Talk:Unnamed 7th-century Serbian ruler

Requested move 22 November 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Closing without prejudice. With this RM being open for over a month with several relistings, I’m not seeing a clear consensus on the new title for this page. I encourage editors to continue attempting to reach a consensus, and re-propose the page move at that time. (closed by non-admin page mover) Steven Crossin ^{Help resolve disputes!} 05:01, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

---

Unknown Archon → ? – This "Unknown Archon" sounds like this is a proper name, but it's apparently not, this is just uppercase added to a translation of one of the general descriptions used in historiography about this story.

The article is a bit of a mess - most of it is the lead section that doesn't actually summarize the body; half the body is a verbatim copy from a 20th-century translation of a 10th-century primary source, and then there's a few paragraphs which kind of say yeah none of this stuff in the lead is necessarily true true.

So I don't really know if there's a good name for this topic, or if this small amount of context has potential - should it just be merged into a more general article? Joy (talk) 07:54, 22 November 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Raladic (talk) 03:23, 1 December 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. Feeglgeef (talk) 02:58, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not completely sure what we should do here. @Sorabino: any thoughts? — Sadko (words are wind) 14:14, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

As a historical personality, and part of Serbian origo gentis, mentioned several times in the primary source, and discussed in secondary sources, deserves its own and Wikipedia needs such an article. I would move the title to "Unnamed Serbian Archon" (DAI literally mentions "archon" which can interpreted in various ways, while "prince" could be misunderstood) because it sounds more specific than "Unknown Archon", he isn't "unknown" per se only "unnamed" (while e.g. Porga of Croatia is named, but his father is "unnamed") and is known to be of the Serbs. Regarding the "unnamed" in favor than "unknown", e.g. Tibor Živković 2010 mentions "unnamed brothers", Danijel Džino 2023 also mentions "unnamed two sons ... unnamed brother who led the Serbs ... legendary unnamed Serb prince who led the Serb migration". As for the body of text in the article, the scope should be only about the archon and origo gentis, anything else is already cited and discussed in other articles (like Serbia in the Middle Ages#De Administrando Imperio on the Serbs). Authors like Florin Curta and D. Džino should be cited with caution because they have a specific viewpoint/opinion which is contrasting traditional scholarship viewpoint, but as they are often dealing with identity of the elite - and the archon in question is representing an elite - should be cited nonetheless with attribution.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 17:43, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

Again, why uppercase "archon" there, when the sources don't? --Joy (talk) 20:14, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

And likewise when these sources you mention use plural, using singular doesn't appear to make sense...? --Joy (talk) 20:16, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

It seems that the main characteristic of this unnamed historical person was him being the first Serbian ruler in regions that became Serbia after the 7th century migrations, and thus we should consider some new titles that would be more precise than the present one. New solutions, that would enable readers to recognize the subject of this article by the very title, could be formulated in a descriptive manner, for example: "First Serbian ruler (unnamed)" or "First ruler of Serbia (unnamed)". Terms ruler or monarch would be more recognizable then archon, with emphasis on this person being the first one. Sorabino (talk) 07:47, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, and in that case we might as well drop the parenthetical part because it doesn't disambiguate anything, and the lack of known names is explained by the lead section. --Joy (talk) 20:17, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

We should stick to the primary ("Serbian archon") and secondary sources adjective ("anonymous Serbian prince", "unnamed Serb prince", "unnamed Serbian archon"). We should not invent new titles, see also WP:COMMONNAME "generally prefers the name that is most commonly used (as determined by its prevalence in a significant majority of independent, reliable, English-language sources) as such names will usually best fit the five criteria listed above.[e] When there is no single, obvious name that is demonstrably the most frequently used for the topic by these sources, editors should reach a consensus as to which title is best by considering these criteria directly". The only solution is Unnamed Serbian archon, with the "archon" recognizably alluding to the only (Greek) historical source he is mentioned, Byzantine-Slavic historical context and specific time period as "prince/ruler" is too general and could be used for articles in later historical period (if needed). --Miki Filigranski (talk) 18:54, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Serbia, WikiProject Royalty and Nobility, and WikiProject Middle Ages have been notified of this discussion. Feeglgeef (talk) 02:59, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

As the discussion seems to have died down, let's recap the best proposals - First Serbian ruler or First Serbian archon? --Joy (talk) 22:06, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

It's not good at all, the First Serbian ruler/archon/prince would be and/or primarily reminds of Dervan, not this person. Should be Unnamed Serbian archon.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 18:54, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Well, Dervan seems to be primarily described as Sorbian, so I'm not sure about that.

Likewise, I don't see why we would have to use the term archon when secondary sources don't have a consensus on this, and often use knez which is more commonly translated as duke, just like dux which applied to Dervan - flip-flopping between these translations will hardly help readers, and "ruler" is already a compromise, but at least an easily readable one.

How about just 7th-century Serbian ruler? --Joy (talk) 23:46, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Dervan isn't primarily described as Sorbian in the sense of being any different than being described as (White) Serbian, it's the same ethnonym for the same people/tribe from the same location with variation in writing the ethnonym depending on foreign sources (with other variations as Surbi, Sirbi...). Secondary sources are using both primary title (archon), and translations of the title itself depending on (modern) language in question, but often being anachronism (e.g. the title of knez is still scholarly debated as being incorrect translation of Latin/Greek titles). Having in the article title "archon" is far more recognizable than "ruler". We should stick to the primary and secondary sources as per WP:COMMONNAME, as an intermediate solution, maybe Unnamed Serbian ruler could be fine as well.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 13:15, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

Proposal no. 3 - Fist ruler of Serbia (unnamed). — Sadko (words are wind) 23:06, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

• Move to 7th-century Serbian ruler. I think Joy's most recent proposal is the best one. Given we don't have agreement from scholars on what his (or her?) title was, and no name either, there isn't that much to go on. But I think simply indicating when he lived is preferable to bigging up the "unnamed" aspect in the title.  — Amakuru (talk) 22:09, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Please explain how the cited contextualization per WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV of a subject as part of Serbian nationalist historiography is a violation of NPOV

@Theonewithreason Please explain how the cited contextualization of a subject as part of Serbian nationalist historiography is a violation of NPOV in your eyes. As it stands, you allege violations of NPOV and claim that my edits aren't an improvement but revert to version of these articles with worse citations, illustrations with broken English and versions of these articles wikivoicing historiographic perspectives specific to certain schools of thought and don't provide any productive criticism regarding what actually bothers you about contextualizing historiographies per WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV. If a POV happens to be particular to a historical school of thought it's going to be difficult to describe the view neutrally without naming that school of thought in my book. These 19th-century romantic-nationalist historiographies are of such great importance to these subjects if not merely for their political consequences, that they should be represented in the lead, but they remain disputed enough to require clear attribution to certain scholars and movements on wikipedia. Bari' bin Farangi (talk) 01:33, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

To cite the relevant section from Džino 2014 directly here

"They also have a special importance: these chapters in modern Croatian and Serbian historiographies act as the foundation-stone of national historical narratives, historical ‘biographies’ of these nations. Therefore, it is not surprising that these historiographies focus on the attempts to classify information from DAI as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, maintaining the idea that the stories had certain elements of historical value. Both historiographies generally accept the idea that some parts of these stories from DAI after all have some degree of historical validity, providing decisive evidence for either the migration of both groups in the seventh, or the later Croatian migration in the late eighth/early ninth century. This widely held perception has further implications: it is, for example, visible in Croatian archaeology, which dates the finds from post-Roman Dalmatia to the seventh, or less frequently the early ninth century, according to these stories from DAI. The most recent works on these stories from DAI in a local context thus remains divided between a more or less positivist reading of this source, and dissenting attempts to read the text ‘between the lines’, analyzing tenth-century contexts and ideological discourses affecting earlier interpretations."

Because these narratives from the DAI serve as the "foundation-stone of national historical narratives" but because they also remain assailed by a large volume of dissenting voices in scholarship, they can't be wikivoiced (as they are now), but they also can't be left out of the lead de facto robbing these articles of the "why?" these ideas from a 10th-century chronicle would be of so much interest today. Bari' bin Farangi (talk) 01:52, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

I suspect you were tripped up by the use of nationalist and myth in these edits (as you accuse me of pushing a POV here even though I don't actually hold a particular POV on this issue at all) as their use in historiography and outside of it differs quite radically; thus, I hope my attempts at rephrasing these edits alleviates your worries here. My goal in describing something as an origin myth of 19th-century romantic-nationalist historiography wasn't to make an implicit truth claim regarding the narrative—rather it was meant to provide context via the academic meaning of these terms as "fundamental stories about the origins of the Serbian nation" (origin myth) from the perspective of romantic (source analysis with a focus on crafting an emotionally resonant narrative) and 19th-century nationalist historiography (the belief that history is the story of nations and that modern people groups are direct representatives of ancient people groups like the Gauls for France, German tribesmen for Germany etc and that the historians goal should be to aid the liberation of these nations by crafting narratives which allow for them to develop into their own nation-states). In fact, nationalist historiography cannot really be wrong after it has successfully established the concept of a coherent national people group tied together by a shared past, something which has occurred in the case of Serbia (like it did in France, Germany, Italy etc) and which is why I would mainly leave the dissenting views in the body of the article and only present the quasi-orthodox perspective in the lead.

The only thing I really want to see in these articles, besides more (and particularly more recent) academic citations and the digitized manuscript image etc. is a clear differentiation between what primary sources clearly state (ie the Frankish and Byzantine chronicles) and how secondary sources interpret that, as I think it is helpful for NPOV to not wikivoice contested historical interpretation. Bari' bin Farangi (talk) 03:42, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes your last edits in my opinion were better rephrased, so I thank you for that. Theonewithreason (talk) 09:38, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

"If a POV happens to be particular to a historical school of thought..." - that's the issue, you're basing the NPOV and specific paragraphs on Danijel Džino, without knowing that Džino belongs to a biased postmodern school of thought of the Vienna School of History (incl. Walter Pohl), also that is influenced and supportive of Florin Curta's writing about the Slavs, all of them obsessed with revisionist interpretation of historical sources, evidence and criticism of traditional historiography which they so easily label as nationalist, and there's almost no difference what's generally claimed in the South Slavic "nationalist" traditional historiographies and international traditional historiographies about this topic. Many claims of these three historians are often non-mainstream, and recent archeogenetics is rejecting almost everything from that historical school of thought.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 14:27, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

The "biased postmodern school of thought of the Vienna School of History" is one of the dominant paradigms in current historiographical scholarship so it can't and shouldn't be ignored when writing about subjects related to the concept of ethnogenesis. Of course, approaches of this nature assailing dominant narratives in their fields shouldn't be wikivoiced by themselves, but I didn't do that—I mainly built on Džino's work to describe developments in the scholarship itself without adopting his conclusions. "Nationalism" in the context of historiography truly isn't a pejorative, as the emergence of the modern science of history (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Geschichtswissenschaft) is quite uniquely intertwined with nationalism, thus an "international traditional historiography" is still going to be nationalist in the historiographic sense if it speaks of the history of singular people-groups across time and space in grand meta-narratives. There also isn't anything archaeogenetics can prove or disprove in that regard, as language, culture, and ideas simply aren't genetic. The concept of ethnogenesis is so central to the this area of history, which we are discussing and yet its not a concept that can proved or disproved by establishing a hereditary relationship between the inhabitants of some ancient grave site and some modern village—as history is the study of narratives and ideas, not of bloodlines. No genetic test is going to be able to establish if someone thinks of themselves as belonging to this or that higher-oder people-group, how they construct their own identity, or what meta-narratives meaningfully convey their experience.

Think of black Americans for example, if you go in simply analyzing DNA strands in that population you will find some communities which are mostly of Western-European ancestry (with lots of similarities to that of inhabitants of the Jastorf culture)—now it would be utterly unhelpful to go from that observation to crafting a meta-narrative of how you get from these ancient Germanic tribesmen to this modern group of black Americans in the linear evolution of a single people-group. That is because though they may be related to this population their experience in the world in no way maps onto being understood as European.

To maintain NPOV it's therefore paramount to differentiate two things: what primary sources, like medieval chronicles say and how modern historians take these data points to craft coherent narratives. The former isn't really up for dispute, the latter very much is—like Džino states no one is taking DAI as true in its entirety, even the most traditional romantic-nationalist historian is going to consider its etymology of "Serb" incorrect etc. so the question is which parts of the narrative are to be seen as more reliable and which parts as less reliable. Because of the difference in epistemological quality between these two I sought out to clearly differentiate what derives directly from primary sources from the latter (in line with WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV) as these acts of interpretation clearly are controversial given they can illicit inflamed evaluations like "the biased postmodern school of thought of the Vienna School of History". Bari' bin Farangi (talk) 18:06, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Nobody ignores WP:NPOV and WP:WEIGHT, but be aware of WP:BIAS when citing authors of reliable sources. The secondary or tertiary source for some claim can be reliable, but it does not mean it is without bias and mainstream. These historians are also "romantic", not in a nationalist sense, but ideological, making up a whole new revisionistic narrative about the barbarian world and migrations. Both the 20th and 21st century historiography dealt with ethnogenesis more or less seriously, but these historians go beyond denying historicity and making up whole new historical narratives. Their common baseline of thought is that there was no mass migration of the Slavs and population replacement, advancing a cultural, not migrational model of the spread of Slavic identity/ies, language, and culture. No, archaeogenetics and population genetics are easily proving common origin, migration, homeland, spread of language, and culture of specific groups of people. The conclusions based on evidence and facts that are coming out of such studies on early Slavs (and many other historical ethnic groups of people) are almost completely in line with traditional modern historiography and archaeology, and debunk such radical interpretations of tribal/national ethnogenesis. The "Vienna School of History" is becoming history as we speak, and in the near future, historians will critically analyze it as a historiographical methodological failure.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 19:25, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

I'd argue that genetics can never prove what language someone speaks or which culture they belong to, but that is besides the point we seem to agree on the general interpretation of NPOV and that's what it comes down to. I wouldn't cite Džino for his wider (and wilder) conclusions, just for his decent history of historiography so to speak. Bari' bin Farangi (talk) 19:42, 7 February 2026 (UTC)

Anyway, thank you for editing these few related articles, it was constructive.--Miki Filigranski (talk) 19:37, 7 February 2026 (UTC)