Banate of Bosnia

The Banate of Bosnia was the medieval Bosnian state, lasting from 1136 to 1377. Hungarian kings claimed it as crown land and sent bans to govern it; the bans stayed and became sovereigns instead. Under Ban Kulin, whose charter of 1189 is the oldest Bosnian state document, the banate grew de facto independent, trading with Dubrovnik and guarding the heretical Bosnian Church that Rome damned and Hungary crusaded against in vain. The Šubić interlude aside, native bans ruled from Bobovac for two centuries, balancing Hungary, Serbia and Venice against each other. In 1377 Ban Tvrtko, strong enough to crown himself, raised the banate into the Kingdom of Bosnia, and the story of the banate ends where the kingdom's begins. The kingdom itself would last less than a century before the Ottomans closed over it, but the banate's two hundred years made Bosnia a country and not a province. Its charters in Bosnian Cyrillic, cut beside the great stećak tombstones, remain the oldest monuments of Bosnian literacy.