The Islamicization Of Bosnia

he arrival of the Turks in the fifteenth century was probably not the first contact between Bosnia and Islam. The early Arab expansion in the Mediterranean, which by the ninth century had established Muslim rule in Crete, Sicily, southern Italy and Spain, must have have brought Muslim merchants and raiders frequently to the coast of Dalmatian. The slave trade from that coast, which, as we have seen, spread Bosnian slaves round the western Mediterranean throughout the later middle ages, was certainly operating during this earlier period: enslaved Slavs from the Mediterranean region were present in early Muslim Spain, and the Saracen rules of Andalusia are known to have had a Slav army of 13,750 men in the tenth century. But we can only speculate about whether any Bosnia's converted to Islam, obtained their freedom and returned and returned to heir homeland. Speculation too is all that is possible on the relations between Bosnia and the Muslims of medieval Hungary - Arab merchants, descendants of Islamized Turkic tribes and another immigrants. They are known to have lived in many parts of the hungsarian lands, including Srem, the area adjoining north eastern Bosnia, until their eventual expulsion from Hungary, along with the Jews in the fourteenth century. It is understandable that some Bosnian scholars have been particularly eager to establish that Islam was ancient presence in Bosnia, perhaps older then the Bosnian state itself. But the horizontal significance of these early possible contacts is slight. Contact is one thing; mass conversion is another.

The Islamicization of a large part of the population under the Turks remains the most distinctive and important feature of modern Bosnian history. Many myths have arisen about how and why it happened; some of them still percolate from the earlier scholarly