Lingua s(c)lavica, crovatica, illirica, rassiana, dalmata – the Venetians had many names for the Western South Slavic language they encountered in the Dalmatian possessions of their maritime empire. The difficulty of naming this foreign language points to the challenge of understanding and using it in both oral and written form. While the Venetian administration of the Dalmatian coastal towns exclusively used Latin and Italian for its records, the Slavic communities of the surrounding regions under Venetian or Hungarian/Habsburg control resorted to their native Slavic language for their correspondences or written judicial and notarial documents. Likewise, the local Ottoman officials employed mainly Slavic to communicate with their Venetian counterparts. The aim of this lecture is to analyse
(1) how the Venetians first understood and then recorded (or even produced) such Slavic documents as well as oral statements and testimonies expressed by Slavic speakers in front of the Venetian administration, and
(2) what that can tell us about administrative processes and social relations in the urban centres and their surrounding territories.
Next to numerous translations, the archives contain many Cyrillic and Latin-script Slavic originals of diverse provenance and content. For the purpose of this presentation, documents from the archives of Venice, Split and Zadar concerning Split (Spalato), Poljica (Poglizza), Omiš (Almissa) and Klis (Clissa) in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries will be analysed.
Lena Sadovski is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (research unit Balkan Studies) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Previously, she has been a visiting researcher at Leiden University and predoctoral assistant at the University of Vienna. While her current research project is dedicated to Bulgarian Catholics and Ottoman Catholicism in the seventeenth century, her Ph.D. thesis, defended summa cum laude at the University of Vienna in April 2023, studied the social structures of Venetian Split and its surrounding territories in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.