ABSTRACT
Barely two years after his death on November 21, 1321, Stephen Uroš II Milutin, king of Serbia, was proclaimed a saint. Unlike his ancestors who obtained sainthood, his great-grandfather and the founder of the Nemanjić dynasty Stephen Nemanja-St. Simeon, and his grandfather Stephen the First-Crowned, or his brother Dragutin, Milutin had not taken monastic vows and was married no less than four times during his sixty-six-year-long life, four decades of which he spent as the first king of Serbia. Yet his cult spread swiftly, well beyond the borders of medieval Serbia. Milutin’s royal sanctity comprised two distinctive elements: a strictly speaking religious aspect and cult and its strongly pronounced political and ideological side, especially during the reign of his grandson, King, and from 1345 Tsar, Stephen Dušan (1331–55).
