Ban (title)
They often ruled as the king's governmental representatives, supreme military commanders and judges, and in 18th century Croatia, even as chief government officials.
[10][11][12] The title's origin among medieval Croats is not completely understood,[13] and it is hard to determine the exact source and to reconstruct the primal form of the Turkic word it is derived from.
[18][6] The Proto-Turkic root *bāj- is sometimes explained as a native Turkic word;[19] however, it could also be a borrowing from the Iranian bay (from Proto-Iranian *baga- "god; lord").
[16][17][21] The starting point of the debate was year 1837, and the work of historian and philologist Pavel Jozef Šafárik, whose thesis has influenced generations of scholars.
[41] In his work Slovanské starožitnosti (1837), and later Slawische alterthümer (1843) and Geschichte der südslawischen Literatur (1864), was the first to connect the ruler title of ban, obviously not of Slavic lexical stock, which ruled over župas of today's region of Lika, with the Pannonian Avars.
[42] However, modern historians and archaeologists until now proved the opposite, that Avars never lived in the area of the Roman province of Dalmatia (including Lika), and that statement occurred somewhere in Pannonia.
[46] Franz Miklosich wrote that the word, of Croatian origin, probably was expanded by the Croats among the Bulgarians and Serbs, while if it is Persian, than among Slavs is borrowed from the Turks.
[16][50] Historian Franjo Rački did not discard the possibility South Slavs could obtain it from Avars, but he disbelieved it had happened in Dalmatia, yet somewhere in Pannonia, and noticed the existence of bân ("dux, custos") in Persian language.
[3] Tadija Smičiklas and Vatroslav Jagić thought that the title should not derive from bajan, but from bojan, as thus how it is written in the Greek historical records (boan, boean).
[33] Gjuro Szabo shared similar Klaić's viewpoint, and emphasized the widespread distribution of a toponym from India to Ireland, and particularly among Slavic lands, and considered it as an impossibility that had derived from a personal name of a poorly known khagan, yet from a prehistoric word Ban or Pan.
[55][56] Ferdo Šišić considered that is impossible it directly originated from a personal name of an Avar ruler because the title needs a logical continuity.
[58] Francis Dvornik on the other hand, although mentioned Šišić's argumentation,[59] considered to be of common Indo-European root (an Czechs and Poles have pan meaning "master") or Iranian-Sarmatian origin, and "we are fully entitled to suppose that the Croats had a similar organization when they were living northeast of the Carpathian Mountains".
[63][21] The view of the possible Iranian origin (from ban; keeper, guard), besides Avarian, was shared by the modern scholars like Vladimir Košćak, Horace Lunt and Tibor Živković.
[21][64][10] In the 21st century, historians like Mladen Ančić (2013) and Neven Budak (2018) in their research and synthesis of Croatian history concluded that the Avar linguistic argumentation is unconvincing and the historical sources poorly support such a thesis, emphasizing rather the Frankish origin of the title.
According to him, the title and its functions directly derive from a Germanic medieval term ban or bannum, the royal power of raising of armies and the exercise of justice later delegated to the counts, which was widely used in Francia.
[44][39] In 2013, historian Tomislav Bali noted the possible connection of the title with the military and territorial administrative unit bandon of the Byzantine Empire.
[65] Sources from the earliest periods are scarce, but existing show that since Middle Ages "ban" was the title used for local land administrators in the areas of Balkans where South Slavic population migrated around the 7th century, namely in Duchy of Croatia (8th century–c.
It rather indicates to the influence of the expansion of the Northern border by King Tomislav of Croatia, after the conquest of Slavonia by the Hungarians, making the position of ban similar to that of a margrave defending a frontier region.
This imperial title, somehow related to that of a ban, was given to provincial governors and foreign rulers, and most probably was used to highlight the connection between the Croatian and Byzantine royal court.
At the beginning Bosnian status as a de facto independent state fluctuated, depending on era, in terms of its relations with the Kingdom of Hungary and Byzantine Empire.
Regions ruled and influenced by Kingdom of Hungary, besides those in Croatia and Bosnia, were also formed as banates usually as frontier provinces in today's Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.
