The Boundary Between the Domains of the Kosača and the Branković South of the Tara River

Abstract

With the partitioning in 1373 of the domain of Nikola Altomanović, a Serbian feudal lord, the old political core of the Serbian heartland was shattered and the feudal Bosnian state considerably extended to the east. The region was crossed by the Tara river, mostly along the southeast–northwest “Dinaric course”. Although the line along which Altomanović’s domain was partitioned has been discussed on several occasions and over a comparatively long period, analyses show that the identification of its section south of the Tara is still burdened by a number of unanswered questions, which are the topic of this paper. An accurate identification of this historical boundary is of interest not only to historiography, but also to archaeology, ethnology, philology (the history of language and dialectology in particular) and other related disciplines.