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Between Islam and Catholicism: Bosnian Franciscan Missionaries in Turkish Hungary, 1584-1716
Abstract
The Catholic Historical Review 89.3 (2003) 409-433
The work of the Bosnian Franciscan missionaries represents a peculiar episode in the history of Catholic renewal in Central Europe. By studying these developments, we may become acquainted with the manner in which the various denominations and nationalities coexisted in the Carpathian basin. In the following, I shall examine the work of the Bosnian missionaries on the basis of documents preserved in the Rome archives of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of Faith (de Propaganda Fide), a body of cardinals founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 to direct Catholic missions throughout the world. Until recently most of the documents used in this study were unknown; they are soon to be published.
After the battle of Mohács (1526) and the fall of Buda (1541), the middle third of the medieval kingdom of Hungary was occupied by the Turks. Large numbers of southern Slavs moved into the Turkish-occupied areas of Hungary. While many of these people were Catholics, overall the Catholic Church in Hungary was significantly weakened by the effects of the Reformation. The Catholic bishops were appointed by the Holy Roman Emperor acting as the king of Hungary. The Emperor was the main enemy of the Turkish Sultan, and thus the Hungarian bishops were refused access to the Turkish territories. After the Reformation and the Turkish conquest the fate of the Catholic Church became increasingly uncertain in Turkish Hungary. For this reason, the arrival of Bosnian Franciscan friars from the Balkans had a great effect upon the lives of Hungarian, Croatian, Romanian, and Bosnian Catholics living in the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Compared with other Catholic priests working in the Turkish sovereign area, the Bosnian Franciscans established a far more "intimate" relationship with the Ottoman authorities. This special relationship, where it led the Bosnians to persecute their rivals within the Catholic Church using Turkish military force, rightly outraged the Ragusan, Italian, and Hungarian priests who were the potential victims. Still, it did provide the Franciscans with far greater room for manoeuvre in their missionary work.
Franciscan friars appeared in Bosnia at the end of the thirteenth century. They were given the task of challenging the Bogomil heretic church. The Pope declared the whole of Bosnian Kingdom to be a missionary territory and appointed the Franciscans as local inquisitors. Friars arrived in Bosnia from many different countries: English, German, Italian, and Aragonese Franciscans converted the Bosnian heretics, and here too the famous inquisitor, Saint Jacob of Marche, worked. During the golden age of the order in Bosnia in the middle of the fifteenth century, Franciscan friars were living in about sixty monasteries throughout the country. Owing to the popularity of the Bogomil heresy, the number of Catholic secular priests in the country was very small. Thus, contrary to the traditional ecclesiastical model, according to their papal privileges the Franciscans in Bosnia also worked as parish priests. From the sixteenth century on, they continued to occupy the parishes also in Turkish Hungary.
The end of the golden age of the Bosnian kingdom and the Franciscan order in Bosnia came with the occupation of the country by the Ottomans, which was completed by 1463. The Turkish occupation divided the Franciscan order in Bosnia into two parts. One part fell under Turkish rule (its territory grew constantly with the advance of the Turks), while the other part remained part of the Christian world.
Following the incorporation of Bosnia into the Sultan's empire, local Franciscans stayed on rather than fleeing. The Turkish administration tolerated and even assisted the Bosnian Franciscans because it needed them in order to keep the peace and to control the tax-paying Catholic populations and prevent their emigration. At the same time, the Turks also had an interest in provoking differences between Christians of the various denominations, especially the Catholics and the Orthodox. For this reason, they made no attempt to establish a lasting peace between the various churches and were also quite willing to adjudicate in church affairs. Bitter rancor among the non-Muslim populations reduced the likelihood of a united Christian...
This article reframes the formation of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier after 1699 in social historical terms. By going beyond diplomatic and military factors, it identifies how the contraction of Ottoman borders affected taxation, landholding, and Muslim-Christian relations in Bosnia. The article argues that peasants in Ottoman Bosnia experienced the mounting pressures of increasing taxation, manipulation over landownership, and religiously inflected hostility, often driven by those Muslim noblemen who tried to capitalize on the destabilizing wake of several wars that the Ottoman Empire fought with the Habsburg, Venetian, and Russian states in the eighteenth century. Through these processes, by the end of the century the meaning of the reaya or raya —an Ottoman term for taxpaying “subjects” that theoretically applied to all denominations, including Muslims—had become synonymous with “Christians,” acquiring a new political significance.
This article analyses the influence of confessional divides in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb at the very beginning of the early modern period. Questioning the influence that religious difference had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two confessional empires, the Ottoman and the Habsburg. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario where religious and political frontiers were far from coincide. This article will analyse the diplomatic negotiations promoted by different Muslim communities from the Maghreb to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic Monarchs in the framework of the Spanish imperial expansion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach my aim is not to deny the religious or the political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. I will argue, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, with changing agendas towards religious difference.
The Ottoman Empire, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had conquered one after another of the Balkan states, pushed the imperial frontier forward to the environs of Vienna. At the Battle of Mohács in 1526, the Turks defeated the Hungarian army and during the following decades the Turkish province of Hungary was established around the former royal Hungarian capital of Buda. The frontier of the Ottoman Empire — and thus of Islam — reached to the very heart of Europe. Meanwhile, in the eastern half of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, a new state was created: the Principality of Transylvania, which existed from 1556 until 1690 as a vassal of the sultan. Nevertheless, in spite of the Ottoman conquest and following Islamization of south-eastern Europe, a large Catholic and Orthodox population lived in the Turkish provinces. In the world history of Reformation, the success of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and antitrinitarian churches in the lands of Islam, in the Ottoman Empire, represents an interesting case. In the sixteenth century, Muslims still formed minorities in all of the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. From Buda to Istanbul and from Sarajevo to Sofia, many Catholics were living in these territories; in Bosnia they were particularly numerous. In the Balkan territories, however, most Christians were Orthodox; since the Reformation had arisen within Rome-based Latin Christianity, Protestants were rare here. In Moldavia and Wallachia, two vassal principalities of the sultan, most people were Orthodox. However in Moldavia, Catholics and, in the sixteenth century, Protestants were also quite numerous.
Between the later middle ages and the eighteenth century, religious orders were in the vanguard of reform movements within the Christian church. Recent scholarship on medieval Europe has emphasised how mendicants exercised a significant influence on the religiosity of the laity by actually shaping their spirituality and piety. In a similar way for the early modern period, religious orders have been credited with disseminating Tridentine reform, training new clergy, gaining new converts and bringing those who had strayed back into the fold. Much about this process, however, still remains unknown, particularly with regards to east central Europe. Exploring the complex relationship between western monasticism and lay society in east central Europe across a broad chronological timeframe, this collection provides a re-examination of the level and nature of interaction between members of religious orders and the communities around them. That the studies in this collection are all located in east central Europe - Transylvania, Hungary, Austria, and Bohemia- fulfils a second key aim of the volume: the examination of clerical and lay piety in a region of Europe almost entirely ignored by western scholarship. As such the volume provides an important addition to current scholarship, showcasing fresh research on a subject and region on which little has been published in English. The volume further contributes to the reintegration of eastern and western European history, expanding the existing parameters of scholarly discourse into late medieval and early modern religious practice and piety. © Maria Crǎciun and Elaine Fulton and the contributors 2011. All rights reserved.
This authoritative volume presents the history of Christianity from the eve of the Protestant Reformation to the height of Catholic Reform. In addition to in-depth coverage of the politics and theology of various reform movements in the sixteenth century, this book discusses at length the impact of the permanent schism on Latin Christendom, the Catholic responses to it, and the influence on the development of the Orthodox churches. This comprehensive and comparative overview covers the history of society, politics, theology, liturgy, religious orders, and art in the lands of Latin Christianity. In thirty chapters written by an international team of contributors the volume expands the boundaries of inquiry to the relationship between Christianity and non-Christian religions - Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism - both in Europe and in the non-European world.
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