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Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Przemystaw Wiszewski, who has revised and commented on the preliminary versions of this work, and to Professors Jacek Banaszkiewicz, Andrzej Pleszczynski, and Lestaw Spychata for their valuable remarks on the draft manuscript.
This work was translated with the financial support of the University of Wroctaw. I owe many thanks to Professor Lucyna Harc and Katarzyna Polak (Institute of History, Wroclaw) and to Alessandra Giliberto (Brill Publishers) for their executive assistance and guidance.
I am grateful to Leokadia Krzewska for stylistic corrections, Andrzej Wojtasik for his comments during the translation process, and Sara Elin Roberts for proofreading and making the text more elegant and approachable.
Special thanks to my parents for their help and for patience they showed when I was doing the research, to my sister, whose practical approach allowed me to adopt the right perspective, and to all my friends, colleagues and teachers who helped me with advice, support and enthusiasm at various moments of work on this project.
Preliminary Chapter
1 Introduction
This is a book about fictitious rulers of an imaginary realm. In accordance with historiographical tradition, we will use the term “The Kingdom of the Slavs”. The history of this kingdom was presented in a text titled The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja. As the title indicates, the author of the work was a clergyman from the city of Bar, in Duklja (Dioclea in Latin), a state situated within the border of today’s Montenegro. This anonymous chronicler details the history of a powerful dynasty once ruling in the area of Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to some extent also Macedonia and Albania. The task of the present work is to approximate the meanings hidden behind this history of the contrived monarchy, by recognizing the tradition in which the course of the fate of its most important rulers was ascribed. Our reflection will focus on four representatives of that royal family who could be considered rulers of breakthrough periods. Each of them presented a different pattern of rule and each of them in his own way established new rules for the functioning of the Kingdom of the Slavs, presenting grounds for its existence in the future.
Such a task does not at first glance seem to be very difficult. When preparing for the analysis of the source, it would be prudent to pose some initial questions, and then move on to a critical analysis of selected fragments. The crucial issue would be to ascertain the place and time of the creation of the work. For obvious reasons, the issue of authorship of The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja is also important. Another important goal would be to define this earliest audience of the text. Unfortunately, it turns out that none of these issues can be settled satisfactorily unless we let ourselves be misled by the answers provided by the later tradition surrounding this work. In the case of The Chronicle, the inability to conduct standard criticism of the source is only the start of the disappointments.
2 What Is The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja, and What Is It Not? It is usually assumed that The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja was written in
the second half of the twelfth century, and is therefore one of the oldest preserved monuments of the historiography of medieval Dalmatia. This view has a long tradition, and is still held by the vast majority of Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin scholars studying this source. Norbert Kersken also supports this view in his complex monograph on the direction and different stages of medieval historiography in various parts of Europe, although he does not devote a great deal of attention to The Chronicle, as he considers it an isolated case that is difficult to place within the broader framework of local historiographical tradition.! Indeed, despite the enormous popularity of The Chronicle among modern and contemporary historians in later times, it is difficult to find clear evidence that it was well-known in the Middle Ages. In addition, the circumstances of the creation of The Chronicle are unclear. In the introduction to one of the surviving texts, the chronicler explained the motives that prompted him to take up the task, while at the same time asserting that he was only a translator of the older book written in Slavic; his Latin translation was reportedly a response to an appeal by his brethren and other clergymen of the archbishopric in Bar. He stated that he had been requested to write down the historical events by older people, but above all by youngsters, who were interested in hearing about tales of wars as much as in participating in them.” The Latin text of The Chronicle, allegedly the translation of the older narrative, is said to have been created in this way.
The initial situation seems to be essentially clear. The Chronicle was an attempt to write down a piece of history to meet the needs of the local community. The circle of recipients is known: the clergy and citizens of the city of Bar on the shore of the Adriatic Sea. Who was the author of the Latin text? A monk at one of the local convents. The purpose of writing the history was also expressed explicitly. The issue of establishing the date of The Chronicle’s creation appears to be the only remaining problem, yet it seems that it could be solved quickly, on the basis of the text itself and an analysis of knowledge of the local history taken from other sources.
Unfortunately, in actual fact, the case of The Chronicle is much more complicated. A reader can quickly come to the conclusion that the narrative leads through a maze of fictitious characters and unbelievable events — sometimes even giving the impression of a fairy-tale. For this reason, Slavko Mijuskovic¢, one of the translators of The Chronicle, called the Priest of Duklja the first author of belles-lettres in the territories that were to become Yugoslavia. In fact, Mijuskovi¢ was not the first scholar to be disappointed with the information provided by the author of The Chronicle; from the nineteenth century, scholars no longer considered it to be a valuable source. Numerous efforts to critically review The Chronicle were focused mostly on interpreting the title of traditions hidden in the text as reflections of real events, and on connecting the names of fictitious rulers with historical figures known from other sources.
Until recently, however, there had been a consensus on a few of the fundamental issues: the information provided in the aforementioned prologue was usually considered to be credible, although the earliest preserved copy of the basic longer text is the Italian translation by Mauro Orbini from the start of the seventeenth century. Also, the hypothetical creation date of The Chronicle in the mid-twelfth century, as determined by Orbini, was adopted (with some corrections) in the most important critical edition of The Chronicle by Ferdo Si8ic.4
Today’s historians are deprived even of these foundations. Not only are the dating and authorship of The Chronicle challenged, but even its originality is called into question. According to the most extreme concepts, the Latin text known today could be the work of an early-modern counterfeiter. It is becoming increasingly difficult to consider The Chronicle as a source of information on “actual” events, even if — from the point of view of a scholar studying “real” history — some sections of it have greater value than others.5 However, one can find legendary motifs within, traces of certain traditions, as well as conventions typical to medieval literature, and — above all — to the contemporary historiography of the Adriatic Sea region.
Deprived of the possibility of standard criticism of The Chronicle, we will be forced to seek meanings from within its narrative, making use of similar texts, and hoping that we will manage to identify certain political or cultural contexts that motivated the author to present selected issues. We share, without reservation, Danijel DZino’s opinion, who observed that medieval written sources are first and foremost “products of political and cultural discourses of their times’.6 Although the plural form of “times” in the previous sentence is used in a broad sense rather than confined to rhetorical reasons, in this work we will attempt to identify even the slightest traces of discourses echoed in The Chronicle.
In this situation, it is worth recalling the words of Czestaw Deptuta, who — in his reflections on the legendary vision of Polish history — noted that “the distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘fairy tales’ is basically a product of modern science”.” It is a side issue whether and to what extent the Priest of Duklja himself believed in the tale he presented. Undoubtedly, it was supposed to fulfil certain persuasive functions and to construct a concrete image of history, above all in its readers. The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja — regardless of whether we consider it as an example of a chronicle, genealogy, annals or medieval gesta — proposes a genetic vision that is, to a certain extent, formalized and conditioned by a specific literary mode. Despite its Slavic title — Ljetopis popa Dukljanina — The Chronicle is not really a fjetopis (annals) in the strict sense. It bears certain features of a chronicle, a genealogy, and “a tale about rulers’ deeds’, but determining the extent of each of these aspects is secondary to our inquiries. In fact, The Chronicle is a hybrid text. Its particular narratives and motifs are implemented and displayed in different manners, although the work as a whole presents a coherent vision of a dynasty shaped by means of examples of the attitudes of its most famous representatives.
3 The Different Versions of the Text
There are several extant versions of The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja. These are discussed in the next chapter of this work. The discussion in this chapter will not focus on which of the texts is closest to the original version, and which of the narratives better corresponds to the hypothetical original plot. From the surviving material, we can conclude that although the shorter Croatian version was preserved in the oldest manuscript known today, there are many indications that this variant is based on a lost Latin version. Traditionally, it has been assumed that two of the Latin manuscripts contain a text that should be considered the closest to the original. Those manuscripts have raised many doubts among scholars, some of whom have not hesitated in making very serious allegations and have sought evidence of forgery in the Latin text. Nevertheless, in the present work, the Latin version will be treated as the main source; further it will be referred to as Regnum Sclavorum, the title taken from its prologue. The other variants discussed in detail in Chapter 2 will not be forgotten, for they constitute a certain body of texts which we can certainly say are interrelated. In this case, when we write about phenomena that are characteristic of all the versions, we will call them collectively: The Chronicle.
4 Who Was the Priest of Duklja?
The Priest of Duklja is an anonymous figure. It is possible that he really lived and worked in the city of Bar. However, he could equally have written extensive parts of his chronicle elsewhere. The idea that he was only the translator of an older source, or the compiler of several previously separate texts, cannot be excluded. Regnum Sclavorum (both the manuscripts known today and the translation by Orbini) present a certain narrative unity. Differences between the three known versions of the longer text indicate that further alterations took place, yet they did not result in a fundamental change in the plot. We will attribute the work of giving the Latin text the shape in which it is known today to “the Priest of Duklja”. This conventional name does not suggest in any way that he actually came from Duklja. We also assume, agreeing with Zivkovié, that it was in the latter part of the Middle Ages that The Chronicle gained the shape in which it is found today. It cannot be ruled out that it contains some earlier material which was only superficially edited, or that comprehensive parts of the text were appended to it as late as the sixteenth century. The only things we know for certain about the Priest of Duklja is that he wrote in Latin, and that he had completed his work before 1601, when the text of the Italian translation of Regnum Sclavorum was printed.
5 Topoi, Symbols, Structures, and the Way of Imaging in The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja
In order to confront the particular motifs appearing in The Chronicle, first we must identify them correctly. If we consider the use of certain ready-made and conventionalized structures to present a desired image of history, or to evoke appropriate associations in readers, the Priest of Duklja’s historiography cannot be an exception.
Of these structures, topoi — made famous by the work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius — are the smallest ones. They are strongly conventionalized, and their meanings were determined by the principles of rhetoric.® Even Curtius, referring to the Jungian concept of archetype, allowed the possibility of creating new common places, as well as influencing the significance of those already existing.9 The cultural and historical context in studies on the meaning of topoi was fully appreciated by Leo Spitzer.!° His analysis of topoi was compared, by Jarostaw Marek Rymkiewicz, to the iconological method of reading visual art proposed by Erwin Panofsky.4
While analysing selected motifs in Regnum Sclavorum, we will also consider the proportions between the conventionalized and the mutable in the context of the broader narrative tradition. We will discuss specific molecules of topoi or “clusters of ideas”!? that will enable us to interpret particular fragments of The Chronicle. We will also try to trace the formation of particular motifs which are based on acommon structure, and deviate from these at the level of details. Recognizing each of the variants as a symbolic tale, we will try to recognize the particular sets of meanings conditioning its content.
In the Middle Ages, a symbol was not understood to be an arbitrary sign. As has been shown by Michel Pastoureau, medieval scholars viewed symbols as being motivated by their etymology as well as by analogy to other phenomena (and by inversion of such an analogy); they recognized them in relation to a particular sign in the context of a larger system of metonymic meanings.!8 A symbol, like the world, was purposeful. Its scope, connected with such a purposeful interpretation, was dynamic, though limited within a particular scope of meanings.
Therefore, detailed elements of a narrative — such as toponyms or the names of rulers — are as important as the system in which they were placed (because of the etymological significance attributed to them in the Middle Ages). Umberto Eco noticed that a medieval interpreter could read a given narrative account in many ways, within the frames of a given system of values determined by the convention of presenting history as part of a purposeful process.!+
Perhaps the dynamism of details within certain confined semantic structures, conventionalized symbols, or set motifs, can enable us to gain insight into the ideological assumptions of the Priest of Duklja’s work. Although we know neither the milieu in which he wrote, nor the target group of his readers, the very awareness of the existence of these categories allows us today to perceive Regnum Sclavorum as a body of text carrying certain meanings.
Clifford Geertz had attributed the role of regulation of social processes to symbols and signs. According to him, a text would be the transmitter of certain values and meanings which — depending on the interpretation — would somehow affect the community in which they were present. In this way, we can move our consideration of symbols from the plane of permanent structures and unchanging conventions, into the tissue of the social determinants of a text — a matter much more susceptible to changes. Jan Assmann wrote about the transmission of “meanings” in the context of the functioning of a community. He believed that memory of the past helped societies build a vision of the world in which they functioned. He also reduced the term “space” to its non-geographical meaning, recognizing that its order may also constitute a certain thought construct enclosed in “figures of memory” — a category similar to the earlier Maurice Halbwachs’ “icons of memory”.!¢ In this sense, a medieval text (such as the one that we deal with in Regnum Sclavorum) would be able to influence not only the image of the past and the memory of a community about itself, but would also be able to organize the space, taking into account historically important places and symbols around which specific contents accumulate.
The composition of Il regno de gli Slavi by Orbini was based on local historiography. The arrangement of the work was strictly subordinated to the category of space.!” Orbni’s work included an Italian translation of Regnum Sclavorum, and it is possible that the organization of the content around clusters of regional motifs had diffused into Il regno de gli Slavi from that work.!8 In our opinion, this feature of the plot of Regnum Sclavorum — the movable nature of the described centre — corresponds with the multitude of patterns of a ruler as presented in Orbini’s work. The kingdom, in the description by the Priest of Duklja, is subject to constant reinvention, a process of renewal and demorphization. The anonymous author placed specific markers in his work; a turn in a plot-related understanding of space, of the role of a ruler, and of the tasks assigned to him. Elements of a “new beginning” appear in Regnum Sclavorum at least four times. Each time they modify the meaning and the historical role of the Slavic kings and the community, and emphasize new challenges, where meeting these challenges was considered the fulfilment of the ruler’s duties.
6 The Image of a Ruler and the Concept of “the Beginning” in the Work by the Priest of Duklja
As the Priest of Duklja noted: When Constantine arrived at the court of the Slavic King Svetopelek, he managed to persuade the king to be baptized. Immediately after this event, there was a congress in which the legates of Pope Stephen and deputies of the Emperor Michael participated. During this synod, Svetopelek was crowned by Archbishop Honorius. At that time, the boundary of his vast realm was also marked, administrative issues were regulated, and rights were granted.
This comprehensive image demands a contextual framework. The recognizable names Svetopelek and Constantine, as well as the much more vague identities of the pope, the emperor and the archbishop, were presented in a completely fantastic constellation which does not appear in other sources. With a lack of any basic historical context regarding the circumstances of the creation of The Chronicle, as well as the almost autonomous character of the events described in the work, we are forced to seek these references wherever possible. Such tedious studies sometimes resemble guesswork, and they are often as ineffective as fortune-telling. However, we cannot forget that the context, although unknown, had to exist — Regnum Sclavorum had its author and its milieu of readers; it was connected to a particular place (or several places), and written at a certain time; it passed through the process of developing its form over a longer period. The Chronicle is a carrier of noticeable content related to a certain oral or written tradition, to which we have almost no access today.
The rulers in the work by the Priest of Duklja are not a product of (just) his imagination. Their images had to correspond to a pattern known to the author, and needed to have been modelled in a literary manner on such a cultural pattern. The very structure of the work seems to confirm such a supposition. Regardless of whether Regnum Sclavorum was written earlier in the Middle Ages and based on oral tradition, or, as some claim, it is a brilliant forgery inspired by older sources!® — it was certainly connected to an elaborate system of references immersed in local tradition. The characterization of the rulers of the Kingdom of the Slavs was shaped not only by conventional rhetoric, but also by not-so-strictly formalized symbols and motifs, perhaps even referring to the vague concept of the archetype. Scraps of older sources or oral legends can be identified as if crammed between the lines of text.
Each of the narrative schemes discussed in this work refer to the idea of the “Beginning”.2° In Regnum Sclavorum, it is possible to distinguish several “starting points’, when the concepts of power, ruler and royalty itself were revalorized. From these fictional origins we will try to derive the dynamics of later events. Each of the breakthrough events of this type was associated with a differently-characterized royal figure.
It should be realized that the changes in the models of an ideal ruler were to a certain extent conditioned by the material available to the Priest of Duklja. In this respect, he was limited by his own imagination and by earlier tradition. Shaping the models of an ideal ruler was also an intentional procedure, recognizable to the milieu of readers. The point of the “Beginning” was to become a unique moment, a time when the kingdom (though fictitious) described by the Priest of Duklja gained new features, and its rulers were legitimized in a new way.
There are four distinguishable “points of creation” in Regnum Sclavorum which are closely related to the specific “code of history” presented by the author. In the Middle Ages (though not only then), the time the kingdom came into being was given a special meaning, in being able to affect repetitive elements of reality. In this context, the heroes of the “Origins” are the permanent models that the Priest of Duklja had to take into consideration while creating the ideology of the fictitious realm he was to describe. Another important element of the chronicle, providing the leitmotif of the narrative, is the history of the dynasty. Special significance needed to be given in his work to emphasize its continuity. By means of specific narrative constructs, the Priest of Duklja introduced new content into the history of the dynasty and redefined the image of the Kingdom of the Slavs. The origin of the kingdom was marked by the invasion of the Goths and the reign of the pagan kings; the second early phase of its inception — the baptism and the granting of borders and rights to the realm at the Synod in Dalma during Svetopelek’s reign — was the act of the proper foundation of the kingdom; the third stage in its creation — the renewal of the kingdom and the foundation of Ragusa by King Pavlimir Bello — ended the period of the interregnum; and finally the fourth step — marked by the death of the king-martyr Vladimir — was the founding sacrifice for the auspicious continuation of the kingdom.
The four abovementioned fragments look particularly important for the concept of authority and for the image of a ruler in the Priest of Duklja’s work. Their multi-threaded construction perfectly predestined them for the role of narrative connectors. Each could be assigned to the role of re-opening — not only shifting the narrative focus onto new tracks, but above all redefining the concepts of the king, the kingdom and the community of subjects, providing models and principles according to which the kingdom described by the Priest of Duklja was supposed to function. Each of the selected narrative schemes is the subject of a separate chapter (Chapters 3 to 6).
1. The protagonists of the first chapter are Goth leaders, mainly Totila and Ostroil. While analysing the origins of the kingdom in Regnum Sclavorum in the context of legends about the origin and migration of the people, we will attempt to determine what features the author of the text attributed to the Goth rulers, and to what extent they refer to perceptible traditions of the Gothic origins of the Slavs or to the conquest of Dalmatia by the barbarians. We will also examine the function of starting the entire narrative in such a way.
2. The protagonist of the second chapter is the king Svetopelek, with his activities during the Synod in Dalma as the main issue under discussion. In this part we will refer to the image of the second phase and the proper foundation of the kingdom. We will describe those features of Svetopelek’s reign that allowed him to reform the state. We will look at the extent to which the Priest of Duklja used written sources known to him to present the Kingdom of the Slavs; we will also discuss the main foundations of this form of presentation. Then, we will examine the role played in these processes by the missionary named Constantine.
3. In the fifth chapter we will discuss the theme of Pavlimir Bello, the foundation of Ragusa and the renewal of the kingdom. We will examine the origins of the motif of a returning king in the older story about how Ragusa was founded. We will also discuss the results of the narrative procedure of attaching this figure to the course of events related by the Priest of Duklja. We will analyse the three stages of Pavlimir’s activity, showing how his actions were the aftermath of a tradition well-known to the author, and how they reflected his literary intention.
4. In the sixth chapter the figure of King Vladimir will be discussed. We will show how, by means of emphasizing the role of the king-martyr, the Priest of Duklja constructed another founding legend for the fictitious realm described by him. We will reflect on the sources of this narrative and how it was related to the cult of Saint Jovan Vladimir in the Balkans. We will also be interested in using the rhetoric typical of hagiographies by the author of Regnum Sclavorum.
5. The excursus in Chapter 7 is dedicated to the tale of the violent death of King Zvonimir presented in the Croatian version of The Chronicle. We will analyse the sources of this legend and will try to show how the ending of the Croatian version distinguished the overall meaning of this variant from the Latin version of the work.
For each of the narrative episodes we will also try to answer the following auxiliary questions:
— From which elements was the story built? What images of the ruler and his reign emerge from it? — What was the function of the motif in the narrative concept of Regnum
Sclavorum? (In Chapter 7: in the Croatian version of The Chronicle).
— To what tradition did the author refer (if any)?
— Is it possible to assign particular royal figures to the model of a medieval ruler?
The five abovementioned chapters will be preceded by a sketch on the histori-
ography of studies on The Chronicle.
7 Studies on the Royal Authority: the Model of an Ideal Ruler
The rulers of the Kingdom of the Slavs were assigned various features in the Priest of Duklja’s work. Some of them served as a negative example, while others were considered by the chronicler as perfect monarchs and models to follow. We will focus primarily on the kings of the latter category. It was these figures that legitimized the royal dynasty and showed the principles according to which the Kingdom of the Slavs should be ruled.
There is a long and rich tradition of studies of authority in the Middle Ages that has already been discussed and recapitulated many times. Gabor Klaniczay, in the introduction to his work dedicated to the holy monarchs of Hungary, distinguished two milestones in modern studies on the notion of medieval royalty. The first was the work by Fritz Kern, published in 1914,7! distinguishing two sources of authority: God’s favour and the social contract,” and the second, Marc Bloch’s work, published in 1924,23 introducing the category of “les rois thaumaturges” — kings-magic-workers or kings-miracleworkers — and analysed regal ideology for the first time with methods typical of cultural anthropology and ethnology, which were still to some extent under the influence of The Golden Bough by James George Frazer.”+
Kern’s findings, concerning the symbolism of the medieval state and the importance of coronation ceremonies, served as inspiration to Percy Ernst Schramm.?5 His “school” of studies on the idea of royal authority and its ordines was considered by Janos Bak as the most characteristic for historiography in the mid-twentieth century,?° along with the thoughts by Walter Ullmann on the legal conditioning of medieval monarchies,?” and the trend initiated by the concept of “king’s two bodies” by Ernst Kantorowicz and its role in changing the way of understanding political theology.®
As was noted by Smilja Marjanovi¢-DuSanic¢ in her essay on royal sanctity, the attributes of royal authority in the Middle Ages may have three roots: (1) those related to the ideology of Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors;?9 (2) pagan sources of power by barbarian leaders, and (3) elements directly related to Christianity, referring to the figures of the Old Testament kings and judges, or the New Testament figure of Christ the King and the cult of saints.
The significance of the pagan factor was emphasized by Karl Hauck, who combined the idea of the sanctity of the rulers and the supernatural properties attributed to royal authority, with the heritage of Germanic paganism and the cult of Wotan in particular.2° Hauck’s positions were criticized by Frantisek Graus, who stressed, above all, Christian influences in the process of development of the medieval institution of kingship.3! Nevertheless, Hauck’s concept, linking the cultural order of early medieval societies with the sanctity of their “charismatic” rulers, still finds many followers.”
One of them, and certainly the most interesting, is Jacek Banaszkiewicz, who derived his reflection on the myth-based structure of Indo-European legends from Georges Dumézil’s system, while at the same time trying to show the dynamic impact of legendary accounts on the formation of groups and the creation of intra-community relations.?? Banaszkiewicz was particularly interested in the formation of communities. He associated them with the figure of a king-founder bearing the features of a cultural hero or a semi-mythical organizer of the newly emerging ethnos.
However, the pagan elements were certainly not the only influence on the image of an ideal ruler. Biblical patterns, heritage of antiquity, medieval legends and moral norms, passed down through romances, chronicles or sapiential literature, gradually formed an increasingly dense network of connections, creating new models of ideal rulers while adapting the old ones, as well as conditioning their popularity. The literary image of a medieval ruler often consisted of elements belonging to several patterns: rex iustus — a just king — in certain situations could also be presented as an ideal warrior, a “good king” and even a martyr to the faith, which was often conditioned by the narrative situation and the related choice of the most appropriate model that would emphasize the noble qualities of a monarch.
Attempts to determine the typology of an ideal ruler and its development in the period of the High Middle Ages and Late Middle Ages are very interesting, especially in the areas of “Younger Europe’, the periphery of the medieval Christendom. Robert Antonin recently comprehensively diagnosed these models, focusing on the territories of medieval Bohemia. He not only dared to recognize the patterns used to construct the narratives about the kings, but also described the sources and meaning of particular images of a ruler in the medieval Czech chronicles.*4
The abovementioned works by Klaniczay and Marjanovi¢-DuSani¢ focused on the phenomenon of a specific category of rulers — the holy kings — and tried to link it with the development of dynastic ideologies in medieval Hungary and Serbia since the Middle Ages almost to contemporary times. Both scholars were inspired by Robert Folz, who had already in the 1980s tried to place a chronological perspective over somehow static interpretations of models of holy rulers.?> Folz distinguished three examples of such rulers: (1) a kingmartyy, (2) aking-confessor, and (3) a king-miracle-worker, all three recognized by him as basic types. According to Folz, the first was the most popular in the early Middle Ages, the second in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and the third began to dominate in narratives about holy kings from the second half of the thirteenth century.
Klaniczay, who based his works on the propositions by Folz, slightly modified this sequence. He distinguished three periods: (1) the one dominated by the model of a holy and charismatic king strongly inspired by pagan heritage; (2) the one dominated by the model of a king-martyr, popular primarily in the British Isles and the peripheries of Christendom; and (3) the one dominated by the model of a just ruler (rex iustus et bonus) that began in the eleventh century, and — as a result of the Crusades, and the increasingly popular cult of Charlemagne — transformed into the model of a modest king, a courteous knight protecting his homeland (athleta patriae).3© According to Klaniczay, this evolution of the models of holy kings was also characteristic for central Europe.
Marjanovic-DuSani¢é proposed a typology of Serbian cults of holy kings different to that presented by Klaniczay. The ideology of the Nemanji¢ dynasty developed not only under the influence of the Byzantine symbolism of imperial authority, but — according to Marjanovic-DuSani¢é — was also evidently affected by the local cults of ancestors which saturated it with specific endemic features.2” Marjanovic-DuSani¢ distinguished three main models of Serbian ruler: (1) the sacred founder of the dynasty, Stefan Nemanja, similar to the type rex renitens®® and the models of Byzantine ruler-monks; (2) the cult of Saint Sava associated with the project she called “the symphony of the church and the state”; and (3) the cult of the holy dynasty dating from the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in which the Serbian rulers were sanctified by membership of the Nemanji¢ family.°°
Both typologies will be important for us, as they characterize the development of the model of an ideal ruler in regions adjacent to the area described by the Priest of Duklja (Serbia, known at that time as the Grand Principality of Rasgka, was allegedly even a part of the Kingdom of the Slavs). Unfortunately, without knowledge of the circumstances and the time of creation of Regnum Sclavorum, the application of a comparative method on a broader scale is impossible. As we shall see, this Latin work also presents a whole range of exemplary rulers. However, they can often be reduced to being “universal examples” and, with the exception of King Vladimir, it is difficult to identify the exact origin of the models, thus it is only possible to reflect on the ideological meaning they carried.
It should be emphasized that neither this short introduction, nor the present work as a whole, aspires to be a detailed description of the models of an ideal ruler existing in the Middle Ages, and neither does it examine their philosophical, literary or ideological foundations in their entire diversity. On the contrary, the models of rulers will serve as a key to interpret selected images in the Priest of Duklja’s work, where the selection of typical features may prove helpful in understanding the underlying narrative content.
8 Connection between Regnum Sclavorum and Local Tradition
Hypotheses regarding the way The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklia was composed are discussed in the next chapter. It should be noted that the work was probably based on earlier texts that did not survive, and the same is true of its Latin version, Regnum Sclavorum. Such conclusions can be drawn from the sudden changes in narration, usually filled with short annalistic information and often without warning turning into much more comprehensive tales. The texts used by the Priest of Duklja, as well as the very nature of the information taken by him from other sources, including oral ones, undoubtedly influenced the shape of the vision of history proposed by him.
To determine which components in the extant narrative were the author’s own idea, and what was borrowed from older content, we would have to reconstruct the very process of reforming the tradition related to a particular motif; however, that is impossible for the lack of sources. Nevertheless, we will try to use other, usually local, accounts closely associated with the events described in selected fragments of Regnum Sclavorum. The narratives include: the Croatian version of The Chronicle (as an exception: early modern translations of the text), and other local narrative sources from the period of the High Middle Ages (as an exception: early modern literature, mainly from the area of Dubrovnik). Besides the narrative sources, we will occasionally use documents and references to monuments of material culture that seem to be related to the plot in question.
Only half of the episodes we selected for analysis are mentioned in the Croatian text of The Chronicle. This version will help us as a reference point in the tale of the Goths and the Synod in Dalma described in Regnum Sclavorum.
Plots of the Croatian and Latin versions irretrievably split at the point of the expulsion of King Radoslav, immediately before the motif of Pavlimir Bello was introduced in Regnum Sclavorum. The tale of Radoslav in the Croatian variant differs from the one described in the Latin version, thus we used the opportunity to compare both narratives while describing the events that preceded the introduction of Pavlimir. The Croatian version does not mention the founding of Ragusa by Pavlimir Bello or the legend of King Vladimir.
Among the narrative sources from the period of the High Middle Ages and Late Middle Ages or early modern period, the work of Thomas the Archdeacon (also known as Thomas of Split) is distinguished as a basic example and a reference point of the phenomenon of “Gothomania” that linked the appearance of the Slavs in Illyricum with the invasion of the Goths. The relationship between Constantine and the King Svetopelek is exhaustively discussed in the comprehensive hagiography of the Solun Brothers — St. Cyril and St. Methodius — including several themes repeated in Regnum Sclavorum. The legend of Pavlimir Bello seems to correspond with the late medieval and modern literature of Ragusa. Byzantine chronicles mentioned King Vladimir, who later became an object of worship and a literary hero. King Zvonimir, the protagonist of the excursus, is mentioned in Croatian, Dalmatian and Hungarian historiography. These sources determine only the basic scope for comparative studies of particular legendary motifs, and so this study has also included sources from other parts of Europe wherever it seemed useful, turning in the first place to sources from adjacent regions.
9 Regnum Sclavorum and Historiography
The Latin version of The Chronicle of the Priest of Duklja is a unique work, considered to be one of the oldest literary sources describing the history of southern Slavonic countries. It is no wonder that since the first publication in the mid-seventeenth century (or perhaps even from the times of Tuberon and Orbini) it has been one of the axes around which the historiographical reflection of the region was shaped.
Scholars offered numerous and often mutually exclusive hypotheses concerning the work. For some time the authenticity of Regnum Sclavorum had been questioned, just as had several other pieces of medieval literature of Slavic countries: it will suffice to mention the claims by Edward Keenan and other scholars that The Tale of Igor’s Campaign is a forgery,*° or the dispute among Czech historians over the date of origin of the work known as Legenda
Christiani [Vita et passio sancti Wenceslai et sancte Ludmile ave eius |.
Writing about history is a discursive act. Hayden White showed that a work by historians, from the very nature of the process of constructing a “historical fact’, is similar to the work of a prose-writer, and its perspective — far from being objective — is highly personalized.” Moreover, the history of studies of a text affects our view and becomes a part of the text itself.
David Kalhous, facing the problem of a similar burden in the case of Legenda Christiani, postulated the application of game theory terminology into historiography, in order to establish a model interpretation of historiographic production.*? Indeed, the problem of the prevalence of some views over others, the temporary success of some hypotheses, and the decline of those which had previously enjoyed great popularity, is all too visible — as is the case for scholarly literature on Regnum Sclavorum. Kalhous, referring to Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s concept,*4 wrote about “conceptual metaphors” from which the arguments of historians are constructed. Such concepts are never “innocent”. Quite the contrary: language is the weapon of a historiographic war.*5 This war continues, and the present work is a modest participant. Describing the arguments of the possibly many parties to the conflict will constitute its essential element.
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