Memory and Authority in the Ninth-Century Dalmatian Duchy
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Marino Kumir MEMORY AND AUTHORITY IN THE NINTH-CENTURY DALMATIAN DUCHY MA Thesis in Medieval Studies Central European University CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2016 MEMORY AND AUTHORITY IN THE NINTH-CENTURY DALMATIAN DUCHY by Marino Kumir (Croatia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ Chair, Examination Committee ____________________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________________ Examiner ____________________________________________ Examiner CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2016 MEMORY AND AUTHORITY IN THE NINTH-CENTURY DALMATIAN DUCHY by Marino Kumir (Croatia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Reader CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2016 MEMORY AND AUTHORITY IN THE NINTH-CENTURY DALMATIAN DUCHY by Marino Kumir (Croatia) Thesis submitted to the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Arts degree in Medieval Studies. Accepted in conformance with the standards of the CEU. ____________________________________________ External Supervisor CEU eTD Collection Budapest May 2016 I, the undersigned, Marino Kumir, candidate for the MA degree in Medieval Studies, declare herewith that the present thesis is exclusively my own work, based on my research and only such external information as properly credited in notes and bibliography. I declare that no unidentified and illegitimate use was made of the work of others, and no part of the thesis infringes on any person’s or institution’s copyright. I also declare that no part of the thesis has been submitted in this form to any other institution of higher education for an academic degree. Budapest, 19 May 2016 __________________________ Signature CEU eTD Collection Abstract This thesis investigates how ninth-century elites of the Dalmatian duchy used the imported trends of weapon burial rites and church-building as ways of expressing and performing authority and constructing and maintaining memory. Dalmatian duchy, like the whole eastern coast of Adriatic, underwent a dramatic process of transformation from the late eighth to the early ninth century. The evidence of this change was most apparent in the material culture where, among other things, weapons began to be deposited inside the graves of the elite. The new burial customs would not last for long, however, and they were gradually replaced by the increasingly more popular church- building trend. I argue that unlike the weapon rite which were single events confined by their temporality, the building of churches enabled the elites to express their power in more visible and permanent ways. The possibility to have a text carved upon the altar beams of churches gave them an opportunity to memorialize their names, their marriage, their rank within the society, their political allegiance and their piousness. CEU eTD Collection i Acknowledgements I dedicate this thesis to my family, whose love and support throughout my life made all of this possible. I would like to thank the whole faculty and staff here at CEU for providing such a welcoming and invigorating environment for learning about the Middle Ages. Special thanks to Daniel Ziemann, for his advice, guidance and support in the long and heavy process of writing this thesis. I owe thanks to Tom Rooney and Zsusza Reed for the pains my early drafts must have given them. I am grateful to Marianne Sághy and Andra Juganaru for the challenging and affable atmosphere of their classes which surely broadened my horizons. In addition, I am thankful to Ivan Basić for guiding me through the first steps of my academic career. It would be remiss of me to skip over my friends and colleagues here in Budapest, without whom I surely would not have survived. Thanks also to my friends back in Split, for their constant support and encouragement. Last, but not the least, to Iliana and Dan, whose friendship and late night card games I will never forget. CEU eTD Collection ii Table of contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Research objective ...................................................................................................................... 2 A question of terminology .......................................................................................................... 6 Chapter I – The Dawn of Early Medieval Archaeology in Dalmatia ............................................. 8 Chapter II – Commemorating the Dead: Reinterpreting the Familial Past ................................... 15 Chapter III – Constructing Memory: Intervening into the Landscape .......................................... 28 Chapter IV – Performing Authority: The Short-Lived Trend of Burials with Weapons ............. 38 Chapter V – A View from the Outside: The Frankish Royal Annals and Their Treatment of Dalmatia ........................................................................................................................................ 52 Chapter VI – Towards a Shared Identity: (Re)Affirmation of Church-Building and Its Role in the Preservation of Memory ............................................................................................................... 58 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 66 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 70 Appendix ....................................................................................................................................... 80 CEU eTD Collection iii List of Figures Figure 1: The plan of the architectural complex at Biskupija-Crkvina together with the position of eighth-ninth century graves (Petrinec and Jurčević, “Crkvina-Biskupija: Insights into the Chronology,” 351). ....................................................................................................................... 18 Figure 2: The location of the sarcophagus from the sacristy at Galovac-Crkvina (Belošević, “Osvrt na rezultate istraživanja lokaliteta ‘Crkvina,” appendix). ............................................................. 21 Figure 3: The placement of graves 253 and 258 at Begovača-Crkvina (Josipović, “Prijedlog za čitanje imena kneza Mislava s Begovače,” 130) .......................................................................... 29 Figure 4: The names of Sebedrago and Trpimir entered in the Gospel of Cividale. .................... 36 Figure 5: The ground plan of the church at Koljane Gornje-Crkvina (left) and Biskupija-Crkvina (right) (Jurčević, “Usporedba skulpture i arhiekture,” 68). .......................................................... 40 Figure 6: The finds of type K swords in Europe, made by Müller-Wille, updated by Bilogrivić (“Karolinški mačevi tipa K,” 130). ............................................................................................... 47 Figure 7: Distribution of eighth-ninth and tenth-eleventh century swords found in the region. .. 49 Figure 8: Distribution map of sites where fragments attributable to the workshops active in the late eighth and ninth century have been discovered. ........................................................................... 60 CEU eTD Collection iv List of Abbreviations Ann. inst. archaeol. Annales instituti archaeologici Cod. dipl. Codex diplomaticus Diadora Diadora: glasilo Arheološkog muzeja u Zadru HAM Hortus Artium Medievalium Izdanja HAD-a Izdanja Hrvatskog arheološkog društva JAZU Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epp. Epistolae SS Scriptores SS rer. Germ. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi MHAS Muzej hrvatskih arheoloških spomenika Opusc. Archaeol. Opuscula Archaeologica PL Patrologia Latina SHP Starohrvatska prosvjeta VAHD / VAPD Vjesnik za arheologiju i historiju / povijest dalmatinsku VAMZ Vijesnik Arheološkog muzeja u Zagrebu Viestnik HAD-a Viestnik Hrvatskoga arkeologičkoga družtva CEU eTD Collection v Introduction When Charlemagne expanded his great Empire up to the Adriatic, the societies of early medieval Dalmatia suddenly found themselves in contact with a new imperial power.1 Once established, these connections had profound influence on the aristocratic culture of the region which gradually adopted Carolingian models of governance, power and religiosity. It was the Empire which provided the periphery with the framework needed for the establishment of a Christian regnum, a process which was underway for the much of the ninth century.2 Despite these contacts, however, the duchy was, for the most part, left on its own. This positioned it somewhere in-between; it was neither inside the Empire nor completely outside it. Its elites occupied offices which used the available Slavic terminology, but which closely resembled Carolingian models. 3 The