Читать книгу History of the Adriatic - Egidio Ivetic - Страница 8

The Adriatic is another sea within the Mediterranean; it is the Mediterranean of the Mediterranean. In the past defined as a sinus, a bay or a gulf, the Adriatic is the maritime corridor that has united East and West for over a thousand years. Stretching out to the south-east, it delineates Italy and the Balkan peninsula. From here, it is possible to perceive the sky of the Levant, see the Alps and imagine central Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was still widely thought that the Near East began at the Balkan shores.¹ And the idea persists that, despite the integrations of recent years, the Adriatic is a frontier between Western and Eastern Europe; the memories of the Cold War and old antagonisms are still fresh.² Today, seven of the ten European Mediterranean states overlook the Adriatic: Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and Greece.

The Adriatic shares its central position in the Mediterranean with Italy and the destiny of the Eastern Mediterranean with the Balkans. It can therefore be considered to lie at the crossroads between three continents or, according to world history, the central point of a single African-European-Asian continent. The role of the Adriatic in world history narrative is as part of the Mediterranean crossroads; it is one of the characteristic aspects of Mediterranean Europe. It was the South for those who travelled from north of the Alps. It was Goethe’s first sea when he saw it from the top of St Mark’s bell tower in Venice. It was instead the Latin West for those who landed in Apulia first from the Byzantine, then from the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. In the Modern Age, it was considered one of the three branches of the Mediterranean, together with the Western (Ponent) and the Eastern Mediterranean (Levant). For Fernand Braudel, incomparable scholar of Mediterranean history, the Adriatic was ‘perhaps the most unified of all the regions of the Mediterranean Sea. On its own and by analogy, it poses all the problems implicit in the study of the whole Mediterranean’.³ In the view of Predrag Matvejević: ‘The Atlantic and the Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean is a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic is a sea of intimacy.’⁴ The Adriatic is, to all effects, the Mediterranean Sea on a smaller scale, a minor or minimal Mediterranean.

There are many meanings, indeed. Nevertheless, as for the Mediterranean, it is history which has shaped the Adriatic identity that everyone recognizes but few truly know. Although the geography of the Adriatic, its elongated narrow form and two generally linear coasts, suggests a certain simplicity, in fact the Adriatic has fractures that have divided worlds and layers of a complex past. It is the complexity of being at the crossroads for events with distant epicentres.⁵ On the world map, according to areas of partition between religions and confessions, it is evident that in the western Balkans, defined by the Adriatic, the eastern borders of Catholic Christianity intersect with the western borders of Orthodoxy and the northern borders of Islam. Nowhere else in the world is there such a node of coexistence. And the history of the eastern Adriatic reveals these superimpositions. Numerous empires had their most distant borders in the Adriatic: the Byzantine Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Empire, the Austrian Empire and so on. Like other closed frontier seas, such as the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Adriatic has been a zone of mediation between diversities.

A silent witness to the course of civilization, the Adriatic has been the background to extraordinary histories: the history of Venice, for example, the history of Italy, and that of the Balkans. In very few contexts, even on a world scale, have so many contrasting yet connotative aspects been brought together over time and space, with so many references to different civilizations and the presence of apparent opposites: Syracusan Greeks and Germanic emperors, Latins and Slavs, dervishes and Jesuits, papal coast and Turkish coast, tolerance and crusades, holy wars and communist revolutions, lingua francas and language frontiers, the Renaissance and pastoral civilizations, localisms, tribalisms, the eastern question and modernity. The time of the Adriatic tends to elude conventional chronologies. It is a striking collection of historical periods, if quantified and aligned: over a thousand years of Venetian history, first a duchy and commune, then a republic; over a thousand years of the Papal States, 850 years of the Holy Roman Empire, 816 years of the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, 730 years of the Kingdom of Naples, 670 years of Byzantium, 542 years of the Habsburg dynasty, 443 years of the Ottoman Empire, 400 years of the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 150 years of unified Italy, 135 years of Montenegro, over 100 years of Albania, 73 years of Yugoslavia, 30 years of Slovenia and Croatia. This does not take into consideration the economic cycles of the sea as a whole and of its coasts, the long periods of small-scale coastal navigation and transhumance and the many centuries of Adriatic trade fairs and religious pilgrimages. In short, there is more history than geography in the Adriatic.

How can such a history be interpreted? How can the historical sense of a sea be interpreted? Braudel’s lesson is well known: identify different intrinsic economic, social and political periods in the sea, considered as a territory and the subject of historical interpretation. From Braudel’s starting point, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have attempted to move forward, formulating the definition of the Mediterranean as The Corrupting Sea, insofar as it influences local contexts that it unites through countless synergies dictated by a generic sense of uncertainty and subsistence, a series of several minimal realities.⁶ The Mediterranean has therefore been a collection of microsystems with exceptions and specificities, yet all tending to engage with one another and develop networks of synergies from a smaller scale of proximity to a larger scale of transmaritime connections. Diversity in unity: the Mediterranean encompasses a multitude of contexts and at the same time represents a plurality of processes that connect and create through ‘Mediterraneanization’, a Mediterranean system from the individual places that form it.⁷ According to Horden and Purcell, the time has come for a shift in the approach to historical research. To date, it has mainly been a question of history in the Mediterranean, a history that has narrated what happened around the Mediterranean shores. Today, it is a question of doing historical research of the Mediterranean, conceived as a maritime unity with its own characteristics that are to be examined as they developed over time.

It is hard not to agree with this approach. The Adriatic has indeed a history as a sea that corrupts, constantly connecting its coasts and the people who live there. However, the sea is not merely an organism or a mechanism. It undoubtedly brings together goods and people but also ideas, languages and cultures. It unites, but it also divides: it is a symbolic space into which both local and national communities project themselves, and its coasts are subjected to systems of political sovereignty. The Adriatic is all this, the crossroads of different and often contrasting experiences of civilization. Therefore, it is acceptable to talk of the history of the Adriatic, the sea as an organism, but it cannot be separated from the history in the Adriatic, from the world that has experienced it.

Like all seas, the Adriatic is a liquid plain – to use Braudel’s term – in which the trade routes, the shipping flows, the relations between coasts, the traffic of goods, migrations, use of resources, fishing, political, strategic and military control, sovereignty and the struggle for hegemony can all be traced over time. It is the sea of seafaring people and those who ruled them: maritime and economic history and political history. The Adriatic is also and most importantly coastal lands, or rather a network of regional coastal systems, a kind of membrane that is the water front for those coming from the hinterland and the land front for those arriving from the sea. It is a habitat that is almost everywhere populated, even with small settlements, not necessarily looking only to the sea but also to the hinterland. The coast, therefore, always has a double connotation. The maritime association is the more elusive and requires a reversal of the usual perception of the Adriatic world: an island or liquid peninsula traversed by shipping routes, and the coast a facade facing the continent. It is therefore a liquid island with a series of shores that surround it. It is this narrow strip a dozen kilometres wide, made up of dunes, lagoons, river mouths, inlets and promontories, cliffs and island systems, which represents the human Adriatic, the territory, the landscape transformed by humans in which people have lived with the sea, and still do so, as is evident in Venice, Ancona, Trieste, Split (Spalato), Rijeka (Fiume), Bari, Durrës and in other ports and islands, and entire lagoon and coastal contexts. Although it is clear that living beside the sea does not mean necessarily being seafarers, it does epitomize a maritime civilization. There are some places that are more maritime than others: for instance, along the western Adriatic coasts, only some ports (Trani, Ancona, Chioggia, Venice); along the eastern coasts, entire regions (Istria, Dalmatia).

Finally, just as there is a great Mediterranean, there is also a great Adriatic, a kind of crown of hinterland regions with a more or less close connection with the sea. It is a wide area, the limits of which are not easy to define, as it might lie as far as 30 kilometres from the coast, a day’s walk, or it could also include apparently distant places, such as Macerata, Ferrara and Padua. Even more remote capitals of states lying on this sea, such as Rome, Naples, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade, were also, in some aspects, Adriatic cities.

In short, as always within and around a sea, there are three levels: the liquid element, the coast and the surrounding territories. The regional coastal systems, made up of shores, islands, populations, economies and cultures, are the fundamental fabric of a complex maritime region, places in which intrinsic unity with and diversity from a sea is measured. The coastal systems are regions in and of themselves; many are well known and identifiable, regardless of the Adriatic. Let’s start to list them: on the western Adriatic, the Salento region, the Tavoliere Plain and the Gargano area in present-day Apulia; the long Apennine coast between Termoli and Pesaro, i.e. ancient Picenum, present-day Molise, Abruzzo and Marche, which have similar landscapes but are historically divided between two Italies. Then there is the lower coast of Romagna, the Po Delta, the Venetian lagoon between the Po River and the mouth of the Isonzo River, a sea outlet for the Veneto and Friuli plains. On the eastern Adriatic lie the cliffs of the Karst region (Carso) with Trieste; the Istrian peninsula and region; Dalmatia, a historic region made up of a widespread archipelago of more than a thousand islands and skerries, and of a continental area, between the Zadar (Zara) Plain, Ragusa or Dubrovnik, and the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro). The Croatian Littoral, parallel to the archipelago, opens up between Rijeka (Fiume) and the Velebit Canal, known to the Venetians as the Morlach Canal, whereas inland from southern Dalmatia lies Herzegovina, a Balkan land untouched by the sea but Mediterranean in its landscape and therefore an Adriatic region, although the only non-maritime one. Beyond Dalmatia, further south, lies the Montenegrin coastline down to the Bojana River where the coastline dips and the Albanian riviera begins, with its sandy beaches and wetlands. The rocky Karaburun peninsula, the mouths of the Butrint River in Albania, and Corfu, the gateway to the Adriatic, complete the sea. In all, there are a dozen regional segments with specific historical characteristics; segments in which we measure civilizations and empires, states and nations. This was and remains the basis of the Adriatic. However, there is also another, more conceptual Adriatic.

Since 2006, there has been an Adriatic Euroregion, renamed since 2014 as the Adriatic–Ionian Euroregion, which brings together the regional and local authorities of the seven coastal countries. It is an association that includes higher education bodies, municipalities and chambers of commerce. The concept of a geographical network stems from the past even when reference was made to the Gulf of Venice. Undoubtedly, it is a cultural proceeding and model. The very monde méditerranéen, the Mediterranean region, was created first by geographers (Carl Ritter, Friedrich Ratzel, Alfred Philippson) and then by historians (Henri Pirenne, Fernand Braudel), later followed by the concept of a Mediterranean cultural region, a mixture of archaeology, imaginaries, mentalities, customs, lifestyles – a common place.⁸ For decades, cultural anthropologists have unsuccessfully attempted to decipher what characterized the people of these areas as being ‘Mediterranean’.⁹ Horden and Purcell’s enormous study attempts to provide an answer to the question ‘What is the Mediterranean?’ Hence, by implication, the question arises as to ‘What is the Adriatic?’. There certainly exists a widespread geographic awareness, even amongst the people who inhabit the coasts. Individual scholars and studies have attempted to open up a dialogue between the coasts, yet the concept of a common Adriatic history has never really emerged; there is the lack of a sense of a shared past. The valuable cultural histories of each segment of coast, on which are layered the national histories of the seven Adriatic states, are naturally not the history of the Adriatic. On the other hand, it is not easy to trace a historical vision of this sea. There has been a thematic fragmentation in terms of histories and historiographies right from medieval times, and this partition has continued up to contemporary times in an increasingly national perspective. For the history between the seventh and nineteenth centuries, there exist a dozen regional histories in which are interlaced at least seven national perceptions of the past. This is a long period of time during which the east coast gradually defined itself as an area of multiple political, religious and civilization frontiers, a bulwark of Christendom, an Antemurale Christianitatis, while the west coast lived the history of two or three Italies: communal and feudal Italy; or the Mezzogiorno (southern Italy), the Papal States and Venice. In contemporary historical studies, there has been a return to a unitary concept of the Adriatic as a fundamental geopolitical place for the national states that belong to it.¹⁰ However, these are a common set of problems in the history of the Mediterranean.

To move beyond the divergences and unambiguous perspectives, it is necessary to consider the Adriatic as a single cultural context, as a historical region, a Geschichtsregion, by extension a smaller geographical space than the continent but larger than a single state. A space with a series of connotations and social, economic, cultural and political structures, perhaps counterposed but nonetheless converging, connected; transnational structures such as, for example, the Balkans, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean itself. Within the Mediterranean, the Adriatic stands out for its own physiognomy and personality. The Mediterranean is undoubtably a historical region, and the Adriatic is a part of it. Yet it can be considered an independent historical region, midway between historical and geographical regions, between the Balkans, Italy and central Europe.

To understand the specific role that the Adriatic plays within the Mediterranean requires comparison with other seas. In the Western Mediterranean, for example, there is the Arco latino (Latin Arch) initiative, which aims to enhance the Romance linguistic and cultural dimension between Andalusia and Calabria. It is one of the most interesting organizations in the Western European Mediterranean whose uniformity lies in its being Latin and Catholic; it is one way of interpreting a part of the Mediterranean. In comparison, the Adriatic is not a space of uniformity but of the meeting of diversities. Like the Mediterranean, it is the place where differences converge. It is the place in which Italian (Italian dialects) meet the southern Slavic languages: Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian, as well as Albanian.

In the eastern Adriatic, the Slavic world (Slavia) – a wide linguistic and cultural context that was idealized in the nineteenth century – joins the Mediterranean. The Croat population is linguistically Slav but in part culturally Mediterranean. Along these coasts, Catholicism coexisted for centuries with the Orthodox confession practised by Serbs, Montenegrins, Albanians and Greeks. It is often forgotten that for more than six centuries, from 555 ad to 1204 ad, the Byzantine Empire formally ruled the eastern Adriatic coasts in Dalmatia, in Dioclea (Duklja) or Zeta (present-day Montenegro), and in Albania. Likewise, the Islamic presence in the same regions, which once were Ottoman, or the Islam today practised in Mostar or Durrës, are often overlooked, as is the fact that the Ottoman Empire was formally an Adriatic state from 1479 until December 1912. And it is often overlooked that the German world had its southernmost Mediterranean extremities in two outposts of the Holy Roman Empire, Istria and Trieste, ruled directly by the Habsburgs from 1376 to 1918 and from 1382 until October 1918, respectively. They were considered part of the Germany that was born at the Frankfurt National Assembly in 1848. However, the western Adriatic is equally complex when considering the numerous minority communities (Slav, Albanian, Greek, Orthodox, Jewish and Armenian) situated in the cities and along the coast. It is, in short, a miniature Mediterranean, and therefore a historical region that becomes per se a conceptual tool for a transnational approach to the study of this context. Historians, moreover, need to identify their research with a context that is not only temporal but also territorial, with its own geography.

When the sea becomes a concept rather than a physical place, this is the result of an old and inherited perception of the maritime dimension, as well as of geography and thus of scientific thought; it is the product of our need to identify a space. When attempting to narrate a sea, there is the advantage that it eludes ideological frameworks intrinsic to categories of a nation and of a state. Geography’s determinism, which attempts to contemplate the whole context of a place, stems from Braudel’s thought, a determinism that frees up historical narration, in this case of a sea, from the determinisms of political histories and their defined length, and national histories, which are in themselves historicist and ideological. The sea is therefore a historical object and an extraordinary text through which the past can be read.¹¹ The sea becomes a historical character, an alternative to canonized historical narrations. Its geography in historical time, as a place where events, dynamics and specific experiences took place, makes it an object formed by diversities and therefore by comparisons. Hence it is a physical place, a reality but also a historical entity, a vehicle of historical knowledge and experience.

The tendency for thalassography has been widely documented in recent years. Alongside the development of world history, historiography has seen the biggest and most important progress in studies relating to the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, in other words the histories of the oceans both as a grand narration, of synthesis, and as a privileged place for historical comparison. The Mediterranean is a fourth ocean in terms of the density of its history. It has been studied as a place of civilizations since the eighteenth century and the time of Edward Gibbon. If the Pacific embodies immensity and the Atlantic is an expression of modernity, then the Mediterranean recalls classicism and, in some way, eternity in the sense of human historical experience – a sea history to use Fernand Braudel’s term. And the Adriatic, as part of the Mediterranean, is a supporting actor: on the sidelines but integrated in the great historical processes, in the grand designs. All this has taken place since Braudel to the present day, when we have proposals for a history of the Mediterranean as a heuristic paradigm transverse to archaeology, history, cultural anthropology, art history, and literature. For example, A Companion to Mediterranean History deals with stimulating themes, and is surprisingly exclusive in not considering the national historiographies that converge on the Mediterranean, except for recent studies in English.¹² It proposes four approaches to the history of the Mediterranean: (1) the Mediterranean as a useful label under which various limited histories are grouped; (2) the Mediterranean as a background for general histories of the exchanges that took place in it, in other words for synthesis of a wider narrative (like David Abulafia’s recent synthesis); (3) the Mediterranean in which environmental history is connected to its geography and becomes a paradigm for studies such as those by Braudel or Horden and Purcell; (4) lastly, the Mediterranean as a fluid, hybrid, cultural area, transverse to the readings that decline history by civilizations, nations or religions; a postmodern region, or rather a postmodern subject of study.¹³

The Adriatic is clearly part of the Mediterranean narration, and all questions relating to the Mediterranean also relate to it. Studying the history of the Adriatic means studying Mediterranean history. Nevertheless, the Adriatic comes after the three oceans, after the Mediterranean itself (and other Mediterraneans that await their history), between seas such as the Baltic and the Black Sea which have been of recent historical interest, between the frontier seas, convergence seas and mediating seas – all seas of particular historical complexity. However, compared to the large elusive spaces that have only in the last two centuries really been connected, and compared to the Mediterranean, which is heterogeneous although ever recognizable, the Adriatic, contemplated on a global scale, is a perfect case of a sea region, a circumscribed yet contrasting place. As with oceanographic studies, also for the history of the sea, the Adriatic is a privileged point of research and reflection.

Unlike other more or less open seas, the Adriatic can be perceived as a cultural area (as in A Companion to Mediterranean History) if examined as a whole and if every single detail is connected: Venice, Ravenna, Split, Bari, Ragusa, cathedrals, places of worship, saints, artistic figures, literary figures, from Dante to Byron to Leopardi, to musical inspiration. There is a cultural history around which the Adriatic finds its unity. The sea thus becomes something more than a territorial medium, which has been noted by certain pioneering scholars. Exploring the globe and investigating encyclopaedia entries, there are few seas that manage to retrace the idea of themselves in terms of a culture, even a plural culture; these are not found at the edge of the Indian and Pacific oceans, nor is it the case of the Chinese seas (Eastern China and Southern China seas). On an Atlantic scale, it is not yet the case of the widespread fragmented Caribbean world. Naturally, there is the Mediterranean, which is inevitably constantly idealized given the importance of its history on a world scale. Then there is the Aegean Sea with its classical age and insular Greekness; the Baltic Sea involving the medieval Hanseatic League; the North Sea and its many individual seafaring populations, its coastal populations and languages. And the Adriatic which is, in this perspective, more than a sea; it could even be considered a memory.

The history of the Adriatic I am proposing here draws on all these underlying perspectives and expresses the conviction that the Adriatic is not only a sea but a sea region and a historical region of the Mediterranean and of Europe. Naturally, the Adriatic here is interpreted in its longue durée. It is a concept of history that lies in between, or as an alternative to, the canonized history of Italy and the history of south-eastern Europe. It is the second book to take on this task. There is only one earlier study, the formidable Histoire de l’Adriatique, edited by Pierre Cabanes, a very commendable work of which the importance amongst the historiographies that examine the Adriatic has not been fully understood.¹⁴ This second vision of the Adriatic past aims to be more compact in its narration, even though the time is actually ripe for a large history of the Adriatic in two or three volumes, edited by an international group of historians, as the recent AdriAtlas has suggested, for a wide post-Braudelian, truly comparative and comprehensive study of each Adriatic segment, perhaps examining a specific century.¹⁵ This volume is a pared-down synthesis, but has the purpose of providing readings of the historical and cultural layers that can be traced as much in the real Adriatic of today as in an Adriatic civilization that is perhaps not yet recognized but nonetheless exists. And, like any synthesis, this is also the proposal of a historical canon divided into periods, events and issues to consider and explore as a specific Mediterranean history.