L'Idéologie monarchique dans les hagio-biographies dynastiques du moyen âge serbe by BoškoI. BojovićReview by: Martyn RadyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Oct., 1997), pp. 740-744Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212519 .

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740 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Bojovic, Bosko I. L'Idiologie monarchique dans les hagio-biographies dynastiques du moyen age serbe. Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 248. Pontificio Instituto Orientale, Rome, I995. Iii + 727 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Price unknown.

THE political theology of the 'Byzantine Commonwealth' made it hard for the medieval Balkan principalities to affirm their own particularity. The belief in a hierarchically organized Christian oikoumnene, at the head of which stood the Emperor of the Romans, rendered any claim to sovereignty by lesser princes tantamount to a disturbance of the divine order (taxis). It was the impossibility of articulating within their own lands the familiar West European adage, rex est imperator in regno suo, which compelled Simeon of Bulgaria and, later, Stephen Dusan of Serbia to claim the Byzantine imperial title for themselves. Writing in this journal some forty years ago, George Ostrogorsky observed, 'Like Simeon of Bulgaria, Stephen Dusan also lived in the Byzantine world of ideas, and his political thinking was also based on the theory of a single world empire. This is why he did not strive for the foundation of a Serbian empire beside the Byzantine empire but wished to replace it by a Graeco-Serbian empire of his own creation. He was also not content with the title of Serbian emperor, but assumed the prodigious title of "Emperor and Sovereign of Serbia and Romania"' (SEER, 35, I956-57, P. 7). As it turned out, Dugan's bid to wrest the imperial dignity for himself not only drew Serbia into a series of exhausting engagements but also cracked the gymphonia which had hitherto existed between the Nemanjic dynasty and Serbia's own Byzantine-trained clergy.

The present work is a close and extensive study of one of the ways by which the Nemanjic princes of Serbia and their successors sought to construct an ideology of rulership which was capable of compensating for their subordinate place within the hierarchical ordering of Eastern Orthodox society. From the time of St Stephen Nemanja-Simeon onwards, the sanctity of the ruling family was exalted either by the straightforward canonization of individual princes or in vitae which recounted their spiritual achievements. The scope of the volume is, therefore, not confined to the hagiographies of St Nemanja-Simeon and of his son, St Sava, but encompasses also what the author refers to as 'dynastic hagio-biography', that is the lives of all the Serbian rulers whether they were canonized or not (and most of them were not). One critical point in the history of Serbian hagio-biography was the amalgamation of the vitae of SS Nemanja-Simeon and Sava by the monk Teodosije around the year I 300, which reinforced the notion of a symphonic and divinely-ordained diarchy of secular and spiritual authority. A second was the collection of royal lives drawn up by Archbishop Danilo II and his continuators in the first half of the fourteenth century, which transferred the charisma of sanctity from the founders of the Nemanjic dynasty to the ruling family as a whole. As Bosko Bojovic indicates, the extinction of the Nemanjic line in Serbia following the death of Uros V in 137I provoked an ideological crisis which could have robbed the Serbian rulers of their legitimacy. In timely fashion, however, Uro's's heir, Prince Lazar, released by his death on the field of Kosovo a new dynastic charisma which borrowed as much from the numen of the martyr as

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from the Nemanjic inheritance (p. 568). Although the Nemanjic tradition was subsequently revived to lend lustre to the Brankovic family, the story of Prince Lazar performed an important role in compensating for the contumacy and inadequacy of the reigns of Dusan and Uros V.

Dynastic hagiography and hagio-biography proved, however, inadequate instruments for counteracting Byzantine notions of empire, hierarchy and taxis. The sanctification of the Nemanjic dynasty was insufficient to match the assembled ideological weight of the sacred empire. Serbia might thus be the New Israel, but Byzantium retained its pre-eminence as Paradise itself (p. 370). In this respect, it is instructive that St Nemanja-Simeon's chrysobull for the Chilandar monastery, in which Bojovic detects the origins of the Nemanjic cult and of the belief in divine election, contains a characteristic exposition of Byzantine theory relating to the ordering of power (p. 326). An important motif within the Nemanjic tradition remained the gift of a crown by the Byzantine rulers, and even the despots of the fifteenth century sought to buttress their slender authority by reference to the Byzantine origin of their title (p. 6I5). Likewise, the compiler of Milutin's vita saw fit to include Andronicus II's letter to the Serbian king, in which was enunciated Milutin's filial relationship to the emperor (p. 500). Dusan's self-appointment as Emperor of the Serbians and the Romans and the installation of his own patriarch indicate the retained influence of Byzantine conceptions of rulership. The way Dugan's own vita breaks off before this episode may be understood as signifying clerical disapproval of the ruler's presumption and of the potential disordering (ataxia) which it implied (pp. 556-57).

Throughout his account, Bojovic assumes a functionalist approach towards sanctity which owes much to the writings of Karol Gorski (in particular his 'Le Roi-saint', Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations, 24, I 969, 2, pp. 370-76). He presupposes that the cults of SS Nemanja-Simeon and Sava served an ideological purpose and that dynastic hagio-biography was intended for a political end. He does not, however, seek to elucidate the domestic conditions which made possible and sustained such veneration. It is simply taken as understood that the Serbian ruling family had to find some way of confronting the universalist claims of Byzantium, that sanctity offered one solution, and there was a willing body of monks ready to translate this wish into an 'official', hagiographical form. If such an account is accepted, then it must be admitted either that the Serbian scheme was not pursued with any great consistency or that it encountered resistance sufficient to blunt its purpose. Among the Nemanjic rulers, only three were canonized during the lifetime of the dynasty: Nemanja-Simeon himself, Milutin and Stephen Decanski. Of these, the cult of Milutin appears to have been more successful in Bulgaria than Serbia, while the reputation of Decanski owed much to the later writings of Gregory Camblak. Similarly, despite the vast biographical literature recording his mimesis Christou, Prince Lazar was not canonized. AsJanet Nelson has argued with regard to royal saints elsewhere, cults cannot be imposed. In order to prosper and to reinforce the charisma of the dynasty, they probably require a larger measure of popular approbation and support than the functionalist account allows ('Royal Saints and Early Medieval Kingship', in D. Baker (ed.), Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, Oxford, 1973, pp. 39-44).

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The individual lives of the Serbian royal saints rely upon familiar koinoi topoi of medieval hagiography: visionary powers; posthumous miracles; a sweet- smelling and incorruptible corpse, and so on. Nevertheless, saintly rulers were as rare in Byzantium as they were in the German empire. Constantine the Great and the Empress Theophano are, to the present author's knowledge, the only examples. On several occasions, Bojovic indicates other potential sources for Serbia's hagiographical tradition: the lives of SS Boris, Gleb and Vladimir in Kievan Russia; the cult of St Laszl6 in Hungary inaugurated in I I92; and the concept of the Holy Vine and Root in the vita of St Sabbas of

Jerusalem. Nevertheless, he does not extend his analysis into a sustained textual examination, preferring instead to make generalized comparisons with dynastic traditions in, mainly, West European states: les rois thaumaturges and various unspecified English monarchs. This conveniently serves one of Bojovic's aims, which is to demonstrate that the ideology of monarchy in Serbia was inspired as much by Western as by Byzantine models. According thus to Bojovic, the synchretic character of Serbian kingship reflected Serbia's own position at the meeting-place of the Western and Eastern worlds.

Any discussion of the Serbian ideology of kingship which derives principally from hagiography must, however, encounter the same problems as I. P. Eremin has indicated with regard to early Russian literature (for which, see J. Bortnes, Visions of Glo7y: Studies in Early Russian Hagiography, Oslo, I988, p. 22). On the one hand, there are the hagiographical traditions themselves, which follow established literary conventions and are intent upon 'the constant transformation of reality'. On the other, there are the 'factual records', most notably charters of foundation and law-codes. As Bojovic concedes, the terminology applied in these different literary remains is often at variance. Nemanja-Simeon may thus be an autokrator or samodruzhni gospodin according to his vitae, but these titles were never attributed to him in charters published during his reign (pp. 5, 3I6). Nevertheless, having largely discounted the evidence of the charters and codes in the earlier part of his account, Bojovic seeks to demonstrate by reference to these instruments that the Serbian ideology of rulership moved during the fourteenth century from a Christ- centred kingship to a new variety of law-centred kingship. (Here, Bojovic's debt to Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies is obvious even though unstated.) According to Bojovic, Dugan's empire was constitutionally ordered. The king was subject to the law and the Sobor operated as a form of estates-parliament (grandly called here an 'Assemblee des representants des grands corps sociaux' [p. 684] ). As Bojovic concludes, 'The juridical texts of the Nemanjic period demonstrate the evolution of political thought which moved from a close interdependence [etroite solidarite] between the two powers at the beginning of the thirteenth century, towards a certain secularisation of society which the constitutionalism of Dusan in the mid-fourteenth century reveals particularly well' (p. 688).

Bojovic's case is unconvincing. First, it is not enough to point out a Sobor and then to extrapolate a theory of government analogous to ones found in Catholic Europe. Within the Central European kingdoms, which, as Bojovid concedes, are the ones most likely to have fed Serbian political theory, the prevailing doctrines postulated the existence of two repositories of right: the

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crown and the political nation. It was from the interaction of these two coming together in the institution of the diet that statute law was determined. Now, it is by no means obvious that this distinction was at all understood in medieval Serbia. Here the principal expressions of government refer in the Middle Ages almost exclusively to lordship and to its attributes, hence srpska drzava and srpsko kraljestvo or tsarstvo. (The term srpske zemnzje appears to the present author to be devoid of political associations and was certainly never employed in the meaning of Land or orszag and so as a counterpoise to the royal power.) As Leonidas Mavromatis has argued (Byzantion, 48, I978, pp. 4I7-29), the dominant ideology of rulership in Serbia remained a narrowly patrimonial one which failed to distinguish between public and private law, and which might even describe political power by reference to the vocabulary of personal land possession, most notably as bastina. For its part, the Sobor was a royal council and thus an extension of the person of the ruler. It was emphatically not a parliamentary body vested with rights independent of the king. Secondly, the transition to 'law-centred kingship' in Serbia (if such indeed ever occurred) may itself have been a consequence of the country's increasing exposure through conquest to Byzantine influences, for Byzantine theories of kingship particularly stressed the role of the ruler as supreme magistrate and law-giver. As Bojovic concedes, the text of Dusan's Code was itself preceded by several Byzantine laws to which it acted almost as a gloss. Moreover, the critical passage which Bojovic cites from the Code, as illustrating the ruler's subordination to the law, is itself directly borrowed from Manuel Comnenus's Novel of i i59 (see Byzantion, 2, 1958, p. 538).

Bosko Bojovic has certainly published the most comprehensive survey of the dynastic literature of the Serbian Middle Ages. His account is preceded by a wonderfully compressed summary of the political history of medieval Serbia. The scholarly apparatus is formidable and the footnotes amount to a critical bibliography of all the most important books and articles on this period of Balkan history. His account additionally yields a fresh explanation for the retained potency of Prince Lazar's memory in the popular imagination. Nevertheless, there is only so much that royal vitae can tell us. Their stylized form and their adherence to the established loci communes of hagiographical tradition may mean that their content does not always adequately reflect prevailing political beliefs. The twelfth-century Reginald of Canterbury's verdict on the content of Western hagiography, 'All things are common in the communion of saints', may thus equally well apply to the political common- places found in the texts of the vitae. Bojovic's attempt to obviate this limitation by investigating other sources is, however, not pursued with sufficient vigour and his conclusions do not always carry conviction. It is, therefore, greatly to be hoped that the author will follow up this work with a broader account of Serbian political ideology which takes fully into account those other sources to which he refers but only very partially discusses: sigillography; inscriptions; charters and law-codes; secular literature and iconography. Until then, the issue must remain in the balance as to whether late medieval Serbia was moving from patrimonial kingship towards a 'mixed monarchy' of the Western type or whether it was still largely influenced by political traditions inherited from Byzantium. Even if the latter is accepted, the extent to which local

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Serbian traditions acted as a prism through which Byzantine ideas were refracted requires itself a separate evaluation. After all, as the fourteenth- century Nicephorus Gregoras remarked on the relationship between Serbs and Greeks, 'One cannot expect apes and ants to act like eagles and lions'.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies MARTYN RADY University of London

Pelc, Ortwin and Pickhan, Gertrud (eds). Zwischen Liubeck und Novgorod: Wirtschaft, Politik und Kultur im Ostseeraum vom fraen Mittelalter bis ins 20.

Jahrhundert. ]Norbert Angermann zum 6o. Geburtstag. Nordostdeutsches Kulturwerk, Luneburg, I 996. 496 pp. Notes. Tables. Maps. Illustrations. DM I00.00.

NORBERT ANGERMANN has for many years enjoyed a pre-eminent position amongst German historians of the Baltic, mostly notably for his work on Livonia and Muscovy in the sixteenth century. This Festschrift, which includes a comprehensive list of all his publications, offers a rich variety of contributions to the general theme of Russia and the Baltic, ranging from Viking times to World War II. Most are fairly short, and deal with a specific topic, but there are several longer contributions which have a broader perspective. The old chestnut of the Normanist controversy is given a fresh polish by Ruslan G. Skrynnikov, drawing largely upon Byzantine sources, and there is a rather interesting and unusual contribution by another Russian scholar, Anna Leonidovna Khoroshkevich, in which the 'Hof' of the medieval German trading community in Novgorod and the fondaco dei tedeschi in Venice are compared. Trade is a dominant theme running through most of the thirty-one contributions. Henryk Samsonowicz, in a brief but stimulating essay, offers three consequences for the Baltic region of the trade which flowed from the Orient to Western Europe during the Viking era: it made possible the attainment of a positive balance of trade, which in turn furnished the means, such as acquisition of a supply of weapons, which allowed the creation of 'state organisms', and it created a relatively homogenous economic system extending from the British Isles eastward and bounded by the Elbe and Danube. Paraphrasing Pirenne, Samsonowicz concludes that without Mohammed, there would have been no creation of states in Eastern and Northern Europe, either. Gerhard Theuerkauf gives a timely warning against overestimating the size and volume of seaborne trade, and his work on the internal trade routes of Mecklenburg is complemented by a longer contribution from Heinz von zur Muhlen on the carters of Reval (which incidentally concludes a tale of frustration with marine insurers which spilled over into decades of vengeful piracy and plunder, the earlier phases of which are chronicled in the Danish Historisk Tidsskrift for I9I9-20). On eighteenth-century trade there are two useful contributions. Viktor Zakharov, using the I 722 list of merchant ships visiting the harbour of Kronshlot, reveals a city still in the full throes of construction, importing building materials, but already with a wealthy clientele for marble statuary, books, wines, fruit and spices - not to mention coal from Newcastle to heat their new palaces. Elisabeth Harder-Gersdorff

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