01 — Serbia Before Nemanja

The medieval Serbian lands of Raška and Zeta at the moment before Stefan Nemanja’s rise: a cluster of principalities on the confessional and political fault line between the Latin West and the Byzantine East, an ecclesial borderland whose allegiance was not yet fixed. This section sets the stage that makes Nemanja’s whole career — and his sons’ — intelligible.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

Contents

• Raška, Zeta, and the Ecclesial Borderland — the two Serbian centers, coastal and inland, and the divided church between Rome and Constantinople into which Nemanja was born.
• Byzantium and the West — the great powers pressing on twelfth-century Serbia: Manuel I Komnenos’s Byzantium, the Hungarian crown and the papacy, Venice and the Adriatic cities, and the space a shrewd Serbian prince could work between them.

See Also

• The Rise of Nemanja — the man who emerged from this world
• Orthodoxy: World Orthodoxy — Serbia — the later Serbian Church whose foundations were laid here
• St. Sava of Serbia — the son who fixed Serbia’s church firmly to the East