Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal Forgeries and Their Social Circulation in the Context of Historical Culture: The Usable Past as a Resource for Social Advance in Early Modern Lemberg/Lviv Author: Alexandr Osipian Source: Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal 1 (2014): 95–134 Published by: National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy http://kmhj.ukma.edu.ua Forgeries and Their Social Circulation in the Context of Historical Culture: The Usable Past as a Resource for Social Advance in Early Modern Lemberg/Lviv 1 Alexandr Osipian Kramatorsk Institute of Economics and Humanities, Department of History and Cultural Studies Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to put the charter – for a long time seen as simply forgery – into a wider context of historical culture of the epoch. It also aims to investigate motive, means, and opportunity, as used by the social actors – the forgers. The examination of the forgeries not only uncovers the historical imagination of their producers but also helps our better understanding of the historical culture of the epoch and its social circulation in a given society. The study of “Prince Fedor’s charter of 1062” examines how urban elites accepted the noblemen’s political and historical culture and used it for their own purposes. The author of the paper examines how the social aspirations and dominant cultural framework in the host society influenced the wealthy Armenian Diaspora to promote some possible options of the usable past and to abandon other ones. Finally, it shows how the elements of all these options were combined into a new narrative in the nineteenth century, in accordance with the historical culture of Romantic nationalism. Key Words: forgers, historical imagination, usable past, social advance, urban patricians, Armenian merchants, ennoblement. 1 This article was written thanks to my fellowships at the International Cultural Centre (Cracow, Poland), and Deutsches Historisches Institut Warschau (Warsaw, Poland). I am grateful to the New Europe College (Bucharest, Romania) for the financial support of my research trip to Rome. I am grateful to Prof. Oxana Pakhlovska, Prof. Giovanna Siedina, and Dr. Felicia Roşu who helped to arrange my visit to Rome and, therefore, my archival work at the Archivio storico Congregazione per l’evangelizzazione dei popoli (“De Propaganda Fide”), in Biblioteca Pontificio Istituto Orientale and in Biblioteca na- zionale centrale di Roma. 96 Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal › 1 ( 2014) The images of the past are a product, yet at the same time they figure as an influential factor in the discourses of the identity of social groups. According to Bo Strath, “History does not exist ‘out there,’ waiting to be discovered, but is permanently invented in order to give meaning to the present – and to the future – through the past.” 2 Thus, the examination of the forgeries not only uncovers the historical imagination of their pro- ducers but also helps to understand better the historical culture of the epoch and its social circulation in the given society. By 1500, senses of the past among elite groups had clearly become a major if not predominant element in various political cultures of Euro- pe. 3 There can be little doubt that the 16th and 17th centuries witnessed an enormous efflorescence in historical interest among European social elites. Professor Bernd Schneidmüller’s note of the changes in urban his- torical consciousness in late medieval Germany could be easily applied to late 16th–17th century Lemberg: “It is important to note that urban historiography was subject to a general process by which urban society increasingly splits into strata. When the patriciate emerged as an autho- rity endowed with a God-given right to rule, urban chroniclers, when describing the origins of their city as a social body, no longer focused exclusively on the emancipation of the city dwellers from their lords … [Now] … city chroniclers […] were far more interested in explaining the royal acts of favor that had fostered the development of their cities. They integrated the community of burghers into the history of realm.” 4 2 Bo Strath, introduction to “Myth, Memory and History in the Construction of Community,” in Myth and Memory in the Construction of Community: Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond, ed. Bo Strath (Bruxelles, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt/M, New York, Wien: P. I. E.-Peter Lang, 2000), 26. 3 Orest Ranum, introduction to National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Orest Ranum (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1975), 5. 4 Bernd Schneidmüller, “Constructing the Past by Means of the Present: Historiographical Foundations of Medieval Institutions, Dynasties, Peoples, and Communities,” in Medi- eval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, ed. Gerd Althoff et al. (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 189. Alexandr Osipian. Forgeries and Their Social Circulation in the Context of Historical 97 Culture: The Usable Past as a Resource for Social Advance in Early Modern Lemberg/Lviv In 1641, representatives of Lemberg’s Armenian community submit- ted to the royal chancery a charter, issued in 1062 by the great Prince of Rus Fedor (Theodore), son of Dmitry. According to the charter, the Prince invited Armenian warriors to help him at war and allowed them to settle anywhere in his domains. The Armenian community used the Latin translation of this charter in a lawsuit against the city magistrate of Lemberg in 1654 and was granted some privileges by King Jan Kazimierz. But, as we know, in 1062, there was no Ruthenian prince with such a name. The original charter, written in Old-Slavonic or Ruthenian, was lost in the early 19th century. In the late 19th century, with the development of a positivist critical approach some scholars doubted the authenticity of the charter. 5 The last time the charter caught scholarly attention was in the 1960s. In 1962, young Ukrainian historian Iaroslav Dashkevych made a statement that the charter is an evident forgery because of the lack of many features obligatory for late medieval charters. 6 His statement was attacked by the Armenian historian Vardges Mikaelian, who insisted on the authenticity of the charter. 7 This discussion had no further develop- ment. In some of his later papers Dashkevych simply repeated his positi- vist criticism of the charter. 8 Being positivists, both scholars absolutely 5 Tadeusz Gromnicki, Ormjanie w Polsce. Ich historja, prawa i przywileje (Warszawa, 1889), 9–10. For more general survey, see: V. F. Inkin, “Chy ie istorychna osnova v falsyfikatakh hramot kniazia Lva Danylovycha?” [“Is there Historical Ground in the Falsified Charters of Prince Lev, son of Daniel?”] Visnyk Lvivskoho universytetu 24 (1988): 55–63. 6 Iaroslav Dashkevych, “Hramota Fedora Dmytrovycha 1062 roku (Narys z ukrainskoi dyplo- matyky),” [“Charter Issued by Fedor Dmytrovych in 1062 (A Study in Ukrainian Diploma- cy),”] Naukovo-informatsiynyi biuleten arkhivnoho upravlinnia URSR 4 (1962): 9–20. 7 Vardges Mikaelian, “K voprosu o gramote Fedora Dmitrievicha,” [“On the Issue of Fedor Dmitrievich’s Charter,”] Arkheograficheskii iezhegodnik za 1964 god. 1965: 11–19. 8 Iaroslav Dashkevych, “Drevniaia Rus i Armenia v obshchestvenno-politicheskih sviaziah XI–XIII vekov. (Istochniki issledovania temy),” [“Social and Political Contacts of Ancient Rus and Armenia in the 11th–13th Centuries: Problems of New Reading of Source Mate- rial,”] Drevneyshie gosudarstva na territorii SSSR. Materialy i issledovania, 1984: 177–95; Iaroslav Dashkevych, “Davnii Lviv u virmenskykh ta virmeno-kypchatskykh dzherelakh,” [“Old Lviv in Armenian and Armeno-Kipchak Sources,”] Ukraina v mynulomu 1 (1992): 7–13; Yaroslav Dachkevytch, “Who are the Armeno-Kipchaks (On the Ethnic Substrate of the Armenian Colonies in the Ukraine),” Revue des études arméniennes 16 (1982): 357–416. 98 Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal › 1 ( 2014) ignored the socio-cultural context in which Theodore’s charter was used. Moreover, they did not even try to pose questions about a general percep- tion of the past in the early modern period, the historical imagination of the townspeople in Lviv, and – what is more important – the uses of the distant past by the Armenian community before 1641. When it is discovered that a forgery is indeed a forgery, the tempta- tion may be simply to call it that and stop, instead of attempting to study the relationship of the particular forgery to historical culture. As an umbrella term to capture what is being described in the present paper, I have chosen the term “historical culture.” According to Daniel Woolf, A historical culture consists of habits of thought, languages, media of communica- tion, patterns of social convention that embrace elite and popular, narrative and non-narrative modes of discourse. It is expressed both in texts and in commonplace forms of behaviour – for instance, the resolution of conflicts through reference to a widely accepted historical standard such as ‘antiquity.’ 9 This paper can contribute to the study of the following two aspects of early modern historical culture: the social construction of the distant past as evidence to resolve legal disputes and its uses by urban elites for their social advance. The investigation of this microscale case could also contribute to a better understanding of developments in the township’s historical imagination in early modern Europe. The difficulty is that these sorts of questions are not the only ones that can or should be asked in connection with Polish historical thought during the early modern period. What we now need to know is what turned the townspeople in Lemberg – and Armenian merchants resi- ding there in particular – who were not remarkably interested in their national and local urban history in the 1560s, and only marginally more so in the 1600s, a generation later, into people thoroughly preoccupied with history in the 1630s–1670s (so absorbed by it that they not only used 9 Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9–10.