The history of the Banjani tribe raises a question that is more complicated than the modern labels “Serb” or “Montenegrin” suggest. The conventional narrative places Banjani within the Serbian or Montenegrin tribal world of Old Herzegovina. Yet the medieval evidence points toward an older and considerably more complex social formation: a pastoral community repeatedly associated with the Vlachs, organized through katuns, and living in a region where Romanized and pre-Slavic populations had survived alongside Slavic-speaking communities.

This raises a serious historical possibility: that the Banjani were a Vlach population containing descendants of Romanized Balkan and possibly Illyrian populations that subsequently became Slavic-speaking and incorporated into the Serbian Orthodox and, later, Montenegrin political world.

That possibility deserves much more attention.

The problem with calling every medieval highlander a Serb or Montenegrin

The first written reference to the Banjani dates to 1319, centuries before the modern Montenegrin state incorporated their territory. Their historical homeland lay west of Nikšić, between Nikšić and Bileća, extending toward the Trebišnjica and Bileća Lake. The area belonged historically to Old Herzegovina rather than to the territorial core of the later Montenegrin state.

Indeed, Banjani did not become part of Montenegro in the modern political sense until the territorial settlements surrounding the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Contemporary historical literature therefore places their incorporation within Montenegro precisely in the context of the territorial expansion of the principality after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78.

This distinction matters.

A medieval tribe living in what eventually became Montenegro should not automatically be projected backwards as “Montenegrin.” Nor should the later adoption of Serbian Orthodoxy, Serbian literary culture, or a Serbian national identity necessarily tell us what the community’s medieval ethnogenesis was. The Banjani case is particularly interesting because there is direct evidence connecting them to the Vlachs.

Banjani were explicitly associated with the Vlachs

The English archaeologist Arthur Evans drew attention to the fact that the Banjani were recorded among the Vlachs of medieval Herzegovina and Montenegro in Ragusan documentation and Serbian charters. His observations placed the Banjani alongside other groups such as the Nikšići, Mirilovići, Pilatovci and Riđani. Evans further connected these communities with the older population of the region and argued that the Vlach populations represented, in part, Romanized descendants of earlier Balkan peoples.

This is not merely a modern internet theory.

Evans wrote that Ragusan records and old Serbian chrysobulls revealed a considerable presence of “Rouman”/Vlach tribes in western Illyricum, specifically naming the Vlachi Banjani among them. He connected their mountain settlements with the katun system and explicitly compared them with the ancient Docleatae/Dokleates, whom he regarded as an Illyrian population from the same general mountain region and as part of the ancestry of the later Romanized inhabitants.

The historical picture that emerges is therefore considerably more complicated than:

Illyrians, Serbs and Montenegrins.

A more plausible model may involve several successive layers:

pre-Slavic Balkan populations, Romanization, Vlach pastoral communities, Slavicization, Serbian Orthodox identity and incorporation into Montenegro. That is a theory of ethnogenesis, rather than a claim that one modern nation simply replaced another.

The word katun is crucial

Perhaps one of the most revealing features of the Banjani social structure is the katun.

The katun was not simply an ordinary village. It was an Albanian word and a form of pastoral and kinship organization strongly associated with Vlach communities in the medieval western Balkans. The earliest recorded medieval Bosnian katuns include Banjani in 1319, alongside groups such as the Drobnjaci, Mirilovići, Vragovići and others.

The Banjani were organized under katunari—leaders of the katun. Medieval records name figures such as Jurek Junaković, later Herak Draženović of Radovan, and Nenad. This is precisely the type of organization found among medieval Vlach pastoral communities.

Even more revealing is the relationship between Banjani and neighbouring Piva.

Research into the 1475–1477 Ottoman cadastral register shows that the Vlach population of Banjani had summer settlements in Piva. The connection survives in the place-name Banjski Katun, literally preserving the memory of a Banjani pastoral settlement. The same research describes the Banjani and Piva districts as being connected by common winter and summer settlements.

This is exactly the kind of transhumant pastoral system associated with Vlach society.

It is therefore difficult to dismiss the Vlach element of Banjani history as an irrelevant footnote.

But “Vlach” does not simply mean “Romanian”

There is an important qualification.

“Vlach” in medieval Balkan sources was not necessarily an ethnic synonym for modern Romanians. The term could denote Romance-speaking populations, Romanized Balkan populations, pastoral communities, or groups defined by their social and economic organization.

Consequently, saying that the Banjani were “Vlachs” does not automatically mean that they were Romanians who migrated into Montenegro.

The more interesting possibility is precisely the opposite.

They may have represented a local Romanized Balkan population, descended partly from peoples who inhabited the region before or alongside the arrival and expansion of Slavic-speaking populations.

This is where the Illyrian question enters.

The Illyrian connection

The Banjani homeland lies in an area with a deep Illyrian and pre-Slavic history. The region around present-day Montenegro, Herzegovina and Nikšić belonged to the wider autochthonous cultural and political landscape of ancient Illyria. Evans specifically associated the Romanized populations of the region with the ancient Docleatae, an Illyrian people whose territory included parts of what is now Montenegro.

Why do medieval communities in this region appear simultaneously as Vlach pastoral groups and later as Slavic-speaking Orthodox tribes?

One answer is that the process of Slavicization was gradual.

A population does not have to disappear merely because it adopts another language.

A Romanized Balkan population could become Slavophone while retaining older patterns of settlement, pastoral economy, kinship organization and local identity. Over generations, the language could become Slavic while elements of the underlying population remained descendants of older Balkan inhabitants.

The Serbian identity came much later than the tribe

The later adopted and slavicized Serbian identity of the Banjani should therefore not be confused with the origins of the tribe.

By the eighteenth century, Banjani could be included within broader “Serbian” political and religious concepts. In 1789, Jovan Radonjić’s correspondence with Catherine II included Banjani among the populations for whose interests he sought Russian support.

But this tells us about the political and national vocabulary of the late eighteenth century—not necessarily about the biological or cultural origins of the community in the fourteenth century.

This distinction is essential.

The fact that a nineteenth-century Banjanin became Orthodox, Slavic-speaking and politically aligned with Serbia or Montenegro does not erase the possibility that his ancestors belonged to a medieval Vlach and Illyrian community, having very little to do with either Slavs, Montenegrins or Serbs. Indeed, this kind of transformation is precisely what we would expect from the gradual Slavicization of Vlach-Illyrian pastoral populations in the western Balkans.

1876: Banjani under Montenegrin military command

The events of 1876 provide an especially fascinating final piece of evidence.

A contemporary report published in Bothe für Tirol und Vorarlberg describes Prince Nicholas of Montenegro crossing the frontier into Banjani in order to inspect Montenegrin troops and insurgents assembled at Crni Kuk. The report states that the insurgents had been militarily organized in the same manner as the Montenegrins, had received new weapons and ammunition, and had been divided into battalions.

It then reports that the Montenegrins spent the night of 5–6 August encamped at Velemija in the district of Banjani, before marching toward Gacko, Korita and Nevesinje. A further report claimed that Prince Nicholas had reached the vicinity of Gacko, where a substantial Ottoman force was entrenched.

The source is particularly significant because Banjani had not yet formally become part of the internationally recognized Montenegrin state. Its incorporation came with the territorial expansion recognized in 1878.

In other words, the 1876 report captures the moment when Montenegrin political and military power was operating inside a historically distinct tribal territory that was about to be incorporated into the expanding Montenegrin state.

The military cooperation of 1876 therefore tells us much about political alignment—but it cannot by itself prove ancient ethnic identity. And that distinction is crucial.

From Vlach katun to Serbian tribe to Montenegrin territory

The Banjani story can therefore be interpreted as a long process of transformation:

Ancient Balkan population, Romanization and the survival of local populations, Medieval Vlach pastoral communities, Katun-based tribal organization, Gradual Slavicization, Adoption of Serbian Orthodox culture and identity and Political incorporation into Montenegro

The category “Serb” or “Montenegrin” describe a much later cultural and political identity of the Banjani without adequately describing their deeper ethnogenesis. The Banjani can thus not be considered to be either Serbs, Montenegrins or even Slavs – only culturally. Their origin was Pre-Slavic and Vlach-Illyrian.

A forgotten Balkan pattern

The Banjani were not unique in this respect. Across the mountains of Herzegovina, Montenegro and northern Albania, medieval sources describe numerous communities as Illyrians and Vlachs, while later centuries saw many of them become Slavic-speaking and become assimilated into Serbian, Montenegrin or other national identities. Modern scholarship likewise emphasizes that the katun system could develop into the tribal structures characteristic of the later Montenegrin highlands.

The provocative conclusion

The question should therefore not simply be:

“Were the Banjani Serbs or Montenegrins?”

A more historically meaningful question is:

“What population became the Banjani?”

The surviving evidence points toward a community whose medieval identity was deeply connected with the Vlach world and the katun system, living in a region inhabited long before the emergence of modern Serbian and Montenegrin national identities. Arthur Evans even proposed a connection between these Romanized Vlach communities and the older Illyrian population of the region.

It is that the Banjani may represent a heavily Vlachized—or more precisely, Vlach-organized and subsequently Slavicized—population containing substantial ancestry from the older Romanized Balkan populations of the Nikšić–Herzegovina region, including descendants of the ancient Illyrian inhabitants.

By the nineteenth century, these people could fight under Prince Nicholas of Montenegro, speak a South Slavic language and participate in Serbian Orthodox culture without this necessarily telling us what their ancestors had been six centuries earlier.

The Banjani may therefore be better understood not as a tribe that was simply “Serb” or “Montenegrin” from time immemorial, but as a product of centuries of Balkan ethnogenesis: Vlach pastoralism, Romanized indigenous populations, Slavicization, Orthodox Christianity and finally Montenegrin state-building. And that is a far more complicated—and arguably far more interesting—history.

References

1. Arthur Evans, “Antiquarian Researches in Illyricum,” Archaeologia 48 (1885): 35. Evans specifically discusses the Vlachi Banjani and other Vlach communities of western Illyricum, their katun settlements, and their relationship to the Romanized population associated with the ancient Docleatae.
2. Marica Malović-Đukić, “A Contribution to the History of the District of Piva,” Istorijski časopis 53 (2006): 166–72. The article discusses the 1475–1477 Ottoman cadastral register, the Banjani nahija, and the Vlachs of Banjani whose summer settlements were in Piva; it also identifies the surviving toponym Banjski Katun.
3. Esad Kurtović, “Hum i Hercegovina kroz povijest,” in Zbornik radova s međunarodnoga znanstvenoga skupa održanog u Mostaru 5. i 6. studenoga 2009, 669–70. The work is cited for the Banjani katun, its katunars, and the medieval political position of the community.
4. Richard Zgusta, “Die Zusammensetzung der montenegrinischen Stämme,” 大阪外国語大学論集 11 (1994): 187–202. Zgusta places Banjani among the historically attested tribes of the Herzegovinian group and notes their incorporation into Montenegro only in the period of the state’s nineteenth-century territorial expansion.
5. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 275. Banac describes Montenegro’s 1878 territorial expansion into Old Herzegovina, including Banjani, Nikšići, Šaranci, Drobnjaci and Pivljani.
6. Bothe für Tirol und Vorarlberg, 1876, report concerning Prince Nicholas of Montenegro, Banjani, Crni Kuk, Velemija, Gacko, Korita and Nevesinje. The newspaper is a nineteenth-century Innsbruck publication; digitized holdings of the 1876 volume survive in Google Books and Austrian library collections.
7. Milenko Krešić, Depopulacija jugoistočne Hercegovine izazvana turskim osvajanjem. Krešić discusses the medieval Vlach communities of Herzegovina and specifically the involvement of Vlach groups including Banjani in the slave trade during the Ottoman conquest.