16 - Changes in Identity and Ideology in the Byzantine World in the Second Half of the Twelfth Century: The Case of Serbia

Summary

The twelfth century brought a paradigm-shifting change to the region of southeast Europe, exemplified by the case of the creation of medieval Serbia in the form and with the features that would characterise this polity until the end of the Middle Ages. The Serbia of the 1160s onwards and the Serbia of the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries were two clearly and conspicuously different political formations. This is particularly true regarding identity, ideology and religion, three basic features and markers of political self-perception and self-representation in the Middle Ages, which became unified in a coherent political platform that would serve to create the basis of the more than two-century-long rule of the Nemanjić dynasty in Serbia.

In the early twelfth century, Serbia was still an insufficiently defined polity that was situated in the deep Balkan hinterland of the Byzantine Empire under the formal but distant and somewhat lax control of Constantinople. Constantinopolitan influence and even control was exercised indirectly, mainly through Hungary from the north or Diokleia from the southwest. By the second half of the twelfth century, however, the Serbian kingdom had emerged as a clearly profiled, recognisable and politically and ideologically defined entity that was now subordinate to the empire of Constantinople through a personal bond of its ruler to the Byzantine emperor. Mirroring the new epoch that had commenced through a changed relationship with the emperor, Serbia's new ruler Stephen Nemanja, chosen personally and installed as the great zhupan by Emperor Manuel I Komnenos in the mid- 1160s, closely and adeptly followed the main features of the political and ideological culture of the Byzantine capital at the time of Manuel Komnenos. From this point on, there would be no doubt which political centre medieval Serbia was orientated towards, and to whose political and cultural sphere it belonged.

The questions of identity, its understanding, characteristics and transformations in medieval Serbia have never been addressed in scholarship. It was always tacitly assumed, and from the time of the influential and voluminous early twentieth-century Geschichte der Serben by Constantine Jireček practically codified, that the identity of the Serbs was an unchangeable constant, from the early Middle Ages (the time of the Serbs’ settlement into the Balkans and their first mentions in the Byzantine sources) until the end of the Middle Ages and beyond, all the way to the modern era.