The Adriatic is ‘the small Mediterranean’ – a sea within a sea, part of the Mediterranean and at the same time detached from it, a largely enclosed sea with stunning coastlines and a long history of commercial, political and cultural exchange. Silent witness to the flow of civilizations, the Adriatic is the meeting point of East and West where many empires had their frontiers and some overlapped. With Italy on one side and the Balkans on the other, the Adriatic is the area where the Latin West became intertwined with the Greek and Ottoman East. This book tells the history of the Adriatic from the first cultures of the Neolithic Age through to the present day. All of the great civilizations and cultures that bordered and crossed the Adriatic are discussed: Ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire, Venice and the Ottomans, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and Islam. Byzantium was replaced by Venice, queen of the Adriatic, which reached its zenith at the beginning of the sixteenth century and maintained commercial and military hegemony in its Gulf, sharing the sea with the Turks, the Habsburgs, the Pope and the Spanish vice-kingdom of Naples. It was Napoleon who ended Venice’s reign in 1797. In the nineteenth century, the Austrian Empire prevailed, and Central Europe reached the Mediterranean through the Adriatic. United Italy placed its most symbolic frontier in the eastern Adriatic, clashing with Austria-Hungary in the First World War. The twentieth century was marked by the prolonged conflicts and eventually peace between Yugoslavia, Albania and Italy. Today the Adriatic is a region increasingly integrated into the European Union, experiencing a new era of cooperation following the dramatic collapse of Yugoslavia. Across centuries, this book illustrates the rich cultural and artistic heritage of diverse civilizations as they left their mark on the cities, shores and states of the Adriatic.
Оглавление
Egidio Ivetic. History of the Adriatic
Table of Contents
Guide
Pages
HISTORY OF THE ADRIATIC. A Sea and Its Civilization
Copyright Page
Preface
Notes
Introduction: The Historical Sense of a Sea
Notes
ONE A Minimal Mediterranean. The maritime territory
A system of regions
The Adriatic world
Notes
TWO The Upper Sea (1000 bc–500 ad) Origins
Adriatic peoples
Greeks and Romans
Mare Superum
Aquileia, Pula, Salona, Brindisi and Rimini
Notes
THREE The Third Antiquity (500–1000) Byzantium
West and East
The Slavs
Venetiae
The rebirth of a system
Ravenna and Zadar
Notes
FOUR The Carrier Sea (1000–1500) Towards the East
Communes
The Gulf of Venice
Potentates and signorie
The Kingdom of Naples
Ships, trades and connections
Venice and the Adriatic
Notes
FIVE The Antemural (1500–1797) The equilibrium of the limes
Venice as a civilization
The Ottoman Adriatic
The Habsburg Adriatic
Papal coasts
Neapolitan shores
The Adriatic ancien régime
Ragusa and Ancona
Notes
SIX Imperial Borders, National Frontiers (1797–1914) The new epoch
From the Restoration to 1848
Italy and Austria–Hungary
The lingering Orient
Maritime modernity
The national question
The Adriatic question
Trieste, Rijeka and Bari
Notes
SEVEN Contrasts and Integrations (1914–2018) The cautious war
A hard-fought peace
The difficult coast
From empire to revolution
A European border
The late twentieth century
The European Union
A common cultural space
Notes
Appendix: Place Names According to Language
Maps and place names
Index
Plates
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Egidio Ivetic
Translated by Geraldine Ludbrook
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Historic Dalmatia, once Roman then Byzantine and Venetian, extended from the islands of Cres (Cherso) and Lošinj (Lussino) to the Bay of Kotor. It is an archipelago of islands that are amongst the most spectacular in the Mediterranean, running along the coast which is itself shaped by the Velebit and Dinaric mountains. Today, Dalmatia lies entirely within Croatia, except for the Bay of Kotor, and is divided into several sub-regions. The Kvarner Gulf and the islands of Krk (Veglia), Cres, Lošinj and Rab (Arbe), as well as the towns of Senj (Segna) and Novi Vindolski on the coast, make up the so-called Kvarner area and gravitate towards Rijeka, once an emporium city for Hungary of which it was a corpus separatum, almost a suburb of Budapest, from 1867 to 1918. Rijeka (Fiume) was an independent state between 1919 and 1924; it was then incorporated into Italy and later into the independent state of Croatia in 1943–1945; it then finally became part of socialist Yugoslavia, of which it was the largest port. From 1953, a sub-region was assigned to Rijeka: the mountainous hinterland area of Gorski Kotar and the Kvarner area.
Recent Croatian geography includes northern Dalmatia with Zadar (Zara), the island of Pag (Pago) and the Zadar archipelago and hinterland; central Dalmatia with Šibenik (Sebenico) and its archipelago and hinterland, Split (Spalato) with the large islands of Brač (Brazza), Hvar (Lesina) and Vis (Lissa), the coastal towns of Omiš (Almissa) and Makarska (Macarsca); finally southern Dalmatia, with the island of Korčula (Curzola), Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and the territory that was once the Republic of Ragusa (Konavle, Astarea, Ston, the Pelješac peninsula and the island of Mljet). The Dalmatian islands spread out over 400 kilometres; they include the large islands of Kvarner and those of central and southern Dalmatia. In the middle lies a scattering of small and medium-sized islands and rocky islets. As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, over the last 50 years, this world has been undergoing depopulation, tourism overload and a total transformation of what life on these islands means. The Dalmatian archipelago is a network of archipelagos, with sailing routes marked by kanali, corridors between inland seas such as the Murter opposite Šibenik or the small Novigrad Sea (Novegradi) below the Velebit mountains. There are four rivers that run into the sea along this coast: the Zrmanja River, behind Zadar; the picturesque Krka River, which flows into the bay of Šibenik; the Cetina River, which cuts across mainland Dalmatia; and the Neretva River (Narenta), which flows from Herzegovina and is the river of Mostar. Dalmatia was always polycentric and at the same time self-sufficient, if only because it is geographically well defined by mountains and the sea. Zadar or Zara was long the landmark city, to which in the last two centuries was added Split, which is today the second largest city in Croatia. The archipelago of the Dalmatian islands, a true Adriatic archipelago, should be examined separately, as a specific Mediterranean world, as a geographical and historic and anthropologic subject, because in the Mediterranean it is second only to the larger and more jagged archipelago in the Aegean Sea.
