Serbian Chancellery in Dubrovnik
Historical Serbian diplomatic office in Dubrovnik

The Serbian Chancellery (Serbian: Српска канцеларија), sometimes known as the Slavic Chancellery (словенска канцеларија), was a diplomatic and economical office of several states of Serbia in the Middle Ages (such as Kingdom of Serbia, Kingdom of Bosnia, Serbian Empire and Serbian Despotate) in the Republic of Ragusa (now in Dubrovnik, Croatia). It was established in the early 13th century.
It served for Cyrillic transcription by Romanophones in the city in correspondence with Serbian lands in the interior; with the Serbian Orthodox and members of the Bosnian Church. The initial chancellors were Romans (Italics), or Slavophones, or Slavicized Romans who hailed from local patrician noble families. Only in the 14th century, there were scribes belonging to the lower classes, whose biographies are harder to determine.
The head scribe (канцелар) of the chancellery was titled dijak srpski ("Serb scribe"). Three early names of chancellery scribes are known from between 1278 and 1336: Ozren, Stojan Ceprić (1312–19, a nobleman), and Stefan Benčulić. During the rule of King and Emperor Stefan Dušan (r. 1331–55), Jaketa Krusić was a chancellery scribe (ca. 1340–47), followed by Dživo Parmesan (1348–63) and Niko Bijelić (1363–1367).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Serbian Chancellery in Dubrovnik” is historical Serbian diplomatic office in Dubrovnik. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Serbian, Chancellery and Dubrovnik, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q102347825. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1278, 1336, 1312 and 1331.
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This entry incorporates text from “Serbian Chancellery in Dubrovnik” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.