So far, this remains the best work on history of that contested land in English unfortunately



YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y1URyko630
Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/noel-malcolm-v-1

Introduction
Malcolm's "Bosnia: A Short History" has a few significant virtues and, alas, numerous faults. Yet- those faults lie mainly in that shadowy region of unspoken word: Malcolm is vociferously silent on those facts that would erode the book's central thesis (and which is buried deeply enough for an uninformed reader-that is, some 99% of the general reading public to diagnose the author's partisanship): this is a book on and about Bosnian Muslims, with Croats and Serbs appearing on the scene only because they are unavoidable. Well, one cannot easily write a chronicle of a region ignoring two thirds of its populace or as betes noires whose stale nationalist mythologies – for instance in slogans like "hands off Bosnia!" are Malcolm's special concern. So, since this is a book full of blanks and unwritten sentences, here we will present a few historical facts, avoiding the heated topic of recent years following the 1992 to 1995. war tumultuous events.

Which are the merits of Bosnia: A Short History?
1. Very concise and informative survey on the "Bosnian Church" controversy, based on John Fine’s groundbreaking works on Bosnian “Kristians”. This is Malcolm's finest hour.
2. Scattered throughout the book, one can find a wealth of information on many variables defining the societal condition in Bosnia at the particular moment of time -demographic statistics, travelers' observations and picturesque “Orientalist” tales on the ways of these exotic Balkan peoples, evaluation of essential historiographic references and much more.
3. This work is a tombstone to Greater Serbian expansionist project based on Serbian outright falsifications and distortions of Bosnia’s history, especially ethnic composition of medieval Bosnia, misappropriation of much of Bosnia and Herzegovina multicentenary literary and artistic cultural heritage and efforts to present Bosnian Muslims and Croats as some kind of “Serbs with amnesia” that has, combined with loudspeaker propaganda, in the past two centuries permeated the academia throughout the world-and, in addition, general uninformed Western perception of Yugoslavia and its central region.[/list]

Which are Malcolm's blind spots and failures?
Since his hidden focus is the growth of Bosnian Muslim ethnicity to national self awareness and any form of statehood, he must of necessity exclude or disregard a multitude of facts that would refute his multiculturalist dogma. So:
1. He has cautiously, avoided inclusion of maps that would show the territorial compass of medieval Bosnia, especially if a succession of maps from the 10th to the 15th centuries had been juxtaposed on the current "sovereign" Bosnia and Herzegovina state
boundaries map. An imaginary innocent reader would have been greatly surprised had he been shown that the medieval, pre-1379, Bosnia covered somewhere between 20 and 40% of the contemporary republic and that more than 50% of the contemporary "Bosnia" has historically been part of the Croatian state in one form or another. Current boundaries are a legacy of the Ottoman expansion and nothing sacrosanct per se- a product of balance of powers and something intrinsically contestable. This doesn't mean that we can nonchalantly brush off the last 5 centuries; but it equally shows that "hands off Bosnia" slogan is just politicos's empty talk. Which Bosnia? What boundaries?
2. Malcolm has done a heavy cultural/historical misrepresentation in a few cases (again, a vocal silence):
a) the vast majority of extant pre-Ottoman Bosnian written works of art (illuminated manuscripts decorated mainly in Romanesque style - the best examples being the Hval miscellany and Duke Hrvoje missal) are written in Croatian Glagolitic and Western or Croatian - Bosnian Cyrillic script and are a part of Croatian cultural heritage, as are the oldest monuments of literacy on the Bosnian soil, for instance the Humac tablet and Gršković’s fragments (one can see examples at the address http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/et04.html). So much for pre-Ottoman Bosnian "Slavic" diffused and confused identity that is neither Croat nor Serb.
b) author's survey of cultural development from the 1600s to the 1800s is "monumentally" myopic. He has enumerated almost exclusively Bosnian Muslim writers who had been writing mainly in Oriental languages and has neglected Bosnian Croat Franciscan writers who, writing both in Croatian and Latin, had, in literary production, dwarfed their Muslim contemporaries beyond dispute. Of course- measured by European best writing
standards of these times (Milton, Defoe, Johnson, Lessing,..)- these are provincial and dated works. But, they are the best literature that has come from Bosnia during these times. And are ignored only to give boost to the author's implicit thesis: it's Bosnian Muslims who center, one way or another, the region portrayed in the myopic narrative.

To present a balanced view of pre- Ottoman Bosnian identity, one could enumerate various arguments from all sides.

Most of what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, belonged to the Croatian kingdom until the 11th Century. In the 10th C, Croatian king Tomislav routed Magyars/Hungarians somewhere in the Majevica region in eastern Bosnia, as Serbian historian Relja Novaković surmised.

Pro-Croatian arguments about the character of medieval Bosnian polity would be:
1. the official title of Bosnian ruler was “ban”, which is Croatian, too, derived, perhaps, from the Avars
2. the language in the most medieval Bosnia and Hum was Western Štokavian green area, one among Croatian, a and not Serbian dialects
3. denominationally, most old Bosnians from the 11th to the 15th C, were Catholics and all Bosnian rulers were Catholics. This is shown by a multitude of Catholic monasteries & churches in the pre-Ottoman period:
4. the dominant script in old Bosnia was Bosnian or Croat or Western Cyrillic, different from the Serbian one, and in usage also among Croats in Dubrovnik and central Dalmatia
5. the only continuity with pre-Ottoman, pre 15th C Bosnian polity are Bosnian Franciscans, who are also Croats in modern national sense.

As for pro-Serbian arguments, they would be:
1. in two or three early sources, belonging to the 9th or 10th century, Bosnia is mentioned as a part of Serbia
2. Serbian presence is evident in the eastern part of Bosnia and especially Hum, in Orthodox monasteries
3. the first Bosnian king Tvrtko had publicly declared he was a successor to the Serbian throne through his grandmother, who belonged to the
Serbian Nemanjić dynasty; he occupied parts of the Western Serbia and had imported Serbian scribes- who changed, partially, the physiognomy of Bosnian chancery letters for some time. Also,many Bosnian rules had adopted Serbian name in their official intitulations, more frequently than the Croatian one

Bosnian autochthonous, non-Croatian and non-Serbian arguments:
1. only in Bosnia and Hum was the Bosnian Church a semi-official and influential, as different from Croatia and Serbia
2. although variants of Bosnian Cyrillic can be found in the central Dalmatia and Dubrovnik, the dominant Bosnian script
was neither Glagolitic and Roman (as in Croatia), nor Serbian Cyrillic (in Serbia) * Bosnian rulers generally referred to themselves as Bosnians, not as Croats nor Serbs

Conclusion

Malcolm succeeded in presenting this historical polity as an individualized cultural-political area. Also, he followed the traditional four-stages historical classification: medieval period, Ottoman period; Austro-Hungarian period and Yugoslav period.

So far, this remains the best work on history of that contested land in English unfortunately, because virtually all other works are journalist and post-modernist sterile propaganda aiming at creation of a functioning state which, almost 30 years after cessation of war, remains essentially a colonial protectorate. And three peoples in that protectorate have three identities, nationalities, and three visions of their past, present and future.

To conclude: the author's partiality in service of giving credence to Bosnian Muslim political agenda is glaringly evident. But not to the average perplexed reader. Malcolm made a crucial mistake in presentation of the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina because he ignored William Faulkner’s admonition in one of his novels: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

https://www.academia.edu/94258086/Early ... _Routledge

https://www.academia.edu/23507120/Can_B ... erzegovina

https://www.academia.edu/1840616/Societ ... erzegovina

Firstly, I love your channel and this is an excellent post which you have made! I only wish to address the second point in which is made in the Autochthonous perspective.

To claim these people considered themselves as Bosnians, not as Croats nor Serbs is true, but to what extent? They called themselves Bosnians on the basis of their civic nationality, it does not necessarily denote ethnicities. For instance, something which comes to mind is a source from „Povelja upućena knezovima Vuku i Pavlu Vukoslaviću”, 1351 in the alleged words of Stjepan Kotromanic II:
"A tome su pristavi i svedoci dobri Bošnjani I Usorani [...]" // "And good Bosnians and Usorans are witnesses to this [...]".

Here Usoran is clearly not an ethonym, and is used almost in conjunction with the term Bosnian, like Dalmatian could be used as a blanket term for a Croat, Serb or Italian living in Dalmatia but most probably a Croat... the terms Bosnians, Usorans, Zahumljians and so on are simply blanket terms for the ethnicities which encompassed these territories. Just another thing which can be negated from the claims of those which deceive the masses from their positions of power in BiH.

You have one of my favorite pages on YouTube and please keep up the good work, Bog i Hrvati!

Kroatocentrik, thank you for this! I had been looking for a good critique of the book from a Croatian point of view.

Thanks!



I agree. It was just to state that this mindset exist in the Bosniak perception of others and themselfs.

You are welcome.

TRY TO FIND THIS IN THE MALCOLM's BOOK

BARTOL KAŠIĆ AND THE LITERATURE OF THE BOSNIAN FRANCISCANS - the 14th - the 19th century

The Bosnian Franciscans intensified the bilingual literature with two alphabets. The examples of their literacy in the Latin language were preserved in continuity from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. These are expert texts from philosophy, theology, law, history and medicine, and individuals tried their hand at poetry in the Latin language.

Far more important for the Croatian cultural profile of the Bosnian Catholics, is the literature of Bosna Srebrena, written in Western Cyrillic. In spite of various appellations during the centuries, the lingua patria and Cyrillic script of the Bosnian Franciscans carries in itself the developmental dynamic of the Croatian language. In it the Franciscans shaped their pious literary texts.

The lingua patria of the Bosnian Franciscans has two sources: the living western Štokavian, oral speech vernacular, which was mutually intelligible with Serbian Eastern Štokavian did not see confessional boundaries as a communication hurdle, and other source around literary models originating in the 15th and 16th centuries from Croatian cultural areas, in both Croatian vernacular literacy and Western Latin language literacy.

For example, the religious book Roman Ritual from 1640, written by Croatian Jesuit Bartol Kašić, was written in Western Štokavian and was widely used among Catholics in both Bosnia and Croatia. At the same time, first Croatian grammar in 1604 by Bartol Kašić was written in Latin language, where he calls his language synonymical Slovin and Illyrian.

Kašić named his literary language in Roman Ritual Illyrian, and he calls idiom in Bosnia Bosnian, which is the idiom he chose for his language, and also, in Ritual he includes writers from Dalmatia, who had been writing in Čakavian for example Marko Marulić, and writers from Ragusa, in his perception of his own macro language. In his dictionary he used Croatian and Slavonic names synonymicaly. Language in his translation of the Bible in the vernacular of Dubrovnik variety he calls, in his autobiography, Dalmatian, and this language is similar to the modern Croatian standard, it is only a little bit antique, and it is the same as the language in Roman Ritual. In his other work he differentiates slavonicis, dalmaticis seu illyricis, that would mean Croatian literary language in modern sense at that time, and in other group serblianis seu ruthenicis, which would include Serbian literary language at that time, which was not in vernacular.

Radoslav Katičić presented the practice of naming the Croatian language in his scientific paper that can be seen on the screen. For example, the religious book Roman ritual from 1670, written by Croatian Jesuit Bartol Kašić, was written in Western Štokavian and was widely used in both Bosnia and Croatia among Catholics literacy.

Matija Divković and Bartol Kašić, https://hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/343125%3F
Srećko Džaja, https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/151263