Page 130

the Byzantine army or fell into Arab captivity. Perhaps among them were the four “Slavs” who accompanied the eminent Companion Abu Dharr al-Ghifari on his journey from Damascus to Medina.

When the Ottoman Turks took control of most of the Balkans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Bosnia and the Principality of Herzegovina became parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Serbs were unable to regain their independence finally until the decision of the Congress of Berlin in 1878. That decision also provided that Bosnia and Herzegovina would be ruled and administered by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. As for the Croats who live in the northwestern part of present-day Yugoslavia, the Ottoman conquests did not extend across all their lands. At the beginning of the twelfth century they had been forced to join the Kingdom of Hungary and recognize the sovereignty of its kings. The Slovenes in the far north of present-day Yugoslavia were likewise tied to Austria-Hungary until 1918, when the state of Yugoslavia was established, meaning the state of the South Slavs. It had borne this name since 1929 and was composed of three elements: Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

The ancestors of these Slavs in the Balkans were pagans who were strict in their paganism. Efforts to convert them to Christianity did not succeed until after the middle of the ninth century. The Croats and Slovenes then became followers of the Catholic Church, while the Serbs followed the Orthodox Church.

The inhabitants of Bosnia, situated between Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox influence, included many adherents of the Bogomil doctrine, the “lovers of God,” which drew its origins from Manichaeism, a mixture of Christianity, Persian religion and Buddhism, and was later influenced by Islam. It spread through southern Europe, in the Balkans, Italy and France, under different names.

When the Bogomil movement began spreading from Bulgaria into the Principality of Serbia at the end of the twelfth century, its authorities feared the spread of the new doctrine. They sent a military campaign against its followers, burned their books, destroyed their homes, confiscated their property, cut out the tongue of their leader and subjected them to severe persecution, even burning some of them. The remnants of the Bogomils fled to the Principality of Bosnia, where they found among its people tolerance, gentleness, sympathy and care from Prince Kulin Ban, which led to the rapid spread of the doctrine.

The Bogomil movement met strong resistance from the religious authorities in Rome, to the point that they asked the kings of Hungary to send military campaigns against its followers. These campaigns, however,