Długosz, Jan (Johannes Longinus)

DŁUGOSZ, JAN (Johannes Longinus). - Historian, b. at Brzeźnica in 1415, d. at Kraków on 19 May 1480. Secretary to the bishop of Kraków Zbigniew Oleśnicki and ordained priest in 1440, he carried out diplomatic missions for his bishop and for King Casimir IV, by whom he was appointed archbishop of Lviv, but he died before taking canonical possession of it. D. is the most celebrated Polish historiographer of the Middle Ages.

In Italy he had dealings with the humanists and brought manuscripts of Latin classics to Poland. A diligent collector of sources, he is not always critical in using them, and his patriotism sometimes prevails at the expense of impartiality. Among D.'s works the principal ones are: Annales seu cronicae inclyti Regni Poloniae, libri XII, written in the years 1455-80 (Leipzig 1711-12); Liber beneficiorum dioecesis Cracoviensis (3 vols., written between 1470 and '80).

As a rule it is placed at the head of the inscription, at the top, as a title. It came into use already during the 1st century A.D., but it was truly frequent and, as it were, a matter of routine in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, naturally in pagan burials.

However, this formula also appears above a notable number of certainly Christian epitaphs (and on some Jewish ones), particularly in Rome, and in the rest of Italy at Chiusi, and in Africa under the fuller form D. M. S. Great efforts were made by scholars of the past to explain those abbreviations in a Christian sense (for example, D(eo) M(agno), d(igno et) m(erito), θ(εσί) κ(τιστῆ), but in vain. It must be said that such abbreviations had, through usage, become devoid of their specifically pagan meaning, serving by then only to indicate that it was a funerary inscription; for many their true reading must even have been unknown, for example for that African who translates it donis memoriae spiritantium (CIL, VIII, no. 20780).

On many tombstones, beside and in the midst of the D. M., specifically Christian signs or words were carved. It has been said that Christians, buying the tombstone already prepared with that titulature, wished in a certain way to cancel out with those additions the pagan sense of the D. M.

This cannot be true in general, because those tombstones are either the work of Christians or plainly show the same writing by the same hand.

One must therefore conclude that even in this case the juxtaposition of heterogeneous things shows that the true import of D. M. was no longer understood. The same is shown by certain strange forms such as D.I.B.M., D.O.M. and the placing alongside the monogram of Christ, all things that give rise to the suspicion that whoever wrote them read those abbreviations in a manner very different from the true one.

One may think that the similar titulatures of later Christian epitaphs B. M. (very common) and B. M. S. (in Calabria) proceed by certain filiations from the D. M.

Antonio Ferrua