Dagome iudex
A summary, in a Roman canon-law collection of the 1080s, of a document by which a ‘judge Dagome’, his wife Ote and their sons gave a city called Schinesghe and its territory to Saint Peter. It is read as a gift of Mieszko I of Poland.
The text is named after its opening words. It is not the document itself but a note made by Cardinal Deusdedit, who was collecting evidence of the property and rights of the Roman church. He found, he says, in a volume from the time of Pope John XV that Dagome the judge, Ote the senatrix and their sons Misica and Lambert had conferred on Saint Peter a whole city called Schinesghe with everything belonging to it, and he copies its boundaries: the sea, Prussia, Rus’, Kraków, the river Oder, the land of the Milzeni.
Deusdedit did not know who these people were; he guesses that they were Sardinians, because Sardinia was ruled by judges. One manuscript of his collection reads “Schinesne of the province of the Poles”. Thietmar of Merseburg says that the second wife of Mieszko I was called Oda, that she bore him a son Miseco, and that Mieszko died in 992 (Chronicle 4.57–58). On these grounds Dagome is taken to be Mieszko and Schinesghe to be Gniezno. The text does not explain the name Dagome, and the editor of the collection calls the document unclear in many respects.
Cited in
- AD 966, estimated date