Ostoja of Bosnia
King of Bosnia

Stephen Ostoja (Serbo-Croatian: Stjepan Ostoja / Стјепан Остоја; died September 1418) was King of Bosnia from 1398 to 1404 and from 1409 to 1418.
Family connections
He was a member of the House of Kotromanić, most likely son of Vladislaus and brother of King Tvrtko I. When duke Hrvoje Vukčić in 1416 died, King Ostoja divorced his old wife Kujava from the house of Radinović and married Hrvoje's widow Jelena Nelipčić the next year. Jelena Nelipčić was the sister of Prince Ivan III Nelipić from the Croatian noble Nelipić family. That way Ostoja inherited most of Hrvoje's lands.
Rise to power
Ostoja was crowned King on 10 May 1398 by the forces of Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić, Grand Duke of Bosnia, Knez of Donji Kraji and a Herzog of Split, which deposed Queen Jelena Gruba in 1398. In 1403 he sided with King Ladislaus of Naples in his plights against the Hungarian King Sigismund, Bosnia's liege. King Ostoja led a war against the Republic of Dubrovnik, a Hungarian vassalage that year. In 1404, the Bosnians under Hrvoje Vukčić replaced him by his brother Tvrtko II because of his pro-Hungarian views. He had to flee to Hungary, after a stanak in Mile, Visoko.
In 1408, Hungarian King Sigismund managed to defeat the Bosnian nobility and King Stephen Tvrtko II and restore Ostoja to the throne in 1409.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ostoja of Bosnia” as king of Bosnia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as king of Bosnia. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2578848. VIAF identifies the subject as 26146522334332390378. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1418, 1398, 1404 and 1409.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ostoja of Bosnia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.