Alimov, D. E.
The Kingdom of Svetopelek in the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea: a Reflection of Reality, a Legitimizing Myth, or a Discursive Image?, Proslogion: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Social History and Culture, 2025. Vol. 8(2). P. 64–96.
Denis Evgenievich Alimov, Doctor of History, Associate Professor, St. Petersburg State University (199034, Russia, St. Petersburg, Mendeleevskaya liniya, 5)
d.alimov@spbu.ru
Language: Russian
The article examines various historiographic approaches to interpreting the image of the «kingdom of Svetopelek» in the so-called «Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea», a history work created in the Kingdom of Dioclea (Duklja) in the second half of the 12th century. While supporting the interpretation of the «Gothic-Slavic kingdom» ruled by King Svetopelek as a fictional state, the author points to difficulties connected with attempts to interpret this fictional image as an ideologically oriented construction or a legitimizing myth. Linking the features of the historical narrative of the «Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea» with social and cultural processes that took place in Western Europe in the 12th century, the author points out the similarity of the «kingdom of Svetopelek» with other fictional states of the 12th and early 13th century historiography (Geoffrey of Monmouth’s empire” of King Arthur, Saxo Grammaticus’s Danish «empire», Wincenty Kadłubek’s «empire of the Lechites») and supports considering the «kingdom of Svetopelek» not so much as an ideological construction, but as a discursive image. According to the author, the emergence of this discursive image was connected with changes in historical imagination, which were conditioned by the process of supra-regional integration, while the inclusion of the figure of Svatopluk of Moravia in the Diocleian historical narrative can be explained by the Chronicle’s vision of the Slavs as a single ethnopolitical organism with its center in the territory of Duklja.
Keywords: Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea, Duklja, king Svetopelek, historical imagination
URL: http://proslogion.ru/82-alimov
10.24412/2500-0926-2025-82-64-95
