Explore the History of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country of Dinaric mountains, deep river valleys and karst plateaus, with the Pannonian plain along the Sava in the north, a short stretch of Adriatic coast at Neum and borders with Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, has been inhabited since Palaeolithic hunters engraved a pierced horse on a rock shelter at Badanj about 14,000–12,000 BCE. Neolithic farmers of the Kakanj and Butmir cultures, the Bronze and Iron Age communities of the Glasinac plateau and the Illyrian peoples, among them the Daesitiates, Ardiaei, Autariatae and the Daorsi of the walled town of Daorson, preceded Rome, which crushed the Great Illyrian Revolt of 6–9 CE and organised the province of Dalmatia. After Ostrogothic and Byzantine rule and the Avar–Slav invasions, Slavic settlers took the valleys, and about 950 the emperor Constantine VII named the small land of Bosona for the first time.

In the 12th century Bosnia appears as a banate under Hungarian suzerainty, ruled from Ban Borić and Ban Kulin, whose charter to Ragusa of 1189 is the oldest dated state document of the country. The Bosnian Church, accused of heresy by Rome and Hungary, the Hungarian crusade against Ninoslav, the Šubić interlude and the Kotromanić dynasty shaped the next two centuries, and Stephen II Kotromanić won Hum and an outlet to the sea. In 1377 Tvrtko I was crowned king and for a time ruled from the Drina to the Dalmatian coast, but after his death the great magnates, Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić and the Kosača, whose duke Stjepan took the title Herceg in 1448 and gave Herzegovina its name, held the real power. Ottoman armies conquered the kingdom in 1463, executed its last king, Stephen Tomašević, and took Herzegovina by 1482.

Under Ottoman rule Bosnia became a frontier sanjak and, from 1580, an eyalet. Isa-beg Ishaković and Gazi Husrev-beg made Sarajevo a city of mosques, bazaars and waqfs, Mostar and Višegrad received their great bridges, Islam became the majority faith over more than a century, and Orthodox Christians, Franciscan Catholics and Sephardic Jews kept their own communities. The Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699 drew a frontier close to the present border, Travnik became the viziers' seat, the captains and notables resisted reform until Husein Gradaščević's autonomist uprising of 1831–1832 and Omer Pasha Latas's campaign of 1850–1851, and the Herzegovina uprising of 1875 led to the Congress of Berlin. Austria-Hungary occupied the provinces in 1878 and annexed them in 1908, building railways, mines and schools under Béni Kállay and his successors, until on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

In 1918 Bosnia entered the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where the Yugoslav Muslim Organization defended its unity until the banovinas of 1929 divided it. In 1941 the whole country was annexed to the Ustaše Independent State of Croatia, which carried out genocide against Serbs and the Holocaust, while Chetniks massacred Muslims and Serbs and the Partisans of Josip Broz Tito fought their greatest battles on the Neretva and Sutjeska; the second session of AVNOJ at Jajce in 1943 made Bosnia and Herzegovina a republic of a federal Yugoslavia. Socialist Bosnia industrialised, recognised the Muslims as a nation in 1968 and held the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984. After the first multiparty elections of 1990 it declared independence on 3 March 1992 and was recognised in April, but the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, with the siege of Sarajevo, ethnic cleansing and the Srebrenica genocide, which the ICTY and the International Court of Justice have ruled to be genocide, ended with the Dayton Agreement, signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. Today the state consists of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and the Brčko District, under a three-member Presidency and the High Representative; it has been an EU candidate since 2022, and its population is about 3.3 million, down from 4.38 million in the census of 1991. Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.