No i'm just asking because from the picture I saw it showed a Serbian crossbowman not a Bosnian one although I looked fairly quick since I was busy. But I mean it's like saying "picture of Turkish mounted rifleman. Oh let's make a mounted Moldovan rifleman."
What...?
I know it exists. My point is that it was puny, a minority. And Bosnian does not coreleate with any specific people, religion or race. There is no "Bosnian" language or race just as there is no Moldovan one. It's a regional name. That's been my only point concerning that. The notion that the medieval Bosnian state had a specific people known as Bosnians living in it and were all part of the Bosnian Church and later converted to Islam becoming the Bosniaks is non sense. It's Sarajevo politics trying to discern "Bosnians" which are really no more than Serbs and a few Croats living in that region, into a new catagory of people. Like Trvko for example.Carpathian Wolf,
I know you are skeptical about the amount evidence in support of the existence of the Bosnian church and I don't wish to argue with you as it is hardly my area of expertise. I suggest you check out John V.A. Fine's The Bosnian Church: Its Place in State and Society from the Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century and judge the evidence he presents for yourself.
"He was Bosnian!"
"No he was Serb!"
Blah blah blah stupidity from kids today that have no notion of history what so ever. He was a Serb in Bosnia...so he was both.
Just like Stefan the Great. Was he Romanian or Moldovan. He was both, he was a Romanian in Moldova. One is an ethnicity, the other is a region.
It's like arguing if babe ruth was an American or a New Yorker. Idiotic things like that happen here in the Balkans because people have been switched and mixed every other way by the communists.
There is a "Bosnian" identity just like I have an Oltenian one. The notion for example that Bosnian = Bosniak Muslim is what is dangerous. "Recent history" had nothing to do with making Muslims into Serbs. If you look at the JNA composition of the leadership in the Airforce, Navy and Army, you will find that only one of those gentlemen had any Serb linneage and only half. "Recent history" was a conflict based on foreign implication and using the momentum of certain extremists that returned to Zagreb in the 70s as well as the Islamic dictatorship of Alija Izetbegovic.As an outsider myself, I see the campaign by some Balkan Slavic intellectuals to deny the legitimacy of Bosnian identity as both unfounded in fact and potentially dangerous as we have seen by the tragedies in recent history. We all know that the idea they promote is that the Bosnians are just Serbs who happen to be Muslim. This assertion is based on a simplified and unrealistic view that categorizes people by their linage alone. It fails to recognize that the Bosnians do have a shared culture and traditions that are uniquely their own that stretch back to at least the medieval period. The evidence is sparse at times; particularly for the very early medieval period, but it is not non-existent.
In any case, if you'd like to go and provide me with a chronicle mentioning some sort of "Bosnian migration" i would love to read it. At this point "Bosnian" is no more a race or ethnicity than Dalmatian is. What about the Serbs in Bosnia who have been there long before it was a Muslim majority. Are they no longer Bosnian?
Lastly don't come making me your little uninformed points and then at the end "teehee but I think the discussion i've just opened up shouldn't be discussed here but in VV." You opened up with a serve, expect a return. If you didn't really think it was a good idea to open up the discussion, you should have probably been quiet and said nothing. Instead you pull this little bs tactic in an attempt to not allow me a reply.
I wish the tones could have been more pleasant but your methods suggest it would be a waste of time on my part. If you really want to have a discussion, go to VV and put it there. I wouldn't mind lecturing Yugoslavian Civil War 101 again.