The Baptist historian Linus Pierpont Brockett (1820–1893) here mourns both the brutal extermination of thousands of Bosnian Bogomils at the hands of crusaders in the late 1230s and the lack of source material that might attest to this episode. Brockett, writing in 1879, joined a historiographic tradition of nineteenth-century Protestant thinkers who located the roots of their own churches in various medieval heretical sects and, occasionally, the circle of disciples who formed around Francis of Assisi. For Brockett, the so-called Bogomils of Bulgaria and Bosnia formed the foundation of his Baptist Church, and his history of the Bogomils is first and foremost one of their persecutions. Named “Bogomils” from the tenth century by their oppressors, they were the Balkan manifestation of a Manichaean dualist sect which stretched back to the time of Constantine and drew inspiration from the churches of the “East” which were founded by the apostles. In Brockett’s survey, which covers the period from late Antiquity to the Ottoman conquest of the fifteenth century, the sect stood firm against persecution by both Rome and Constantinople—and the especial cruelty of the Byzantine Empresses. Yielding to neither church, the Bosnian Christians held out until Bogomilism was eventually “crushed under the heel of the fanatic Turk” and Europe irrevocably transformed.Footnote 1

One might be forgiven for dismissing Brockett’s colourful lament in its entirety. He admits that it is impossible to substantiate the events of the massacre that he so deeply felt had happened while at the same time claiming that it had, indeed, taken place. His tone here is consistent with the emotive hyperbole that characterises his book as a whole, and his survey bears the awkward hallmarks of nineteenth-century orientalism—the wicked Greek matriarch; the militant Sultan—but with little of the methodological sophistication of his contemporaries. His commentary, however, hints at something still little considered in scholarship on the campaigns launched against Bosnians under the aegis of Pope Gregory IX (1227–1241). The troubadours of whom Brockett writes were those who sang of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), a bloody episode in which countless numbers of people who lived in what we now refer to as the Languedoc were slaughtered by crusaders on the basis that they may have been infected by heretical depravity.Footnote 2 Killing one’s neighbour or burning down a settlement became an act of “redemptive homicide,” in the words of Mark Gregory Pegg, in which crucesignati might ensure both their salvation and that of Latin Christendom in its entirety.Footnote 3 In 1234, five years after these brutal wars had ended, Gregory IX would encourage a similar crusade to eradicate heresy in the region of Bosnia. The chronology of the crusade is uncertain, but most scholars have taken 1241—when the crusade’s leaders were redeployed to fight against the Mongols—as a terminus for this period of crusading.

The first part of this chapter covers the crusade’s historical background, followed by a historiographical overview from the nineteenth century to the present. Having disentangled the crusade from the nationalist and Balkanist paradigms through which it has been so often read, I then read the papal letters concerning the crusade within the violent reimagining of Latin Christian society by Latin prelates in the thirteenth century. In so doing, I argue that the crusade is interpreted productively as a movement launched not against the adherents of a particular doctrine but to eradicate heresy and heretics in Bosnia and its neighbouring environs in Slavonia, a region which was thought to be an especial incubator of heretical pestilence and a dire threat to the project of building a distinctly “Latin” Christendom (Map 8.1).Footnote 4

Map 8.1
A map of Banate of Bosnia surrounded by Croatia, Slavonia, Krajna, and Serbia. The bishopric and archbishopric locations are marked across the kingdoms, along with the river names.

Bosnia and its neighbours in the first half of the thirteenth century [after Gábor Barabás, “Heretics, Pirates, and Legates. The Bosnian Heresy, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Popes in the Early Thirteenth Century,” Specimina Nova Pars Prima Sectio Medievalis 9 (2017): 35–58, at 58]

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The crusade took place at a time during which those charged with the eradication of heresy began to believe that heretics were organised and formed part of wide-reaching institutional structures.Footnote 5 Gregory, accordingly, ensured that crusading efforts in Bosnia were accompanied by the construction of churches, the implementation of a Latin clerical hierarchy, and the discipline of clerics who fell short. Crusading was not, however, replaced with inquisitions into heretical depravity in Bosnia, as it was in the Languedoc, at least not officially anyway; certainly, papal letters suggest that visitators and legates used inquisitorial methods, particularly when investigating clerics. If the metaphors of disease used heavily by Gregory referred to heretical structures, his letters also employ a form of environmental determinism to explain how heresy was more easily able to travel through the conduits of heretical structures in a region like Bosnia and to justify the use of crusade to eradicate heresy. To understand, then, why crusade rather than inquisition was employed by Gregory even after the latter had been employed in the Languedoc, I contend also that it is fruitful to situate the crusade under the same umbrella as preaching and the construction of churches; that is, as acts that were also designed to secure the salvation of Christendom via invasive alteration of the imaginative and physical landscape of Bosnia. We do not see a cautious adaptation under Gregory to Bosnian culture and society but an attempt to secure its obedience to the Latin Church via an influx of friars and Hungarian crusaders, and the transformation of the people of Bosnia and the surrounding regions into either crucesignati or heretics.

Historical Background

The crusade has been overshadowed by more enticing questions on the nature of Bosnian heresy and has rarely been the focus of in-depth study, likely owing to the lack of varied source material. With the exception of a short entry in the Dominican friar Gerald of Fracheto’s Vitae Fratrum, written in 1260, Brockett is correct that there are no other narrative sources for the crusade from the thirteenth century.Footnote 6 The information that allows us to piece together the events can be found almost exclusively in papal letters and, as others have noted, it is difficult to trace the “on-the-ground” development of the crusade itself, or even to know with certainty whether a concerted military exercise took place at all.Footnote 7 The papal documentation, however, is not slight and has enabled some detailed studies of this crusade, or planned crusade, and of the papal and Hungarian agendas, over the past decade or so.Footnote 8 Prior to these studies, discussion of the crusade usually made up only a very small part of broad-ranging histories which attempted to trace dualism in Bosnia, or of general surveys of the Bosnian Church. Owing to the methodological difficulty of reconstructing belief systems from a hostile source base, and as papal letters tend not to discuss the finer points of doctrine in any depth, these newer studies mark a departure from attempts to reconstruct the beliefs of the heretical Christians against whom the papacy called a crusade.Footnote 9

Gregory IX was not the first pope to prepare for such an act in Bosnia. Since the mid-twelfth century when it was made a banate of Hungary, the Bosnian monarchy and Church had respected the authority of Rome.Footnote 10 We know very little about the organisation of the Bosnian Church—to describe it as an organisation that conceptualised itself as separate from other societal structures or other churches would be overly determined—but what we do know seems to suggest that it comprised a monastic clergy. On hearing that the ban and thousands of other Bosnians had allegedly fallen into the snare of heresy, Innocent III (1198–1216) initially threatened action against Bosnia, but then instead sent a legate to investigate the Bosnian Church. This ended in an accord at Bolino Polje in 1203 between representatives from the Bosnian clergy, the legation, and the Hungarian crown. Describing Bosnia as a land in which heretics “feed their whelps like lamias with naked breasts” and “openly propound their dogma,” Honorius III (1216–1227) in 1221 urged the king of Hungary to take military action against the region but this does not seem to have materialised.Footnote 11

Over the course of his pontificate, Gregory’s curia would increasingly employ inquisitors into heretical depravity as a method of eradicating suspected heresy.Footnote 12 By the time of his pontificate, rumours that there was a heretical bishop who lived in the Balkans and who was in contact with heretics in the Languedoc were in circulation.Footnote 13 It is possible that the pope was motivated in part by these allegations to launch a crusade. The pope charged clerics with preaching the cross in Bosnia and its environs in 1234, and although he reported success in eliminating heretical depravity by 1238, he subsequently called for further action. The intended crucesignati encompassed both those living within Slavonia—usually used by the papacy to mean Bosnia and its surrounding regions—and a contingent of Hungarians led by Coloman (1208–1241), a Hungarian prince and duke of Slavonia.Footnote 14 The papacy had sought the co-operation of Hungary also in crusades against the Cumans and the Bulgarian ruler Ivan Asen II, who was accused of heresy and of conspiring with the Greek emperor-in-exile, John III Doukas Vatatzes (1221–1254), against the recently established Latin Empire of Constantinople.Footnote 15 Hungary’s involvement was undoubtedly motivated by a wish to exert a more direct form of governance over its neighbouring regions, and the curia would likely have viewed this as a welcome move in its imposition of a distinctly Latin ecclesiastical culture upon these areas.Footnote 16 Although nominally a vassal of the kingdom of Hungary, the Bosnian banate acted independently from its imposed overlord and it seems likely that the prospect of strengthening its grip on Bosnia was attractive to the Hungarian crown.Footnote 17 The “second wave” of activity in Bosnia would be brought to a halt in 1241 when the Hungarian contingent of the crusade, led by Coloman of Slavonia, was redirected to fight the Mongol armies which were fast encroaching upon the borderlands of Latin Christendom.Footnote 18

That the pope launched a movement of this kind in the wake of the Albigensian Crusade has much to tell historians about how the papacy conceptualised and wielded the crusade as a tool for the eradication of heresy as it shifted in the thirteenth century. Gregory’s intervention in Bosnia has not, however, been studied extensively until relatively recently as a crusade. Students of history in the Anglophone and Western European traditions, to whom the present volume will perhaps most directly speak, are most likely to encounter—if they do so at all—this crusade, or these crusades, as part of discussions of how Latin churchmen treated the heresy that they believed threatened the unity of Christendom. Bosnia is rarely given substantial treatment in surveys of the approaches taken by the Latin Church toward heresy, and usually plays the role of a strange Eastern country from which heretical bishops came to proselytise in the West or a peculiar breeding ground for a strange yet resilient heresy. This characterisation has influenced how historians have viewed the crusade as a venture by lending a false degree of inevitability to the movement: Bosnia’s mountainous terrain, weak governance, uncertain relationship with Greek and Latin cultures, and/or comparatively heterarchical ecclesiastical structure produced heresy—usually described as Catharism, Bogomilism, or Paterenism—which in turn necessitated a crusade, or series of crusades, to eradicate it.

Topoi such as these are the entangled inheritance of nineteenth-century agenda setting and uncritical reading of the papal source material, which has at best contributed to a poor understanding of the crusade’s objectives. The pope did not target “Bogomils” or adherents to any other confessional group in particular; he sought to disinfect the region, and Christendom by extension, of heretical pestilence. Whether it was Gregory’s decision to launch a crusade against Bosnian heretics “only” after or alongside other redemptive acts such as the installation of new clerics or preaching or not, his curia’s choice to take this course of action was a significant act in the wake of the Albigensian Crusade.

Worse, however, is how these narratives have obscured how we view the persecution of the people targeted by the crusade and the reshaping of their environs by the Latin Church. For example, in material which is still widely cited and prescribed on reading lists, the prominent religious organisation in Bosnia is described as an “old, backward, monk-dominated indigenous Church.”Footnote 19 In the context of a volume on crusading against Christians, an introduction to the crusade must then also unravel the historiographical genealogy of the crusade and the role that it has played in nation-building and Balkanist narratives of “Europe.”Footnote 20

Historiographical Overview

Brockett’s conviction that thousands of would-be Baptists were martyred at the hands of crucesignati, and that these martyrs were Bogomils, was formed in the context of a nineteenth-century resurgence of the scholarly study of medieval heresies. Scholars working within this tradition placed emphasis in their surveys on explaining the trajectory of their own confessional or national identities, but were also piqued by what they saw as the opportunities that heretics carved out for thought outside of dominant institutions such as the church. These threads of thought were, in turn, often entangled with the project of creating a modern Europe and, with it, a “Middle Ages” that supported this agenda.Footnote 21 The crusades as a form of persecution usually played a subtle but decisive role in the histories arising from these efforts.

Charles Schmidt was fascinated by medieval Bosnia as a region in which dualism was ostensibly able to thrive despite—or, perhaps, because of—its persecution by the Roman Church until the Ottoman conquest in 1463.Footnote 22 Schmidt, whose Histoire et doctrine de la secte des cathares ou albigeois (1849) is often credited with inaugurating the modern study of heresy, was a Protestant theologian who identified in the Bosnian “Cathars” a peculiar ability to resist the homogenising impulses of the Latin Church.Footnote 23 In his survey, dualists of medieval Europe were “Cathars” and Bosnia was the land in which Catharism was able to roam most freely. Bosnian Cathars were not “Bogomils”; importantly for Schmidt, Bogomils were “oriental” dualists and Bosnia fell within the “Occident.”Footnote 24 He did, however, view Bosnia and its environs as out of step with the remainder of Latin Christendom. In his text, even by the thirteenth century, the south “Slavic” lands had not felt the “civilising influence of the Gospel” as fully as they might have, the lands being covered by impenetrable forests in which men “half-wild” and in close contact with unconverted pagans dwelled.Footnote 25 This was in part why the Cathar heresy was able to thrive in Bosnia for so long; the land was “foreign to the progress of the human spirit, which was being accomplished elsewhere.”Footnote 26 Schmidt also, however, attributed Bosnia’s resilience to an innate ability to oppose Rome, an energy which was not defeated but fed by persecution.Footnote 27

Where Schmidt strove to explain the longevity of Catharism in Bosnia, others were driven by the question of why the Bosnians allegedly converted so quickly to Islam following the Ottoman takeover.Footnote 28 The Catholic priest and theologian Franjo Rački’s Bogomili i Paterini (1868), a classic pan-Slavist text, would usher in both the idea that the form of heresy in Bosnia of which Latin churchmen spoke was an offshoot of Bulgarian Bogomilism, and that the persecution of the adherents of this sect was the reason why so many converted to Islam.Footnote 29 Rački based his assessment of the movement in Bosnia on Latin sources and so the categories that he uses to label Bosnian heresy are those of the Latin Church; although he also referred to them as “Bosnian Bogomils,” Bosnian heretics are the “Patareni” of the book’s title. One of Rački’s key lines of enquiry was a consideration of why so many “Patarenes” converted to Islam following the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans when their “Bogomil” neighbours in Serbia and Croatia did not. He did not hold crusading or inquisition—the particular mechanics of which did not seem to interest him—directly responsible for the Patarenes’ conversion to Islam, but concluded that the centuries’ long conflict between the Patarenes and both the Latin and Greek churches swayed them to join the Turks out of a sense of revenge after having been persecuted for so long by the Latins and the Greeks.Footnote 30

If Rački seemed to exercise some caution over categories, others were more charmed by the story of a Balkan religion with strange contours which withstood the blows of the established churches while providing shelter to heretics who fled persecution from elsewhere in Europe. Brockett’s elegy for the Bosnian Bogomils references heavily Arthur J. Evans’ (1851–1941) account of his travels through Bosnia and Hercegovina during the 1875 uprising against the Ottomans.Footnote 31 Evans prefaced his account—a piece of travel writing with ethnographic flourishes and some archaeological commentary—with a short history of Bosnia, which included a long digression on the development of Bulgarian Bogomilism. This sect had ostensibly taken root in Bosnia by the twelfth century and continued to expand in the thirteenth century when Bosnia became a refuge to those other dualist proto-Protestants, the Albigensians.Footnote 32 Owing to the church’s “continued crusades, the persecutions of the Inquisition—fire, sword, exile, and dungeon,” the Bosnians chose to favour the “Infidel” when it came in the form of the Ottoman conquest in 1463.Footnote 33 In doing so, the Roman Church allowed the “alien civilisation and religion” of the Turks to infiltrate Europe.Footnote 34

That dualism ran rife in Bosnia would remain the dominant paradigm until it received a significant challenge in the form of John V.A. Fine’s The Bosnian Church (1975, reissued in 2007).Footnote 35 Fine argued that dualism was not the confessional identity of many Bosnians throughout the later Middle Ages, and his survey was the first which attempted to centre Bosnian society, and particularly the rural labourers who made up most of Bosnia’s population, in his narrative. The significant limitation of his work is that, in spite of the attention paid by Fine to Bosnian society and culture, religion is the stuff of hegemonic doctrines, liturgy, and theologies rather than of behaviour, society, or culture.Footnote 36 The Bosnian peasantry, most Bosnians, could not have been dualists because, being practically minded, peasants would not have been able to grasp complex theology.Footnote 37 While Fine speculates on the presence of creation myths and folk healing in Bosnian society, he does not read this as “religion.” This may seem inconsequential for our understanding of the crusade, but it factors into Fine’s speculation over whom the papacy targeted during the crusading movements of the 1230s. If peasants were unable to grasp doctrine of any kind, and were therefore not able to “be religious,” then they could not have been true targets of the crusade but only mistaken for “real” heretics. Bosnia’s monastic clergy might too have been mistaken for the “heretics.”Footnote 38

Here, Fine misses how the papacy narrated the spread of heresy in documents that detail and legitimise the crusade. It is important, of course, to consider that the papacy may well have cited the Bosnians’ adherence to a particular sect as reason for crusade outside of the papal documents which detail the crusade. But, as I discuss in the following section, if the letters which call for crusade, or appoint preachers, or depose prelates, do not expound on theologies, they do go into great depth on heresy as a disease, Bosnia as a special incubator of this blight, and the response of prominent individuals and would-be crusaders and heretics to such pestilence. This is a persistent analogue in Gregory’s letters, and how one behaved in response to this “disease” mattered. In these documents, those who lived in Bosnia and its neighbouring regions were targeted both as potential heretics and potential crusaders not because the church was searching to identify and root out a particular confessional devotion, but because the perceived eccentricities of that region’s landscape and its people were identified as heretical. The relative “oddness” that Fine identifies was not the reason that Bosnians were mistaken for real heretics; this oddness was heretical.

Fine’s reluctance to assume dualism where there was no evidence for this and his emphasis on Bosnian society and culture should have precipitated a major shift in how historians viewed the Bosnian Church and the Latin Church’s mapping of heresy. However, scholars, to varying degrees, continue to argue that dualists—whether Bogomil, Cathar, or Patarene—were present in Bosnia in significant numbers.Footnote 39 The implication of this line of argument for our understanding of the crusade is that it reinforces the outdated narrative of a group of adherents to a peculiar doctrine which withstood Roman persecution until the Ottomans arrived in the fifteenth century. The misunderstanding of the papacy’s aims in launching the crusade has led in turn to an artificial separation of crusade and other “missionary” acts such as pastoral care and the construction of churches. Where the popes and their mendicant advisors would have interpreted these acts as “works of the cross” and their purpose to implement invasively the norms of the Latin Church through a variety of means, the “persistence” of dualism in Bosnia has been interpreted as the failure of so-called missionary work to heal the antipathy sown through persecution.Footnote 40

Some ahistorical paradigms—Bosnia as “backward”; its strange terrain and rural society either a breeding ground for dualist thought or a predominantly peasant population who were too simple to grasp religion—have clearly persisted for a long stretch of time, even in revisionist literature. They have prevented us from viewing the crusade as one which targeted Bosnia and Bosnians as a land and a people to bring under the obedience of the Latin Church and remake in the divine image. These perceptions likely explain, at least in part, why more recent scholarship on crusading against Bosnians in the first half of the thirteenth century has largely avoided contending with religion altogether. In what follows, I read the crusades of the 1230s and associated works of the cross that were carried out in Bosnia in the context of the papacy’s growing penitential emphasis on the auto-surveillance and discipline of one’s own body and of others, and the startling reorientation of local, situated ties—to kin or to land—towards the heavenly realm.

A Land Deserted and Impassable: The “Work of the Cross” in Bosnia in the 1230s

On 5 June 1232, three years after the surrender of Count Raymond of Toulouse had ended the campaign against the Albigensians, just under a year before Pope Gregory IX mandated the use of inquisitions into heretical depravity as a tool with which to eliminate heresy, and two before he urged Christians in Hungary and Slavonia to take up the cross and exterminate heretics in Slavonia, the pope charged Ugrin, the archbishop of Kalocsa, and Stephen, the bishop of Zagreb, with the investigation of the bishop of Bosnia. Gregory had heard—he did not say from whom—that the bishop could “not recognise his imperfections, that is, that he is illiterate, a public defender of heretics, and that he arranged for himself to be appointed bishop by the vice of simony, through the agency of a known heretic.”Footnote 41 Furthermore, he did not celebrate the divine office or administer sacraments, and had no knowledge of the baptismal formula. Gregory and his informants saw the bishop’s lapse into heresy as the result of deadly contagion: “he used to stay with a heretic on a certain country estate, and his blood brother is a known heretical leader.”Footnote 42

The alleged sins described are so striking that they have tended to draw the reader’s attention away from an observation that would have been particularly alarming to Gregory. The bishop was not only an illiterate simoniac who publicly defended heresy and did not perform his sacramental duties, he could also “not recognise” these errors. Gregory’s world was one in which the perpetual observation and discipline of one’s own unruly and corruptible body were expected of all members of the Latin Christian community as a precondition of salvation. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 mandated annual confession which, though it was to be administered by a cleric, required penitents’ initial identification of their own sins.Footnote 43 The papal curia and the offices of those who had been charged with administering the delivery of pastoral care were populated by friars who emulated a Christ whom they believed had come to persecute.Footnote 44 Gregory’s own confessor was a Dominican friar, Raymond of Peñafort, who codified the pastoral regime of Lateran IV in the Liber Extra of 1234. Raymond was instrumental in the formal development of the inquisition, which he developed in the context of pastoral care through the handbook that he wrote for confessors, the Summa Penitentia (1225–1235).Footnote 45

A true Christian, and a pastor no less, ought then to have placed himself under constant self-surveillance. The bishop’s alleged admission that he was not able to recognise his purported sins for what they were did not absolve him of his errors but amplified them. He had admitted that he was unperturbed by his close proximity to known heretics, in and of itself concerning behaviour for a pastor. The gravity of his other sins, his familiarity with heretics, and that he shared blood with a heresiarch, however, meant that his obliviousness would have been read as a sign that he, too, had been infected with heretical pestilence.Footnote 46

We learn from a 1233 letter of Gregory that, during the investigation, the bishop had pleaded that he had indeed sinned “out of ignorance” (ex simplicitate).Footnote 47 It was only fit, then, that the bishop be removed from office. The letter was addressed to John of Palestrina, Gregory’s legate in Bosnia. Unfortunately for the Bosnian bishop, what may well have been a truthful, or at least seemingly reasonable, defence did not only fail to absolve him of his actions, but it had also compounded his other alleged sins. Accordingly, Gregory charged John with the removal of the bishop from his see and undertaking the diocesan re-organisation that seemed necessary to combat heresy among the Bosnians, the greater portion of whom had been “infected with heretical depravity.” He was to appoint, as he saw fit, “two, three, or four men … learned in the law of God.” By “imitating ardently the spirit of the poverty of the poor Christ”—echoing the words used by Innocent III in his instructions to his legate Ralph, a monk of Froidmont, on preaching to suspected heretics in southern France—and “by the example of good works and instruction in sermons,” they would “report the scattering of seeds.”Footnote 48 The bishop had failed in his duties, and the radical restructuring of the diocese and oversight of external clergy would remedy the situation. John of Wildeshausen (1180–1252), a future Minister General of the Order of Friars Preacher and experienced preacher of the cross, was appointed as a replacement.Footnote 49

It is tempting to read the instruction of a letter as a mild response to the problem at hand compared with the bloody violence of crusade. Removing an unfit leader, appointing educated people in his stead, and reorganising the ecclesiastical structure of the region had been a tried and tested method of converting people to the true faith for hundreds of years. It is, however, difficult, particularly given historians’ preoccupation with Bosnia’s mountainous and heavily forested geography, to skirt over a reference made by the curia to Bosnia’s terrain; specifically, in relation to Bosnia’s ecclesiastical infrastructure. Gregory ordered that the legate remove the bishop from the control both of his church and “in other places in the Bosnian diocese, which is said to be not a little spread out” (non modicum est diffusa).Footnote 50 For historians who have tried to map out the contours of Christianity in Bosnia, Bosnia’s “remote” or “wild” landscape is a factor either in Bosnia’s susceptibility to heresy or in the evolution of its church separately from the Latin or Greek churches. Fine attributed Bosnia’s idiosyncratic religion and weak ecclesiastical infrastructure to Bosnia’s rural settlement pattern and rugged landscape.Footnote 51 For Lambert, “Bosnia, with its forests and mountains, was an ecclesiastical no-man’s land in which neither of the churches had effective jurisdiction.”Footnote 52 Filipović argues that Bosnia’s rugged terrain helped the Bosnians to resist the Latin Church and develop their own “religious and ecclesiastical policy independently of foreign influence.”Footnote 53

The pope rearticulated this theme using more metaphoric and forceful language in his letters regarding the preparation for crusade. On 13 February 1234, he wrote to all the prelates and Christian faithful in “Carniola, Istria, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and all other parts forming Slavonia” to announce the arrival of a legate, the prior of the charterhouse of St. Bartholomew at Trisulti, who would preach the cross throughout Slavonia.Footnote 54 The letter describes Bosnia specifically as “a land as though deserted and impassable (terra velut deserta et invia) … filled with thorns and nettles, and made a lair of dragons and pasture for ostriches.”Footnote 55 He repeated this phrasing in a letter to John of Wildeshausen on 17 October 1234, in which he asked the new bishop to preach the cross.Footnote 56

We might write this off as a stock description of a region in which heretical pestilence was left to spread unchecked. But it is worth remarking upon for a number of reasons. The descriptor terra deserta et invia is a reference to Psalms 62:3, which describes David’s longing for God while in the desert of Edom. “In a desert land, impassable, and without water,” David supplicated to God for direction and nourishment. It was not the first time that the psalm had been used to describe Slavonia, and was used in a number of other contexts to describe unusual lands with difficult terrain. Slavonia was a terra deserta et invia, et montuosa in the passage of the chronicler Raymond d’Aguilers’ Historia Francorum (c.1105) in which he discusses the difficult journey of Raymond of Saint-Gilles’ army through Slavonia on the First Crusade.Footnote 57 The verse was referenced by the prolific chronicler Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), to describe Ireland in his Topographica Hibernica (1188), a retrospective justification for the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland: “Ireland is an uneven land and mountainous; soft and watery; wooded and marshy; and truly a desert land, impassable, but with water.”Footnote 58

The papacy alluded to the psalm in descriptions of Provincia, the land between the Rhône and the Garonne that was targeted by the participants in the Albigensian Crusade. For those outside of the curia, the verdant and mountainous landscape of these regions had become, by the 1200s, a rotting wilderness that conducted the spread of heretical filth.Footnote 59 Honorius III, towards the end of his pontificate, adopted this conceit in his description of the areas of the Languedoc which had been infected with heretical depravity as a terra deserta, invia et inaquosa.Footnote 60 The connection made by various ecclesiastical authorities between an unruly or odd landscape and the need for invasive reform is an important context for the papal curia’s comments about Bosnia, and tracing it enables us to situate the curia’s depiction of the region within a much wider ecclesiastical project in which reordering the world to reflect the heavenly hierarchy was a necessary means for universal salvation.

As part of this project, Gregory also sought to reorder the relationships of the Bosnian people to one another. On 10 October 1233, Gregory IX wrote to the Bosnian ban, Matej Ninoslav (d. 1250), to tell him that as he had abjured the heresy of his ancestors, Gregory would place his possessions under papal protection.Footnote 61 On the same day, he wrote to Coloman, duke of Slavonia (1208–1241), who may have been eager for a Bosnian campaign and would later be appointed by the pope to lead one, to explain that, as Ninoslav had renounced heresy, he should be left alone to persecute heretics as he saw fit.Footnote 62 These exchanges label Ninoslav’s ancestors as rulers who had been infected with heretical depravity and had aided and abetted heresy in the lands under their jurisdiction. This wrote Ninoslav into a narrative in which his ancestors, without recourse to their own abjuration, were tarred for eternity as heretics. Whether he cared that deeply about what the curia thought or not, the pestilential understanding of heresy meant that Ninoslav too would always be under suspicion of permitting heresy to flourish, if not of being a heretic himself. He became implicated in this narrative by “recognising” that his predecessors were guilty of this crime. He thus had to become complicit in this accusation, casting his ancestors in a heretical light, and rejecting their practice, presumably whether he had understood their practices to have been erroneous or not. It was a humiliating ritual which recast his society’s history in the eyes of a dominant power as one replete with heresy, and became an accusation that he and other members of his family would repeatedly have to prove that they were rejecting. A few years later in 1236, Sibislav, the Knez of Usora and the unnamed widow of the previous ban, Stephen, would be praised by Gregory for standing out among Slavonian nobles, as “lilies among thorns,” for opposing heresy.Footnote 63

This is perhaps why Gregory pulled an about-turn after stating clearly that Coloman ought to leave Ninoslav alone to root out heresy. In the spirit of Luke 14:26—“if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, and indeed his own life also, he cannot be my disciple”—Gregory wrote to all of the prelates and Christian faithful in Slavonia on 13 February 1234 to encourage them to take up the cross and exterminate heretics “in Bosnia and neighbouring countries.”Footnote 64 Whoever took up this cross against their neighbours would receive the same plenary indulgence as that received by those who travelled to the Holy Land. He explained that the prior of the Carthusian monastery of St. Bartholomew in Trisulti was coming to the region, “imitating the poverty of the poor Christ in a contemptible state and with burning spirit”—Gregory again employs this as an ideal model for preaching—to “root out and destroy, scatter and ruin, build and plant just as the lord himself.”Footnote 65 From their ambiguous position within Christendom, in becoming crucesignati, the Bosnians would place themselves firmly under the obedience of the Latin Church as only those who would be saved could be. If they did not take up the cross against heresy, then they were liable to be accused of it. Later that year, on 17 October, Gregory also wrote to John of Wildeshausen to preach the cross, noting that anyone who took up the cross would be granted the plenary indulgence given to the crusaders who travelled to the Holy Land.Footnote 66

Given its uncertain contours in papal writing, however, I suggest that including the crusade under the amorphous umbrella of the “works of the cross” rather than a discrete event better captures what the papacy aimed to achieve. Such blending is evident in other letters concerning the preparation for the crusade. On 13 October 1234, Gregory wrote to Coloman of Halych to ask him to join the efforts in converting those who had been “infected with the stain of heretical depravity,” to prepare to go “manfully and powerfully” against the regions of Slavonia, and to undertake holy work so that those who were sitting in the darkness of perfidy might be brought to the light of the catholic faith.Footnote 67 On 17 October, he sent a second letter to John of Wildeshausen which granted him permission to relax the penance of excommunicates or people who had enacted violence against clerics if they went against heretics in Slavonia. On the same day, in three separate letters, he took into papal protection the goods of the Hungarian crucesignati, the bishop of Zagreb, and Coloman.Footnote 68 They had been granted such a privilege because they had taken up the “life-restoring sign of the cross.”Footnote 69 The cross was life-restoring, of course, because it gave access to the true life, which was not of this world but of the next. Life was not the terra deserta et invia of the Bosnians but the via crucis. This might be achieved through the redemptive violence of crusade or the invasive implementation of a distinctly “Latin” Church; the two blend into each other.

Such blending appears in the curia’s narration of what it had at least understood to be the aftermath of the extermination of alleged heretics. Gregory initially seemed confident that the efforts made to purge Bosnia were successful. In a letter to the bishop of the Cumans on 26 April 1238, in which Gregory told the bishop—who presumably now had some authority over Bosnia—to consecrate the new bishop-elect Ponsa, he mentioned that Coloman had “erased the stain of heretical depravity from Bosnia.”Footnote 70 On 22 December 1238, he congratulated Coloman for erasing the stain of heretical depravity in Bosnia, an area in which the light of catholic purity now “shines forth.”Footnote 71 This might indicate that Gregory had marked the end of the crusade. It was important, however, that good works continued. In another letter of 22 December, Gregory wrote that Bosnia had always, up to this point in time, endured the shame of heretical depravity “in injury to the redeemer and to the endangerment of souls.”Footnote 72 In the letter, he implored the archbishop of Esztergom and his suffragans to give money to the bishop of Bosnia, who had also been given the full legatine office, so that he could continue his good works. The Benedictine abbot of Várad (Oradea) was ordered to collect money from crusaders who had redeemed their vows and assign it to the bishop.Footnote 73 On the same day, the abbot was also asked to give some money that had been deposited by one Ban Iula to the bishop of Bosnia so that he could keep fighting heresy.Footnote 74

Curiously, in a letter dated 23 December of the same year, Gregory wrote to the Friars Preacher in Pécs that the region had fallen back into heresy. The friars were ordered to send money to the bishop for the construction of a cathedral.Footnote 75 On the same day, he called for a new crusade. He gave legatine powers and the power to grant remission of sins to the bishop of Bosnia and asked him to exhort the faithful of the kingdom of Hungary to prepare to abolish heretical pestilence in the Bosnian diocese. Everyone who went on crusade would have their goods and families placed under the protection and defence of the apostolic see.Footnote 76 On 6 December 1239, the provincial prior of the Order of Friars Preacher was instructed to preach the gospel in the land of Bosnia.Footnote 77

Despite reports of success, then, the pope clearly feared that the threat of heresy had not disappeared from Bosnia and its environs. Given Gregory’s observation that all but a few members of the Bosnian ruling families had been contaminated by heretical depravity, and that those virtuous few were nonetheless characters in a narrative in which their ancestral bloodlines were adulterated with heresy, it is difficult to see how the papacy’s fears would have been assuaged by some initial tales of triumph.

Conclusions

No troubadour sang of the Bosnian crusade. In 1241, the armies of Batu Khan decimated Hungary and parts of Poland. The sudden arrival of an unfamiliar people to Latin Christendom terrified secular and ecclesiastical leaders who redirected their attention from other concerns to the Mongol threat. This included Coloman, as the erstwhile leader of the campaigns against Bosnian heretics, who died in April 1241 from injuries sustained at the battle of Mohi. Temporarily given respite from the disturbance, Bosnia would continue to be viewed with suspicion by the curia up until the Ottoman conquest of 1463, and subsequent popes would launch various campaigns under the banner of the cross.Footnote 78

For Gregory IX, the urgent and all-consuming pull of the negotium crucis and the lack of Latin ecclesiastical infrastructure proved to be necessary provocation for reimagining the land to reflect Christ’s glory and the light of the true faith. What appears, particularly towards the end of the 1230s, as either a chaotic or cautious mix of pastoral care and crusade was a series of efforts to exterminate heresy by transforming Bosnia’s landscape and its people. Fuelling this was the papal impression of Bosnia as a land deserted and laid to waste. The crusade was just one part of a forceful societal reordering which encompassed the installation of a Latin ecclesiastical infrastructure to wrest the focus of the populace from their relationship with the land to the church, alongside other invasive forms of correction.

The lingering historiographic narrative of Bosnia as “backward” because of its rural ties demonstrates both a detached acquiescence to a trope created by a hostile source base and also a modernising impulse in which the Balkan lands were out of step with the rest of Europe. Paradigms in which the Bosnian landscape and rural dispersal of Bosnian society made Bosnians prone to serious error or incapable of absorbing doctrine—and therefore, in such interpretations, of “having” religion at all—are inadequate to capture either the agenda of Gregory’s curia in the 1230s or the much longer current of eschatological thought into which Bosnia was placed by the curia. Dealing directly with the impact of this stereotype allows us to see the crusade as part of the papacy’s wider project of embedding a distinctly Latin Church within Bosnia’s landscape and imagination. The crusade was not, or not simply, a harsher mode of action to which the papacy might seek recourse when building new churches or installing new clerics failed, but one which worked in tandem with these other acts as part of a radical programme of (re)building Latin Christendom.