Iz bălgarskata srednovekovna voenna leksika (Săslovnijat blagorodničeski termin GARDINAR', GARDIAR')

On the interpretation of two terms in a medieval Bulgarian chronicle – the noble title gardinar’/gardiar’ and the weapon trǫbačij The two terms examined in this study occur in the "Bulgarian Anonymous Chronicle" from the 15th century which describes the Turkish conquest of the Balkans, and in particular that of Bulgaria in the period 1296-1413. Formally, the chronicle is similar to the short Byzantine chronicles; it exists in a single manuscript which is included in the final part of the so-called Kiev miscellany, a group of diverse historical texts. In the absence of a thorough investigation of the chronicle, our lexical analysis is aimed at clarifying the sources, and ultimately establishing the authorship of the historical compilation. The two terms analyzed are both adaptations of lexemes of foreign origin. The first one, gardinar’, gardiar’ is used in the story of the crusade of 1396 which was organized by the Papacy and led by the Hungarian King Sigismund (1387-1437) and was the first attempt of a united Europe to defeat the Ottoman invaders coming from Asia Minor. The decisive battle took place at Nikopolis on 25 September 1396 in which the Ottoman army of Sultan Bayezid totally defeated the Christian Coalition. In the Latin translation of the chronicle both V. Jagic and I. Duychev render the term gardiari as Cardinales, considering it most probably an error of the scribe. However, the appellative occurs two more times in the same manuscript in a polemical anti-Latin treatise. What we suggest instead is that it is possible to establish a relationship between the term gardinar’ and the estate medieval Latin name gardingus, also known from the legal acts of the Visigoths in Spain in the 7th c., as well as from the acts of the Church Council of Toledo (683), described by Du Cange as 'office of a senior nobleman serving as courtier of King'. The Visigoth word gardingus may be traced back to the Old German borrowing *garding-, consisting of theme *gard- and the appellative suffix -ing, several such borrowings being also attested in Old Slavonic, that could be connected to Goth. gards ‘oikos”, oikia”, aulé, proaulion’, OScand. garđr ‘yard, enclosure’, OSax. gard 'field, land', OHG. gart 'fenced area, circle', Fris. garda 'yard', OHG. garto 'enclosed piece of land', and others. In other words, gardingus has the meaning of 'one that belongs to the house or the court of the sovereign', and in this case the Russian form dvorjanin ‘nobleman’ can be seen as a calque of Old Slavonic dvor’’ ‘yard, court’. New light has also been thrown on evidence suggesting that the title may be part of a rather damaged epitaph on the tombstone of prince Ioan Asen V (?-1388) in The Holy Forty Martyrs’ Church of Tarnovo. The second example of a Church Slavonic adaptation of a foreign military term is the word trǫbačij, used in the story of the 8 year-long siege of Constantinople by the army of Sultan Bayezid (1394-1402). What trǫbačij refers to is a particular weapon used by the Ottoman Turks during the first siege of the Byzantine capital. In various translations of the chronicle this term has wrongly been rendered with cannon, while the weapon concerned, trebuchet, actually means ‘a catapult facility of wood fastened to the ground, something like a big slingshot that shoots stone shot puts for demolition of the fortress walls’. The fact is that, as reported by Ottoman historians, Bayezid ended the siege of Constantinople and headed quickly north to fight the crusaders of Sigismund, having previously burned down all of his siege machines. It is quite obvious that the term trǫbačij is a nomen agentis with the Proto-Bulgarian suffix -čii and is the result of adaptation of the foreign word trebuchetum 'siege drilling facility', essentially nomen instrumenti, in view of the phonetic closeness between the two words. Artillery cannons appear only later, with reference to the siege of 1453. For centuries the Byzantine capital had withstood the sieges and attacks because of the strength of its walls. In 1453 a new weapon came to the battle scene – a cannon-bombard designed by the Hungarian engineer Urban which could destroy large sections of the ramparts, provided the parabola had been properly calculated . Artillery ensured the victory of the Turks in the decisive attack on Constantinople. The compiler of the Bulgarian Anonymous Chronicle, who lived and worked around the middle of the 15th century, when artillery cannons were already in place, obviously failed to realize that the old trebuchets mentioned in the literary sources he was drawing from were a different kind of weapon from the new cannons with their tubular barrels. In conclusion, the discussion in this paper not only helps to correct some misinterpretations of the two borrowings gardinar’/gardiar’ and trǫbačij in the Bulgarian Anonymous Chronicle, but even more importantly, throws additional light on the possible sources on which the manuscript is based. While formally the Chronicle may be similar to the short Byzantine chronicles, the information about the history of the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans must have come from elsewhere. When drafting his historical compilation, the Slavonic chronicler most probably drеw his information from Serbian, Wallachian or Moldavian historical works, and not from Greek sources, because the latter did not register Sigismund’s military campaign. According to our hypothesis, the author of the chronicle was probably some unknown monastery cleric who has been linked albeit indirectly to the circle of the royal court in Tarnovo; some additional evidence was gained from Bulgarian monks who had left the Mount Athos monasteries and emigrated to the Danubian Principalities.