Byzantium and the West

Twelfth-century Serbia was a small power in a field of giants. To its south and east lay the Byzantine Empire of the Komnenoi, at the height of a last great recovery under Manuel I; to its north the aggressive Hungarian crown, allied to the Latin papacy; on its western coast the maritime republic of Venice and the Adriatic city-states; and beyond them the wider Latin West of the Crusades. This file surveys the powers pressing on Nemanja’s Serbia and the narrow, shifting space a shrewd Grand Župan could work between them.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

The Komnenian Byzantium of Manuel I

The dominant power over the Serbian lands in the middle decades of the twelfth century was the Byzantine Empire under Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143–1180), the last of the three great Komnenian emperors whose reigns had restored much of Byzantium’s Balkan and Anatolian position after the disasters of the eleventh century (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 1–8; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). Manuel was an active, interventionist ruler of the Balkans: he campaigned repeatedly in the Serbian and Hungarian marches, installed and deposed Serbian Grand Župans as clients of Constantinople, and treated Raška as a vassal principality whose ruler held his throne at imperial sufferance (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 3–8; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). For the whole of Nemanja’s rise and the first years of his reign, Byzantium under Manuel was the fact that constrained everything: a Serbian prince could gain and hold power only by managing his relationship with the emperor, whether as loyal vassal, as rebel to be chastised, or as opportunist exploiting imperial distraction (see Unification and Byzantium).

This constraint had a religious as well as a political dimension. To stand within Byzantium’s orbit was to stand within the world of Orthodox Christendom — the “Byzantine commonwealth,” in Obolensky’s phrase, a family of Christian peoples united by the Orthodox faith, the Greek liturgical and theological inheritance, and the ideal (however contested in practice) of the emperor as the head of the Christian order (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971; Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). Serbia’s incorporation into this commonwealth — cultural, ecclesiastical, and dynastic — is the deep meaning of the Nemanjić turn to the East, and Manuel’s Byzantium is the form in which that world first pressed on Nemanja.

The Death of Manuel and the Byzantine Collapse

The pivot of the whole period was the death of Manuel in 1180 and the rapid unraveling of Byzantine power that followed. Manuel’s death removed the strong hand that had held the Balkans in check; the empire passed into a generation of weak, contested, and violent reigns — the fall of the Komnenian house, the tyranny and overthrow of Andronikos I, and the troubled reigns of the Angeloi (Isaac II and Alexios III) — culminating in the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade and the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204 (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 1–13; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). For the small powers on Byzantium’s periphery this collapse was an opportunity: the Bulgarians restored their empire, and the Serbs under Nemanja seized the moment to expand at Byzantine expense (see Unification and Byzantium). Nemanja’s whole career must be read against this arc — a rise under Byzantine constraint, an expansion into Byzantine weakness, and a dynasty that would be secured, at the very end of his life, by a marriage alliance with the failing Angelos house (see Vatopedi and the Chrysobull).

Hungary and the Papacy to the North

If Byzantium pressed from the south and east, the Kingdom of Hungary pressed from the north. The Hungarian crown was an aggressive, expanding Latin Catholic power that sought to extend its influence over the northern Serbian lands, over Bosnia, and down the Adriatic coast, and that would repeatedly involve itself in Serbian dynastic quarrels — most consequentially in backing Nemanja’s grandson-era successor disputes and, in the next generation, Vukan’s bid for the throne (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 22–26, 47–48). Behind Hungary stood the papacy, whose interest in drawing the Balkan Slavs into the Latin obedience aligned it with the Catholic Hungarian monarchy in a loose Hungarian-papal axis that formed the western pole of the pressures on Serbia (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 22–26, 47–48; see St. Sava: Reconciling the Brothers). The choice of Serbia’s confessional direction was thus never a purely spiritual matter; it was bound up with the choice of a great-power patron, Rome-and-Hungary or Constantinople.

Venice, the Adriatic Cities, and the Crusading West

On the western coast lay a third world: Venice and the Latin city-states of the Adriatic. Venice was the dominant naval and commercial power of the eastern Adriatic, contesting the coast with Hungary and with Byzantium and drawing the Zetan port-towns into its economic sphere; the coastal cities — Kotor, Bar, Dubrovnik (Ragusa) — were Latin in rite, semi-autonomous in government, and oriented toward Italy and the sea (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8, 202–204). Beyond them lay the broader crusading West, whose armies passed through the Balkans on the way to the Holy Land; the Third Crusade of 1189, led by the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, marched down the great road through Serbian territory, and Nemanja met and negotiated with Barbarossa at Niš — a vivid instance of the way the wider Latin world reached even into the interior of Serbia (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 9–10; see Unification and Byzantium). The Adriatic and crusading West was the milieu of Nemanja’s coastal, Latin-baptized origins and of the western-leaning party in his own house.

The Space Between: A Serbian Prince’s Statecraft

The art of a successful Serbian ruler in this field was to play the powers against one another and to expand into the gaps their rivalries opened. Nemanja proved a master of it. He rose as a Byzantine client and, when it served him, rebelled; he exploited Manuel’s death and the empire’s subsequent weakness to unify and enlarge his realm; he treated with Barbarossa’s crusaders against Byzantium while keeping his options open; and he secured his dynasty at the last by marrying his heir to a Byzantine princess of the very house he had earlier fought (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 3–13; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). This capacity to work the space between Byzantium, Hungary-and-Rome, and the Adriatic-crusading West is the practical genius of his statecraft, and the reason a minor frontier prince could become the founder of a lasting state.

Yet the deepest of his choices was not tactical but civilizational. For all his opportunism against Byzantium in war, Nemanja and his sons chose the Byzantine East as the cultural, ecclesiastical, and spiritual home of the Serbian people — a choice sealed by the flight of his son Rastko to Athos, by the refounding of Hilandar, and by the fixing of the Serbian church under Constantinople rather than Rome (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; see Athos and Hilandar). The powers pressing on Serbia offered a genuine fork in the road; the Nemanjići took the eastern branch, and that decision, more than any battle, made Serbia what it became.

See Also

References

  • Fine, John V. A., Jr. The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987, pp. 1–13, 22–26, 47–48, 202–204. On Manuel I, the Byzantine collapse, Hungary and the papacy, Venice and the Adriatic, and Barbarossa’s crusade through Serbia.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4 (“Sava of Serbia”). On Serbia within the Byzantine world and the eastward turn of the dynasty.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. On the commonwealth of Orthodox peoples into which Serbia was drawn.