ABSTRACT
When Byzantine studies emerged during the humanistic period, the Serbian lands were mostly under Ottoman control, separated from the intellectual currents in Christian Europe. In the wider South Slavic region, the basic Byzantine studies of the humanistic scholars from Dubrovnik and Dalmatia were most often simply excerpts from Byzantine historiographers based on their western European editions.1 The works by these authors from the eastern Adriatic coast, with the significant exception of Mauro Orbini in abridged Russian translation (1722), had almost no reception among the Serbs. The Austrian count Ðordē Branković, learned writer of an extensive work with a medieval conception of history (named “Chronicles,” written between 1690 and 1711), made scant use of some Byzantine sources in his work, but nevertheless he became the first Serbian historiographer who, although only in a rudimentary manner, worked with original Byzantine source material. Archimandrite Jovan Rajić, the first ever Serbian author of a modern history (“of various Slavic peoples,” being the Bulgarians, Croats and Serbs, published in 1794–5), having been living on the periphery of the Austrian empire, used certain Byzantine authors too, but only in the Latin translations of the chrestomathies. In both cases one is concerned with the reception of European Byzantine studies rather than any contribution to their development.
