Authors:
Muresan, Dan Ioan
Abstract:
Part of the project "Migrating Dacia" © All right reserved -Dan Ioan Mureşan 2019 Rex Dacie / regina Dacie. Contributions to the history of Danish monarchic ideology at the end of Middle AgesBased on previous geographical confusions in Norman and Danish historiography in the 11th-12th centuries, the official creation of "Northern Dacia" pertains to the Roman Church, specifically to Pope Paschal II, simultaneously with the elevation in archbishopric of the siege of Lund, “metropolis Dacie”, in 1103/1104. By transforming Denmark in a "regnu (...)
Part of the project "Migrating Dacia" © All right reserved -Dan Ioan Mureşan 2019 Rex Dacie / regina Dacie. Contributions to the history of Danish monarchic ideology at the end of Middle AgesBased on previous geographical confusions in Norman and Danish historiography in the 11th-12th centuries, the official creation of "Northern Dacia" pertains to the Roman Church, specifically to Pope Paschal II, simultaneously with the elevation in archbishopric of the siege of Lund, “metropolis Dacie”, in 1103/1104. By transforming Denmark in a "regnum Dacie", we argue, the Roman Church “provincialized” it as a part of the new Christian Roman Empire of the Church, in the same way ancient Dacia was a province of the classical Roman Empire. From then on, “Dacia” in a restricted sense designates from the Danish kingdom, while it regards in an extended meaning the Church province of Scandinavia. The crisis of this medieval political and ecclesiastical terminology is thereafter put under closer scrutiny, starting with the making of the Union of Kalmar in 1397 and Eric VII’s reign. The official visits of Christian I and Dorothea in Italy and Rome in 1474, 1475 and 1488, as “Rex Dacie” and “Regina Dacie”, are here studied in some detail as the turning point when “Baltic Dacia” became part of a comprehensive European political and cartographic representation. Put in their genuine context, the few documents concerning a “Re de Dacia” starting with 1489 – recently claimed to be identified allegedly with Stephan the Great of Moldavia – concern in reality exclusively the sovereigns of medieval Denmark. A rich selection of representative pontifical, imperial and Italian written sources as well as iconographic and cartographic documents is convoked here in order to highlight this reality. At the end of this evolution, King Christian III, breaking the ties with Rome in 1536-1537, officially abolished the name of “Dacia” as well, and replaced it with the new modern title of “Regnum Danie”, under the intellectual authority of the “national” Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, rediscovered and published by the great scholar Christiern Pedersen, “the father of the Danish language”, in 1514. Humanism and Reform were thus unmaking the pontifical myth of “Northern Dacia”, still remembered in the name of the Scandinavian province of the mendicant orders. Recent works on the genesis of the idea of Dacia in Romanian culture show unmistakably that this is discovered only during the reign of Petru Rareş, thanks to his connections with the Archbishopric of Ohrid. Incidentally, yet somehow symbolically, the last Catholic archbishop of Lund “in Dacia”, John of Weeze, played a crucial role in forming the anti-Ottoman alliance between Petru Rareş and Emperor Charles V.
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