Dušan’s Code

Dušan, king of Serbia from 1331, used the Byzantine civil war of 1341–1347 to conquer Albania and most of Macedonia and, in 1347–1348, Epirus and Thessaly. At Easter, on 16 April 1346, an assembly at Skopje raised the Serbian archbishopric to a patriarchate with its seat at Peć, and the new patriarch Joanikije crowned Dušan emperor. The code issued three years later declares in its preamble that it was enacted by the Orthodox synod, the patriarch and all the lords of the empire together with the emperor; further articles were added at a council in Serres in 1353 or 1354, giving 201 articles in all.

The code was not meant to stand alone. Most early manuscripts copy it together with an abridgement of Matthew Blastares’ Syntagma and the so-called Law of Justinian, a short Byzantine compilation drawn largely from the Farmer’s Law, and it supplemented the church law of the Nomocanon of Saint Sava (1219 or 1220) and, apparently, a lost code of Dušan’s grandfather Milutin. Its own articles deal mainly with public law and procedure: the jurisdiction of church, imperial and noble courts, punishments — often harsher, in the Byzantine manner, than Serbia’s traditional fines — landholding, the labour dues of serfs, who could nonetheless sue their lords before the emperor’s court, and the collective responsibility of villages and frontier lords for brigandage. The code protected the privileged position of the Orthodox Church but obliged it to feed the poor, banned simony, called Catholics “half-believers” and forbade proselytism and mixed marriages.

No original survives; two dozen manuscripts are known, and the oldest, the incomplete Struga copy, dates from the late 14th century (1373 according to some, the 1390s according to its watermarks). Dušan’s empire broke up after his death in 1355, but the code remained in force in the Serbian lands and in the Serbian Despotate until the Ottoman conquest of 1459.