Београдски родослови

Abstract

Genealogy is an auxiliary historical discipline concerned with tracing family origins and descent. The term “genealogy” (γενεαλογία) comes from the Greek words γενεά (generation) and λόγος (word, learning, science). Genealogies can present information in narrative or graphic form, such as charts. Genealogy and the scope of its achievement as an aid to the study of the past constitutes an important methodological question in historical research. Central to genealogies is how reliable they are. There are various kinds of unreliability. Errors in dates, generations, male and female names, even in the sequence of generations, are the least of problems. A more serious problem is posed by unprovable genealogies listing the names of ancestors which cannot be verified in any way. There are what may be called mythic genealogies, where a string of names, unaccompanied by any further information, and a few generations are followed by well-known historical figures, medieval rulers, for example. A goal of the critical method in historical research is reliability and trustworthiness. For genealogy as a historical discipline to be useful in studying the past, it must be based on reliable historical sources. Those considered to be the most reliable are primary documentary sources, such as parish or civil records. But that does not mean that documentary sources can be taken for granted. As is well known, there have always been false or forged documents, some medieval charters, for example. It can happen, though rarely, that even parish or civil records contain inaccurate data. Researchers may well have all the necessary data from such records, know the language in which they were written, such as Latin or Church Slavonic, and the general historical background, but without a deeper knowledge of the milieu they are studying, they can easily make mistakes, which then lead to mistaken conclusions and, consequently, to a misrepresentation of the past. As with statistical data, one should be very careful with information such as people’s occupations because one and the same term can denote different things in different times. Also, if we take into account the existence of “family secrets”, which might not have been known even to all contemporary family members, it becomes clear how easily mistakes can be made if the sociocultural and political context is not known in sufficient detail. When studying the life of people in the past it is usually necessary to be familiar with concrete circumstances and take a problem-oriented approach. In Serbia, the best-known genealogies of ruling families are those of the medieval Nemanjić, Lazarević and Branković dynasties, and the modern houses of Karadjordjević, Obrenović and Petrović Njegoš. There are also other, lesser-known genealogies, as well as a large number of private genealogies. Scholarly genealogical research has, however, been rare. It has been shown that most private genealogies that lay claim to a distant past cannot be substantiated. If all circumstances, assumptions and the available sources are taken into account, they not only are impossible to substantiate but also are highly fanciful (e.g. some Irish genealogies). We have at our disposal many surviving medieval Serbian ecclesiastical documents and charters, but almost no aristocratic charters. Much of the western Balkans was the area of the shifting Ottoman-Habsburg borderland. The areas inhabited by Serbs were within the area of such military frontiers for the longest. Tracing their lineages back to a period before the Great Turkish War (1683–1699) is impossible today. In some cases, we have the names of particular people or the surnames preserved in family traditions that also occur, for example, in documents surviving in the coastal areas of the eastern Adriatic. Such sources are exceptionally valuable. But, a community that has lived in a geographical area for a few centuries, sometimes taking its name from that particular area, does not necessarily have blood ties to the community that lived there previously. Whoever embarks on the genealogical research of the Serbian people is necessarily faced with these issues. As already noted, reliable genealogies are few, which contradicts the proliferation of books on families and family names. Since this latter type of literature does not follow the standards of scholarly research, we shall not discuss it in any detail. It should be noted, however, that the books offering the history of a surname based on the assumption that all people that bear it descend from the same ancestor fail to take into account a number of glaringly obvious facts. Thus, the fact that a person’s surname is Nemanjić does not mean that he/she descends from Stefan Nemanja, the founder of the medieval dynasty, but simply from a Nemanja. Compiling a reliable genealogy requires that multiple sources be cross-checked: parish records (births, baptisms, marriages, deaths), adoption records, cemetery records, census data by household, occupational or career data (personal documentation, official calendars with lists of all institutions and officials, official gazettes, systematizations and the like), reports on the performance of civil servants (data on government members, personal dossiers, career trajectories), mark sheets, diplomas and degree certificates, business documentation (taxes, receipts, registrations, customs data etc.), lists of émigrés, court records, medical records, wills, diaries, letters, personal notes, newspaper articles, personal memories, oral traditions and communications, photo documentation, accounts of foreign travellers in Serbia. The genealogies presented in this book span a period of about three centuries and concern a distinctive social group. Most of the book covers the period of restoration and development of the Serbian state in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The reference to Belgrade in its title results from the fact that Belgrade has been Serbia’s capital since Karadjordje’s time (1804–1813). Some families, including the ruling ones, had special ties to other parts of the country, but Belgrade was the seat of government (apart from, for a while, Kragujevac). Both Karadjordje and his vojvodas had a home and lands in the place where they served as military or civil officials, but they also had a house in Belgrade. The Genealogies of Belgrade Families mostly deal with the families whose members were members of “the noble civil service” (blagorodnoe činovničestvo), relatives of ruling houses, descendants of oborknezes, vojvodas and members of the Governing Council. The term “old Belgrade families” is not clear or precise enough, but, in the absence of a better one, it describes the abovementioned group most closely. Some Belgrade families were tied to Šabac, some to Valjevo, some to Smederevo or Požarevac. The centralization process during the nineteenth century, however, increasingly tied them to Belgrade. On the other hand, their children were born in different places, because civil servants and military officers were moved around the country. The towns where they served gradually acquired buildings similar to those in Belgrade, becoming “little Belgrades”. One should be careful with concepts and terminology when describing social groups. This group may be described as the elite of the state and society in the Principality (1815–1882) and Kingdom of Serbia (1882–1918). Nowadays, however, the term “elite” often tends to evoke a negative connotation and so do some other terms (e.g. “nationalist” or “patriot”). The derived word “elitism” does not carry a positive meaning. The world discussed in this book constituted a coherent whole in the past, and now, looking back at it from a distance, we can define its place and role in the history of Serbia of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The names of their descendants are also given here so as to make it possible to follow later history as well (emigration, adaptation and non-adaption to changing circumstances, “internal emigration” etc.) and to point to the existence of private family archives (often substantial), highly important for the study of the history of Serbia and the Serbian people. Official calendars containing lists of office-holders, the official gazette of the armed forces, individual career dossiers, all of them make it possible to follow the career movement of civil servants and military officers of the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia. Lists of decorated persons provide information about national and foreign civil and military awards and decorations, and about privileges that they brought to the families of their recipients. Only few Serbian historians were good connoisseurs of these genealogies, which are not merely a local city-history, but rather they have a more general relevance, because those were persons and families of importance to the history of Serbia and the Serbian people. In fact, there were only two of them, Stojan Novaković and Slobodan Jovanović, who knew that world from the inside. Of course, archival records are the most important and most reliable source material. Data contained in older genealogies are often unverifiable due to the destruction of archival material or to population displacements caused by war. Whereas in some European countries, the continuity of a population in an area can be followed from the medieval period to the present, the same is impossible in the Serb-inhabited areas of the former military frontier(s). Sometimes a foreigner with a sense of social nuances, as Herbert Vivian was, was able to paint a more accurate picture of Serbia’s society in the past than local observers: “Belgrade society consists of little more than the Court circle, the Corps Diplomatique, the families of a few Ministers, officers, and retired diplomats … But means, education and leisure have called an upper class into existence. Their manners and habits are those of European society everywhere else, and they have no social dealings with the bourgeoisie or peasantry. The bourgeoisie is filled with American notions of equality … Within the bourgeoisie, official position first and then wealth are the criteria of respect. But the bourgeois looks down upon all peasants, even upon farmers, who are often much richer and better-mannered than himself … ‘He is only a peasant,’ is often said, half-contemptuously and half in admiration, of the Deputy [MP] who owns 2,000 acres and is a power in his province, if not in the State.” Since we have not been able to compile the genealogies of all old Belgrade families and because of some limitations of the genealogies themselves, we cannot say that all of Belgrade society is presented here. Nonetheless, most of the genealogies concern the social group described in the excerpt quoted above. Among the figures occurring in the genealogies are descendants of the vojvodas of Karadjordje’s Serbia, almost all princely and royal regents and prime ministers, presidents and members of the Governing Council, princely representatives, presidents and members of the Council of Ministers, leading statesmen and generals, closest relatives of the princes and kings of nineteenth-century Serbia. Persons from that world are well known, because they are historical figures, but once they left the historical stage, their community or social group sank into oblivion. To the Serbian post-war social sciences and humanities, they became a well-hidden minority. Genealogies of Belgrade families provide a picture of that forgotten world, including an entire network of relationships which were very important at the time. The practices, values and rules they held to constitute a separate topic. When the dynastic genealogies are taken into account, a clearer framework for the genealogies presented here can be established. Given the subject of our research, first presented are the basic dynastic genealogies. Particular attention is paid to kinship relations between the Serbian dynasties and their kinship relations to other families. It should be borne in mind that in the nineteenth-century Principality and Kingdom of Serbia the ruler was the locus of power. We have arranged the genealogies according to what essentially are natural groups, which has not been as simple as it may appear. For the sake of easier navigation, we have sought to present more closely related genealogies next to one another. As a result of the complexity and interwoven nature of the kinship networks, members or branches of some families occur in several places in the book, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. Some genealogical headings cover a large number of families and pages of the book, whereas others cover only one family (in a narrower sense) and a single page. The concept of family in old Belgrade encompassed a much wider circle of people than it does today. A family was not an exclusively patrilineal group, but it also included characteristic horizontal and vertical kinship structures, and in-law kinship relations were also highly respected. Degrees of kinship had been set out with precision as early as the middle ages, in Serbian legal texts translated from Greek. In compiling the genealogies, we have also sought to present relevant kinship relatedness to Serb families from, for example, Montenegro, the Military Frontier, Novi Sad, Trieste or Vienna. The book contains the genealogies of the Karadjordjević (dynasty and female-line descendants), the Obrenović (the ruling house and descendants through daughters), and the Petrović-Njegoš (kinship between the ruling houses and their relatives). There follow the genealogies of the Pljakić (descendants of Karadjordje’s daughter Sava, married to vojvoda Antonije Ristić nicknamed Pljaka), the Radojlović (descendants of the adopted children of Karadjordje’s daughter Stamenka), the Nenadović (family of Princess Persida Karadjordjević), the Stanojević and their relatives, the Lazarević, the Bogićević (family of King Milan’s grandmother), the Ilić and the Grujić (descendants of vojvoda Vule Ilić Kolarac), the Cincar-Janković and the Cincar-Marković (descendants of vojvoda Cincar Janko and vojvoda Cincar Marko respectively), the Čolak-Antić (descendants of vojvoda Čolak Ante), the Petrović (descendants of vojvoda Hajduk Veljko Petrović and his younger brother, vojvoda Milutin Petrović), the Cukić (descendants of vojvoda Pavle Cukić and vojvoda Petar Nikolajević Moler), the Veljković (descendants of knez Veljko Miljković, Petronijević, Nikolajević and Cukić), the Garašanin (families of Ilija and Milutin Garašanin), the Stojićević (descendants of vojvoda Miloš Pocerac), the Arsenijević (descendants of Lazar Arsenijević Batalaka), the Lešjanin, the Žujović, the Djurić, the Grujić, the Vučić-Perišić, the Hristić descending from Nikola Hristić (statesman) and the Hristić descending from Filip Hristić, the Baba-Dudić, the Hadži-Toma (Jovan Ristić, Radivoje Milojković, Filip Hristić, General Antonije Bogićević), the Baba-Stakić, the Spužić (the Pavlović, Radovanović, Topuzović and Jovanović families), the Matić, the Protić, the Rakić, the Mićić and other families. We have strove to provide as reliable data as possible, but future research may, of course, lead to minor rectifications. What should be borne in mind when analyzing the development of institutions, the structure of social life and social relations in nineteenth-century Serbia is the organization of the Ottoman Empire, the influence of the neighbouring Military Frontier, i.e. the Habsburg Monarchy, and of the Russian Empire. It should be noted that members of prominent families increasingly moved to Belgrade, becoming an integral part of Belgrade society in the interwar period or, in some cases, much earlier. In the post-war period, after the revolutionary takeover, these families increasingly distanced themselves from the political mainstream. Most of the families tied to other cities or centres moved to Belgrade, and rural population moved to provincial urban centres. This was a new phase of centralization, which, of course, constitutes a separate topic. By carefully reading the genealogies and establishing links between figures from different genealogies one can get a new insight which then leads to an easier and more reliable interpretation of the past of the Principality and Kingdom of Serbia and of the period that followed. It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that these genealogies are, to use a metaphor, an algorithm for understanding the society and politics of their time. At any rate, what seems to be self-evident is that, notwithstanding all distinctive features of individual regions and states, the world presented in the genealogies was in many ways similar to the world that could be found in other contemporary European countries (from Britain to Russia).