International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Dušan Popović
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia;
[e-mail]
Some Observations on Vigenère’s Translation of Chalcocondyles, or: 
How the Bulgarians Became the Most Ancient of All Peoples?
Translational and scholarly activity of the French Renaissance polyhistor Blaise de Vigenère 
(1523-1596) has been arousing considerable controversy quite some time. In this communication we 
will take into consideration that part of it which pertains to the late Byzantine historiography or, to be 
more exact, to his translation, done in the second half of the 16
th
c., of the book Ἀπόδειξις
 
ἱστοριῶν by 
Laonicus Chalcocondyles, specifically in the segment dedicated to the origin of the Serbs and dealing 
with their lands. Inasmuch as the Chalcocondyles’s approach to the subject of ethnogenesis served also 
as a purpose for abuses by particular pseudo-scientists even most recently, it would be interesting to 
examine in more detail its elaboration by such an early Modern humanist as Vigenère.
Specifically, in cases where Chalcocondyles writes about the Serbs as one of the most ancient 
peoples of the then known world (for all that, using anachronisms as „Triballians“ and the similar 
like, to be sure), Vigenère in his translation, for seemingly inexplicable reasons, transfers the same 
qualification to the Bulgarians and, in addition, he also attributes to this people certain territories 
which Chalcocondyles describes as Serbian. Moreover, this not so insignificant a detail will serve us 

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as starting point for some wider considerations, of certain more important issues, which are posing 
themselves on the occasion of interpreting the historical sources dating from the end of the Middle 
Ages and the beginning of Modern age. We will approach this problem above all from the viewpoint 
of the so-called cultural translation in early Modern period and of its peculiar mechanisms, better 
to say subordination of the original text’s contents to the main goal, that is its adapting, in this