Stefan Nemanja
Stefan Nemanja was the grand prince of Rascia who between 1166 and 1196 made the Serbian lands one state, took Zeta, Kosovo and the upper Morava from the Byzantines, was defeated by them and kept his throne by submitting to the emperor in person with a rope round his neck, founded the monasteries at Studenica and, with his son, at Hilandar on Mount Athos, abdicated to become a monk, and was made a saint; his son Stefan was the first crowned king of Serbia and his son Sava the first archbishop, and every Serbian ruler for two hundred years was a Nemanjic. He was born at Ribnica in Zeta, baptised as a Catholic there and again as Orthodox at Ras, and was the youngest of four brothers who held parts of Rascia as Byzantine dependants. Manuel Komnenos made him the favourite among them about 1163, and by 1166 he had deposed his eldest brother Tihomir and taken the whole; he beat the brothers and their Byzantine backing at Pantino in 1168. He took Zeta with the coast from Kotor to the Bojana in the 1180s, Nis and the Morava valley, and in 1189 received Frederick Barbarossa's crusade at Nis and offered him an alliance against Constantinople that the emperor declined. Isaac II beat him on the Morava in 1190, and the peace that followed recognised most of his conquests and married his son Stefan to a Byzantine princess with the rank of sebastokrator. He gave the state its church. He drove out the Bogomils, built Studenica in white marble in the 1180s as his own burial church, and the monasteries he and his family founded held the state together when the princes could not. At a council at Ras on 25 March 1196 he abdicated in favour of his second son Stefan, took the name Simeon and the habit at Studenica, and went in 1197 to join his youngest son Sava on Athos, where the two rebuilt the ruined Hilandar as the Serbian house on the Holy Mountain. He died there in February 1199. Sava wrote his life, brought his body home to Studenica, and the church made him Saint Simeon the Myrrh-streaming; his cult was the dynasty's claim to rule.
- Lived: 1113 CE – 1199 CE
- Nationality: Serbian
- Roles: grand prince, ruler, founder, saint
