page_title: Serbia in the Middle Ages
section_title: Crime
hierarchical_section_title: Serbia in the Middle Ages / Society / Law / Crime
caption_attribution_description: English: A selection of medieval Serbian weapons in The National museum in Požarevac.
context_page_description: Serbia in the Middle Ages refers to the medieval period in the history of Serbia. The period begins in the 6th century with the Slavic migrations to Southeastern Europe, and lasts until the Ottoman conquest of Serbian lands in the second half of the 15th century. The period is also extended to 1537, when Pavle Bakić, the last titular Despot of Serbia in Hungarian exile, fell in the Battle of Gorjani.
context_section_description: The state, even at its heyday, lacked the proper police-like apparatus. That way, it had to delegate certain law-enforcing powers to the local regional and village chieftains, but only as long as it is in accordance with the code. Additionally, at the time the state was sparsely populated and vast parts of the country had no resident population, so the criminals had a large territory to hide. The locals were strongly discouraged from enforcing justice of their own, as taking legal matters in your own hands was also against the law. Though officially judged by the imperial magistrates, the village councils, which were to be elected to start and conduct the criminal proceedings, were the root of the inquisitor-type examinations in Serbia, which were cut with the fall of the state, and failed to develop into similar Western Europe counterpart. The proceedings were called "general investigation".
  Stealing was one of the major concern of the code. The council would first have to establish if the person is indeed guilty of stealing and then whether this person is a "well known thief", meaning that he has, in modern terms, "criminal history". If a village would harbor such a thief, the entire village would be resettled, and the villagers were obliged to pay the damage to the victim. The punishment for professional thieves was blinding. Thieves who were on the "lower level" were punished with some sort of body mutilation: cutting of the pieces of ears, or the entire noses and hands in some harsher or repeated crimes. Modern crime scholars consider this a rudimentary criminal records: by seeing what was cut on some criminal, you could see how far he progressed in his crimes.
  As mirrored by modern laws, the crime was divided into individual and organized one. Criminal of the first kind was called tat (thief; tatba, robbery), while the latter would be gusar (pirate, marauder). The gusars were considered a bandits, who also loot and plunder public goods, rather than just private ones, and their crime was called najezda or grabež (raid or plunder, respectively). The horses used in the raid (najezdni konji, raid horses) were taken from the gang and divided in two: half for the state (that is, emperor) and half for the victim of the crime. As horse was an expensive commodity in medieval Serbia, it was used as a currency for damage payments. The plunderers themselves were hanged upside down.
  The state considered organized crime much more threatening to the society. Not solely because of the concern for the population, but for the security of the ruler and the state itself. In this matters especially, the relatively weak internal security system of the state forced the government to cooperate with the local population. As the horses were expensive, regular thieves could rarely organize themselves to conduct horse raids, so the concern came from the acts of the noblemen, who had resources. They would often plunder the population and take lands that are not theirs and not given to them by the emperor. The ruler didn't want to allow them to control more assets than he gave them, or to let them form their own private armies. In accordance with this, the punishments for these crimes became harsher in time, including the death penalty as the later amendments to the code recognized the crime as being premeditated. The code was specifically forbidding the noblemen to plunder their own villagers, which was a common thing at one point.
  There was one legal institute which was left to the local lawmen to be conducted by their free will, the institute of conciliation. It involved an agreement on resolving the dispute between the plaintiff and the defendant. Though this institute exists today in numerous legal systems, legal historians consider it a forced result of the state's weakness, that is, of the internal affairs apparatus which wasn't able to conduct proper investigations and produce evidence.
  Especially harsh provision were for the crime of betrayal against the state, called nevera (unfaithfulness). The complete assets of the person sentenced
caption: Medieval Serbian weapons The National Museum in Požarevac
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