Raška, Zeta, and the Ecclesial Borderland

Before Stefan Nemanja welded them together, the Serbian lands were a set of loosely linked principalities gathered around two poles — coastal Zeta (Duklja), fronting the Adriatic and looking to Rome, and inland Raška, in the mountainous interior, drawn into the Byzantine orbit. The church of these lands stood on a genuine frontier between the Latin and Greek obediences, its allegiance unsettled; this borderland condition is the essential background to Nemanja’s life, his contested baptism, and the eastward fixing of Serbian Orthodoxy by his sons.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

Two Serbian Centers: Coastal Zeta and Inland Raška

The medieval Serbs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were not a single kingdom but a cluster of principalities under local dynasts, and their political center of gravity shifted over time between two regions. The older focus was Duklja (Dioclea), later called Zeta, the coastal and near-coastal land of the southern Adriatic littoral — roughly modern Montenegro and its hinterland — which in the eleventh century, under the Vojislavljević dynasty, had briefly held a royal title and the primacy among the Serbian lands (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8, 202–204). By the twelfth century primacy had passed inland to Raška (Rascia), the mountainous interior around the old town of Ras, whose ruler bore the title of Grand Župan (veliki župan) and who would become, under Nemanja, the architect of a durable Serbian state (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 3–8, 116–117; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

The two regions faced in different directions, and the difference was lasting. Zeta, fronting the sea, was bound to the world of the Adriatic city-states — Kotor, Bar, Ulcinj, Dubrovnik — and through them to the Latin Church and the commercial and cultural currents of Italy and Dalmatia. Raška, in the interior, looked south and east along the great roads toward Niš, Skopje, and ultimately Constantinople, into the Byzantine ecclesiastical and political world (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8, 116–117). This coastal-versus-inland, Latin-versus-Greek polarity was not merely geographic; it ran through the dynasty itself and would erupt, a generation later, in the civil war between Nemanja’s sons Vukan (Zeta-based, Rome-leaning) and Stefan (Raška-based, Byzantine-leaning) (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 47–48; see St. Sava: Reconciling the Brothers).

The Church on the Frontier

The ecclesiastical situation of the Serbian lands mirrored their political division and was, in the twelfth century, genuinely unsettled. The coastal towns of Zeta lay within the jurisdiction of Latin bishoprics — above all the archbishopric of Bar (Antivari), which claimed metropolitan authority over the coastal Serbian church and looked to Rome — while the interior of Raška was drawn into the orbit of the Byzantine (Ohrid) hierarchy and the Greek episcopal sees (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8, 116–117; Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). A Serb of the period could be born, baptized, and buried on either side of a boundary that ran, in places, straight through his own family’s lands.

This is what is meant by calling twelfth-century Serbia an ecclesial borderland. It was not a settled Orthodox country with a Latin fringe, nor a Latin country with an Orthodox one, but a frontier where the two obediences overlapped and competed, and where the confessional allegiance of the ruling house — and therefore of the emerging state — was still to be decided (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8). The great achievement of Nemanja and, decisively, of his sons was to resolve this ambiguity in favor of Byzantine Orthodoxy: to fix the Serbian church, and Serbian identity with it, on the Eastern side of the line. That resolution is the through-line of the whole Nemanjić story, and it can only be understood against the openness of the frontier as it stood before Nemanja (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; see World Orthodoxy: Serbia).

The Dualist Presence

Complicating the Latin-Greek frontier was a third religious current: the dualist heresy of the medieval Balkans, the Bogomil movement and its kindred, which flourished across the region and is best documented for neighboring Bosnia but was present, or believed present, in the Serbian lands as well (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8; Fine, The Bosnian Church, 1975). Bogomilism — a dualist Christianity that rejected the material creation, the sacraments, the cross, and the Church’s hierarchy as belonging to the evil power — had spread from tenth-century Bulgaria across the Balkans, and the label “Bogomil” came to serve the period as a loose designation for varied forms of religious dissent (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8; Obolensky, The Bogomils, 1948). The suppression of this dissent would become, in the hagiographic tradition, one of the marks of Nemanja’s Orthodox zeal (see The Council Against the Bogomils); its presence on the frontier is part of what made the confessional situation of pre-Nemanja Serbia so fluid and so contested.

A Society of Župas and Župans

The internal structure of these lands was tribal and territorial rather than bureaucratic. The basic unit was the župa, a district defined by a river valley or mountain basin, governed by a local lord, the župan; above the župans stood the Grand Župan, first among them, whose authority over the lesser lords was real but never absolute and had constantly to be reasserted (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 116–117, 202–204). Power was personal and kin-based; a Grand Župan ruled through a network of relatives and clients, apportioned territories to his brothers and sons as appanages, and faced the perennial medieval hazard that those same kinsmen would turn their appanages into bases of revolt (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 116–117). This is exactly the structure within which Nemanja rose — himself the junior of several brothers who held their own župas — and exactly the structure whose instability produced both his war against his brothers and, later, the war among his sons (see The Path to Grand Župan).

Why the Borderland Matters

The condition of the Serbian lands before Nemanja is not mere scene-setting; it is the problem to which his dynasty was the answer. A people divided between two coasts, two churches, and a scatter of quarrelsome župas, pressed on every side by greater powers, might have gone the way of several Balkan neighbors — absorbed into a Latin-Hungarian sphere, or dissolved back into Byzantine provinces, or fragmented among dualist and rival lords (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, pp. 7–8, 116–117). That it instead became a unified, durable, and firmly Orthodox kingdom is the work of the Nemanjić house, and the first and founding act of that work was Nemanja’s welding of Raška and Zeta into one realm and his (and his sons’) decision for Byzantium over Rome. The borderland is where the story starts because resolving the borderland is what the story is about.

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. 3–8, 116–117, 202–204. On Raška and Zeta, the župa system, and the confessional frontier.
Fine, John V. A., Jr. The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation. Boulder: East European Monographs, 1975. On the dualist movement in the western Balkans.
Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4 (“Sava of Serbia”). On the Serbian lands within the Byzantine commonwealth and the eastward fixing of the Serbian church.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Bogomils: A Study in Balkan Neo-Manichaeism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. On the origin and spread of Balkan dualism.