The Early Modern Multi-Confessional Balkans in the Regional Policy of the Holy See. Review of Confessionalization on the Frontier. The Balkan Catholics between Roman Reform and Ottoman Reality by A.Molnár, (Roma: Viella, 2019)

Abstract

The monograph by Hungarian historian Antal Molnár summarizes many years of research into the age of Confessionalization in the Balkans in the space of collision and coexistence of Christianity and Islam. In the territories that fell under the rule of the Ottoman Porte in the 14th – 16th centuries, the Holy See undertook missionary activities, the most successful in which were the Bosnian Franciscans, and cooperated with the rich and influential communities of the Ragusan merchants. The author turns to the role of the Catholic Church in the early stages of nation-building among the Albanians who had had no state tradition and explains why the idea of church union among Orthodox Serbs actually failed. The end of the Confessionalization age came with the Great Turkish War (1683–99), which saw the return to Hungary of territories that had been under the Ottoman rule for a century and a half, but which also proved tragic for Catholics who remained in the Ottoman Empire. The book is based on Italian, Hungarian and Croatian archives and offers an analysis of the historiography of the issue in a number of European languages. The author makes extensive use of methods of microhistory and cultural history, going back to broad generalizations through a detailed examination of selected well-documented cases.

Keywords

• confessionalization age
• the holy see
• slavic peoples of the balkans
• franciscans of bosnia
• ragusa
• merchant communities