From Justinian to Branimir

The Making of the Middle Ages in Dalmatia

Danijel Džino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000206852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

From Justinian to Branimir explores the social and political transformation of Dalmatia between c.500 and c.900 AD.

The collapse of Dalmatia in the early seventh century is traditionally ascribed to the Slav migrations. However, more recent scholarship has started to challenge this theory, looking instead for alternative explanations for the cultural and social changes that took place during this period. Drawing on both written and material sources, this study utilizes recent archaeological and historical research to provide a new historical narrative of this little-known period in the history of the Balkan peninsula.

This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in Byzantine and early medieval Europe, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. It is important reading for both historians and archaeologists.

1 Dalmatia in time and space

Dalmatia as a unit of historical analysis

The term Dalmatia changed many times throughout history, depicting different political and geographical entities on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. It was a name of the Roman imperial province(s),¹ the province of the Ostrogothic kingdom from 493, the Byzantine province from the 530s, the early medieval Byzantine doucate, archontate and thema, the Carolingian duchy, a part of the kingdom of Croatia after it was incorporated into the medieval Hungarian arch-kingdom, the Venetian Stato da Màr, and the Habsburg province (or ‘kingdom’). Today the term depicts the southern part of the Republic of Croatia known as such to a growing number of tourists and travellers from all over the world and roughly corresponds to the Venetian and Habsburg Dalmatia, without the Boka Kotorska gulf. The name Dalmatia comes from the indigenous Iron Age group that the ancient sources called ‘Delmatae’, which inhabited modern-day central Dalmatia with the hinterland.² This book is using the term Dalmatia for the territory stretching between the eastern Adriatic and the river Sava, the modern-day regions of Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Lika, Kvarner, Gorski kotar, Bosnia, Boka Kotorska and its hinterland in Montenegro. It is an approximate equivalence to late antique Dalmatia, which comprised most of the original Roman province of the same name, except for the eastern parts, which were separated in the late third century into the province of Praevalitana.

The reason for choosing these particular regions as a unit of analysis is twofold. First, they represent core areas of the geo-political concept of Dalmatia, which existed as an imperial artefact from antiquity to the late medieval period. While its size varied, and it merged with new medieval geo-political terms, Dalmatia’s existence in imperial geographies – real and imagined – lasted for a very long time. The first recorded mention of Dalmatia as a fully formed imperial artefact is attested in Historia Romana, the work of the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus written in the 20s AD. Velleius, who himself was a military officer under the command of the future emperor Tiberius during his military campaigns in Dalmatia and Pannonia, makes numerous references to this new concept in Roman imperial geographies. It is more difficult to attest the last mention of this extended Dalmatia in the sources. One of those benchmarks could be the inscription on the tombstone of Anna of Schweidnitz (1339–1362), the third wife of the Holy Roman emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg and mother of the Bohemian king Wenceslaus IV, from the cathedral of St. Vitus (Wenceslaus) in Prague. In the inscription, she is described as Anna de Bosna de regno Dalmatiae (Anna of Bosnia, from the kingdom of Dalmatia). Anna of Schweidnitz in her life had nothing to do with Bosnia or Dalmatia – apart from being a distant relative of the Kotromanić clan that ruled large parts of the Dalmatian hinterland at times in the name of Hungarian kings. Yet, the title she carried shows how the idea of Dalmatia as an imperial artefact was still alive in the imperial geographies of fourteenth-century Europe.³

The other reason for choosing those regions as a single unit of historical analysis is that they preserved and maintained essential networks between local communities from the establishment of the Roman province to the end of the Middle Ages, enabling a surprisingly long life for this imperial artefact created in antiquity. These networks are clearly attested through communications, the exchange of goods and ideas, and shared architectures of power until the sixteenth century, when this region became a frontier zone between three complex Early Modern imperial formations: the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire and the Venetian imperial republic. The existence of this triple frontier between ca. 1500 and 1800 did not completely seal off parts of Dalmatia belonging to these three empires from each other – they continued to maintain a certain level of contact, the exchange of goods and ideas, and even social networks.⁴ Nevertheless, the unity Dalmatia maintained for such a long time in the mental geographies of contemporaries was broken, although a memory of its existence lingered for a while.⁵ This period also brought unprecedented population movements, which replaced the existing medieval populations with new migrants. Ottoman, Venetian and Habsburg parts of old Dalmatia became integrated within different architectures of power and started to participate in three different cultural discourses. This resulted in completely different ways in which local elites and the common people interpreted these cultural discourses and constructed their identities. The development of modern nations in the nineteenth century established new identity-patterns, which transgressed the division from the period of triple frontier. The Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims (after 1993 self-designated as the Bosniaks) from all three parts of the former triple frontier started to construct their identities within these new ideological and identity-patterns. State borders of the modern-day independent countries of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia and Serbia intersect in the region under consideration, taking their present shape in 1945, as parts of the newly established Yugoslav federation.

The research of pre-industrial empires in recent decades has generated significant scholarly interest. These empires, whether as successful or unsuccessful political projects, are specific macro-social formations, which strive to control large and diverse territories from a single political centre of power. They build specific imperial economic systems and complex social networks, construct recognisable imperial ideologies and discourses in order to build these political super-organisms and maintain their continuity or at the least illusion of it. The research shows that we cannot fully understand the functioning of these empires without fully understanding the relationship between the imperial core and its periphery, and between the imperial periphery and frontier-zones, which are areas outside direct imperial control but are still considered imperial zones of interest. The peripheries are not passive historical backwaters, but rather, spaces of increased imperial activity that provide imperial interaction with the outside world creating its own dynamics of political power and imperial influences. They are contact-zones and as well as zones of conflict space where the power of empires ceases and begins at the same time.⁶

Dalmatia is an excellent example of a region that was formed as imperial artefact and existed as an imperial periphery and frontier-zone in several different chronological contexts stretching from antiquity to the end of Middle Ages. Its creation as a Roman province was the consequence of Roman attempts to solve problems in the imperial periphery by incorporating the periphery through imperial expansion. Dalmatia becomes an imperial periphery again a few centuries later, but in a rather different situation. The contraction of the eastern Roman Empire in the early seventh century leaves this region positioned between a few Dalmatian cities controlled by the Byzantines and central Europe, which belonged to the Avar qaganate. Its transformation into an imperial periphery significantly impacted on social structures and identity-formation in the region. Shortly afterwards, Dalmatia again becomes part of a frontier-zone established between three imperial projects – the expanding Carolingian, Byzantine and Bulgar empires in the ninth and tenth century. However, this period also witnessed the formation of local polities, such as the Croatian duchy – later kingdom – which acted as independent agents in foreign affairs. The rise of the Hungarian kingdom places Dalmatia again in a position of imperial periphery as part of the commonwealth indirectly controlled by the Hungarian political centre from the early twelfth century. The failure to control the region and the appearance of another expanding empire – that of the Ottomans – in the fifteenth century breaks down Hungarian control and divides the region for the first time between different cultural and political systems, dealing a significant blow to the regional unity of Dalmatia.

Dalmatia beyond national, ‘local’ and ‘global’ paradigms

The history and archaeology of pre-Ottoman Dalmatia is divided along modern national paradigms and administrative borders. These have often been imposed anachronically by current interpretative approaches. As a consequence, the scholarship very much remains closed within the boundaries of the national histories of the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and more recently the Montenegrins and Bosniaks. The problem of Dalmatian history is not only national division, but also the impact of mental templates imposed by supra-national political entities from the past. This region was part of a wider Yugoslav political construct between 1918 and 1991. Yugoslavia (first as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) was created from historically and culturally diverse political units and nations in 1918. The ‘unification’ happened with significant support from outside political factors of the times, rather than being a genuine wish shared by the majority of its inhabitants. For that reason, it was important to explain and justify the social realities arising with the creation of this new state. History was used as an important ‘educational subject’, a tool for the interpretation of new social realities in this supra-national state. This was explicitly implied in the years immediately after the Second World War, when the new Communist authorities tried to impose programmatic and ideological approaches to the study of history. Consciously or unconsciously, the existence of a Yugoslav political construct impacted historical narratives. The past of Yugoslav territories has frequently been taken as a separate unit of analysis, even in the periods long before Yugoslavia started to exist. For those reasons, synthetic works dealing with either Roman or medieval Dalmatia outside of the contexts of either national or ‘Yugoslavising’ histories very rarely appeared.⁷

The other problem facing any history of ancient and medieval Dalmatia is the ongoing tension between ‘local’ and ‘global’ scholarship. This is well illustrated by the verses of the Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor in the prologue to the third edition of his book of poetry The Kings of the Croats, published in 1931:

They told us: ‘You have always been slaves/And like a graveyard your history is/Without even a decent grave-cross to be found/Just a tombstone here and there with no names/And weeds everywhere! By all the roads/The bones of your fathers are scattered’ …

… Even if there are no graves, monuments/Walls, plaques, parchments, paintings/I know what and how things have been./Not dispersed through all four corners of the world/but inside my body buried they are/The flesh of my fathers and all their bones!.... I am the monument of them dead.

While Nazor is a poet, not a historian, who writes under particular circumstances contributing to the construction of a Croatian national discourse,⁸ these verses very symbolically underline the essence of the problems in research into Dalmatian history. On the one hand, they illustrate a lack of interest in this region by macro-historical narratives (“… like a graveyard your history is …”), and on the other hand they underline the self-identification of local scholarship with the past and the appropriation of the role of ‘the keepers’ of historical discourse (“... inside my body buried are the flesh of my fathers and all their bones …”).

Macro-historical narratives are, by their very nature, focussed on political and/or cultural imperial centres. These centres possessed the ability and political power to gather knowledge and dominate the written discourse projecting the ideological and identity-narratives of contemporary imperial elites. They created, reproduced and maintained imperial cultures and kept imperial elites united, acting as an essential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Dalmatia in time and space
• 2 “An Old Woman’s Summer”: a glimpse into late antique Dalmatia
• 3 “Winter is coming”: signs of deeper social changes in sixth-century Dalmatia
• 4 The collapse of Byzantine Dalmatia
• 5 After the apocalypse: Dalmatia after 620
• 6 Clash of the empires and the Treaty of Aachen (775–812)
• 7 Tempora domini Brannimero
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Places and archaeological sites featured on the maps