Projects
The present research project studies the phenomenon of venerating Serbian kings and princes in the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century, with particular emphasis on those who should not be reasonably considered saints like Stephen Uroš I or Dragutin. The emphasis lies on the real-time strategies employed by these particular rulers to place their reigns within the spatial, institutional and ideological framework established in the past with the holy foundations of Stephen Nemanja. It is an effort to discuss the politics of memory within the Serbian space during the period in view of the integration of the expanding territory of the kingdom along deliberate parallels between realm and monastic foundations.
The project examines royal hagiography under the Nemanjić dynasty in thirteenth and fourteenth century Serbia - a phenomenon in which the veneration of holy relics and the commemoration of dead rulers overlapped and promoted the idea of a holy dynasty. This idea is best expressed in the Lives of Serbian Kings and Archbishops by Danilo II (d. 1337) and the royal genealogical trees in several churches. The present study focuses most specifically on the connection between sacral space and territorial expansion. The working hypothesis is that Danilo's quasi-hagiographical accounts of the lives of Stephen Uroš I (d. 1277) and his family were not after-the-fact rationalizations of the rulers' pious politics, but the culmination of a policy of connecting their dead bodies to a network of monastic foundations that formed the nucleus of the territorial base of the Serbian monarchy.