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(Ivo Banac)...A bit of nonteleological history
One of the great problems is that our understanding of the common and individual histories of the South Slavs and the other peoples of southeastern Europe has not significantly benefited from critical historiography. This is because nationalist historiographies regularly have explained modern developments as an aspect of unilinear design. We have been taught to see connections that may be of our own making. For example, if we look at a current political map of the area and compare it to that from the era of settlements we will see that the present political divisions do not correspond to those from the early medieval period. Croatia is mainly a coastal area from the Rasa River in Istria to the Cetina River, a little bit to the east of the city of Split. Down the coast from the original Croatia, we have a row of unfamiliar Slavic territories that Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the tenth-century Byzantine emperor-historian, called Pagania (literally, land of the pagans), Zachlumia (most of present-day eastern Herzegovina, with the Croatian peninsula of Peljesac), Terbounia (the Trebinje area of eastern Herzegovina, with Dubrovnik and its eastern coastal environs), and Dioclea (the southern portions of contemporary Montenegro with the Bay of Kotor and the northwesternmost portions of present-day Albania around Lake Skadar/Shkoder). Serbia is located in the hinterland of Zachlumia, Terbounia, and Dioclea, its center around Ras, near today's Novi Pazar, in the Sandzak. Bosnia was apparently within this territory, but represented a negligible area around the source of the Bosna River, where we now find Sarajevo and its environs. And Dalmatia? In the tenth-century this was a necklace of Byzantine-ruled Roman coastal cities and island territories, from Krk in the north to Ulcinj in the south.

Moreover, modern territoriality required a tradition that was itself a product of modernity. Thus, unrelated traditions were merged to produce an idea of ethnic-as opposed to cultural-continuity. The Croat historical tradition goes back to the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea (a twelfth-century text from Bar in contemporary Montenegro) and its various translations (for example, Marko Marulic, 1510), which were in turn incorporated into the Early Modern ""Slavic"" and ""Dalmatian"" histories of Mavro Orbin (1601) and Ivan Lucic (Ioannes Lucius, 1666). These works then became material for the Croatianizing work of Pavao Ritter Vitezovic (Croatia rediviva, 1700), who was the most important influence on the revivalist generation of Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872) and that of postrevival integral nationalists like Ante Starcevic (1823-1896). Curiously, the same histories (Orbin's) were Serbianized through the translations of Sava Vladislavic (1722), which then influenced the pioneering Serbian histories of Jovan Rajic (1794), and were Bulgarianized in the history of Paisij Hilandarski (1762). The Bosnian historical tradition was somewhat more self-contained. It combined the Franciscan memory of medieval Bosnian statehood with the experiences of Muslim ayan (notable) selfrule to argue for a uninational Bosnia (for example, Antun Knezevic, whose book was published between 1884 and 1887).

Clearly, something has happened in the span of ten centuries. Pagania, Zachlumia, and Terbounia have disappeared. The center of Croatia has migrated from the Adriatic to the north, into medieval Slavonia (literally, Slavic land), with Zagreb at its head. This happened in stages. During the High Middle Ages, the heart of Croatia was on the Una River, now in northwestern Bosnia. This territory (Turkish Croatia) was lost to the Ottomans in the sixteenth century and became a part of Bosnia. During the Habsburg reconquest and the concomitant Venetian operations in the seventeenth century, the framework of modern Croatia emerged in two extended shanks-one, to the north, to modern Slavonia; the other, in the south, in modern Dalmatia. At the same time, the Zagreb area, which was only dubiously Croatian in the early Middle Ages, became the heart of modern Croatia.

The story of Serbia is not much different. Serbia first migrated to the coast and assimilated Dioclea. Then it moved to the Ibar-Morava valleys; then toward the valleys of Struma and Vardar in Macedonia. It reached the Danube only as an Ottoman vassal in the fifteenth century. And its modern capital, Belgrade, became truly Serbian only in the course of Karadjordje's uprising in 1806. Bosnia, too, expanded under Ban (or prorex) Kulin (r. 1180-1204) into the Donji Kraji (literally, Lower Lands) around the Vrbas River and the Soli (literally, Salt Lands; for centuries, Ottoman, then modern Tuzla) and Usora, in its present northeastern corner. Later on, at the height of its power in fourteenth century, Bosnia expanded into Hum (Herzegovina) and the Drina River valley. The westernmost regions were inc