The New Yugoslav Historiography and the Problem of Feudalism in Medieval Serbia

Canadian Slavonic Papers

The New Yugoslav Historiography and the Problem of Feudalism in Medieval SerbiaAuthor(s): Milos MladenovicSource: Études Slaves et Est-Européennes / Slavic and East-European Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2(ÉTÉ/SUMMER 1956), pp. 89-99Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41055555 .

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The New Yugoslav Historiography and the Problem oí Feudalism in Medieval Serbia

Milos Mladenovic

In order to understand the new Yugoslav historiography relative to the problem of feudalism in medieval Serbia it is necessary to take into consideration two facts : first, the attitude of the Yugoslav historians before World War II and second, the ideological foundations of the

post-war regime in Yugoslavia. Until the 1930s, Yugoslav historiography concerning the character

of Serbian medieval society, offered an incoherent and unsatisfactory picture. A few historians consecrated their efforts to a comparative study of one feature or another of Serbia in the Middle Ages. Most writers, however, expressed their views in the form of incidental utterances which were largely uncritical applications to Serbian society of historical cate- gories elaborated by scholars in their interpretation of institutions in other countries.

Summing up all their remarks, and leaving aside the differences of detail, it may be said that all these views can be roughly grouped into four main historical interpretations of Serbian society in the Middle

Ages. The first characterization was proposed by Ch. Miyatovich who

imagined Serbia as existing in a patrimonial system where all political power originated in land-ownership. Thus there existed a superposition of horizontally divided sovereign rights, founded on the hierarchy of property rights. Since the end of the 19th century this theory has been considered obsolete, even in Germany, whence Miyatovich borrowed it.

* This article is an abstract of a paper presented at the Congress of the Canadian As- sociation of Slavists on June 10, 1956.

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Etudes Slaves et Est-Européennes

The second group consisted of the majority of historians, who, under the impact of Western historiography, used historical terminology relative to feudalism, without discrimination. As a rule, they spoke of feudal government and feudal relations in Serbia, and they did not even try to make a comparison between Western feudalism and Serbian institutions. Professor S. Stanoyevich, whose authority as a leading scho- lar exercised a decisive influence, also belonged to this group for a long time.

The third interpretation was born as a reaction to this tendancy of applying feudal terminology to the Serbian society. The representa- tives of this historical trend considered medieval Serbia as a state sui generis, the state of zadruga, which in its essence had the features of an enlarged family, and had nothing in common with either the feudal states of the West or the Byzantine imperial organization.

The fourth group did not consist of a uniform school, for all the historians composing it <- » as for instance W. A. Maciejowski, N. Krstich, D. Miyushkovich, T. Taranoviski and especially N. Radoychich »- fol- lowed ways of their own. However, all af them endeavoured to use comparative methods and to point out not only the similarities to but also the divergences from, the social and political organization of the West. In spite of their disagreements, a basically exact interpretation was put forward in this manner : Medieval Serbia exhibited, more or less, the features of a State of estates (staleshka drzhava, Strcndestaat, Etat des ordres).

This confusing position of Yugoslav historiography with regard to the character of the Serbian medieval state called for a clarifying study. The attempt towards a clarification and a solution of the problem was undertaken by me. Thanks to the achievements of earlier investigation and owing to the ample use of the comparative method, the results show that the Serbian medieval state, by its structure, held a special position between the feudal state of the West and Byzantine political organization. There was neither a patrimonial system nor feudalism, nor

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Slavic and East-European Studies

could there be found evidence justifying the cherished idea of a specific state sui generis, a state of zadruga. It was a state of estates where, at the beginning, the monarch had power tempered by custom and later by law, and the estates derived their rights from the objective legal system '

After certain discussions this interpretation was accepted. Espe- cially important was the approval of Professor Stanoyevich who aban- doned his former rather vague opinion, and under his influence, the theory very soon found its way into historical textbooks 2.

The introduction of the Communist regime in Yugoslavia imposed a revision of the whole former historiography. Founded on an exclusive ideology, the new system has accepted the materialist theory of history only, according to which historical process is determined by the mode of production. Conditions of production constitute the economic structure of society which is the material basis of the super-structure, consisting of social and political institutions as well as of the whole moral and intellectual life. The development of economic conditions adheres to a certain sequence of stages, and the organization of society follows the corresponding pattern, of which feudalism is also a phase, and all societies have to pass through it in their historical evolution '

The result of his revision has been summed up in the introduction to the History of the Peoples of Yugoslavia, a collective work directed by a Committee composed of Marxists. It is said there 4 :

"In spite of all the deficiencies as well as the traces of old con- ceptions which are not yet overcome, and which appear in the solution

1. See M. Mladenovitch, L'Etat Serbe au moyen-âge, Paris 1931. - The word estate is used here in its original meaning : order, class in the legal sense.

¿. In preparing his lite work, a synthesis on medieval ¡Serbia, Jfrot. otanoyevich stated that the third volume would deal with social and political organization and that my interpretation would be taken for its basis. Unfortunately his untimely death left his work unfinished.

3. The Fifth Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party (1948) approved the basic directives for the work of Yugoslav historians, who were reminded that there was no compromise between proletarian and bourgeois ideologies and that they had to reinterpret the history of the Yugoslav peoples. On the criticism of bourgeois historiography and the duties and objectives of Marxian historical writing, see the article on the subject by V. Novak in Istoriski Chasopis, Beograd, I (1948) pp. 198 et seq.

4. Historija Naroda Jugoslavie, Zagreb 1953, I, p. 7.

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of some questions, this work is an important effort in making a step further in the materialistic explanation of our past".

Still more explicit is the textbook, History of the States arid Laws of the Peoples of the Federal Peoples* Republic of Yugoslavia by D. Yankovich. In the first volume 5, treating the "early feudal states" it is said :

"It is necessary to stress the fact that even at the time of its highest development and its best achievements, and in spite of its service and established results, bourgeois historiography and especially our Yugos- lav institutional historiography always remained limited by its class- ideology and its unscholarly and idealistic views of the evolution of the state . . . Because of the gaps and essential deficiencies in bourgeois his-

toriography, it is indispensable, today, to return again to historical sources, to explain and interpret them correctly in order to reconstruct truthfully the real process of the origin and development of the state and law of our peoples in the past... Marxism requires that the study and interpretation of history take openly and decisively the side and point of view of the progressive social class of a given period ; that the progressive events of every period in particular should be stressed, and that the development should be considered through the prism of those social classes which are pioneers of social progress in a given period and which materialize this progress through their struggle againt the forces of the old society".

In this effort to revise pre-war historiography and to reinterpret the historical process, the entire evolution from the arrival of the Slavs in the Balkan peninsula to the end of the 16th century, has been named "a process of feudalisation". The time from the 6th to the 12th centuries is called "the epoch of early feudalism" or "the period of the

pre-feudal states", while the time from the 12th to the 16th centuries is

5. D. Jankovic, Istorija drzave i prava naroda FNRJ, I, 3rd. cd. Beograd, 1952, p. 12. See also his article on principal extant tasks of the legal history of Yugoslavia in Arhiv za prav. i druskt, nauke, III, (1947), pp. 481 et seq.

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considered as a period of stabilization or expansion of the feudal system 6.

In one form or another, all the writers follow the same idea. Thus, in his work The Formation of the Monténégrin State and the Deve- lopment of the Montenegrin Nationality Y. Yvanovich explains the process of feudalisation in medieval Serbia by saying : 7

. . . "that already towards the end of the 8th century and during the 9th century there was a slow but steady process of disintegration of tribal social structure. It grew into a patriarchal slavery and early feudalism after the model of Byzantine feudalism and under the influence of the Christian church... In the 14th century Serbian feudalism reached its full development".

In the previously mentioned History of the Peoples of Yugoslavia there is a characterization of medieval Serbia as a whole given here and there on various pages by different authors. If we unite these se- parate passages we obtain the following picture of the medieval society and state :

"The socio-economic and socio-political development of the Yugos- lav peoples in that period shows, in its essence, the same tendencies which are shown by the evolution of the West-European feudal society. In general this process was not parallel in time with that in the West, nor did it reach the same stage, nor was it so uniform in all fields of economic and political life, but its direction was the same".

"From the time of Nemanya in the 12th century we can follow the final process of transformation of free peasants into a feudally dependent peasantry until the ultimate establishment of the feudal system".

"Until the middle of the 14th century, feudalism in Serbia is de- finitely built up with an already stabilized class division which is characteristic of a class society".

6. On Marxist periodization of Yugoslav history in general, see the extensive biblio- graphical survey of post-war Yugoslav historiography by W. S. Wucinich in The Journal of Modern History, XXIII (1951), pp. 43-44.

7. J. Jovanovic, Stvaranje crnogorske drzhave i razvoj crnogorske nacionalnosti, Cetinje 1948, pp. 7 and 20.

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"In the feudal state of the Nemanyichs the ruler had the greatest power. His power originated in the fact that as the highest person in the feudal hierarchy he was the supreme landowner of the whole ter-

ritory of the state". "The basis of the political organization was represented by sei-

gneuries, which were not only independent economic entities, but also

independent administrative and juridical units... However, beside the

power which the lord had over the inhabitants of his fief, there was in the state also a coercive organization of the ruler over the units which did not belong to the lords

" 8.

If these scattered generalizations in the collective historical synthesis are not sufficient to give us a complete picture of the Yugoslav Marxian

interpretation of feudalism, Professor S. Jantoleks systematized repre- sentation may be added. According to his History of the States and Laws of the Peoples of the Federal Peoples' Republic of Yugoslavia

9 : "Feudal Serbia was an agrarian country and agriculture repre-

sented the basic occupation of her population. The indispensable means of and the fundamental condition for agriculture was the land held and

exploited by the ruling feudal class, i. e. the ruler, the church and the

nobility. The main mass of direct producers consisted of dependent peasants attached to the soil and in personal dependence on their feudal lords for whom they toiled. The feudal society was, therefore, a class

society which was basically divided into a class of feudal masters and a class of exploited peasants. The necessity for the governing feudal class to uphold its domination and to exploit the mass of dependent peasant producers resulted in the corresponding social structure and the

corresponding state organization. Fundamentally, the organization of the feudal state corresponded to the feudal social structure, and changed its form according to the changes of the feudal social structure".

The same or similar views could be supported by numerous quo- tations from other writings, for they are general and common amongst

8. Historija naroda Jugoslawe, pp. 340, 416, 418, 431 and 432. 9. S. JANTOLEK, Istonja drzhave i prava naroda tMKJ, il, Jöeograa, iy<ro, pp. lu ana ll.

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the Yugoslav Marxians, but it is obvious from the statements cited, that there is no question of any objective interpretation of historical realities. It is a marxisation of the past, pure and simple, in order to bring it into harmony with the official doctrine of the regime and its educational purposes 10.

A criticism of historical materialism as a theory would be out of place here. It is sufficient to mention that it is a theory which rests less on facts than on an a priori conception. It uses a vague terminology and neglects the distinctive characteristics which are the foundation of every historical category. The entire historical process cannot be explained as a result of economic development and class struggle, and still less the whole political, moral and intellectual life as directly moulded by the mode of production11. This would mean the groundless denial of the reciprocal influences of interdependent historical facts and factors. As far as the notion of progressive class is concerned, it would be helpful if at least an acceptable definition of the term "social class could be worked out.

Speaking of medieval Serbia, the Yugoslav Marxians have started from the preconceived idea of feudalism as an inevitable stage of Ser- bian historical evolution and they have twisted facts into the pattern enunciated by Marx and Engels and developed further by their fol- lowers. However, it should not be forgotten that Karl Marx knew very little of other countries outside Western Europe. He based his theory on his knowledge of the West and classified the development of other societies according to the epochs of occidental history. But even on the supposition that similar conditions in Serbia led to the establishment of institutions similar to the West, it would not be a feudal system as depicted by Marx. It is generally ignored that his characterization of Western feudalism was outlined under the then dominant patrimonial theory which was afterwards generally rejected. The Yugoslav Marx-

10. See for instance the article on significance of national history as an educational subject by M. Djilas in Komunist, Jan. 1949, pp. 52-75.

11. See among others, H. See, The Economic Interpretation of History, Adelphi, 1929, and K. Federn, The Materialist Conception of History, London 1939.

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ians were not aware of this rejection because they were under the sway of Soviet historians, especially before the conflict of 1948, when they were just preparing the fundamental concepts of their interpretation of the Yugoslav past. The Russia of Appanages is the only period of European history where the patrimonial theory may be partially applied.

Except for common generalizations, the historians of post-war Yu- goslavia have not undertaken serious attempts towards proving their theses.

One of the exceptions is represented by the outstanding research work of the well-known Byzantologist Professor G. Ostrogorsky : The Ponoia >- Contribution to the History of Feudalism in Byzantium and South-Slav Countries 12. One of its main aims is to prove the existence of feudalism in medieval Serbia with the help of pronoia. If he succeeded in doing this, it would give scholarly support to the so far superficial generalizations of the prejudiced Marxian historians. Therefore, Ostro-

gorsky's study will be discussed here from this point of view 13.

The pronoia (care, solicitude, administration) in the Byzantine em-

pire meant the act by which certain persons were invested by the central

authority with the administration and the usufruct of land tenures or other productive assets, mostly for their service to the state. Later on the object of the grant itself was also known under this name as well as under the term of posotes (income) which was determined in a docu- ment (Praktikon) issued by the responsible imperial official who des- cribed in detail all the revenues and duties which might be collected from the grant. The pronoia was a conditional land-holding and until the end of the empire it preserved the character of a service tenure

12. Pronija, Prilog istoriji feudalizma u Vizantiji i u juzhnoslovenskim zemljama, Beo- grad 1951. The French translation : Pour V histoire de la féodalité byzantine et sud-slave, Bruxelles 1954.

13. An examination of the work as a whole is given in my review in La Revue de r Université Laval, X (1955) pp. 343-346, and for a criticism of his theory of feudalism in Byzantium, see my article « Zur Frage der Pronoia und des Feudalismus im byzantinischen Reiche», presently in course of publication in Südost-Forschungen, München, where the problem of the Marxian conception of feudalism is discussed.

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which could not be sold or given away as a gift in spite of the fact that in the course of time a hereditary transference became almost the rule.

At the beginning, the pronoia had nothing to do with military service, but, according to Ostrogorsky, it undoubtedly obtained a military character under the Comnenes and there was no longer any essential difference between the pronoia and the western fief.

The feudal lords as well as the pronoiars, held the land tenures for their military service and drew incomes from them in form of a feudal rent which was paid in money or kind by the peasants attached to the soil. As far as the socio-economic conditions are concerned, Ostrogorsky thinks that there was no essential difference between Byzantino-SIav and Western feudalism. However, in political respects, even he points out that the Byzantine-Serbian system was far different from the western type. The multiple, stratified and hierarchical structure of power which is characteristic of the West remained, in the main, strange to Byzantium and medieval Serbia, in spite of the fact that certain elements of similar political relations could be found in the later Byzantine Em- pire and Serbia.

The pronoia system was taken over from Byzantium by the Slav countries of the Balkan peninsula, for, according to Ostrogorsky's explanation, this system corresponded to the conditions and needs of their feudal organizations. The Serbian pronoia was considered a conditional land- holding just as it was in Byzantium, and it was distinguished from a full ownership even when, later on, the transference by inheritance of the pronoia became quite a common custom. The state always retained the property rights on the pronoia. The pronoiars in Serbia as well as in Byzantium all belonged to the military class, and according to their wealth they were members of the lower or higher class of feudal lords, as Ostrogorsky maintains.

In Bosnia the situation was different. Because of the power of feudal aristocracy, there was no conditional tenure, and certain features were developed which were unknown to the Serbian and Byzantine so-

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cieties. There existed a personal relationship between a feudal lord and his vassal, as Ostrogorsky stresses, rightly this time. For this reason, the feudal relations in Bosnia are similar to feudalism of the West, while the Serbian structure is related to the Byzantine system, where there was neither feudal nexus nor subinpronoiation, which would cor- respond to western subinfeudation.

Here only one exception occured at the time of the disintegration of the Serbian Empire under the epigones of Tzar Dushan. With the permission of the epigone of Thessaly and Epirus one of his powerful nobles gave in pronoian part of his large domaines to his nephew. How- ever, as Ostrogorsky aptly stresses, this is the case of a foreigner who came from the West and brought his western feudal custom. It can only show a stronger occidental influence in the epoch of the decline of the Serbian political organization formed on the foundation of the By- zantine system of pronoia.

From the results of Ostrogorsky's scholarly work, in spite of his terminology, it is quite evident that there is no reason whatever to iden- tify the political structure of medieval Serbia with feudalism. His use of the term "feudal" in connection with the Serbian or Byzantine state is arbitrary, for the basic feudal institutions of the West are absent. The pronoia is not identical with the fief which represents a union of two different institutions : vassalage and benefice. Since vassalage did not exist either in Serbia or in Byzantium, the pronoia could be com- pared only with the pre-vassalitic beneficium of the West in the Middle Ages. Vassalage and benefice, blended together into the institution of the fief, formed the basis on which the double hierarchy of persons and land holdings was crystallized, and it served as the foundation of the whole social and political structure of western medieval society 14. And it is, just this double hierarchy which is missing from the Byzantine and Serbian societies.

14. See F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism, London 1952, where also the most important literature on feudalism is listed.

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Therefore, the conception of the non-feudal character of the Ser- bian state in the Middle Ages remains valid, feudalism as a historical category cannot be applied to medieval Serbia. As a contribution to historical knowledge the interpretations of the new Yugoslav historiography cannot be accepted, so far as this problem is concerned, because they are too obviously conditioned by their rigid adherence to preconceived Marxian concepts of the development of history 15.

15. The harsh and violent discussion in post-war Yugoslav historiography on the question of whether the Serbian feudal system or Osmanli feudalism was more backward or more advanced, is deprived of any meaning insofar as the problem of feudalism as a historical category is concerned. A report on this dispute is given by W. C. Vucinich in The Journal of Modern History, XXVII (1955) pp. 287-290. On the problem of feudalism in the Osmanli Empire see « Zur Frage der Pronoia etc. », footnote 32.

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The New Yugoslav Historiography and the Problem of Feudalism in Medieval Serbia