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Turkish Croatia (, ) was a geopolitical term which appeared periodically during the Ottoman–Habsburg wars between the late 16th to late 18th century. Invented by Austrian military cartographers, it referred to a border area of Ottoman Bosnia and Herzegovina located across the Ottoman-Austrian border from the Croatian Military Frontier. It went out of use with the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In Austrian military maps from the 16th to the 19th century, the so-called "Turkish Croatia" appeared as a borderland in the Croatian Military Frontier, whose Habsburg-controlled side, in present-day Croatia, was administered directly from Vienna. The term was similar to other borderland terms such as Morlacchia and Terrae desertae.
The term started appearing in colloquial usage among some Austrian military and political mapmakers, in correlation with Ottoman retreat and Austrian expansion, and subsequently in military and Geostrategy maps. Croatian historian Mladen Ančić has referred to the term within the description of how medieval political and cultural boundaries were destroyed by the Ottoman wars and the establishment of early modern frontiers.
All these various borderland terms vanished by the end of the 18th century or by the beginning of the 19th century, with the change of the complex circumstances that had created them.
In the 19th century, following the conclusion of the Ottoman–Habsburg wars, and the transfer of power in the Bosnia Vilayet from the Ottomans to the Habsburg at the Berlin Congress of 1878, the term became redundant and disappeared from official usage completely. The entire territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina came under Austro-Hungarian rule, and in 1908 was annexed (see the Bosnian Crisis).
== Maps ==
Although on rare occasions, the term was also used in romanticized historiography, as well as in the phantasmagoric politics of "National awakening" and "National integration and homogenization" of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia of the late 19th to early 20th century. In the first half of the 20th century with a rise of nationalist fervor, up to the time and establishment of Nazi puppet-state Independent State of Croatia in the 1940s, this term appeared sporadically again, concerning the resurrection of a Croatian statehood, journalistic and political propagandistic fieldwork in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina future by and geopolitical contemplation by Ivo Pilar and Filip Lukas, eventually getting politically operationalized by Ante Starčević, and in the 1940s, implemented by Frank and Ante Pavelić via occupation and incorporation of entire Bosnia and Herzegovina into Nazi puppet-state, NDH.
In more recent times, with a rise of Franjo Tuđman and establishment of the Republic of Croatia in the 1990s, the term was revived in reference to the political and military aims that Tuđman and his close associates had in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, wanting to control both the area of former Banovina of Croatia as well as the adjacent Una-Sana regions of Bosanska Krajina. Tuđman was widely criticized, among the Bosniaks, by the Croatian intelligentsia and in the international community, for his public discussions of this matter and giving it legitimacy, and was subsequently accused of encouraging a forceful partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Bosnian War Tuđman supported the Croats and the Bosniaks, until the outbreak of the Croat–Bosniak War in 1992, a conflict based on the differences between how the Croat and Bosniak leaders thought the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina should be politically organized. The war ended in 1994 with the signing of the Washington Agreement.
Encouraged with Tuđman's usage of the term as a mean to denigrate and devalue Bosnia and Herzegovina sovereignty and statehood, the term was adopted as part of Croatian far-right nationalist narrative and, although sparsely, as part of their official political discourse, however with little if any impact on mainstream international geopolitics, political geography and historiography, or on academic research for that matter. The term never took hold outside the scope of Croatian political extremism and academic fringes.
In his 1900 work Kratka uputa u prošlost Bosne i Hercegovine, od g. 1463-1850, Safvet-beg Bašagić used the phrase Turska-Hrvatska in reference to Krajina.
References to 'Turkish Croatia' in modern-day Croatian scholarly works include discussions of a lack of an actually centrally positioned geographical space in Croatia since the 15th century.
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