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Ottoman conquest of Bosnia and Herzegovina


The Ottoman conquest of Bosnia and Herzegovina was a process that started roughly in 1384, when the first Ottoman attacks on the Kingdom of Bosnia took place. In 1451, more than 65 years after its initial attacks, the Ottoman Empire officially established the Bosansko Krajište, an interim borderland military administrative unit, an Ottoman frontier, in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1463, the Kingdom fell to the Ottomans, and this territory came under its firm control. Herzegovina fell to the Ottomans in 1482. It took another century for the western parts of today's Bosnia to succumb to Ottoman attacks, ending with the capture of Bihać in 1592.

The entire territory that is today known as Bosnia and Herzegovina was not conquered by Ottoman Empire at once, in a single battle; rather, it took the Ottoman Empire several decades to conquer it. Military units of the Ottoman Empire made many raids into feudal principalities in the western Balkans at the end of 14th century, some of them into territory of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, long before the conquest of the Bosnian Kingdom. The first Ottoman raids led by Timuras-Pasha happened in eastern parts of Bosnia in 1384. The Battle of Bileća in 1388 was the first battle of the Ottoman army on the territory of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina. It soon won important victories against the regional feudal lords in the Battle of Marica (1371) and Battle of Kosovo (1389).

In 1392, the Ottomans established the Skopsko Krajište following the capture of Skopje, the capital of the Serbian Empire between 1346-1371; the term krajište (крајиште) had originally served as an administrative unit of the Serbian Empire or Despotate to designate border regions where the emperor or despot had not established solid and firm control due to raids from hostile neighboring provinces. The militarized territories that would later receive the name Bosansko Krajište (lit. Bosnian Frontierland) were thus governed by the same Ottoman administration, based in Skopje.


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