Landscapes of Faith: Franciscan Friars and Central Bosnian Highlands in the 16th to 18th Centuries

Dinaric mountain ranges of the western fringes of the Ottoman Empire have been seen chiefly as a porous borderland zone that frequently challenged legal and religious boundaries that Ottoman, Venetian, and Habsburg states sought to impose. However, as spaces of transition, they were also crucial spaces for defining and enforcing religious belonging. This paper explores the mountains as stages of confessional change and belonging by studying religious and environmental landscapes on the Vranica mountain range in central Bosnia through the eyes of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Spirit in the town of Fojnica between 16^th and 18^th centuries. Known to historiography for their dedicated pastoral work among the Ottoman Catholics, Bosnian Franciscans were also avid managers of Vranica’s rich natural resources: mineral ore, wood, and mountain pastures. Based on the Ottoman Turkish and Slavic sources from the archive of the monastery, the paper traces patterns of environmental exploitation of the mountain in light of the Franciscan land expansion, conversion to Islam, and the shifting confessional boundaries between the Muslim and Catholic population. For the Franciscans, environmental management was integral to their religious strategies aimed at preserving Catholic community, while the environmental dynamic of mountain life, including movement of people and animals, engendered cycles of negotiating and reasserting religious boundaries between friars and the local converts with almost liturgical regularity.

The paper dissects converging economic, environmental, and confessional layers of the mountain landscapes, proposing both new frameworks for exploring religious history of the Ottoman Empire and suggesting that mountains were imperial microcosms where local actors adopted, adapted, and subverted larger imperial dynamics.