„ДАЛМАЦИЈАˮ У ЖИТИЈУ СВ. ЛИТБЕРТА
“DALMATIA” IN THE LIFE OF ST. LIETBERT

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on the mention of “Dalmatia” in the Life of St. Lietbert, Bishop of Cambrai, written at the end of the 11th century by the monk Radulf of Cambrai. During his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1054, Bishop Lietbert passed through the interior of the Balkan Peninsula. After crossing Bulgaria, where he suffered many troubles from the local “Scythian robbers”, the bishop “entered Dalmatia and passed through places where Diocletian, building baths, had imposed various death sentences on the martyrs of Christ,” after which he continued his journey towards Thessalonica and further towards Syria. Due to the unsettled circumstances in Byzantine Bulgaria, he could not continue along the traditional route to Constantinople; instead he was forced to take an alternative route, which led him from Niš via Toplica south to Thessalonica. In his description of Lietbert’s journey across the Balkan Peninsula, Radulf makes a clear distinction between Bulgaria and Dalmatia. In historical sources from the 11th and 12th centuries, the term Bulgaria denotes the Byzantine territory in the interior of the Balkan Peninsula, while the term Dalmatia in this case can only denote the Slavic, that is, Serbian territory, in its western part, which suggests the possibility that the area of Toplica was within the political framework of the Serbian state in the mid-11th century.

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