Ljubomir Maksimović

Ljubomir Maksimović was born in Skopje on 27 November 1938, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He studied history at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade and graduated in 1961.

He stayed at Belgrade for his postgraduate work under Georgije Ostrogorski, the most influential Byzantinist in Yugoslavia. In 1965 he defended a master's thesis on the political role of John Kantakouzenos after his abdication, covering the years 1354 to 1383, and in 1971 a doctoral dissertation on Byzantine provincial administration in the age of the Palaiologoi, also supervised by Ostrogorski.

Maksimović spent his whole teaching career at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. He was appointed an assistant in the chair of Byzantine studies in 1962, became an assistant professor in 1971, an associate professor in 1978 and a full professor in 1986. From 1994 he led the department and seminar of Byzantine studies. He was vice dean of the faculty from 1983 to 1985, head of the history department in 1988 and 1989, and dean from 1994 to 1996. He later became a professor emeritus.

He also worked abroad as a visiting professor and researcher, including at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, the University of Cologne and the University of Crete.

His research focused on relations between Serbia and Byzantium, the social and state structures of the Byzantine Empire, and the ideology of rulership and political theory of medieval Serbia. He was the author of more than 200 articles and studies published in Yugoslavia, Serbia, Greece, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia and the United Kingdom. His doctoral work was published in Belgrade in 1972 and in English by Hakkert in Amsterdam in 1988 as The Byzantine Provincial Administration under the Palaiologoi. He also contributed chapters to the ten volume History of the Serbian People and wrote a collection of essays on the city in late Byzantine society (2003).

Maksimović held many leadership roles in scholarship. He was president of the Serbian Association of Historians from 1978 to 1980, a vice president of the International Association of Byzantine Studies from 1996, and director of the Institute for Byzantine Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1998. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy in 2003 and a full member in 2009, served as its vice president for the social sciences and humanities from 2015, was re elected in 2019, and sat on its executive board until 2023. From 2016 he was also a member of the board of Matica srpska.

Maksimović lived and worked in Belgrade for most of his life. Published sources concentrate on his scholarly work, and little has been made public about his family or private life.

Ljubomir Maksimović died in Belgrade on Friday, 6 November 2026, in his 88th year, at the age of 87. His death was announced the following day by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which described him as one of Serbia's most important Byzantinists. The cause of death was not made public. Funeral arrangements had not been published at the time of writing.

Maksimović is regarded as one of the most prominent Serbian Byzantinists and a leading figure in the Belgrade school founded by Georgije Ostrogorski. His work on Byzantine provincial administration and on the relationship between Serbia and Byzantium remains a standard reference, and generations of historians trained in his department at Belgrade.

His honours included the October Award of the City of Belgrade (1973), the Scientific Order with Blue Ribbon of Sofia University (1989), an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens (1999), the Vladimir Ćorović prize for lifetime achievement (2011) and honorary membership of the Christian Archaeological Society in Athens (2021). He was a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens from 2001, a member of the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Paris from 2005 and of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg from 2015.