Much has been said lately about who the "Bosnians" are and where they came from. The Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, and others are the result of an influx of Slavic tribes that came across the Danube River in the 6th century A.D., after Justinian's reign of the East Roman ("Byzantine") empire. Theophanes the Confessor, writing in the 9th century, calls this area "the Sklavinias". Beginning in the late 9th century, this area fell into the Byzantine sphere of influence, and the monks Ss. Kyrill and Methodios began to convert these Slavic tribes to Christianity. What would become the Serbs were evangelised under the church of Constantinople (the Orthodox Church), while the Croats adopted the Roman Catholic Rite. Their alphabet to transcribe the Slavonic tongue was developed by Ss. Kyrill and Methodios and their disciples. The first one used is of obscure origin and called "Glagolithic", but the one that found common use is now what we know as "Cyrillic." Centuries later, however, when Croatia and the Bosnia-Hercegovina region fell under Latin and Austro-Hungarian influence, the Latin alphabet was universally adopted by them.
Because of Bosnia's and Hercegovina's relatively isolated position, it began to develop somewhat independently, soon having its own uniquely "Bosnian" Church. Their beliefs are unclear. Some say it was an off-shoot of the Manichaeistic "Bogomils" that originated in Bulgaria. There are various different opinions on the subject. It could, however, simply have been a Church with differing practices, a mixture of Latin and Eastern Rites. The region we know know as "Bosnia-Hercegovina", however, always had significant numbers of Orthodox and Roman Catholic believers, and the Bosnian Church was probably only a minority. An independent Bosnian kingdom DID exist from the mid 13th century to the late 15th century, when the Balkans began to become dominated by the Turks. At the same time, the kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria were at their height and the most powerful forces in the region, until they, too, fell to the Ottoman Turkish armies. However, the extent of the kingdom known as "Bosna" varied considerably-- Basically it was a small pocket that comprised a portion of the Dalmatian coast and extended eastward, perhaps as far as the modern city of Sarajevo.
It should be noted that the concept of "national identity" as we know it today was only in its beginning stages of development during this time of imperial kingdoms. Under Turkish domination, the communities were divided into "millets," which were based on religion. This separated the Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, and the Turkish Muslims (and converts to Islam). What had developed as the Bosnian Church was soon absorbed by the Muslim pressure to convert, along with some Orthodox and Catholic Christians who became Muslims. They were granted the right to own land and certain other favorable conditions. Those that converted to Islam gained higher status in society and began to concentrate themselves in the commercial centers of the cities. Those that did not remained peasants, for the most part. Consequently, even by the 20th century, the Orthodox Christians (who identified themselves with the Serbian kingdom and, thus, as Serbs) were spread out over a wide area of the Bosnia-Hercegovina region, while the Muslims were centered in the cities.
Any "Bosnian" national identity that had existed in the middle ages had, at this point, basically been killed. The region shared a common language and a common racial stock. All that divided them was religion, which under the Ottoman government was the determining factor of national identity. At this point we can say that national identity began to form, as people looked to their common heritage and history. For the Roman Catholics living in Bosnia-Hercegovina, this was the Croatian kingdom, for the Orthodox Christians, it was the Serbian kingdom. I am not convinced that the Muslims or any of the residents of the Bosnia-Hercegovina region found a common heritage or history with the medieval Bosnian kingdom. For all intents and purposes, Bosnia-Hercegovina was just an administrative region of the Ottoman empire, determined by geography, whose urban centers were dominated by Slav-speaking Muslims.
One of the large central-European bulwarks against the Turkish advance was the empire of Austria. By the 16th-17th century, it occupied regions of Croatia and western Bosnia-Hercegovina, which separated the Ottoman Empire from Austria, the frontier -- "Krajina." Serbs were invited by the Austrians to settle in this frontier area as farmers and soldiers to defend against Ottoman military incursions.
As the Ottoman Empire began to disintigrate in Europe in the 19th century, Greece gained indepedence, followed by Serbia and Bulgaria and Romania. Meanwhile, the empire of Austria-Hungary occupied what is now known as Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. By this time, Bosnia-Hercegovina did not define a language, an ethnicity, a religion, or a shared history. It became an administrative region inherited from the Ottoman Empire. Also, the share of Serbs was certainly a plurality of the population of the region, which only became significantly upset after Tito came to power, according to a census taken in 1948 and compared with one in 1981.
Thus, "Bosnia-Hercegovina" is only a region of a former kingdom whose residents are not unified by a shared history in the same way that the Croatians or Serbians are. There are similar examples of this in other countries-- Greece (along with Turkey and Bulgaria) occupies a region known as "Thrace." The Thracians were an ancient people with a common language and even had their own customs within the Orthodox Catholic Church. Over time, their language and culture died out. The Greek part of Thrace is now occupied by Muslims Turks and Greeks. However, this Muslim group does not claim themselves to be "Thracians". The province of "Thrace" is now only an administrative region, not conferring a specific cultural identity or cultural history of the people. The residents certainly couldn't call themselves "Thracians" and try to found an independent state based on it.
The most serious error in the current Bosnian tragedy was the international
recognition of the Bosnian state. It is unclear why the international community
insisted that ethnic groups which hate each other so much, be obliged to live
together in the same state. That state is an artificial, untenable creation.
Henry Kissinger, May 18th