Ana Sekulić: "Their Souls, Land, and Churches”: Franciscan Monasteries in Ottoman Bosnia, Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries

My project “‘Their Souls, Land, and Churches:’ Franciscan Monasteries in Ottoman Bosnia, Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries” examines the history of the Franciscan monasteries in Bosnia in their Ottoman context, focusing on the period from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. By following the Catholic Franciscan order in this Ottoman province, I explore the ways in which the Catholic monasteries developed under Ottoman rule as well as how the local Catholic community was shaped by the interactions of the Catholic order and the Ottoman state. Differing from hitherto historiographical accounts, I explore Franciscan history within the framework of the Ottoman administration and other non-Muslim communities, rather than as an independent and isolated group. Without denying Franciscans’ ties to the western Catholic world, I assert that the Franciscans were as much a product of the Ottoman presence as they were of the Catholic order. They did not just “endure” under the Ottoman state, but constantly straddled their various loyalties, formed their identity and defined their communal role within the framework of Ottoman legal system as well as local religious and political hierarchies. Finally, I believe that it can contribute to better understanding of the formation of the Catholic community in Bosnia, a question that has serious political ramifications for the present. Part of the project’s contribution lies in the exploration how the Ottoman context and the ways in which various groups such as Franciscans shaped religious and ethnic communities in later centuries. I am, however, particularly interested in how property holding and economic ties that the monasteries maintained with the local Catholics contributed to the development of particularly Catholic identities and loyalties.