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The Routledge Handbook of Balkan and Southeast European


History

John R. Lampe, Ulf Brunnbauer

Ottoman Bosnia and the Bosnian Muslims

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https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780429464799-7
Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular
Published online on: 20 Oct 2020

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4
OTTOMAN BOSNIA AND
THE BOSNIAN MUSLIMS
Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular

Introduction
Ottomans were in Bosnia even before Constantinople became the Ottoman imperial capital.
Strategic territorial incursions, interference in regional politics, and trade links with Venice,
along with itinerant Sufi preachers and lodges, all made the Ottoman presence felt in Bosna
by the turn of the fifteenth century. Incorporation of the medieval Bosnian territories into the
Ottoman Empire was completed by the end of the century when Bosnia became the spring-
board for further expansion north, conquering Hungary and reaching the gates of Vienna in
1529. Bosnian Slav inhabitants accepted Islam in larger numbers than in other regions of the
Balkans, becoming a majority and developing a distinct sociocultural identity tied to their region
and dialect. While administrative borders and provincial arrangement shifted over the centuries,
the Ottoman province of Bosnia remained within the current borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Until the nineteenth century, it included the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, inhabited by a Slav Muslims
and Orthodox Christian population, now divided between Serbia and Montenegro. The prov-
ince of Bosnia also included Ottoman territories in Slavonia, Lika, and Dalmatia at the height
of Ottoman expansion.
With the loss of these lands to the Habsburgs in the last years of the seventeenth century, Bosnia
became the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the fortified borderland
against a growing adversary, the Habsburg monarchy. Being an important part of the Ottoman
sociopolitical and economic system helped to integrate Bosnia and its inhabitants into the
Ottoman polity, yet an exceptionalism parallel to this integration allowed for significant autonomy
to the province and its peoples. Significant strides were made in implementing the nineteenth-
century Ottoman reforms in Bosnia-Herzegovina, despite resistance by the local Bosnian Muslim
notables. Finally, this Ottoman province was awarded to Austria-Hungary at the Berlin Congress
in 1878. Full annexation in 1908 ended any formal connection to the Ottoman Empire.Yet many
Ottoman continuities lasted well into the twentieth century and are visible also today.

Urbanization and the vakufs


The first larger settlements in Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Novi Pazar, reached the status of towns in
the fifteenth century as part of Ottoman consolidation that included rapid creation of cities,

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and building of roads and bridges. Their purpose was to improve communication and trade
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networks across Bosnia to Dalmatia and Venice in the west and Hungary in the north, also
linking them to Salonica and Constantinople. Sultan Mehmet II, the great city’s conqueror in
1453, led the Ottoman forces himself in 1463 to complete the occupation of the Bosnia sanjak,
the Ottoman military-administrative unit, later expanding to Herzegovina.
Urban facilities were established by imperially decreed pious endowments (vakuf) and similar
efforts by governors and other high officials. Imperial mosques were built in most major cities in
Bosnia with endowments containing public baths, schools, soup kitchens, public water fountains,
inns, dervish lodges, aqueducts, bridges, mills, and guesthouses. The first neighborhoods were
then built around these mosques, situating them at the city center. In Bosnia, as in the rest of the
empire, caravanserais – inns within towns and along the roads were built to enable travel and
trade. Bazaars – urban covered markets where merchandise was sold – were also erected as pious
endowments. Local crafts and the guild system characteristic of Ottoman urban environments
developed in Bosnia too, often affiliated with the Sufi orders. Networks of roads and bridges
built by the Ottomans facilitated the uninterrupted flow of goods and peoples and prompted
the growth of cities and their economic activities, also enhanced by imperial exemptions from
various taxes and obligations.
The celebrated Ottoman travel writer, Evliya Çelebi (1611–82), described Banja Luka as
having 300 shops and a covered bazaar with 100 shops. In this city alone, the sixteenth cen-
tury governor of Bosnia and later Hungary’s Buda, Ferhad Pasha Sokolović (d. 1586) built 216
public buildings through his own pious endowment – the most prominent being the Ferhadija
Mosque, razed by Bosnian Serbs campaign in the war of the 1990s, and reconstructed with
UNESCO assistance in 2016. Similarly, Isa Beg Ishaković (d. 1470?), the founder of Novi Pazar
and Sarajevo, endowed sprawling building complexes of which some are still in use.Yet another
governor’s endowment, that of Gazi Husrev Beg (1480–1541), advanced Sarajevo’s development
as a regional center and defined the city’s Old Town, still a distinctive feature of the city today.
Educational institutions were likewise financed by pious endowments, as was the practice in
much of the Muslim world. Mekteb elementary schools were widespread, while schools of higher
learning, the medresa existed in major cities. The institutions in Sarajevo, Mostar, and Prusac
became renowned for the quality of the education they offered. Known for its iconic bridge,
Mostar had ten madrasas at the end of the seventeenth century. Ottoman pious endowments
played a central role in the infrastructural, urban, and institutional development of Bosnia-
Herzegovina, making it a relevant trading, educational, and cultural center in Southeastern
Europe.

Population and Islamization


The Ottoman state oversaw its diverse population through the millet system that provided sub-
stantial autonomy to the non-Muslim religious communities and their institutions, and power
to their ecclesiastical hierarchies. While in Bosnia in 1463, Sultan Mehmed Fatih himself guar-
anteed extensive freedom in a charter to the Bosnian Catholic Franciscans. Bosnian Orthodox
Christians were under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate in Constantinople and also the Peć
Patriarchy. It was in fact in the Ottoman period that Orthodox Christianity penetrated beyond
eastern Bosnia, where a number of Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries were built and
spread Orthodox Christianity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Orthodox Christian numbers were
further increased by resettlement of peasants on arable lands, in particular from Montenegro as
well as transhumant Vlachs. Sephardi Jews, fleeing persecution in the Iberian Peninsula settled in

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Sarajevo, Salonica, and Constantinople in large numbers, adding to the cosmopolitan character
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of these cities.Virtually no significant Turkish settlement took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Islamization there and in other parts of the Balkans was a gradual process. Conversions to
Islam in Bosnia-Herzegovina were more intensive in the first two centuries after the establish-
ment of Ottoman rule and continued, though to a lesser degree as late as the nineteenth century.
Bosnian and Albanian native populations became the only ones predominantly Muslim in the
Balkans. Their Islamization was closely related to enhanced communication, developing urban
environments, and the incorporation of the province and Muslim converts into the Ottoman
sociopolitical and administrative core, especially where no strong religious alternative or church
oversight existed. Dervish lodges were established in almost all the early settlements, reflecting
the role of Sufi brotherhoods in the spread of Islam. Ottoman census records show that Bosnian
cities were overwhelmingly Muslim, followed by surrounding villages and settlements along
the main roads and rivers. Until the twentieth century, however, the majority of all Bosnians,
including Muslims, were peasants living outside the towns and cities.
Bosnians were also conscripted into the devshirme, the Ottoman practice of recruiting young
Christian boys, mostly from its Balkan provinces, converting them to Islam and educating them
in the Palace for imperial service. Since many in Bosnia-Herzegovina had converted to Islam,
an exception was made to include them in the system. Such an exception was also made for
Albanian and Abaza Muslims. Already in the fifteenth century, Bosnians attained some of the
highest positions in the Ottoman Empire. Such was Gazi Atik Ali Pasha (d. 1511), the illustrious
military commander, administrator, Grand Vizier, and patron of many educational and religious
establishments. Perhaps the best-known was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha (Sokolović) (d. 1579), the
Grand Vizier who served three Sultans. He was one of the most influential men of his time in
the Empire, hailing from a prominent family network rooted in the Ottoman system. Rising
through the ranks, men from Bosnia-Herzegovina served in the military and the administrative
apparatus of the Empire up until its very end: they were governors of far flung provinces and
fought in Ottoman wars as far away as Persia and the Caucasus. Only in the second half of the
sixteenth century, nine Bosnians held the office of the Grand Vizier, the most powerful office in
the Empire after that of the sultan. A Bosnian religious scholar was appointed Şeyhülislam, the
chief religious authority in the Ottoman Empire, as late as the mid-nineteenth century.
In addition to serving in the military-administrative system, Bosnian Muslims made their
mark in literature. They wrote in Arabic, Persian, and the Bosnian vernacular, contributing to
Islamic science and scholarship as well as literature. The Bosnian Slavic language was written
in western Cyrillic also known as Bosančica in the medieval period, but it was replaced by a
modified Arabic-Persian script with the arrival of the Ottomans. Writing Bosnian in Arabic
script became known as Arebica and classified as Aljamiado literature, while Bosančica continued
to exist in correspondence. The first Bosnian-Ottoman dictionary was compiled in 1631 and
Bosnian remained the dominant language in the province throughout the Ottoman period.
Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian were included in an educational system that enabled
Bosnian Muslims to participate in the Muslim literary and later publishing world into the
twentieth century. Sevdalinka, a corpus of traditional poetic-performances original to Bosnia-
Herzegovina also emerged in the Ottoman era. The earliest written record of this orally trans-
mitted poetry sung in Bosnian and historically attributed to Bosnian Muslims date back to
the early eighteenth century, although its performance and composition was not limited to
them. The memoir of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha (1822–95), an Ottoman High Inspector in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, described the central role of Sevdalinka songs and music in the relations between
young people and their courtship, finding it remarkable that the young women could thereby
marry by courtship rather than by parental arrangement.

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The land regime


Bosnia, including Herzegovina, became one of the core provinces of the Empire early in
Ottoman expansion. It benefited from the establishment of the classical Ottoman state appar-
atus, land organization, and rapid infrastructural development. Bosnia was included in the
Ottoman timar system of land holding. The Sultan granted non-hereditary rights to land tied
to military service, making up the Ottoman sipahi cavalry officer corps, which in its early for-
mation included Muslims as well as Christians, soon required to convert. The timar-holding
sipahis had a right to collect a specified profit from the land and held an administrative role
as representatives of the state in their domain. Whereas the Ottoman legal, administrative, and
military system was rather consistent, it was flexible enough to be adjusted to various provinces
and their existing socioeconomic structures. In Bosnia alone, as in the rest of the Balkans, land
and taxation arrangements took account of variations in agricultural production, considerations
of topography, land productivity, and transhumant pastoralism.
Unlike the other Ottoman provinces, however, the exceptions to the structures introduced
in Bosnia had long-lasting consequences. Already in 1516, an imperial edict confirmed that the
timar-holders in Bosnia could only be locals, diverging from the Ottoman practice of assigning
timar lands in various parts of the Empire and sometimes rotating them in order to prevent the
development of locally entrenched elites. Furthermore, the timar lands in Bosnia became her-
editary – the so-called ocaklık-timar was not only inherited by the male progeny of the original
timar-holders but over time by the extended family, including women. Bosnia and Herzegovina
also had kapetanije, a system of captaincies that served as border administrative-military units, led
by hereditary notables who protected the borders and roads in their districts.
With the Ottomans firmly established in Bosnia, the province became the base for further
Ottoman expansion into Hungarian lands. Bosnian and Croatian forces participated with the
conquering Ottoman armies, most prominently in the decisive Battle of Mohács in 1526. They
also took part in the administration and rule of the new provinces. Over 20 governors of Buda
were Bosnian. Migration for settlement, land tenure, and creation of pious endowments that
financed other institutions in Bosnia and across the empire now spread northward.

Military borderland
By the end of the seventeenth century, however, costly wars with Austria forced the Ottomans
out of Hungary, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. Worn down by participation in these and other fre-
quent Ottoman wars, bandit and Austrian incursions, one of which under Prince Eugen of
Savoy torched Sarajevo, the Bosnian population was further decimated by several bouts of
plague. Bosnia’s economy suffered from the territorial contraction, loss of revenues, the disrup-
tion of trade, and also currency inflation troubling the entire Ottoman Empire. Muslims in the
lost lands were expelled or forced to convert, their properties lost, and place names changed.The
experience left an impression on the inhabitants of Bosnia who expected any further Austrian
expansion to impact them, now in the first line of defense, in the most detrimental way.
Becoming a border region, Bosnia-Herzegovina underwent administrative and military
reorganization. Focusing on defense, old forts were re-enforced and new ones built. Provincial
communication and infrastructure were strengthened to create a succession of border and
inland military zones led by local notables who were to mobilize their own forces. The number
of captaincies increased, spreading even in the interior. New wartime taxes were introduced.
As the wars with Austria continued and the bandit incursions from Dalmatia and Montenegro
disrupted trade and threatened safety in the areas of the province far beyond the border regions,

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more local Muslim peasants were recruited to fight and received tax exemptions. War readiness
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was the main task of Bosnian governors. They relied heavily on local manpower as well as lead-
ership by the Bosnian district notables, with whom the governor began to hold a regular council.
A brief incursion by Austrian forces into Serbia in 1737 cut Bosnia off from Constantinople
and military reinforcement, but the governor led the Bosnian notables and their local armies
to defeat singlehandedly a coordinated Austrian attack on the northwestern city of Banja Luka.

The ayans
The developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina overlapped with Empire-wide difficulties. By the
eighteenth century, the institutions on which the Ottoman state rested had been transformed.
The Janissaries, whose recruitment by devşirme ceased, increasingly became obsolete in the
battlefield and focused on maintaining their salaries, and tax and other legal exemptions. Some
Muslims began illicitly buying membership of the Janissary corps in order to acquire these
benefits without participating in the military campaigns. The sipahi corps, whose timar revenues
and therefore their numbers diminished, also lagged behind in adopting new military tech-
nology based on artillery. As the Ottoman expansion slowed down and no new lands were being
added, chiftlik holdings proliferated. Sipahis appropriated village lands as their own and forced
peasants to work the land under conditions that were more restrictive than the timar system.
They often included requirements of unpaid peasant labor for the chiftlik owner and other
burdens to which the peasants reacted with rebellions and flight.
The collection of taxes became a dominant focus for the state and its provincial governors,
who increasingly relied on the local notables, ayan, to institute the reformed tax system. The
Ottoman regime gradually introduced lifetime leases for tax farming to collect the state’s share
and to prevent overtaxing the peasants who worked the land. While the new practice achieved
satisfactory results in the short run, tax farming created new problems for the state. Despite
Ottoman efforts to centralize the appointment and control the conduct of the ayans and their
district councils, the ayans were successful in exploiting their interrelated positions as land-
owners, tax-farmers, local tax assessors, and military recruiters in their regions. The institution
of the vakıf was also distorted to transfer land and buildings into an endowment that primarily
benefited the donors and their descendants. The original religious and charitable purposes of
the endowments were set aside. In certain areas of the Empire, including the Balkans, leading
tax-farmer ayans presided over their councils and proceeded independently from a central gov-
ernment that had little recourse when they challenged it.
Given the range of exemptions that Bosnia already had in terms of land, taxation, and sover-
eignty of the provincial elites, the new measures made Bosnian notables even more independent
from central oversight. Their unprecedented autonomy in the province opened the way to ram-
pant abuse of power, excessive taxation, nepotism, and the like, as well as the freedom to freely
interpret and evade imperial orders. For instance, Bosnian notables resisted the call from the Porte
to participate in yet another military campaign in Ukraine in 1770, citing the need to protect
their own border region from imminent Austrian attack. It took four years even to force the
collection of a war tax. After a peace treaty by which Austria returned all but one of the border
fortified towns to the Ottomans in 1791, local notables refused to allow the marking of the new
border. Taking advantage of the French-Austrian conflict in Dalmatia, they retook the fort on
their own accord, but sought the Porte’s help when they were caught in between the two powers.
It is therefore no surprise that the Bosnian Muslim notables defied the broad-spectrum reforms,
known as reordering (Tanzimat), which were announced by Sultan Selim III at the turn of the
nineteenth century and implemented by Mahmud II beginning in 1826.

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Tanzimat
Resistance to the new military order, the reorganization of the tax system, and the abolition of
the Janissaries under the Tanzimat reforms was particularly strong in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Its
independent notables and numerous Janissaries rejected the Ottoman reforms that would cur-
tail their political power and economic privileges. Anticipating resistance, the Ottoman central
administration even attempted to fill the newly reconfigured provincial positions from among
the notables, but they unanimously refused, united in safeguarding their independence.
Led by Husein-kapetan Gradaščević (1802–34), Bosnian ayans confronted and defeated the
imperial army of Sultan Mahmud II in 1831. The Ottoman governor was forced to flee, and
Gradaščević declared himself governor of Bosnia. The ayans claimed that the reforms were un-
Islamic and demanded that no such reforms be implemented in Bosnia. They demanded that
their properties, rights, and exemptions as they already existed in the province be protected
and that future governors be appointed from their number. Bosnian ayans were in communi-
cation with other like-minded Balkan ayans, turned warlords such as Işkodralı Mustafa Pasha
Bushatli, who similarly resisted the implementation of imperial reform measures. The Sublime
Porte also found evidence that some ayans received monetary aid from the Serbian leader Miloš
Obrenović and the ruler of Egypt, Mehmed Ali, the latter hoping that the central authorities
would be busy in the Balkans letting him expand in the Middle East without interruption.
Forces led by Gradaščević were soon defeated. He fled to the Habsburg territories and was
eventually exiled to Constantinople. The most powerful Bosnian ayans were politically and
physically eliminated by 1850. Bushatli was also defeated and exiled, then served as governor in
Anatolia and later Herzegovina. These notables’ actions and demands were aimed at protecting
their power and privileges but never stepping away from an Ottoman framework, on which
they based their legitimacy. The center continued trying to reintegrate them into the new
state structures. The notables lost direct control of their land and tax exemptions but preserved
their regional authority and wealth. The state had reasserted itself but then still relied on the
notables in the reordering. Participation by Bosnians in the new Ottoman army was accepted
but only after the notables negotiated that the soldiers serve only within Bosnia, only under
local commanders, and for limited years of service.

Ottoman modernity
Although short lived, the Tanzimat period in Bosnia introduced measures and set foundations
for modernizing all aspects of society, especially in cities, from legal and administrative organ-
ization, economy, infrastructure, and secularization of the shariʿa law to modern education,
printing presses, and notions of civil rights, constitutional government, and the power of public
opinion.The provinces of Bosnia and Danube in Rumelia were the first to experience the new
vilayet form of regional organization. The most important feature of the new system was the
introduction of representative councils at different levels of administration that included both
elected and appointed members. Along the traditional schools, mekteb and medrese, modern
elementary and higher schools were introduced based on a modern curriculum. In a short time,
administrative (Mekteb-i hukuk) and teachers’ (Dar ul-muallimin) schools opened in Sarajevo,
educating the first generation of modern bureaucrats and teachers in the spirit of the Tanzimat.
During the tenure of Topal Şerif Osman Pasha (1861–9), Bosnia-Herzegovina’s enlightened
Ottoman governor, the province experienced the most successful application of the Tanzimat.
In addition to reorganizing the province and building roads, railways, schools, hospitals, and
libraries, Topal Şerif Osman Pasha instituted an inter-confessional provincial assembly and

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executive council. The intensity of anti-Ottoman nationalist propaganda coming from Croatia
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and Serbia, especially through the textbooks for confessional schools and the publications
imported to Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as in a number of missionary schools established in
this period, impelled the governor to introduce comparable local sources of Ottoman influence.
His longest-lasting effect on cultural reform in Bosnia was the setting up of the official vilayet
printing press in 1866 and the launching of two newspapers Bosanski vijesnik (Bosnian Herald)
in Bosnian Cyrillic script, and Bosna (Bosnia) in Bosnian and Turkish.The vilayet press published
books and other publications in Turkish and Bosnian until 1878. The printing of the Salname-i
vilayet-i Bosna, the Ottoman official yearbook for the vilayet of Bosnia, was initiated the same
year and continued until 1892, with a three-year interruption after the Habsburg occupation in
1878. An official paper of the Herzegovina vilayet was Neretva, published in 1876.
At the request of Mehmet Šakir Kurtćehajić (1844–72), the governor approved the launching
of another paper, Sarajevski cvjetnik (Gülşen-i saray) in 1869. In this paper, Kurtćehajić, a jour-
nalist and educator, member of the provincial assembly, and mayor of Sarajevo, expressed his
views on identity and patriotism based on contemporary intellectual currents in the Ottoman
Empire. A longtime supporter of modernization, Kurtćehajić and his peers followed the trends
in Istanbul, in particular Young Ottoman thought. Its dedication to multicultural citizenship
in the Empire was very much applicable in multi-religious Bosnia-Herzegovina. Governor
Topal Şerif Osman Pasha, just like the Habsburg governor Benjamin Kállay some decades later,
encouraged the idea of Bosnianism. They both saw it as a form of regional identity that would
counter the nationalistic propaganda threatening the province and endangering imperial rule
in the Balkans in general.

Peasant uprisings and the end of Ottoman rule


Ottoman reform measures featured introduction of equal citizenship and a uniform agricultural
tax rate but were, paradoxically, received with displeasure as the state encroached upon the life
of all the subjects as never before. It aggravated the Bosnian Muslims who saw their privileges
lost, while the Christian populations resented the new obligations and the intrusion of the
state. The ecclesiastical hierarchies lost the power that they had held for centuries as part of
the millet system. The state became ever present through widespread administrative oversight,
telegraph communication, conscription, new roads, and railroad lines. The central government
confronted the overwhelmingly agricultural Ottoman domains with its land surveys, recording
of deeds, and taxation of both the landlords and the peasants. The fact that the majority of the
peasants were Christian and the landlords Muslim, set the struggle in religious and subsequently,
national terms. Abuses of position and power were however more from class than from religious
differences.
As the process of creating chiftlik land holdings spread in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the
nineteenth century, several peasant rebellions were reactions to the excessive burden and exploit-
ation by the landlords. The Ottoman Land Law of 1858 was intended to address these abuses
directly. It introduced greater oversight of agricultural land distribution and usage, promoted
stable tenure, and fair, reliable taxation.This law, later adopted by the Habsburg administration in
Bosnia, became the basis of land claims in the first decades of the twentieth century in Austria-
Hungary and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.Yet the initial implementation was slow and difficult
as the notables worked to retain their lands, their produce, and their power over Muslim and
Christian peasants.
When the tax collectors insisted on making their collections despite the bad harvest in 1875,
the Christian peasants in Herzegovina rose against the landlords. The uprising spread to other

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regions, northwestern Bosnia in particular. Some peasants left for Habsburg territory and used it
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as a safe haven from which to conduct attacks on Ottoman Bosnia.They were joined by Serbian
and Montenegrin volunteers and commanders and supplied with weapons from Serbia. The
Ottoman army struggled to handle simultaneous insurrections in the province’s north, east, and
south, as well as attacks from Serbia which soon declared war. The insurgents disrupted normal
life, agriculture, trade, and personal security and caused migrations within and from Bosnia
and Herzegovina. An agreement between Russia and Austria-Hungary promised the prov-
ince to the Habsburgs in return for their non-involvement in the impending Russo-Ottoman
war. Serbian support for the insurgents ceased after their hopes for incorporating Bosnia and
Herzegovina into the Serbian lands were thus dashed.The Ottoman forces managed to establish
order in most regions although some banditry continued. The insurgents were offered amnesty
and repatriation. Remaining bandit groups perpetuated the state of rebellion by destroying
homes, infrastructure, and crops, and posing a threat to the returnees.The insecurities and unrest
especially in the border regions of the province caused enough migration, murder, disease, and
hunger to decimate the population. The censuses from 1870 and 1879 recorded a 35 percent
decline in the number of Muslims.
Owing to this uprising and unrest, the European Great Powers yet again became involved
in the Ottoman Balkans, and Bosnia-Herzegovina became part of the Eastern Question. At
the Berlin Congress in 1878, the Ottoman representatives resisted the otherwise unanimously
approved plan to allow a Habsburg mandate in Bosnia and Herzegovina.They based their argu-
ment on the fact that Bosnia-Herzegovina had been Ottoman territory for hundreds of years,
and that Muslims were a majority in the province. They also claimed that the Bosnian people
wished to stay under Ottoman administration. Failing in their appeal, the Ottomans accepted
the Habsburg mandate with the caveat that the sovereign rights of the Sultan in Bosnia and
Herzegovina would be maintained and that the occupation was temporary in nature. Since
the unique and legally vague status of such an administration was also new, the Habsburg and
Ottoman empires with their shared Bosnian subjects all had opportunities to exploit the ambi-
guities of this situation to their benefit until Austria-Hungary eventually annexed the province
in 1908, in the turmoil of the Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire.

Selected Readings
Aščerić-Todd, Ines. Dervishes and Islam in Bosnia: Sufi Dimensions to the Formation of Bosnian Muslim Society.
Leiden, 2015.
Grandits, Hannes. Herrschaft und Loyalität in der spätosmanischen Gesellschaft: das Beispiel der multikonfessionellen
Herzegowina.Vienna, 2008.
Hajdarpasic, Edin. Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914. Ithaca,
NY, 2015.
Hickok, Michael R. Ottoman Military Administration in Eighteenth-Century Bosnia. Leiden, 1997.
Karčić, Fikret. The Bosniaks and Challenges of Modernity. Sarajevo, 1999.
Koller, Markus and Kemal H. Karpat. Ottoman Bosnia: A History in Peril. Madison, Wis., 2004.

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