Tvrtko II

Background

Tvrtko II was the illegitimate son of Tvrtko I, the first King of Bosnia. The identity of his mother, and thus the legitimacy of his birth, is disputed. The uncertainty also stems from the complex religious situation in medieval Bosnia, where it was often hard to discern between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. The 16th-century Ragusan historian Mavro Orbini, writing of Tuartco Scuro (Tvrtko the Plain), claimed that he was born to Tvrtko I's concubine, a Bosnian noblewoman named Vukosava, and this view was taken for granted by subsequent writers. In the 19th century, Vjekoslav Klaić argued that Tvrtko II's mother was his father's wife, Dorothea of Bulgaria. Klaić cited as evidence Tvrtko I's charter of 1382, in which the King mentioned Queen Dorothea and an unnamed son to the government of the Republic of Ragusa. If Tvrtko II is the son his father mentioned in this charter, his birth would have had to have taken place between 1375 (Tvrtko I and Dorothea having married in December 1374) and the date the charter was issued.