Culoare şi Simbol: subscrierea neautografă la începuturile cancelariei muntenești
Colour and symbol – subscriptio at the beginning of the Wallachian chancery

Summary/Abstract: The subscriptio of the Wallachian documents was written with black ink at the beginning of the chancery, but with red ink nearly a half of a century later. The first Slavonic document issued by the voivode Vladislav I, as many of the subsequent charters from Mircea the Old, had a black subscription. Only towards the end of Mircea’s reign the red ink began to replace the black one. The red subscription became regular during Mircea’s successors, starting with his son, Michael I. This important change might have been influenced by Michael, a scribe in the medieval Wallachian chancery, who chose not only to make the subscription red, but also to add different auxiliary chronological elements to the dating of the charters. At the end of the subscriptio the scribes wrote a cursive cross, which can also be found right at the beginning of the charter in the first Slavonic Wallachian documents. Although, for a long-time, this cross was omitted by the editors of the medieval Wallachian documents, it was a constant presence in the first decades of the chancery. This ending symbol was represented in different manners by the scribes and was probably influenced by the Byzantine practices. The cursive cross from subscriptio was not used in Bulgarian charters, while the Serbian ones included it only for the Mount Athos charters. Although it is rather difficult to identify who was responsible for adopting the usage of this cursive cross in the chancery, one might consider the influential clerics actives in Wallachia, such as Nikodimos from Tismana or the Greek metropolitans.

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