The history of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina lies in the mountainous heart of the western Balkans, and its history is one of a distinct land held together across changing empires and faiths. Illyrian tribes and then Rome ruled it in antiquity; Slavs settled it in the early Middle Ages; and from the twelfth century a native banate, later a kingdom, grew up with its own church. Four centuries of Ottoman rule from 1463 made it a province where Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians and Jews lived side by side, before Austria-Hungary took it over in 1878. In the twentieth century it was part of both Yugoslav states and suffered genocide in the Second World War, and its declaration of independence in 1992 led to a war of mass expulsion and killing, including the genocide at Srebrenica. The Dayton Agreement of 1995 created the complex state that exists today.

The region has been inhabited since the Old Stone Age. In the Neolithic, farming villages of the Butmir culture flourished near present-day Sarajevo from around 5000 BCE, known for their finely decorated pottery and clay figurines, and the Kakanj culture occupied the central valleys. In the Bronze and Iron Ages the land was home to peoples whom Greek and Roman writers grouped as Illyrians, among them the Daesitiates of central Bosnia, the Maezaei in the north-west and the Ardiaei and Autariatae further south. Celtic groups moved into parts of the region in the fourth and third centuries BCE and mixed with them, in the wider expansion of the Celts.

The Roman Republic fought the Illyrians along the coast from the third century BCE, and the interior was brought under control during the reign of Augustus. In 6 CE the Daesitiates under their leader Bato rose in the Great Illyrian Revolt, one of the most serious challenges Rome faced, and it took three years and a huge army to crush them. The land then became part of the province of Dalmatia in the Roman Empire. Roads were cut through the mountains, silver and iron were mined around Srebrenica, whose Roman name Argentaria referred to its silver, and the spa of Aquae Sulphurae grew up at Ilidža, near Sarajevo. Christianity reached the region by the end of the second century.

When the empire was divided, the region fell within the Western Roman Empire, and after its collapse it was ruled by the Ostrogoths. Justinian I brought it back under the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, but Avar and Slav invasions soon overran the Balkan interior, and by the seventh century Slavs had settled the land. Remnants of the Romanised population survived as the pastoral Vlachs of the mountains. The first written mention of Bosnia as a small territory comes from the tenth-century Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, when it was associated with the Serbian prince Časlav; over the following two centuries parts of it passed under Croatian, Bulgarian, Byzantine and Hungarian influence.

By the twelfth century Bosnia was a banate, ruled by a ban who owed nominal allegiance to the kings of Hungary while acting largely independently. Ban Kulin, who ruled from about 1180 to 1204, is remembered for a long period of peace and for his charter of 1189 granting the merchants of Dubrovnik free trade, one of the oldest surviving documents written in the local Slavic language. His reign also saw the beginnings of the Bosnian Church, an independent Christian community whose beliefs remain debated by historians: Rome and Hungary accused it of the dualist heresy of the Bogomils, while many scholars now see it as a schismatic monastic church that was largely orthodox in doctrine. Hungarian crusades against Bosnian heresy in the thirteenth century failed to subdue the country.

Under the Kotromanić dynasty Bosnia reached its height. Ban Stjepan II added Hum, the later Herzegovina, and parts of the Dalmatian coast, and his nephew Tvrtko I was crowned king in 1377, claiming also the Serbian crown. Tvrtko briefly ruled much of the Adriatic coast. Silver and lead mines at Srebrenica and Olovo, worked by Saxon miners and exported through Dubrovnik, made Bosnia rich. After Tvrtko's death in 1391, however, power passed to great noble families, and in the south Stjepan Vukčić Kosača styled himself herceg, or duke, in 1448, giving Herzegovina its name.

The Ottoman Empire raided Bosnia from the 1380s and gradually took control of its eastern parts. In 1463 Sultan Mehmed II invaded, and the last king, Stjepan Tomašević, surrendered at Ključ and was executed. Herzegovina held out until 1482, and Hungary kept a defensive line in the north around Jajce until 1527. Bosnia became an Ottoman province, first a sanjak and from 1580 a pashalik, or eyalet, that kept its name and much of its territory.

Over the following generations a large part of the population converted to Islam, including much of the landholding class, so that Slavic-speaking Muslims, the ancestors of today's Bosniaks, became the largest community. Historians still debate how far the Bosnian Church's weakness eased conversion. Orthodox Christians spread across the land, often as Vlach settlers and frontier soldiers, and the Catholic Franciscans received a charter of protection from Mehmed II in 1463, although their numbers fell. Sephardi Jews, expelled from Spain by Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella in 1492, settled in Sarajevo and other towns from the sixteenth century, bringing with them the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated medieval manuscript.

While the frontier lay far to the north in Hungary, Bosnia flourished. Sarajevo, founded as an Ottoman town in the 1460s, grew into a major centre of crafts and trade, and the governor Gazi Husrev-beg endowed its great mosque, school and covered market in the 1530s. Under Suleiman the Magnificent the architect Mimar Hayruddin built the Old Bridge at Mostar, completed in 1566. Bosnians rose high in the empire's service: Mehmed Paša Sokolović, born near Višegrad, served as grand vizier to three sultans and built the famous bridge there. Many Bosnian boys entered that service through the devşirme, the levy of Christian children.

From the late seventeenth century Bosnia again became a frontier. Prince Eugene of Savoy burned Sarajevo in 1697, and the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 left Bosnia as the empire's north-western bulwark against the Habsburg Monarchy. In the nineteenth century the Bosnian Muslim nobility resisted the sultans' centralising reforms, and Husein Gradaščević led a revolt in 1831 demanding autonomy, which was defeated, while Christian peasants, burdened by taxes and labour dues, grew restive.

In 1875 a peasant uprising in Herzegovina spread through Bosnia and drew in Serbia, Montenegro and Russia, leading to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. At the Congress of Berlin the great powers gave Austria-Hungary the right to occupy and administer Bosnia and Herzegovina, which remained formally Ottoman. Its troops overcame armed resistance, mostly from Muslims, within months. The new administration built railways, roads, schools and the buildings that still give central Sarajevo its look, while leaving the old landholding system largely in place, and it tried without success to promote a common Bosnian identity against growing Serb and Croat nationalism.

In 1908 Franz Joseph I annexed the provinces outright, provoking a European crisis and the anger of Serbia. On 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb member of the Young Bosnia movement, shot dead the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia set off the First World War, during which Serbs in Bosnia were persecuted and interned by the authorities.

After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. A land reform took estates from Muslim landlords and gave them to their Christian tenants, often with violence. The Bosnian Muslim leader Mehmed Spaho managed at first to keep Bosnia's historic boundaries as administrative units, but King Alexander's banovinas of 1929 divided it, and the 1939 agreement creating an autonomous Banovina of Croatia split it further between Croat and Serb spheres.

When Germany and its allies invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina was given to the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ruled by the Ustaša movement. The Ustaša regime carried out genocide against Serbs, Jews and Roma. Most of Bosnia's Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia were killed in camps such as Jasenovac and in massacres in their villages. Serb nationalist Chetniks in turn massacred Muslims and Croats, killing an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Muslims across Yugoslavia. Some Muslim notables publicly condemned the Ustaša crimes in 1941, while others joined Axis formations such as the SS Handschar division.

Bosnia's mountains were the main battleground of the Second World War in Yugoslavia and the base of the communist-led Partisans of Josip Broz Tito, who drew fighters from all communities and fought the Germans, Italians, Ustaša and Chetniks in the great battles of the Neretva and Sutjeska in 1943. In November 1943 the Partisan council meeting at Jajce proclaimed a new federal Yugoslavia in which Bosnia and Herzegovina would be one of six republics. Sarajevo was liberated in April 1945.

In Tito's Yugoslavia the republic was industrialised, with mines, steelworks and arms factories, and Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. The communist authorities first counted Muslims as an undefined group, but in 1968 recognised them as a nation, recorded as Muslims in the census from 1971 and later known as Bosniaks. Bosnian politicians such as Džemal Bijedić, federal prime minister until his death in 1977, gained influence. The writer Ivo Andrić, whose novel The Bridge on the Drina told the story of Višegrad across four centuries, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. After Tito's death in 1980 the economy faltered, the Agrokomerc financial scandal of 1987 discredited the republic's leadership, and nationalism rose across Yugoslavia as communist rule weakened in the Revolutions of 1989.

The first multi-party elections in November 1990 were won by three national parties: Alija Izetbegović's Bosniak Party of Democratic Action, Radovan Karadžić's Serb Democratic Party and the Croatian Democratic Union. After Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, Bosnian Serb leaders, backed by Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade, set up their own assembly and autonomous regions. In a referendum on 29 February and 1 March 1992, boycotted by most Serbs, nearly all voters chose independence, which the European Community recognised in April.

War began in April 1992. Bosnian Serb forces, armed by the Yugoslav army, seized about seventy per cent of the country within months and expelled or killed non-Serbs in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, with detention camps such as Omarska and Keraterm near Prijedor and mass killings and rapes in towns along the Drina. Sarajevo was besieged from April 1992 to February 1996, the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare, and shelling and sniper fire killed around 11,000 of its people. From 1993 Croat forces seeking to create the statelet of Herzeg-Bosnia fought the Bosniak-led government army, and in November 1993 a Croat tank destroyed the Old Bridge at Mostar. The Washington Agreement of March 1994 ended the Croat-Bosniak war and created a joint federation.

The eastern town of Srebrenica had been declared a United Nations safe area in 1993. On 11 July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić overran it, while a lightly armed Dutch peacekeeping battalion stood aside. Over the following days they separated the men from the women and children, deported between 25,000 and 30,000 people, and shot more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, burying them in mass graves that were later dug up and scattered to hide the crime. The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled in 2004 that the killings were genocide, and the International Court of Justice reached the same conclusion in 2007, finding that Serbia had not committed the genocide but had violated its obligation to prevent it. The tribunal later convicted Karadžić and Mladić of genocide, and both were sentenced to life imprisonment. Some Serb politicians in Bosnia and Serbia continue to reject the term genocide, and in 2024 the United Nations General Assembly designated 11 July as an international day of remembrance for the Srebrenica genocide.

After a mortar attack on Sarajevo's Markale market in August 1995, NATO bombed Bosnian Serb positions while Croatian and Bosnian offensives retook territory in the west. Peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, in November produced an agreement signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. The war had killed about 100,000 people and displaced more than two million, around half the population.

The Dayton constitution kept Bosnia and Herzegovina as a single state made up of two entities, the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Serb-majority Republika Srpska, with the Brčko District added in 1999. A three-member presidency, one Bosniak, one Croat and one Serb, shares the role of head of state, and an international High Representative oversees the civilian peace with powers to impose laws and dismiss officials. NATO and then European Union troops kept the peace. Many refugees returned and destroyed landmarks were rebuilt, among them Mostar's Old Bridge, reopened in 2004, but the country's politics remained divided along national lines and reform was slow. In 2009 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that excluding citizens who are not Bosniak, Croat or Serb from the presidency was discriminatory, a judgement still not implemented. Protests against unemployment and corruption swept the Federation in February 2014.

The country applied to join the European Union in 2016, received candidate status in December 2022, and in March 2024 the European Council agreed in principle to open accession talks once further reforms were made. The Serb leader Milorad Dodik repeatedly threatened secession for Republika Srpska. In February 2025 a court convicted him of defying the decisions of the High Representative and banned him from politics for six years. The Republika Srpska assembly responded by rejecting the authority of state courts and police on its territory, but in August 2025 Dodik was removed from office, and an early election in November 2025 was won by his party's candidate, Siniša Karan. The High Representative, Christian Schmidt, announced in May 2026 that he would step down once a successor was found, and general elections were held across the country on 4 October 2026.