Continues on the islamicization of Bosnia
literature into the minds of
ordinary Bosnians. Until
historians began the serious analysis of Ottoman administrative
records in the 1940s, much of the essential evidence was unavailable.
But over the last few decades a much fuller picture has been built
up, and some of the commonest myths and legends about about the
Islamicization of Bosnia are at last being laid to rest.
The best source of information is the Ottoman 'defters', tax registers which recorded property-ownership and categorised people by their religion. From these quite a detailed picture can be formed of the spread of Islam in Bosnia. Only 37,125 households were Christian and only 323 were Muslim. Assuming an average of five people per household, this gives a figure of 185,625 Christians; separately listed were also nearly 9000 individual Christian bachelors, and widows. Half of the Christian households, and two-thirds (234) of the Muslim, were simple raya living on ordinary timar estates: the others lived on the larger hass estates, or in towns or in their own land. The scholar who first analysed these documents, Nedim Philapovic, also noted that Islamicization was very slight in Hercegovina, and that it was the most advanced, not surprisingly, in the small area around Sarajevo which had been by the Turks since the 1940s. Some of the holders of the timars are specifically described in these earliest defters as 'new Muslim'; others have a Muslim name, and are listed as 'son of. . .', with the father bearing a Christian name.
