МАВРО ОРБИН, ИВАН ЛУЧИЋ И ЛЕТОПИС ПОПА ДУКЉАНИНА
MAURO ORBINI, JOANNES LUCIUS AND THE CHRONICLE OF THE PRIEST OF DIOCLEA

Summary/Abstract: Given that there is no data on the existence and use of the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea in the Middle Ages, the first reliable evidence of the existence of such a document is the so-called „Croatian redaction“ and its Latin translation, which was composed in 1510 by Marko Marulić (Marcus Marulus). According to a more recent thesis, they served as the basis for Mauro Orbini to fabricate the alleged document of the „Priest of Dioclea“ and publish it as part of his work The Kingdom of the Slavs (Il Regno degli Slavi) in Italian in 1601, and then Ivan Lučić (Joannes Lucius) translated it into Latin and published as an alleged medieval „original“ in his work On the Kingdom of Dalmatia and Croatia (De Regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae libri sex) in 1666. Significant differences in content between the „Croatian redaction“ and the Latin version of M. Marulić on the one hand, and Orbini’s Italian redaction and the Latin one published by I. Lučić, on the other hand, point to a later refinement and addition to the original text, which Orbini then upgraded based on data from the historical tradition of Dubrovnik, as well as data taken from the works of then-known Byzantine authors, which were published during the second half of the 16th century with a comparative translation into Latin. An analysis of the data in the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea that have parallels in Byzantine sources indicates that the author of the Chronicle shaped them precisely according to the Latin translation that accompanied the aforementioned first printed editions of Byzantine sources. It is also important to point out that the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea does not contain a single piece of data that could be linked to the events described in Byzantine sources first published after 1601. In addition, the analysis of certain data from the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea that can be linked to the data from the Lokrum charters shows that the author of the Chronicle used the Lokrum charters as a source for his data. Mauro Orbini, as the abbot of the Benedictine monastery on Mljet, had close ties with the Benedictine monastery on Lokrum and insight into the charters there, as he himself noted in the margin of his work. Consideration of the issue of the presence of manuscripts of the Latin redaction of the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea in intellectual circles of Dalmatia between Orbini’s Italian edition from 1601 and Lučić’s Latin edition from 1666, along with an analysis of the relationship between its only two known manuscripts, those of Vatican and Belgrade, leads to the conclusion that there is no trace of it outside the scholarly work of Ivan Lučić himself. This confirms the thesis about Ivan Lučić as the creator of the Latin version of the Chronicle as a translation and revision of the Italian version by Mauro Orbini and finally refutes the thesis about the existence of the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea as a medieval work. As has been shown, Mauro Orbini took over most of the history of the kings of Dalmatia and Croatia by Marko Marulić, supplemented it in certain places, and added a continuation for the period from the 9th to the 12th centuries using data from Ludovicus Tubero, the historiographical tradition of Dubrovnik, Byzantine sources and Lokrum charters. Ivan Lučić translated his text into Latin, revised it in certain places according to Marulić’s text and the „Croatian redaction“, adjusted the places taken from Byzantine sources according to the Latin translation of those works that were also known and available to him, and published it as a medieval work by the „Priest of Dioclea“ (Presbyter Diocleas). Although its value as a historical source has always been disputed, and its data has been taken into account with extreme reserve and only if they were confirmed in more relevant sources, scholarship has nevertheless insisted on its medieval origin. The arguments presented here provide sufficient grounds for the conclusion that it is actually a fictitious source for an imagined history of an imaginary kingdom.

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