fortified ‘grad’ of the Bosnian lord.[13] Culin is said to have been the first Bosnian prince who struck coins, and the general prosperity was such that to this day ‘the times of good Ban Culin’ are invoked by the Bosniac when he wishes to express the golden age.
But the patronage which Culin afforded to a religious sect that now becomes prominent in Bosnia makes his rule of still greater importance, and leads us to the consideration of a subject which has its bearings even on English history.
The doctrine of the Two Principles of Good and Evil, which had its origin perhaps in the sublime mythology of Persia and the eternal conflict of Light and Darkness, held its own amongst the various Gnostic sects of Christianity, scattered throughout the Eastern world, while the West was content to slumber in comparative orthodoxy. In Armenia, where these doctrines had certain affinities with the earlier religion, they seem to have taken especially firm root; and here, as in the other border states of the Byzantine Empire, heterodoxy went hand in hand with patriotism. Considering the hostile relations in which both nations stood to Byzantium, it is not at all surprising that friendly communications should have subsisted between the Armenians and the Bulgarian Sclaves whose country lay to the east of the Serbians. Further, it was extremely natural that Armenians, for national as well as sectarian reasons, should view with jealousy the progress of orthodox missionaries among the Bulgarians, and should attempt to counteract it by organising a propaganda of their own Manichæism.
Such was actually set on foot. How early this proselytism was first commenced is doubtful, but it is certain that the Danubian Sclaves were converted from heathenism pari passu by Manichæan and orthodox missionaries. The Byzantine Emperors, by their transplantation system, gave the Armenians every facility for their work. In the middle of the eighth century Constantine Copronymus, who had perhaps some sympathies with the heretics, transplanted a body of Paulicians from Armenia into Thrace, who we learn, on the authority of Cedrenus, spread the Paulician heresy through those parts, then largely inhabited by the Bulgarian Sclaves. At the end of the ninth century, when the persecution of Byzantium had provoked the Paulicians of Armenia to assert their independence, when ‘the Roman Emperor fled before the heretics whom his mother had condemned to the flames,’ and Tephricé became the capital of a free-state devoted to Gnostic Christianity, the missionary efforts of the Armenians among the Sclaves was prosecuted with still greater vigour. Petrus Siculus, who in 870 resided nine months at Tephricé as legate of the Byzantine Government, to arrange for an exchange of prisoners, discovered that a Manichæan mission was about to start from Tephricé to the Bulgarians, and addressed his ‘Historia Manichæorum’ to the Bulgarian Patriarch, with the express purpose of counteracting these baneful efforts.