engleski

Imperial vocabulary on the move: bishop Theodore of Catania and the origins of the early medieval ‘Adriobyzantine’ discourse of the Adriatic basin

Imperial legacy of Byzantium manifested itself along the Adriatic rim, as expected, in various aspects, not all of them equally studied in current scholarship. The sources range from official and literary texts, inscriptions, seals, etc. to archaeological artefacts, objects of art and lexical features, all of them pointing to remnants of Byzantine political and social presence and its longue durée in the region, representing a sort of Adriobyzantism or Latin Byzantism, an intellectual product of a marginally Byzantine cultural zone. Coincidentally, the sources enable better understanding of the scope and nature of Byzantine substrate in the entire early medieval Adriatic region. An intellectual product par excellence of these cross-cultural influences were Latinised traces of Byzantine loanwords (a sort of Adriobyzantism in their own right), among the populace of Venice and Dalmatia, observed e.g. by Gottschalk of Orbais in ca. 840-848, and recently thoroughly studied. The phrases mentioned by Gottschalk (imperium nostrum, regnum nostrum, dominatio nostra) are actually appropriated lexical byzantinisms of the imperial court denoting the person of the emperor and his office (ἡ βασιλεία ἡμῶν, τὸ κράτος ἡμῶν). They represent the influence of diplomatic formulas contained in the charters issued by the Byzantine imperial chancery. The evident penetration of Byzantine courtly language via this ‘majestic discourse’ suggests a regular reception of Byzantine documents in the Adriatic province of the Empire, as well as regular communication between the local elites and Constantinople in relation to ceremonies involving imperial ideology. Neighbouring regions (Venice, Istria, Dalmatia) were at the same time exposed to the same phenomena (by way of Greek documents and travels) ; moreover, they shared a common linguistic background (vulgar Latin and Proto-Romance). What lay in the background of Gottschalk's observations on their syntax were in fact complex mechanisms of Byzantine culture. This paper will try to tackle the following questions: what generated the said discourse? What kind of 'local knowledge' (in Geertz's sense) lies behind these lexical peculiarities? May these linguistic features be placed within a wider comparative context, with special attention to other marginal, peripheral areas of Byzantium in the West? The Eastern Empire ceased to be functionally bilingual in the 7th century at the latest, notwithstanding some survivals of Latin-speaking subjects of the emperor (e.g. Thessalonica). These survivals of Latin gradually died out by the end of the 7th and early 8th century, so the only ones among Byzantine subjects still using it were those situated along the coasts of Adriatic and Ionian seas: Venice, Istria, Dalmatia, southern Italy and Sicily ; at the same time, these are areas where the influence of Greek terminology was particularly strong. A case in point is the Sicilian bishop Theodore of Catania, who in 787 attended the Nicaean Council. Before that, in 785 he was a member of an imperial embassy sent by the strategos of Sicily to Rome, on the orders of Constantine VI. Theodore's account of his travels, i.e. his manner of speech when referring to his lord, the emperor, offers a new example of the same phraseology, betraying the influence of transpersonal forms of imperial office. This conciliar text – until now unnoticed in historiography – will be examined here, further developing the arguments on the penetration of Byzantine culture as well as on the contacts between the Adriatic basin and the imperial metropolis.

Gottschalk of Orbais, Dalmatia, Croatia, imperium, regnum, Byzantium, Early Middle Ages

nije evidentirano