Nor must we omit another characteristic which marks off the Christian Bosniacs from their Serbian neighbours. As Bosnia of old was the debateable ground between the Roman Catholics and the Bogomiles, so, to-day, she is distracted between the adherents of the Eastern and Western Churches, who hate each other more cordially than the infidel. It might have been thought that the disappearance of Bogomilism would have resigned the country to the Catholics and Mahometans, for the orthodox Greek element is conspicuous by its absence in the general current of mediæval Bosnian history. But it was there nevertheless, and in the eastern parts of the country was even then the dominant creed. The conquest of Rascia by Tvartko I. brought a Greek province under the Bosnian sceptre, and though the Bosnian hold on Rascia was slight, the Greek Metropolitan appears at the Conventus of Coinica among the great magnates of the realm. Since the Turkish conquest the Sandjakate of Rascia or Novipazar has been incorporated in the Vilajet of Bosnia, and by this means alone a large Greek-Church element has been added to the present province. Nor, if we consider the history of Bosnia since the Turkish conquest, is it difficult to trace the process by which even in Bosnia proper and the Herzegovina, the Eastern Church has risen to a dominant position. The Roman Catholics of Bosnia have at different times during the last three centuries migrated in large numbers into Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, where they found shelter among their co-religionists, and it appears that the Greek population to the South and East, who had less temptation to cross the borders of Latin Christendom, have largely colonized the country thus vacated.[139] The Roman Catholic population who remained, their ecclesiastical organization broken up by these migrations, must in many cases have been absorbed in the congregation of the intrusive Serbs, and indeed, as has been already pointed out, the Roman Church in Illyria was to a great extent only Roman in its higher organization.