The Serbs, a people on the move?

The Serbs have found a place in ‘The Peoples of Europe’, a series edited by archaeologists that includes the Etruscans, the Goths, the Huns, the Illyrians, the Normans as well as the English by the late Sir Geoffrey Elton. They have found a niche among lost tribes, wayward peoples and interesting personal renderings. Their history, from the time when they first left a trace on the limes of the Roman Empire to the present when they hover on the border of the European Union, is told by the most eminent medievalist of the former Yugoslav lands, Professor Sima Ćirković. And so it should be, for a critical strand of medieval history has been at the cutting edge of the study of the past in Serbian scholarship for over a hundred years at least. It managed to preserve its integrity through communism, as it was able to break through romanticism in earlier times, and holds its head high above nationalism since. Having first made his mark in the 1960s with histories of medieval Bosnia and medieval Montenegro, Ćirković has since worked mostly on the social history of the medieval Church, and has published Italian and French versions of a history of the Serbs in the Middle Ages. His aptly titled ‘Toilers, Soldiers, Priests: Societies in the Medieval Balkans’ (Rabotnici, vojnici, duhovnici: društva srednjevekovnog Balkana, 1997) sums up his work to date. The Serbs is an attempt to shed light on the development of a community of people called Serbs, and on the factors pertinent to its creation and preservation as a group. It deals with the legends of the origins. It examines the way in which the idea of a direct relationship to God, taken from the Hebrews, transferred to the Christians, and in particular to the universal Christian Empire, later served individual parts of the Empire, notably the Serbian Nemanjić or Nemanjid ‘dynasty of sacred roots’, as well as its successors and neighbours. Later, the more secular, but hardly less inspired, view prevailed of nations (including the Serbian) created in distant times, each one immutable and fighting for its survival. Against that, Sima Ćirković relates the actual course of events, exposing the discrepancy between them and the events recited in inspired chronicles and epics. This is a dense account of seemingly endless processes of integration and disintegration. Sources for certain periods are sparse and fragmented, dependent on preservation by others, usually neighbouring powers. Already before the