Imagining ‛Bosniaʼ: Review of C. Carmichael, Concise History of Bosnia
It is very difficult to write a cultural history of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). The territory of modern-day B&H existed as a part of different imperial or quasi-imperial structures, and its formation and the present shape was affected by external rather than by internal developments. In antiquity there was neither Bosnia nor Herzegovina, but those areas belonged to the older imperial artefact of the Roman Dalmatian province. This spatial artefact in medieval times transformed into the frontier-zone between the Carolingian, Byzantine and Bulgar empires and its by-products – the kingdoms of Croatia and Serbia. Later, medieval barons of Bosnia and Hum (Chulmia, terra de Chelmo, Herzegovina/Hercegovina) were networked with their peers on the Dalmatian coast, as a southern part of the proto-imperial commonwealth known as the Hungarian arch-kingdom (Archiregnum Hungaricum). The Ottoman piecemeal conquest in the 15 and early 16 century ultimately resulted with political, cultural and population discontinuities, triggering consecutive waves of migrations. New empire created new imperial artefact – the province (eyalet, later pashaluk) Bosna in 1580. Reliquium reliquiaris of this frontier province, close to the shape of the present country, formed only after the Christian (Habsburg and Venetian) reconquista in the Great Turkish War (1683-1699) and its