ABSTRACT
With the exception of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, there is no churchman in the history of southeastern Europe who had a greater influence on that region than St. Sava of Serbia. Dimitry Obolensky even believed that his reputation in Eastern Europe was second only to that of Alexander the Great. The beginnings of the Serbian Church (as an organized, independent institution) are linked to St. Sava. He is regarded as the founder of Serbian monasticism, both in his own country and at Mount Athos. The earliest pieces of original literature written in Serbia in Old Church Slavonic are associated with his name. Sava is also the first original author at Mount Athos to write in that language. He is the earliest known pilgrim from the Balkans to the Holy Land. He was a contemporary of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and like him, he met with the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil. Sava played a key role in the regional politics of the Balkans during the troubled period that followed the sack of Constantinople by Western crusaders (1204). His dealings with the Empire of Nicaea and with Bulgaria are fundamental moments in the political history of the region. However, outside Serbia, he has rarely attracted the attention of historians. The biographical vignette that Obolensky dedicated to him almost thirty years ago remains unique. It was based on the attempts of the Yugoslav historiographical movement to shift the study of Sava from hagiography to biography. That, however, was done at the cost of neglecting the religious dimension of Sava’s life, particularly the interesting combination of monastic qualities and features that one would associate primarily with the secular clergy. Occasionally, Sava’s name appears in studies of Byzantine and Balkan history, but not in works dedicated, for example, to religious developments in Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some of Sava’s writings and actions have been compared to those of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, but outside a small group of scholars dealing with the medieval history of the region, few English-speaking historians know who Sava was and what he did. The European dimension of Sava’s personality has yet to be discovered.
