Franciscan Province of Bosna Srebrena as an Imagined Millet?

Abstract

During the four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Franciscan Province of Bosna Srebrena was the only institutional structure of the Catholic Church permanently present there. According to tradition, their legal status and security were guaranteed by a document issued by Sultan Mehmed II in 1463, known as the Fojnica Ahdname. Franciscan sources show that they had been constantly using documents of Ottoman provenance to resolve their legal and economic issues since at least the seventeenth century and continued this practise even when Bosnia came under the Austro-Hungarian administration in 1878. In the twentieth century, this led to an overemphasis on the importance of the Ahdname and its placement in an anachronistic framework that corresponded to the image of a “better past.” The paper aims to show the historical context in which this narrative pattern developed in the Franciscan sources. The findings suggest that the Bosnian Franciscans also used their incorporation into the Ottoman legal system for relations with the Catholic West.