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Toward
traditions recorded by Byzantine Emperor Konstantinos VII (913-959), Emperor
Herakleios (610-641) promised the Serbs and Croats settling in the Balkan
Peninsula in exchange for destroying of Avars. They settled about 630,
Croats in the western Balkans and Serbs in the area of Thessaloniki theme.
But the Serbs had not been satisfied with the place, and Herakleios granted
their request by giving them new lands in the western Balkans, to the east
of Croats. Serb medieval lands were: Raska, Zeta (Duklja), Bosna, Travunija,
Zahumlje and Paganija. Also, Adriatic islands Korcula, Mljet, Hvar and
Brac were part of Paganija. As we can see, just after the settling in the
Balkans, the borders of Serb ethnic territories were on the west the rivers
Vrbas (maybe the north-west border was between Vrbas and the river Bosna)
and Cetina, and on the east and south-east the rivers Ibar and Bojana.
Northern border was the river Sava and the southern and south-western Adriatic
Sea. Serbs were converted to Christianity during the reign of Byzantine
Emperor Basileios I (867-886), but single converts are known even before.
Serb rulers from IX century Viseslav, Radoslav and Prosigoj are known only
by names, since Vlastimir (ruled in fourth and fifth decade of IX century)
rich historical sources about Serbs are continuous. But let us see what
foreign history science says about Serb medieval state of Zeta, today known
as Montenegro. The article below is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Serb Medieval
State of Zeta
The Slav peoples were organized
along tribal lines, each headed by a zupan (chieftain). In this part of
the Adriatic littoral, from the time of the arrival of the Slavs up to
the 10th century, these local magnates often were brought into unstable
and shifting alliances with other larger states, particularly with Bulgaria,
Venice, and Byzantium. Between 931 and 960 one such zupan, Ceslav**,
operating from the zupanija of Zeta in the hinterland of the Gulf of Kotor,
succeeded in unifying a number of neighbouring Serb tribes and extended
his control as far north as the Sava River and eastward to the Ibar. Zeta
and its neighbouring zupanija of Raska (roughly modern Kosovo) then provided
the territorial nucleus for a succession of Serb kingdoms that in the 13th
century were consolidated under the Nemanjic dynasty.
Although the Serbs have come
to be identified closely with the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity,
it is an important indication of the continuing marginality of Zeta that
Michael, the first of its rulers to claim the title king, had this honour
bestowed on him by Pope Gregory VII in 1077. It was only under the later
Nemanjic rulers that the ecclesiastical allegiance of the Serbs to Constantinople
was finally confirmed. On the death of Stefan Dusan in 1355, the Nemanjic
empire began to crumble, and its holdings were divided among the knez (prince)
Lazar Hrebeljanovic, the short-lived Bosnian state of Tvrtko I (reigned
1353-91), and a semi-independent chiefdom of Zeta under the house of Balsa,
with its capital at Skadar. Serb disunity coincided fatefully with the
arrival in the Balkans of the Ottoman armies, and in 1389 Lazar fell to
the forces of Sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo.
After the Balsic dynasty
died out in 1421, the focus of Serb resistance shifted northward to Zabljak
(south of Podgorica). There a chieftain named Stefan Crnojevic set up his
capital. Stefan was succeeded by Ivan the Black, who, in the unlikely setting
of this barren and broken landscape and pressed by advancing Ottoman armies,
created in his court a remarkable if fragile centre of civilization. Ivan's
son Djuradj built a monastery at Cetinje, founding there the see of a bishopric,
and imported from Venice a printing press that produced after 1493 some
of the earliest books in the Cyrillic script. During the reign of Djuradj,
Zeta came to be more widely known as Montenegro (this Venetian form of
the Italian Monte Nero is a translation of the Serbian Crna Gora, "Black
Mountain").
Copyright
1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica
**Note
of Serb Land of Montenegro - Caslav Klonimirovic (928-950)
indeed united almost all Serb medieval lands. However, about 30% of today's
territory of Montenegro stayed out of Caslav's borders. Areas of Montenegro,
today known as Gulf of Kotor, Highlands and Old Herzegovina were included
in Caslav's common state of Serbs.
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