Законик Стефана Душана цара српског (друго Новаковићево издање)

Законик Стефана Душана
Законик Стефана Душана

The Code of Emperor Stefan Dušan of Serbia in 1349 and 1354 is the second edition of Dušan's Code prepared by Stojan Novaković. The book was published by the Endowment of Ilija M. Kolarac in Belgrade in 1898.

After the first edition, which he prepared in 1870 and in which he abandoned the original arrangement of the articles of Emperor Stefan Dušan’s Code, under the influence of criticism and his own historiographical work, Novaković came to the conclusion that a new edition should be prepared that would respect the original composition of the legal provisions. The preparation of the second edition was accompanied by a significant amount of Novaković’s work on the publication of other legal monuments of the Serbian medieval state, as well as his work on legal history, about which he published several papers. Between the first and second editions of Novaković’s work, two editions of Dušan’s Code by Russian researchers, Theodore Zigel and Timofey Florinsky, appeared. Along with Dušan’s Code, Zigel published the Law of Emperor Justinian and parts of the Synagmata of Matija Vlastar, while Florinsky published the Law of Emperor Justinian and the Abridged Synagmata of Matija Vlastar alongside Dušan’s Code. According to the assessment of Nikola Radojčić, these editions were ahead of the achievements of the then Serbian historiography and could serve as a reliable support for Novaković’s second edition.

The basis for Novaković’s second edition was, as for the first one, the Prizren manuscript. He took articles 187 and 188 from the Athonite manuscript, article 189 from the Bistrica manuscript (this article is found only in this manuscript), and the last twelve articles of the manuscript and the Speech of Emperor Dušan, along with the Code, were taken from the Rakovac manuscript. The extensive introductory study is mostly devoted to the manuscript tradition of Dušan’s Code, but Stojan Novaković also paid attention to the emergence of written laws among the Serbian people, the establishment of the assembly in medieval Serbia, and the composition of Dušan’s Code. After the introductory study, a critical edition of the text with variants from other manuscripts was published, followed by a free translation of the articles into modern Serbian. This edition served as a basis for numerous later editions, was used in scientific research, and the Novaković numbering of articles was adopted in literature.