Полития Борны: Gentes и Herrschaft в Далмации в первой четверти IХ века
Borna’s Polity: Gentes and Herrschaft in Dalmatia in 1st quarter of the 9th century.

Summary/Abstract: Borna’s polity attested by Frankish sources in the territory of the former Roman province of Dalmatia in the first quarter of the 9th century is traditionally considered by many to be the cradle of the early medieval Croatian statehood. Meanwhile, the exact character of this polity and the way it was linked with the Croats as an early medieval gens remain obscure in many respects. It is argued by the author that Borna’s ducatus consisted of only two political entities, the Croat polity proper, with its centre in the region of Knin, and a small chiefdom of the Guduscani in the region of Gacka. Borna was the chief of the Croats, a group of people that gradually developed into an ethnic unit under the leadership of a christianized military elite opposed first to the supreme power of the Avars and then to that of the Franks. The Guduscani as a single whole constituted a separate natio whose identity was in no way connected with that of the Croats. The evidence concerning the important institutions of Borna’s ducatus such as praetoriani and castella points to the existence of all the necessary conditions for transforming the polity into an early state the administrative apparatus of which would be based on the ruler’s retinue of warriors. Meanwhile, the rapid reinforcement of the post-Avar Knin elite that took place c. 800 and led to the formation of Borna’s ducatus should be explained by external impulses connected with a considerable change of political conditions in the Western Balkans following the expansion of the Franks rather than by any internal social factors. For all that, the process of the stabilization of the Croats’ group identity and its transformation into basic identity of an ethnopolitical community was very durable, the rate of the process being considerably inferior to that of the formation of a supralocal political organization in the territory of the future «land of the Croats» (Regnum Chroatorum).

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