Stefan Nemanja is not the father of Serbian statehood – Personal attitudes

These days, the passions around the Stefan Nemanja monument have been awakened in our public at different levels and on different topics, from historical and political to aesthetic and artistic.

Without getting into many problems, this time we will draw attention to only one that concerns historical credibility.

Like a verse from a children’s recitation, we hear the phrase “monument to Stefan Nemanja, the founder of the medieval Serbian state”, repeated every day in all media, written and electronic.

Journalists, publicists, artists and various cultural representatives elevate it to the level of axioms and pronounce it with firm confidence in themselves. It is also surprising that those who certainly should know that there is a great historical error are doing the same.

It is a lack of respect for historical facts, a blatant ignorance and a kind of renunciation of the centuries-old history of Serbian statehood.

In short, the Serbian state was created long before Stefan Nemanja, and in no way can it be considered its founder, the father of the Serbian state.

A simple fact, which is obviously very often lost sight of, shows that the premonastic period was significantly longer than the time of Nemanjić (five centuries to two centuries). From the middle of the 9th century at the latest, and it is reasonable to assume a century and a half earlier, one can speak of Serbian statehood.

The original data shows that the first Serbian prince known by name was Višeslav, who ruled around 780, and was succeeded by his son Radoslav and also by his son Prosigoj. Nothing has been preserved about the reign of these three princes, and more comprehensive data has been preserved about Vlastimir, son of Prosigojev and great-grandson of Višeslav, who ruled in the fourth and fifth decades of the ninth century.

This series of rulers, which continues until the middle of the 10th century, constitutes the oldest Serbian dynasty – the Višeslavićs (they are also called Vlastimirovićs in literature). In the next two centuries, in the 11th century and most of the 12th century, two more Serbian dynasties changed: the Vojislavić who ruled Duklja and the Vukanović.

The Nemanjić are therefore only the fourth Serbian dynasty, but truly the most important ruling family that ruled the Serbian lands during the two “golden” centuries (1166-1371).

Stefan Nemanja was just one of a number of great prefects who ruled Serbian lands. Of course, his merits for the rise of the medieval Serbian state and the founding of the most famous medieval Serbian dynasty are immeasurable.

However, the efforts of Nemanja’s predecessors, the great Serbian prefects who led Serbia through the mazes of Balkan and even European politics, should not be underestimated. Standing between two powers, Byzantium and Hungary, as between a hammer and an anvil, they, step by step, painstakingly paved the way to independence.

However, Stefan Nemanja eclipsed all previous great counties and opened a turning point in medieval Serbian history, a period that lasted seven decades, from Nemanja’s rise to power in 1166 until Saint Sava’s death in 1236.

Nemanja expressed a strong religious commitment to Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine culture. It is known that the Serbs, like the most western Orthodox people, were in the place where the Christian East and the Christian West faced each other, two worlds often located on the exclusive fronts of history.

The fact is that the Serbs also suffered from some influence from the West, but it is indisputable that Byzantine patterns of civilization were crucial. It was in this swing of civilization that Nemanja’s role and the irrevocable turn towards Eastern Christianity were visionary and decisive.

Stefan Nemanja went from being a Byzantine prisoner in the early 1970s to the ruler of a state that gained international recognition within the circle of Byzantine civilization in the 1990s, that is, in a period of little more than two decades. He left his heirs a state with far-reaching borders that stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Morava Valley.

The fact that the medieval Serbian state was vassal in the pre-Stefan Nemanja period does not in any way diminish its statehood. Giving that up would be the same as if we renounced the statehood of the modern Serbian state for the period 1804 to 1878, when Serbia was, excluding the insurgent period, autonomous, that is. vassal status.

Serbia gained full international recognition only at the Berlin Congress in 1878. If Nemanja is our first sovereign ruler of the Middle Ages, Milan Obrenović is our first sovereign ruler of the New Century, but neither Nemanja nor Milan are the founders of the medieval state and modern Serbian.

Stefan Nemanja, therefore, was not the “founder of the medieval Serbian state”, but the forefather of the most famous Serbian dynasty of the Middle Ages, a ruling family that raised Serbia from vassal state to empire and the most powerful state in the world. Southeast Europe. it flooded three seas: the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Ionian.

The authors are historians

Related texts: