Munir Gavrankapetanović was thinking about God on a spring night in 1951, lying in his cell in the Central Prison in Sarajevo and bone-tired from a full day of forced labor on the construction site of the school for the State Security Administration (UDBA). The name of the security administration itself had a frightening ring to it and was often uttered half-jokingly as ‘udba sudba’ – UDBA is your fate, referring to the seeming omnipresence of the intelligence service that monitored all the enemies of the state, like the KGB or Stasi. Yet, Munir knew that there was a more permanent and lasting presence that overshadows this earthly apparatus: God. He could not hear His words, but he knew God was there, and that He listened. His other cellmates were fast asleep, but Munir kept thinking about his friends and comrades who had perished over the past several years. Just like Safija and Hidajeta from the beginning of this book, Munir also was a member of the Young Muslim Movement, the religious organisation that had sought a more active political role in society but was crushed at the end of World War II: some of its members were executed, others jailed. In the years to come, the members of the movement and their extensive network were on the margins of social life in Yugoslavia; yet they were not completely silent. They maintained their family and social connections. More importantly, they cultivated the sentiment of being persecuted for their adherence and commitment to Islam. The feeling of marginalisation of religion – predominantly Islam – in Yugoslav society created a growing subculture of non-comformists, and perhaps the most visible among these were the Young Muslims.

Gavrankapetanović was locked up in 1949, just one year after the Young Muslims branch in Zagreb to which he belonged published its last issue of the journal Mudžahid (Warrior). Back then, Munir had been a civil engineering student. His arrest had cut short his studies; instead, he was sent to do forced labor in several notorious prisons and construction camps across Yugoslavia.

This book has spoken about the permanence and persistence of the Hajj in scholarly discourses and the everyday lives of Bosnian Muslims, as much as about their physical journeys to Mecca and Medina. This presence is especially seen in times of absence: as the current Covid-19 pandemic prevents Hajjis from going on a pilgrimage for the second year in a row, Bosnians have undertaken a number of activities to express their profound sadness at the impossibility of travel, sense of longing and attachment to the ritual. Apart from a number of personal reflections and photographs published online in the form of Facebook posts or through the webpages of daily newspapers and journals, the Hajj-deprived Bosniaks also organised events that kept the flame going. One of these events was held in summer 2021. The roundtable organised by the Rijaset of the Islamic Community in Bosnia aimed to ‘maintain the awareness of the Hajj in the circumstances of the pandemics’. The event provided opportunity for attendees to learn more about the Hajj rites, as well as the significance of the ritual sacrifice and Eid. Special attention, however, was paid to the ‘cultural and civilisational aspects of the Hajj’, with the focus on the ways in which the pilgrimage had affected the Bosniaks in history. One of the participants of the roundtable, Ismet Bušatlić, a retired professor of Islamic civilisation, emphasised the long history of the Hajj in the history of Bosnia and stated that Bosniaks gained much with the Hajj, from dreams about the journey to its realisation:

The Hajj discourse in the twenty-first-century Bosnian context, as seen from the example above, has reached a level of critical self-awareness and analysis that is rare for religious literature, particularly for writings about other normative rituals, such as fasting or almsgiving.

Are there slaves on Arabian markets? Is it true that prostitution is rampant in Jeddah’s dens of vice and debauchery? What is the meaning of Islamic rites? What do Hajjis really do in Mecca and Medina? These questions seemed to be ubiquitous among the fierce Yugoslav public of the interwar period, together with debates on Muslim women’s clothing and education, the plausibility of translating the Qur’an into local languages, or seemingly more mundane discussions on the permissibility of the gramophone. In the decades following the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, the annexation in 1908 and the period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–41), different facets of Islamic belief and practice were opened to scrutiny, not only in the local Bosnian press, but also in Serbian and Croatian publications. This caused anxieties and tensions over who had the right to interpret and (re)present Islam. The Hajj was a frequent topic of these debates which drew in Muslim and non-Muslim participants engaged in defining and describing Islam and its role in the society.

This chapter will address the encounter of ritual and print within the framework of change, by examining the presence of the Hajj on the ‘market of news’, the importance of Islamic geography in the light of new local and global dynamics, and the transformation of the Hajj ritual’s meaning in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. To do so, it will shift back and forth between different decades to highlight these specific issues. Unlike the previous chapters, where the focus was on premodern Ottoman Bosnians, sometimes in conversation with their Muslim scholarly predecessors or contemporaries, this chapter will feature Bosnian Muslims in argument with each other, their non-Muslim critics, Orientalists, ideological enemies or, simply, broader competing concepts of various backgrounds that imposed themselves on the way in which the Hajj was perceived. The media, understood here as both genres and venues of publication, created new possibilities for different participants in the public sphere, but at the same time flattened the discourse under the influence of homogenising and reifying modernist discourses on Islam.

The formulas show us property transactions among laypeople that are fundamentally similar to those between laypeople and ecclesiastical institutions that we see in the extant charters. Laypeople sold or gave property to each other, or exchanged it with each other, and they used documents to do it. However, the formulas broaden our view of the sorts of transactions laypeople engaged in and who engaged in them. For example, different kinds of property changed hands: not simply arable but also vineyards, plots of land within cities, and even townhouses. People used property as security for loans. Laypeople also arranged to hold property as benefices, or as so-called precarial grants, not only from churches/monasteries or kings but also from each other. One person used a benefice arrangement with a king to pass property to a chosen heir, in much the same way as others did with monasteries. The evidence in the formulas for these sorts of arrangements suggests that the property arrangements between lay families and ecclesiastical institutions or kings that dominate the charter record reflect only part of a larger culture, in which a variety of people in the Carolingian world used property to create and maintain ties with each other.

This chapter works through the evidence that connects Paris 2123 and the Flavigny formulas to a real historical world; that is, the evidence that the scribes who copied the formulas understood the texts that they were copying and thought that they were important and relevant. It first takes up the evidence that connects Paris 2123 to Flavigny, and works through the manuscript’s entire contents to establish the context for the Flavigny formulas themselves. It then shows how scribes behind the Flavigny collection deliberately selected their formulas; that is, chose which to copy, which to discard, and how to arrange them, and how they merged and blended preexisting material to create the formulas that they wanted. It also demonstrates the care the scribes took in copying the formulas; that is, in organizing them and making them easy to refer to, correcting mistakes, clarifying obscure language, and so on. From this material the chapter works outwards to similar evidence in other formula manuscripts, in order to further demonstrate that the formulas are not disembodied texts, but in fact have a historical context that lets us anchor them in a real world and use them as sources to learn something about that world.

Many of the formulas dealing with conflict highlight formal courts and judicial processes. Others represent extrajudicial settlements. In this respect they match, though in an entirely lay context, the picture of early medieval dispute settlement visible in other sources. They make particularly clear, however, that judicial and extrajudicial settlements were points on a complex and intertwined continuum. They also tell us that people – both litigants and authority figures – could manipulate and abuse judicial processes for their own purposes. The formulas are particularly interested in interpersonal violence. We find men assaulting each other on the road and taking each other’s property. We find men killing others for a variety of reasons. Those who committed homicide not only negotiated the payment of the required blood price, but actually paid it – and had their payment recorded in a security that protected them from any further trouble. Women too are accused of homicide, sometimes by poison or sorcery but sometimes by more active means. In the end, the formulas suggest that a culture assuming a right to personal violence was alive and well in the Carolingian period, despite strenuous efforts especially by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious to regulate it.

This chapter works through the evidence that in the world envisioned by the Flavigny formula collection and its companions, lay people used documents and letters like those that the formula collections contain to do things that did not involve churches and monasteries, and explore how the formulas say that they used them. This evidence is considerable, and extends well beyond laypeople simply appearing as actors in transactions that were recorded in writing. It includes transactions assuming in principle that the actors involved would keep the records for future reference: laypeople presenting documents as evidence in disputes; provisions for laypeople to update their documents by erasing parts of them and then writing in new words; documents that refer to other documents; references to lay archives, particular some that had been destroyed and whose contents needed to be replaced. Socially document use ranges from members of the elites, to unfree acquiring documents giving them freedom or presenting documents as proof that they had been free to begin with, to lower-status people showing up in front of someone with higher status with a letter of recommendation, to merchants carrying copies of royal privileges with them.

This chapter pulls together the previous chapters’ conclusions about the early medieval laity. It then asks why new, Carolingian-style formula collections stopped being made in the course of the tenth century. After surveying possible answers offered by the scholarship, it suggests – while acknowledging that we will likely never know for certain – another, namely that they continued to be produced as long as scribes wanted to write their documents and letters like others were writing theirs, for a clientele whose interests could span very long distances. As the Carolingian world disintegrated in the later ninth and tenth centuries, this became less important. The chapter closes with the history of the manuscript Paris, BNF, ms. lat. 2123, as it disappears from view, surfaces in the early modern period, arrives at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and ends up in the hands of Karl Zeumer as he edited the formulas for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the MGH edition, the impact that Zeumer’s editorial methods had on the formula texts and their images of the laity, and the resulting dangers of treating this edition, rather than the surviving manuscripts, as a primary source.

This chapter introduces the formulas as a source genre and in particular the manuscript and formula collection that occupies the center of this study: Paris, BNF ms. lat. 2123 and the formulas from Flavigny. It also introduces the concepts “early medieval Europe” and “early medieval laity,” in order to frame the questions that shape the book. The chapter briefly describes how the category “lay” even came to exist; that is, how and when a category “clerical” distilled out of late and post-Roman Christian society and came by the Carolingian period to separate clergy and monks from laypeople. From there it moves into what we know about how lay people lived their lives in post-Roman and early medieval Frankish Europe, and what remains unknown that makes it worth writing a new book about. The chapter then sets the Flavigny formulas in the context of the other Carolingian formula collections, presenting it (and them) as a gateway into a different world. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the steps we need to open the gate and to understand what we see on the other side, and the topics we will explore when we get there.

This chapter illuminates a key characteristic of lay society in the Carolingian period: it was built on personal relationships, such as those between lords and their followers, vassals, or unfree, between patrons and clients, between friends – in short, between those who could offer help and those who needed it. The importance of these relationships is revealed above all in formulas for letters, in which clients asked patrons for help or asked them to intercede with other powerful people to help them solve problems, or in which people with power wrote to an equal or superior on behalf of a supplicant. These letters reach very far down the social scale. Some deal with unfree who have gotten into difficulties and have asked a patron for help. Quite a few tell of unfree who have gotten in trouble with their own lord and run to another powerful person – such as the Carolingian courtier and lay abbot Einhard – to beg his intercession. They show us a society in which power appears to have flowed through these personal relationships as or perhaps more strongly than it did through lines that we might describe as connecting governing and governed, or ruling and ruled.

This chapter tackles two principal problems with connecting the formulas to a real world: their often difficult or incorrect (by classical standards) Latin, and the late Roman and early Merovingian legal language that has led to them being labeled as antiquarian fossils. The chapter argues that the idiosyncratic Latin of the formulas in fact communicated essential content in regions where the spoken languages were evolving into Romance, as well as (with the help of glosses and occasional vernacular words) where they were Germanic. The obsolete (or obsolescent) legal language reflects a legal culture in the eighth and ninth centuries in which – especially in western areas with strong Roman roots – references to Roman law and procedure still meant something. Roman legal language gave some documents an imprimatur of authority. Descriptions of antique procedures bore a recognizable relationship (though not necessarily an exact correspondence) to how those transactions were actually carried out. In short, the legal and formulaic inheritance of Rome in the western regions of the Carolingian world contributed to a normative framework that lent authority and legitimacy both to documents and to the legal procedures that they recorded.