Bibliography and Sources

The description of the corpus briefly presents the types of sources and the ways in which they participated in the nurturing of collective and social identities. As they reflect different practices and are written according to particular rules, they are the basis of the organisation of the volume, i.e. they correspond to individual papers in it.

Hagiographies narrated about a saint’s life (i.e. about the realisation of universal Christian ideals) and the intercessions with God for the community. They created a sense of community through the identification of a particular group as the one under the saint’s protection; the temple where the relics were kept acquired the status of a holy place; they reflected regional or broader identities, including religious ones. In addition to addressing different identities, the hagiographies influenced their content. Moreover, since they were intended for the annual commemoration of saints, they also influenced contemporary and future identifications.

The offices were dedicated to the most immediate spiritual relationship of people to holiness, in the act of a festive service – a hymn celebration of a saint’s life. Liturgical poetry, although ecclesiologically universal and intended for all Orthodox Christians, as a part of the cult of an individual saint carried traces of different collective identities – religious, ethnic, local, and other.  By singing the church songs, the faithful addressed saints directly, reminded themselves of their exemplary life (as well as the events that determined the course of the community’s life) and conformed to that ideal. This annual liturgical commemoration strengthened the cultural memory of the community, and hymnographic topos and poetic structures were inherited, participating in the literary shaping of the latter cults.

Encomia represented, along with hagiography and hymnography, the third most important literary genre of the Middle Ages and were the most immediate heirs of ancient, Hellenistic, and Byzantine rhetoric in a sense of genre and poetic traits. By their nature, they stood exactly between services and hagiographies: more concrete and rhetorical than the former, and more abstract and concise than the latter. They were intended to be delivered orally in front of the community of the faithful, most often in churches and on the occasion of certain important events, and their main goal was to strengthen the sense of belonging, which was achieved through rhetorical identification. By praising the saints, the authors of these works indirectly taught and educated the listeners, encouraging them to mimic the Gospel ideals. In addition to the primary religious content, encomia also contained Church ideology through a collective act of identification. Furthermore, they were not only a separate genre, but they were also an important part of many hagiographies.

Since historiographical writings noted collective experience, they intrinsically reflected various group identities. The space and time they covered for the most part corresponded to the type of identity they fostered; however, their content often reflects other ways of (self-)identification. Genealogies and annals represented “open texts” – they were reworked and supplemented during the period covered by the project. Thus, it is possible to follow not only which type of collectivity they addressed, but also how the main characteristics of those identities were redefined. Therefore, the composing of such texts participated in the constant (re-)shaping of identities – it reflected the past, but it also projected contemporary and future identities.

Church histories, on the other hand, provide a representation of collective consciousness and memory that is carefully thought out and adapted to current circumstances. That is the reason why they can also be characterized as “official historiography” of the researched period. Penned by high church dignitaries, they provide not only ideological frameworks that reveal the understanding of their authors’ own collective identity, but also their notions about other collectives. A different approach can be found in anonymous monastic chronicles, known in science as “short chronicles“. As chronographic writings created in a different environment – far from the centre of political events and through the efforts of ordinary monks – these texts present a more complex idea of identities, since each of them represents a special, author-specific, view of the past and present. Through these idiosyncratic experiences of historical events, one can perceive the authors’ ideas about collective identities, ideas that changed depending on the place and time of writing.

The marginal notes written on the books from the second half of the 15th century are a unique source in which the identities of medieval scribes and the persons ordering the copying of books were shaped in the encounter with Muslims. In the large corpus of inscriptions, it is possible to single out two larger subgroups. One consists of copyists’ notes, in which the authors presented their position toward the historical events in which, most often, the Christian and Turkish sides clashed. In such notes, we find places of meaning where, in the encounter with the Other, the social, ethnic, historical and territorial identities of both sides were shaped. The second group consists of inscriptions in which a book written by Christians was the subject of (commercial) exchange between Christians and Muslims. Different models of designating Muslims who sold (confiscated) books to Christians are the basis on which the cultural and social identity of both collectives was showcased.

Ottoman sources offer the possibility of researching both the ways in which the Orthodox Christian subjects of the sultan used different identity designations in the public space, as well as the attitude of the authorities towards them. In this sense, it is particularly useful to research comparatively sources created locally and those compiled in the capital. Among the first group of sources, court decisions (ott. tur. hüccet) and various types of certificates, receipts, and deeds (ott. tur. temmessük, tezkere, tapûnâme) are of special importance. Attention should also be drawn to the petitions and appeals (ott. tur. ‘arz-ı hâl/‘arzuhâl) that the subjects addressed to the sultan. The language of all these documents was adapted to the Ottoman bureaucratic discourse, but a careful analysis of the used phrases and terms can reveal ways of (re-)shaping the identity of the persons to whom the given documents referred. On the other hand, the documents whose compilation was initiated by the central authorities clearly show which designations of subjects’ identity were considered important by Ottoman bureaucrats and in which ways they used them. Particularly important sources of data are the sultan’s orders (ott. tur. fermân), drawn up either due to the needs of state policy or in response to petitions of subjects, and berats, i.e. orders about the appointment to an office (ott. tur. berât), which were, for example, received by all Orthodox hierarchs after being ordained. Furthermore, although being documents written in a strict administrative language and according to prescribed templates, various registers of population censuses and state revenues can sometimes showcase how certain persons or groups presented themselves to the authorities or how they were recognized by the Ottoman administration.