Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Queen Katarina, Last Queen of Bosnia
This is the anniversary date of the passing of Queen Katarina Vukčić-Kosaća.
She knew she was ill, that in fact it might be her last illness, so she called some of her court and a couple Croatian Franciscan monks and wrote up her will.
Queen Katarina was a learned woman. She kept a pretty sizable library. She believed in reading and learning, and not just for the nobility.
She was known to teach peasant children how to read and write.
She herself could speak and write Latin as well as her own language.
She tried really hard to recover her children. In this she was not successful. Her daughter did not live to adulthood, but died on the journey to Istanbul, in Skopje, Makedonia. There used to be a turbe for her. A turbe is a special form of grave. Muslims reserve such a grave for people who could be described as saintly, or for great rulers, or people who die for the Faith.
People used tho visit her turbe until the awful 1963 earthquake destroyed it.
Queen Katarina's son was made governor of Karaman province. He was married to a daughter of Mehmet II, the same man who conquered Bosnia.
Queen Katarina never got the news of her daughter's death. News traveled so slowly in those days.
She perhaps never knew that her son's life in the growing Ottoman Empire was very good indeed, much better than if he had wound up in Rome on a Papal allowance.
