Diplomatička analiza Trpimirove i Muncimirove isprave: U počast Mihe Barade
The diplomatic analysis of Trpimir’s and Muncimir’s charters: an essay in the honour of Miho Barada

Summary/Abstract: In his career as a medieval historian, Miho Barada mostly used written sources. In this paper I will discuss Barada’s analysis of the charters of Trpimir and Muncimir from the ninth century, for which Barada used tools of ancillary historical disciplines. Croatian historiography dates and locates Trpimir’s charter to 4 March 852 in Bijaći. With this charter the Croatian dux Trpimir (c.845–864) donated the church and monastery of St. George in Putalje, together with some other real estate, to the Archbishopric of Solin. The purpose of the gift was to reciprocate Archbishop’s Peter present of silver for church tableware. The date of the confirmation of Trpimir’s charter, with which the Croatian dux Muncimir (892–910) forty years later, on 28 September 892, and again in Bijaći confirmed the content of Trpimir’s charter did not raise much controversy in Croatian historiography. Historians have abundantly used the historical content of and data contained in these two oldest Croatian medieval charters. They were considered archival sources of first rank. Barada approached their analyses critically, and especially because these charters did not survive in their original forms but as later transcripts. For this reason it is not surprising that their contents (and especially the content of Trpimir’s charter) are in some places contentious and incomprehensible, and that the question of authenticity of both chapters may be raised again and again. Barada thought that such quandaries may be resolved with the help of textual criticism and diplomatics as ancillary historical disciplines. By looking at external and internal characteristics of written documents, diplomatics decides if a document (a charter, a written testimony of a legal act, etc.) is authentic or a forgery. The fundamental external characteristics of a document include the material upon which the document is written, stamp, signature and various other signs. Internal characteristics refer to integral parts of the text or diplomatic formula, language, dates, names and other features that may be studied in a transcript as well as in the original. Barada was the first Croatian scholar to seriously engage with textual criticism of these two charters. Their diplomatic aspects have been studied by other scholars before and after Barada, but mostly in order to glean historical data. Their detailed diplomatic analysis was hindered from the start by the false belief that the oldest transcript had been printed by Lucius and that the transcripts kept in Split were all transcribed from Lucius. Barada corrected this error when he found multiple transcripts of these charters older than the manuscript used and printed by Lucius. Using these transcripts, Barada reconstructed the original text and showed that both charters were indeed authentic. Today we know of five transcripts of Trpimir’s charter from 852 and Mucimir’s charter from 892. The oldest transcript dates from 1568

• Details
• Contents