Документи Лазара и Стефана Бранковића о подизању поклада деспота Ђурђа
Documents of Lazar and Stefan Branković concerning the Withdrawal of the Deposit of Despot Đurađ

Summary/Abstract: In the second half of 1457, Lazar and Stefan, sons of the late Serbian despot Đurađ Branković, withdrew the last installment of a large deposit their father had made in Dubrovnik in 1441. During the procedure, the brothers issued five documents – two pairs of charters confirming first the withdrawal and then the delivery of their respective shares, and a letter by Lazar notifying the Dubrovnik authorities that the transaction has been completed. This paper presents new editions of all five documents (for two of the charters this is the first complete edition) and analyzes their diplomatic characteristics in order to determine their position within the corpus of 15th century Serbian documents, with special focus on comparison between the document-making practices of the two brothers, made interesting by the fact that Lazar was the current ruler, but also the younger sibling. As the only preserved original letter of a reigning Serbian despot from the entire period of the Despotate (1402–1459), Lazar’s letter provides particularly valuable insight into the external features of this type of documents, while its textual formulae are fully consistent with the texts of numerous despots’ letters available in the form of copies. The text of the charters, however, contains many features that deviate from known Serbian practice of the period (lack of signatures, presence of majestic plural in the intitulation, use of an atypical promulgation formula in which the charters are named open documents, etc), but have numerous parallels in contemporary documents issued by Dubrovnik and, especially, by the kings and regional lords of Bosnia. The explanation seems to be that these charters are the only surviving Serbian examples of the expeditoria, a special type of document essentially serving as a receipt for a withdrawal, widely used in Dubrovnik as a consequence of the increasing number of deposits made in the city by neighboring lords faced with the prospect of Turkish conquest. Finally, the potential for comparative analysis of Lazar’s and Stefan’s charters was somewhat reduced by the discovery that Lazar’s second charter, previously thought to be an original like all the others, is most probably a copy, the original having been sent to the Turkish court as evidence in a legal dispute in 1485/86. Nevertheless, even limited comparison suggests that, although the brothers lived together at the Serbian capital of Smederevo, they maintained separate document-making staffs or chanceries, which obviously cooperated in creating both pairs of charters, but also imparted upon the final products elements of their individual practices, resulting in subtle, yet telling differences.

• Details
• Contents