IMAGINING BOSNIA: HISTORICAL PERCEPTIONS OF BOSNIAN MUSLIMS IN THE CROATIAN LITERARY TRADITION FROM RENAISSANCE THROUGH ROMANTICISM
IMAGINING BOSNIA: HISTORICAL PERCEPTIONS OF BOSNIAN MUSLIMS IN THE CROATIAN LITERARY TRADITION FROM RENAISSANCE THROUGH ROMANTICISM

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims to outline the historical perceptions held of Muslims, both Turks and Bosnians, mainly in Dalmatian tradition from the Renaissance through Romanticism. The early-modern Croatian writers perceived the arrival of the Ottomans, the bearers of an essentially different civilization, as a catastrophic event for both the Croatian lands and the neighboring Balkan states. Most modern Croat scholars have claimed that early-modern Croatia lost most of both its territory and population as a result of the Ottoman conquest and experienced economic breakdown, decroatization, and decristianisation. Certain very popular themes have transferred from humanist historiography to the present, including those of cultural recession and the barbarism the Ottomans caused by isolating the Balkans from the effects of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Recent work by Croatia’s ottomanists has begun to offer a different picture: The Croatian medieval lands had not been integrated before the Ottoman conquest. In 1620, there were some 300,000 people living in the Ottoman part of modern-day Croatia, hardly fewer than in pre-Ottoman times.

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