ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the instances when antemurale language was applied to Bosnia, with special attention given to sources emanating from Hungary and Venice, the two archetypal bulwark states. It presents documented occasions when Turkish raiding troops surged through Bosnia during the first half of the fifteenth century in order to invade Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, as well as such distant lands as Carniola, Carinthia, Styria and Friuli by tracing the origins and historical development of the crusading discourse. The chapter shows how these attacks helped shape the typical antemurale concept of Bosnia as the 'gate of Christendom', and the ways in which this ideological device was then used as a propaganda tool to mobilize a unified Christian resistance to the imminent danger posed by the rising Ottoman power. The ideology evolved further in the late-fourteenth and fifteenth century with the emergence of the ever-growing Ottoman Empire whose very existence posed a threat to the medieval world order.
