The chronicle ends before 1200 and gives no event of that year. Its value for the Atlas is as the only narrative from Zeta (Dioclea) itself: the genealogy of the Dioclean kings, the lordships of Zeta, Travunia, Hum and Rascia and their boundaries, the standing of Bar, Kotor and Dubrovnik, and the memory of a Dioclean kingdom that Vukan, ruling Zeta in 1200 with a royal title and corresponding with Innocent III, was reviving. Most of its early matter is legend and its date is disputed, so use it for geography and local tradition, never for facts.
About this source
- Title
- Regnum Sclavorum (Ljetopis popa Dukljanina)
- Author
- Anonymous (the priest of Dioclea; Rudger, archbishop of Bar, by Zivkovic's attribution)
- Written
- disputed: the 12th century on the older view, about 1295 to 1301 on the current one
- Language
- Latin, with a Croatian redaction
- Covers
- legendary origins to about 1150
- Kind
- Chronicle
Sisic's 1928 edition, the one most cited, combined the manuscripts and is now regarded as unreliable; Mosin 1950 and Kuncer and Zivkovic 2009 are the texts to use, neither free. Paul Stephenson's online English translation could not be reached during this check. Authorship and date are disputed.
Where to read it
Editions
- I. Crncic (ed.), Popa Dukljanina Letopis po latinsku i toga nekoliko i jos nesto po hrvatsku (Kraljevica, 1874), Latin and Croatian texts
- F. Sisic (ed.), Letopis popa Dukljanina (Belgrade and Zagreb, 1928) (not freely online)
- V. Mosin (ed.), Ljetopis popa Dukljanina (Zagreb, 1950), Latin and Croatian texts with Serbo-Croatian translation (not freely online)
- D. Kuncer and T. Zivkovic (eds), Gesta regum Sclavorum, 2 vols (Belgrade, 2009) (not freely online)