Konstantin Bodin

Tsar Konstantin Bodin (fantasy portrait of the 19th century)

Konstantin Bodin was king of Raszien between 1082 and 1106 and as Peter III in 1072 . briefly Tsar of Bulgaria .

Life

Konstantin Bodin was the son of Mihailo Vojislavljević and was a Serbian king from 1082 to 1106. He inherited the title of king from his father, who received the royal crown from Pope Gregory VII in exchange for concessions on church policy. His father established an archbishopric in Bar / Antivari to establish an organizational center for the Serbian Catholic Church. The Roman Curia was particularly interested in new, up-and-coming peoples against their religious rivals in East Current, as they were interested in expansion, precisely because of the schisms and the mutual excommunication of the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople in 1054.

Under Constantine Bodin, the empire experienced its greatest expansion up to this point in time. He succeeded in uniting almost all Serbian and other Slavic tribes that had not yet been subject to other larger rulers such as the Bulgarian Empire , the Hungarians or Byzantium . He ruled over Zeta (Dioclitia) and the coastal countries ( southern Montenegro , Herzegovina , southern Dalmatia ), Raszien (western Serbia, northern Montenegro) and Bosnia (central and eastern Bosnia), won large areas on the Danube and in what is now Albania as far as Tirana . He was followed in 1106 by his brother Dobroslav .

Konstantin Bodin opposed the Byzantine Empire and its rigorous Hellenization and church policy even before he came to power. As a family member of the Komitopuli on his mother's side and heir to the house of Vojislavljević on his father's side, he and his father took part in a Slavic uprising against Byzantium in what is now Macedonia in 1072 and, on the initiative of the Bulgarian magnate Georgi Vojtech, was crowned Bulgarian tsar in Prizren. This uprising failed and, even with the support of his father, he could not give the newly won Christian Orthodox title so much emphasis that he could have kept it.

Most of the population of the Bodin Empire, however , was only known to the Greek Orthodox rite after the missionary work by the Slav apostles Method and Kyrill , insofar as they were sufficiently Christian, what the later takeover of power by his relatives, the Serbian rulers in Razia, benefited. The empire fell apart and could no longer be united under the banner of the Catholic interpretation of the faith. It was not until the Serbian ruling dynasty of the Uroševic and later the Nemanjids from the 13th century, who made possible the establishment of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church through clever calculations between the Catholic and Greek Orthodox religious centers of power , that a unifying force succeeded in the individual Serbian tribes exercise.

swell

The most important contemporary source on Konstantin Bodin is the continuation of the Byzantine historical work of Johannes Skylitzes ( Skylitzes Continuatus ). He is also mentioned in the Alexiad written by Anna Komnena .

literature

• Jean-Claude Cheynet: Pouvoir et contestations à Byzance (963-1210) (= Publications de la Sorbonne. Series Byzantina Sorbonensia. Vol. 9). Reimpression. Publications de la Sorbonne Center de Recherches d'Histoire et de Civilization Byzantines, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-85944-168-5 , p. 79, No. 98.
• John Van Antwerp Fine: The Early Medieval Balkans. A critical survey from the sixth to the late twelfth century. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor MI 1991, ISBN 0-472-08149-7 , pp. 213-224.
• Edgar Hösch : History of the Balkan Countries. From the early days to the present. Beck, Munich 1988; 5th, updated and expanded edition. Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57299-9 , pp. 58, 74.
• Paul Stephenson: Byzantium′s Balkan Frontier. A Political Study of the Northern Balkans 900-1204. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, ISBN 0-521-77017-3 , here: pp. 142-148.

Web links

• Bodin , in: Biographical Lexicon for the History of Southeast Europe . Vol. 1. Munich 1974, p. 219 f.
• Konstantinos Bodin, king of Duklja in the Prosopography of the Byzantine World

predecessor	Office	successor
(vacant; last title holder: Peter II. )	Tsar of Bulgaria 1072	(vacant; next title holder: Peter IV. )
Mihailo Vojislavljević	King of Rascia 1082–1106	Dobroslav