A short history of the Bosnia-Serbia border

 

Map 1 (Picture credit: By Optimus Pryme - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24964800)

In the late twelfth century, the Byzantine chronicler Kinnamos observed that Bosnia was a territory “with its own customs and government”, separated from Serbia by the river Drina.

As Noel Malcolm notes in his Bosnia: A Short History, from this period the Drina “remained Bosnia’s eastern border for much of its later history.”

One small section of the Drina that formed part of the border at this time has a particularly long history as the boundary between Bosnia and Serbia. It comprises a few kilometres around the eastern tip of the Drina, a section of the river that today divides a small section of the Bosnian municipalities of Srebrenica and Bratunac on the west side and Serbia on the east.

Under the Ottoman Empire Bosnian territory would expand to the east of the Drina well into modern-day Serbia, except at this small section of the river, which continued to mark Bosnia’s eastern extent.

The rest of the border was only established in its final form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following multiple changes in the late medieval and Ottoman periods. This blogpost seeks to trace these developments.

The medieval border

While the present-day section of the border between Bosnia and Serbia that is marked by the Drina traces its history back to the reign of Ban Kulin from 1180 to 1204, much of the southern section of the border was established under King Tvrtko, who ruled Bosnia from 1353 to 1391. Under his predecessors Bosnian territory had been entirely to the west of the Drina, but Tvrtko expanded it to include a large part of modern day Bosnia around the town of Visegrad.

With this expansion, the border now diverged from the Drina south of Srebrenica following the Brusnicki Potok (a tributary to the Drina, shaded in green on Map 1) and continuing south. Although the Brusnicki Potok is much narrower than the Drina, it is situated in a deep canyon that forms a formidable natural border – one that marks the dividing line between Bosnia and Serbia to this day.

Aside from conquering the modern-day Bosnian territory that lies east of the Drina, Tvrtko also took over a large part of the modern-day territories of Montenegro and the Serbian Sandzak. But following his reign, as noted by Malcolm, “Bosnia entered a long period of weak rule and confusion.”

In the fifteenth century, it faced multiple Serbian incursions. The historian Konstantin Josef Jireček in his History of the Serbs notes that Srebrenica, which was sought after for its rich mining resources, changed hands several times, falling under Serbian control five times between 1411 and the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463.

Bosnia expands under the Ottomans

At the time of the Ottoman takeover of Bosnia, Serbia had already been annexed by the Ottomans in 1459. But the Turks did not erase the border between the historic Bosnian and Serbian territories. Instead, they split Bosnia into different sanjaks, including the Sanjak of Zvornik in the east, while the Serbian territory that had bordered Bosnia became the Sanjak of Smederevo.

Although the old Bosnia-Serbia border was not erased, it was moved east with the expansion of the Sanjak of Zvornik in the early sixteenth century. The historian Hazim Šabanović in his Bosanski pašaluk: Postanak i upravna podjela notes that Macva (a region of modern-day Serbia that includes the city of Sabac) became part of the Sanjak of Zvornik between 1526 and 1533.

Further south, the Sanjak of Zvornik also extended far to the east of the Brusnicki Potok, the previous boundary between Bosnia and Serbia, all the way to the village of Brvenik (incorrectly spelt as Drvenik on Map 2), more than 100 kilometres from the modern-day Serbia-Bosnia border.

In 1580, the Ottomans created the eyalet of Bosnia from the sanjaks into which the old Kingdom of Bosnia had been divided, including the enlarged sanjak of Zvornik.

Map 2 (Picture credit: Armin Šupuk, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

As shown by the Map 2, although Bosnian territory extended deep into historic Serbia, at its eastern tip the Drina remained the border between Bosnia and Smederevo.

And although the Brusnicki Potok was no longer the boundary between the two territories, as is also shown by Map 2 it continued as an internal border within the Eyalet of Bosnia, separating the sanjaks of Zvornik and Bosnia.  

Following the establishment of the Eyalet of Bosnia, the Ottoman Empire was for long periods at war with the Habsburg Empire and Venice, resulting in multiple changes to Bosnia’s northern and western borders. But it was only in the eighteenth century that this conflict began to affect its eastern border.

The Drina border re-emerges

Having pushed the Ottomans back from territory that is today part of Croatia during the seventeenth century, the Austrians in the Austro-Turkish War of 1716 to 1718 took over most of the sanjak of Smederevo, renaming it the Kingdom of Serbia. They also took a strip territory in the north of Bosnia, including the town of Bijeljina and the surrounding area.

With this Austrian advance, the Drina began to re-emerge as the main dividing line between Bosnia and Serbia, because as shown by Map 3, the Habsburgs divided the territory they controlled on each side of the river into “North Bosnia” and the Kingdom of Serbia. The city of Sabac and surrounding region, which under the Ottomans had been part of the Sanjak of Zvornik within the Eyalet of Bosnia, was now part of the Kingdom of Serbia.

Map 3 (Picture credit: Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1482397)

With the Austro-Turkish War of 1737 to 1739, the Austrians lost control of North Bosnia and the Kingdom of Serbia to the Ottoman Empire. But rather than bringing Sabac and the surrounding region back into the Eyalet of Bosnia, Sabanovic in Bosanski Pasaluk notes that the Ottomans allocated it to the Sanjak of Smederevo, retaining the northern part of the Drina as the border between the two territories.

However, this was reversed at the time of the Treaty of Sistova in 1791, which followed another Habsburg-Ottoman conflict that had broken out in 1787. With this treaty, Sabanovic notes, the former Bosnian territory east of the Drina was returned to the sanjak of Zvornik within the Eyalet of Bosnia.

The Drina would finally be established as the main dividing line between Bosnia and Serbia following a series of events beginning with the Serbian uprising that erupted in 1804 under the revolutionary leader Karadjordje. In the following years, Serb rebels established control of the entire Sanjak of Smederevo, as well as the territories east of the Drina that had been part of the Eyalet of Bosnia.

The uprising also spread to the west bank of the Drina and for a time Karadjordje was in control of territory that is now part of Bosnia, including the towns of Bijeljina, Zvornik and Srebrenica. But following a successful advance in 1809, as noted by Leopold von Ranke in his A History of Servia and the Servian Revolution, Karadjordje ordered his troops to retreat in the face of an Ottoman counterattack.

Nevertheless, he continued to hold the territory captured from the Eyalet of Bosnia east of the Drina and Brusnicki Potok , and retained it until 1813 when the Ottomans crushed the uprising and Karadjordje retreated to Austrian territory.

This demise of Karadjordje did not result in a total defeat for the Serbian project. With the Treaty of Bucharest that had been signed in 1812 between the Ottomans and the Russians (who had gone to war with the Ottomans in 1806), the Ottomans had agreed to give the Serbs autonomy in the Smederevo sanjak.

They also promised to award six “nahiyes” (administrative entities within the Ottoman Empire) to the new autonomous territory. These included the historically Serbian territories that had been incorporated into the sanjak of Zvornik in the early Ottoman period; Jadar and Radjevina east of the Drina and Stari Vlah to the east of the Brusnicki Potok.

The six nahiyes (including the three that had previously been part of the Bosnian Eyalet) were ultimately awarded to autonomous Serbia with the treaty of Adrianople in 1829, which was implemented by 1833.

Map 4 (Picture credit: By PANONIAN - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9016192)

With these changes, the Drina and Brusnicki Potok, established as the border between Bosnia and Serbia in the Middle Ages, again marked the main boundary between the two territories, a dividing line that exists to this day.

In 1877, the village of Mali Zvornik on the east bank of the Drina was transferred from Bosnia to Serbia, and in the same year the Ottomans administratively separated the Sanjak of Novi Pazar from Bosnia. Part of this territory was captured by Serbia in 1912 during the Balkan wars, establishing the southern section of the Serbia-Bosnia border.

The border established between the republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia at the end of the Second World War corresponded to the dividing line that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also included a small section of the river Sava separating northeast Bosnia from the Vojvodina, an autonomous province within Serbia. 

This border, most of which dates back to the medieval period, is now the international boundary between the two countries.