Croatian into Latin in 1510: Marko Marulić and the Cultural Translation of Regum Delmatiae atque Croatiae gesta

Source Text and Its Context

Croatia, across the Adriatic from Italy, was in contact with, and influenced by, the cultures of several neighbouring regions. Here the ancient provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia met, and the Eastern Roman Empire was divided from the Western, just as the Eastern Orthodox Church was from the Roman Catholic; and here the Romans (living in Latin cities on the coast) mingled with the Slavs. Catholicism was embraced by rulers of an independent Croatian kingdom, which existed from the 10th until the 12th century. Later the kingdom was forced into a union with Hungary, eventually to be divided among Venice, the Habsburgs, and the Ottoman Empire (only the city state of Dubrovnik, or Ragusa, achieved and retained relative autonomy).¹

During the Middle Ages, the region had a literature written in three languages: Latin, Old Church Slavonic (a ‘common Slavic’ liturgical language created from early Byzantine models, using its own Glagolitic script), and, finally, the Croatian vernacular. Texts in Old Church Slavonic and the vernacular were for the most part translations from Latin, Greek, and sometimes Italian, with religious prose (hagiography, exempla, vision literature) predominating. Historical prose narrative is comparatively scant, with a total of only five texts surviving. One of these stands apart from the rest: the anonymous Gesta regum Sclavorum (GRS), known also as the Annals of the priest of Doclea.² Whereas other Croatian medieval histories centre on a particular city or event, the GRS is a genealogy of rulers of the Croatian kingdom, and tells of the princes and kings of the Slavs (called Goths in the GRS) who invaded Dalmatia and Pannonia ‘during the lifetime of St Bernard’, and how this people later accepted Christianity and formed a state under the auspices of the pope. Furthermore, the GRS includes both the evaluation of the abilities of the rulers as well as their deeds. The chronicle ends in the later eleventh century, at around the time of the Domesday Book. According to the closing narrative of the GRS, the Croats, who did not want to participate in the Crusades, murdered their last king, Demetrius Zvonimir in 1089, which resulted in the collapse of Croatian royal power. Before his death the king is said, in this account, to have cursed his people, providing a legendary explanation of the loss of Croatian independence.³

The GRS survives both in Latin and Croatian versions. The Latin Gesta regum Sclavorum is longer (47 chapters, some eighty pages in the modern edition⁴) and covers a more extended historical period (the events c. 538-1150), but the shorter, vernacular Croatian Chronicle (24 chapters on 27 pages, covering events from c. 538-1079) includes the legend of the murder and the curse of the last Croatian king. The authorship and date of both Gesta and Chronicle have long been the subject of controversy. The GRS could have been written by a churchman residing in Split or, to the south, Bar (Antibarium, as facing Bari across the Adriatic) or both, anytime between the twelfth and fourteenth century. Moreover, the Chronicle could have preceded or followed the Gesta. Also, there does not seem to be any evidence against the account having been composed in Croatian, rather than being a translation from the Latin Gesta; the Latin’s dependency on the Croatian is equally unclear. What we know from documentary evidence is that in the year 1500 a manuscript of the Chronicle was brought to the Dalmatian city of Split from the so-called Krajina, a nearby coastal region, and that ten years later it was translated into Latin (again), under the title Regum Delmatiae atque Croatiae gesta (RDCG). The translator was a Renaissance humanist from Split, Marko Marulić or Marcus Marulus.⁵

The Translator

Marko Marulić was born in Split in 1450. From the year 1420 his hometown, as well as other Dalmatian cities—including Šibenik, Zadar, Trogir, Hvar, Kotor—were under the rule of Venice, belonging to its Stato da Mar. For a time, Venetian rule ensured protection from local warlords...