Strange as seems the comparative disappearance of the Bogomilian religion since the Turkish conquest, throughout a large part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the more minutely we enquire into Bosnian history the less insoluble does the problem appear. On the whole, the disappearance of the Bosnian Protestants was not so much due to voluntary renegation, though that played its part, as to a cause which I have already hinted at. In the days of the Bosnian kingdom the strength of these sectaries lay in the towns; and it was on the towns that the hand of the Turk fell heaviest. The citizens of Jaycze, and Jaycze was then a peculiar stronghold of the Bogomiles, like those of Kliuć, and like those of the other fenced cities throughout the land, saw their children snatched from them, to be forcibly converted to Islâm, and to return as Janissaries and Mahometans to claim their heritage. Nay, more, we have the direct evidence of an eyewitness and contemporary that the Janissaries were largely recruited from the children of the Bogomiles.[137] At the end of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century there were still Bogomiles in Bosnia; but how many of them were wifeless and childless! We have historic proofs that the Bogomiles who existed in Jaycze in 1478 had lost their heirs; their children were already Moslemized;—how many, we may ask, outlived that generation? and how few could have survived the consequences of the second captivity of Jaycze in 1527! In Herzegovina, where at the moment of Turkish conquest the Bogomiles were proportionally more numerous, and where their attitude, in contradistinction to their Turcophile manifestations in Bosnia, had been one of open defiance to the conqueror, their calamity must have been even more overwhelming; and if the Turks bore so hardly on their Jayczan benefactors, what mercy could have been meted to the Bogomilian defenders of Mostar?[138]