Thomas the Archdeacon

Historia Salonitana

Thomas of Split (c. 1200–1268), known to posterity as Thomas the Archdeacon, spent almost his whole life inside a Roman palace. Split — Spalatum — had grown up in and around the enormous seaside residence Diocletian built for his retirement, and by Thomas’s day it was a Dalmatian commune of a few thousand inhabitants, nominally under the Hungarian crown, commercially entangled with Venice, and permanently negotiating with the Slavic lords of its hinterland. Around 1222, Thomas was sent to Bologna to study law, rhetoric, grammar, and the notarial art; while he was there, he heard Francis of Assisi preach in the public square, an occasion he later recalled with unusual immediacy. He came home to serve as notary of the commune, became archdeacon of the cathedral chapter in 1230, and held that office until his death. In 1243, the canons elected him archbishop, but his uncompromising views on the independence of the Church had made him enemies among the citizens, and he stood down without ever occupying the see.

His one great work – the chronicle that its first editor, Johannes Lucius (Ivan Lučić), christened the Historia Salonitana – runs from the apostolic foundation of Salona down to the 1260s, but its heart is the thirteenth century Thomas lived through and helped to govern. It is a biased book, and openly so. Thomas writes as a Latin patrician of an urban commune: suspicious of the Slav hinterland, contemptuous of factional bloodshed among his fellow citizens, and convinced that Split’s salvation lay in importing an Italian institution, the podestà – what he calls the regimen Latinorum. The logic of the office was that the chief magistrate should be a salaried foreigner with some training in law, appointed for a short, fixed term precisely because he had no local kin, no local friendships and therefore no local scores to settle. In 1239, Thomas helped to secure the election of Split’s first podestà, Gargano de Arscindis of Ancona, who governed the city for three years. The chapter we are reading is Thomas’s account of Gargano’s first year, written to justify it.

The chapter falls into two halves that do not obviously belong together. The first is a portrait of good government. Gargano finds the treasury empty and fills it without oppressing anyone; he is feared and heeded “like some saint sent by God”; people come in from almost the whole province to hear his judgements; the murderous feud between the sons of Vitalis and the kindred of Duimus is settled by intermarriage; the Slavs stop raiding; two intractable enemies of Split conveniently die. The city, Thomas writes, came out of a great squalor of darkness into the light.

Then the light goes out. On Friday 3 June 1239, a total solar eclipse crossed Europe – an event recorded from Toledo to Montpellier to Split – and Thomas describes the stars coming out at midday, a bright body blazing beside the sun, and crowds running through the streets shouting that the world was ending. In the same year, a comet stood over the north, “as if above the kingdom of Hungary.” And a rumour was going round that a plague-bearing people called the Tartars had entered Christian territory in Rus’. Most people, Thomas notes drily, treated it as a joke. He was writing after 1242, and he knew perfectly well what came next: the Mongols crossed the Carpathians in 1241, destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohi, and pursued King Béla IV down the Dalmatian coast to the walls of Split and Trogir. The juxtaposition is deliberate: this is the last calm chapter before the catastrophe.

The standard bilingual edition is Archdeacon Thomas of Split: History of the Bishops of Salona and Split, Latin text by Olga Perić, edited, translated and annotated by Damir Karbić, Mirjana Matijević Sokol and James Ross Sweeney, Central European Medieval Texts 4 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2006). We have used here the older edition by Franjo Rački, Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium 26, Scriptores 3 (Zagreb: JAZU, 1894) for being open-source.

This text is suited to upper intermediate readers of Latin (B2 level). Thomas’s prose is the working Latin of a Bologna-trained notary: balanced clauses, result clauses with ut, a steady supply of ablatives absolute, and a fondness for the vivid comparative image. For this reason, the text analysis will not include identifying constructions that this level’s learners should be familiar with. One thing is worth flagging before you start: Rački’s edition keeps the orthography of the manuscript, so expect u where classical Latin prints v (ciuitas, uenerationi), e for the diphthong ae (pecunie, quedam), and simplifications such as orribilis for horribilis, aparuisset for apparuisset and inplacabiliter for implacabiliter. None of this is error; it is what the text looks like on the page.

TEXT

Thomas the Archdeacon, Historia Salonitana, cap. XXXIII

Cum enim nihil pecunie in fisco publico reperisset, per sue discretionis industriam cito ipsum abundare fecit absque grauamine alicuius. Siquidem tantam ei gratiam concessit Deus, ut ab omnibus timeretur et audiretur, quasi quidam sanctus a Deo missus. Nec solum ciuibus uenerationi erat sed de tota pene prouintia ueniebant audire ipsius sententias, quasi diuinas. Erat enim quam maxime intentus cum omnibus pacem facere factamque fideliter obseruare, superbis resistere, pacificos quasi filios confouere. Sicque breui tempore tota ciuitas ueluti de magnis tenebrarum squaloribus exiens ad lucem deuenit.

Tunc illa cruenta et orribilis discordia, quam supra descripsimus, sopita est. Nam filii Vitalis cum parentella Duimi contractis inter se conubiis pacem perpetuam tenuerunt. Sclaui etiam, qui inplacabiliter contra ciuitatem seuiebant assiduis predationibus laniantes eam, ad pacis concordiam reducti sunt. Tanta namque fuit eo tempore securitas intus et extra, ut numquam maior ibi memoraretur fuisse. Hoc ideo contigerat, quia potestatis metus omnes ciues in unitate constrinxerat. Omnes autem, quasi per unum funem trahentes, robur ciuitatis integrum conseruabant nec erat ausus quispiam ciuium priuatas amicitias seu inimicitias cum extraneis facere, sed qui erat amicus publicus a singulis amabatur; quem uero ciuitas pro inimico habebat, quasi omnium hostem omnes insequebantur.

Et hoc ceu miraculose eo tempore contigit, ut duo implacabiles hostes Spalatensium uiuendi finem facerent, uidelicet Tollen de Chulmia et alter Tollen Politianus, qui nunquam poterant cum Spalatensibus pacem habere.

Per idem tempus, anno domini millesimo CCXXXVIIII die tertio intrante mense Iunio, facta est eclipsis solis mirabilis et terribilis. Totus enim sol obscuratus est et tota serenitas aeris obtenebrata est. Et quasi noctis tempore stelle apparuerunt in celo et quedam maior stella micabat iuxta solem ex occidentali parte. Tantusque pauor in omnes incubuerat, ut uelud amentes huc illucque clamando discurrerent mundi finem adesse putantes. Erat autem dies Veneris luna tricesima. Et quamuis solis iste defectus per totam aparuisset Europam, in Asia tamen et Africa non dicebatur fuisse. Eodem anno uisa est stella crinita, id est cometa, que imminebat septentrionali regioni, quasi supra regnum Hungarie, et mansit diebus multis satisque magne rei portendi uidebatur presagium. His etenim diebus crebrescebat iam per aures hominum tristis rumor, quod pestifera Tartarorum gens fines iam Christianorum inuaserant in Ruthenie partibus; sed quasi pro ludo reputabatur a multis.

ANALYSIS

Notes:

1) nihil pecunie in fisco publico – “no money in the public treasury.” The fiscus publicus is the communal chest of Split. The empty coffer is the standard opening move of a reform narrative: the new governor arrives to find nothing, and produces something.

2) per sue discretionis industriam… absque grauamine alicuius – “by the diligence of his good judgement… without burdening anyone.” Discretio in medieval Latin means discernment, the capacity to judge rightly between cases, and it is a cardinal virtue in monastic and administrative writing alike; grauamen is a technical term of fiscal and canon law for an exaction or imposition. Gargano raised revenue without raising taxes, which is exactly what a citizen of a commune wanted to hear about a foreign governor.

3) tantam ei gratiam concessit Deus – “God granted him such favour.” Gratia hovers between two senses here, divine grace and popular goodwill, and Thomas exploits both. Gargano’s authority is presented from the outset as something conferred on him rather than seized by him.

4) ut ab omnibus timeretur et audiretur, quasi quidam sanctus a Deo missus – “so that he was feared and heeded by all, like some saint sent by God.” The comparison is startlingly strong for a salaried Italian magistrate on a three-year contract, and Thomas is not being ironic. For him, the podestà really is providential: an outsider whose freedom from local ties gives him a nearly supernatural impartiality.

Nec solum ciuibus uenerationi erat sed de tota pene prouintia ueniebant audire ipsius sententias, quasi diuinas. Erat enim quam maxime intentus cum omnibus pacem facere factamque fideliter obseruare, superbis resistere, pacificos quasi filios confouere. Sicque breui tempore tota ciuitas ueluti de magnis tenebrarum squaloribus exiens ad lucem deuenit.

Notes:

1) ciuibus uenerationi erat – a double dative, “he was an object of reverence to the citizens,” handled with easy classical correctness. Note also prouintia for provincia, a spelling that reflects how -ci- was pronounced.

2) ipsius sententias, quasi diuinas – “his judgements, as though they were divine.” Sententia is the technical word for a judicial verdict; the people coming in de tota pene prouintia are coming for arbitration. Gargano’s court has in effect become the supreme jurisdiction of the region, which is precisely the point of the reform.

3) pacem facere factamque fideliter obseruare – “to make peace and faithfully to keep the peace once made.” The figure of repetition (pacem… factam) and the alliteration of factamque fideliter give the clause the ring of a communal statute: Gargano’s term of office coincided with the codification of Split’s customary law, a project in which Thomas himself very probably had a hand.

4) superbis resistere – “to resist the proud.” The phrase is taken from Scripture: Deus superbis resistit, humilibus autem dat gratiam (James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5, after Proverbs 3:34). Thomas has just said that God gratiam concessit to Gargano; now Gargano does what God does. The allusion turns the ordinary business of policing factions into an imitation of divine justice. A classically trained ear will also catch Virgil’s parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (Aeneid 6.853) somewhere behind it.

5) de magnis tenebrarum squaloribus exiens ad lucem deuenit – “coming out of a great squalor of darkness, it arrived at the light.” Squalor means filth, neglect, the unwashed state of mourning; joined to tenebrae it makes the city’s factional past both dirty and dark. The movement from darkness to light is baptismal and paschal in register, but it is also a trap. Soon the sun will go out over Split at midday.

Notes:

1) illa… discordia, quam supra descripsimus… sopita est – “that discord which we described above was lulled to sleep.” The cross-reference to his own earlier chapters reminds us that this chapter resolves a story the reader has been following. Sopire is the verb for quieting fires and quarrels, and the metaphor is carefully chosen: a feud is not destroyed, it is put to sleep, and what sleeps can wake.

2) filii Vitalis… parentella Duimi – the two factions whose vendetta had been tearing the commune apart, and whose story Thomas has told in the preceding chapters. It began around 1234–1235, when an elderly citizen, Duimus son of Draža, confronted the sons of Vitalis over the mistreatment of one of his servant girls; the quarrel turned into a brawl in which Duimus and his elder son were killed. The sons of Vitalis were exiled and their houses pulled down, and they withdrew to Zadar together with the sons of Gallona; they came back, drove the dead man’s party out to Trogir, and had their houses demolished and their goods handed over. The two sides then went on raiding each other – and eventually anyone else – across the short stretch of coast between the two cities. Cf. Ante Bećir, “Political Conflict and Violence in Late Medieval Dalmatian Towns,” Historijski zbornik 77/2 (2024), 15–42.

3) parentella – note the word Thomas chooses for the second party. Parentella is a medieval coinage for a lineage or kindred with no classical pedigree, exactly the term a notary would use in a document about inheritance or feud, and Thomas sets it beside the classical filii of the other house without any apparent unease. Note too that Duimus himself is long dead: the peace is being contracted with the kindred of the murdered man, now headed by the younger son who survived the brawl. The sons of Gallona, who fought throughout on the side of the filii Vitalis, quietly disappear from the settlement.

4) contractis inter se conubiis – “with marriages contracted between them,” an ablative absolute. Intermarriage was the standard instrument for closing a blood feud across medieval Europe: the two parties become one kindred, so that further killing becomes the killing of one’s own. Pacem perpetuam is the formal language of a treaty. This half-line is the only account we have of how the feud actually ended, and it is worth weighing sceptically: Thomas credits the settlement to the podestà he had campaigned for, and he consistently writes as though the commune, rather than the factions, controlled the events.

5) Sclaui – the Slavs of the hinterland behind Split. Thomas consistently distinguishes Latini, the Romance-speaking urban patriciate to which he belonged, from Sclaui, and the distinction is not neutral: a great deal of the Historia is written to defend the former against the latter. Note the sequence seuiebant… laniantes, “raged… tearing her apart,” which treats the city as a body being mauled by animals.

Tanta namque fuit eo tempore securitas intus et extra, ut numquam maior ibi memoraretur fuisse. Hoc ideo contigerat, quia potestatis metus omnes ciues in unitate constrinxerat. Omnes autem, quasi per unum funem trahentes, robur ciuitatis integrum conseruabant…

Notes:

1) securitas intus et extra – “security within and without.” The pairing is the whole programme of the podestà in three words: peace between the factions and peace with the neighbours are treated as a single achievement, because in Thomas’s analysis each produces the other.

2) potestatis metus… in unitate constrinxerat – “fear of the authority had bound them together into unity.” Potestas here means the office of podestà itself, so the phrase is almost “fear of the podestà,” and constringere is the verb for tying, fettering, compressing. Thomas’s explanation of civic concord is refreshingly unsentimental: the citizens were united not by virtue but by fear of the same man, and the unity is not chosen but imposed.

3) quasi per unum funem trahentes – “as if hauling on a single rope.” A proverbial image, and a physical one: everyone straining in the same direction.

… nec erat ausus quispiam ciuium priuatas amicitias seu inimicitias cum extraneis facere, sed qui erat amicus publicus a singulis amabatur; quem uero ciuitas pro inimico habebat, quasi omnium hostem omnes insequebantur.

Notes:

1) priuatas amicitias seu inimicitias cum extraneis – “private friendships or enmities with outsiders.” This is Thomas’s diagnosis of the disease of the Dalmatian communes: individual families run their own foreign policy, allying with Slav lords or rival cities against their own neighbours at home. The podestà was expected to put an end to this detrimental practice.

2) amicus publicus… pro inimico… omnium hostem – Thomas reaches for the vocabulary of the Roman republic: hostis publicus was the formal designation of a public enemy of the state, and the antithesis amicus / inimicus / hostis is built to sound like constitutional law.

3) a singulis amabatur… omnes insequebantur – the shift from singuli, “each individually,” to omnes, “all together,” is crucial. The public friend is loved by each citizen separately; the public enemy is hunted by all of them at once.

Notes:

1) ceu miraculose – “as if miraculously.” Ceu is a poetic conjunction, rare in prose, while miraculose is a thoroughly medieval adverb. The two words side by side are a good sample of Thomas’s register, which mixes literary Latin with the working vocabulary of thirteenth-century clerical prose.

2) uiuendi finem facerent – “made an end of living,” i.e. died. A decorous periphrasis, and a rather cold one. Thomas will not say that God killed Split’s enemies, but placing the sentence immediately after the account of the city’s new concord does the work of the claim without his having to make it.

3) Tollen de Chulmia et alter Tollen Politianus – Toljen of Hum (Chulmia, Zachlumia: the region behind Dubrovnik and along the Neretva), who ruled from the late 1220s and died in 1239; and “the other Toljen,” the one from Poljica, the semi-autonomous Slav territory immediately south-east of Split. Both lordships were among Split’s most persistent adversaries in the long struggle over the coastal hinterland. The coincidence of names gives Thomas the tidy pairing duo… hostes; the coincidence of deaths lets him call it a miracle.

4) qui nunquam poterant cum Spalatensibus pacem habere – “who could never be at peace with the people of Split.” Nunquam with the imperfect poterant presents the hostility as constitutional rather than circumstantial: these were men incapable of peace, so only their deaths could produce it. Compare implacabiles in the same sentence, and inplacabiliterof the Slavs above.

Notes:

1) anno domini millesimo CCXXXVIIII die tertio intrante mense Iunio – “in the year of the Lord 1239, on the third day with the month of June coming in.” Intrante mense is the Italian notarial way of counting days forward from the start of a month, as against the Roman system of kalends, nones and ides – one of many small signs that Thomas was trained in a documentary tradition and not only a literary one. The event is real and datable: the total solar eclipse of 3 June 1239 is recorded right across Europe. Eclipsis is a Greek loanword (ἔκλειψις, “a failing”) long since naturalised as the ordinary Latin technical term.

2) quedam maior stella micabat iuxta solem ex occidentali parte – “a rather large star was glittering beside the sun on the western side.” Almost certainly a planet rather than a star: Venus and Mercury both become visible during totality. The detail suggests Thomas is either reporting his own observation or drawing on somebody who was watching carefully.

3) uelud amentes huc illucque clamando discurrerent – “they ran this way and that, shouting, like people out of their minds.” The picture is vivid, but it also places Thomas at a distance from the crowd: he describes the panic rather than sharing it. Uelud for velut is another of the edition’s manuscript spellings.

4) mundi finem adesse putantes – “thinking that the end of the world was at hand.” Solar eclipses were read against Joel 2:31 and Matthew 24:29 (“the sun shall be darkened”), which made an apocalyptic reading almost automatic. Thomas records the reaction without endorsing it.

5) Erat autem dies Veneris luna tricesima – “it was a Friday, the thirtieth day of the moon.” A precise double dating, by weekday and by day of the lunar month, and both details are correct: 3 June 1239 did fall on a Friday, and a solar eclipse can only happen at conjunction, at the very end of a lunation. Thomas is being an exact chronicler – and, since the darkness at the Crucifixion also fell on a Friday, perhaps something more than that.

Et quamuis solis iste defectus per totam aparuisset Europam, in Asia tamen et Africa non dicebatur fuisse. Eodem anno uisa est stella crinita, id est cometa, que imminebat septentrionali regioni, quasi supra regnum Hungarie, et mansit diebus multis satisque magne rei portendi uidebatur presagium.

Notes:

1) solis iste defectus… per totam aparuisset Europam, in Asia tamen et Africa non dicebatur fuisse – “although this failure of the sun had appeared throughout Europe, it was said not to have occurred in Asia and Africa.” This is the most interesting sentence in the passage. Having just reported the crowd’s apocalyptic terror, Thomas observes quite coolly that the phenomenon was geographically limited – an argument, never spelled out, that it belonged to the natural order and was not the end of the world. Note dicebatur: he marks this as report rather than knowledge.

2) stella crinita, id est cometa – “a hairy star, that is, a comet.” Thomas glosses the Greek loanword with its native Latin calque — the reverse of the usual direction. Stella crinita translates κομήτης, “long-haired,” and both terms were current.

3) imminebat septentrionali regioni, quasi supra regnum Hungarie – “it hung over the northern region, as if above the kingdom of Hungary.” Imminere means to loom or overhang, with a strong connotation of threat. Comets were read everywhere as portents of the death of rulers or the fall of kingdoms, and Thomas positions this one geographically over the target. Writing after 1242, he knows precisely which kingdom the omen was for.

4) magne rei portendi uidebatur presagium – “it seemed a presage of some great matter being portended.” The doubled portent vocabulary (portendi, presagium) is heavy, but the passive uidebatur keeps Thomas himself uncommitted. He does not say the comet was a sign; he says it looked like one.

His etenim diebus crebrescebat iam per aures hominum tristis rumor, quod pestifera Tartarorum gens fines iam Christianorum inuaserant in Ruthenie partibus; sed quasi pro ludo reputabatur a multis.

Notes:

1) crebrescebat iam per aures hominum tristis rumor – “a grim rumour was already thickening through people’s ears.” Crebrescere, “to become frequent, to spread,” is used of rumour by Virgil and Tacitus; per aures hominum makes the transmission physical, passing from ear to ear. The imperfect keeps it in motion.

2) pestifera Tartarorum gens – “the plague-bearing people of the Tartars.” The Latin West called the Mongols Tartarirather than Tatari, and the extra r was no accident: it assimilated them to Tartarus, hell. Contemporaries made the pun explicit, and pestifera keeps the register of infection and infernal punishment. It is worth noticing that this is not the first time Thomas has used the word. A few chapters earlier he called Split’s own factions pestiferae. The plague that will come from outside is described in the same terms as the plague the city has just cured at home.

3) fines iam Christianorum inuaserant in Ruthenie partibus – “had already invaded the territories of the Christians in the regions of Rus’.” The report is accurate: Batu’s campaign against the Rus’ principalities began in 1237, and Kyiv fell at the end of 1240. News reached the Adriatic slowly and unreliably, but it did. Note the singular gens with the plural verb inuaserant, a construction ad sensum that is entirely normal in this period.

4) quod… inuaserant – a quod-clause with a finite verb after a word of reporting, where classical Latin would use the accusative and infinitive. This is one of the most characteristic developments of medieval Latin syntax, and the ancestor of the Romance che and que constructions.

5) sed quasi pro ludo reputabatur a multis – “but by many it was reckoned as a kind of joke.” The chapter ends on this flat, quiet sentence: Thomas has spent several pages describing a city finally at peace, and closes by recording that its inhabitants laughed at the news. Within two years the Mongols would break the Hungarian army at Mohi and chase King Béla IV down the Dalmatian coast to the walls of Split – which Thomas narrates at length, and as an eyewitness, a few chapters later.

We hope you enjoyed Split’s one good year. Thomas certainly did — he had helped to arrange it. As for the rumour the Spalatines laughed off, the answer arrives a few chapters later, and it is not a comfortable read. 💥

Source:

Thomas Archidiaconus. Historia Salonitana. Ed. Franjo Rački. Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum Meridionalium 26, Scriptores 3. Zagreb: JAZU, 1894. Text of chapter XXXIII.

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