History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic

was a strong reference point, as was Sante Graciotti, renowned Slavic scholar and Homo adriaticus. The Homo adriaticus is a forma mentis and a paradigm in the principle of cultural openness, and the Adriatic lends itself to precisely this approach. The Mediterranean is the sea of diversity. The Adriatic, despite its borders and conflicts, is the sea of convergences.

This book is the fruit of years of reading, archival research and comparison of a wide range of sources: archaeological sites, inscriptions on tombstones, mariegole volumes of confraternities, medieval chronicles, Venetian doges’ commissions, notary deeds from both coasts, ship logs, registers of births and deaths, reports by Venetian consuls and podestà, portolano port books, numerous nautical maps, land registers, specialist journals, municipal and provincial deeds, documents from Italian police registers, diplomatic summits and military commands. Besides these, my research involved history books from all the coastal countries, proceedings from international conferences on marine biology and the state of the sea, all kinds of tourist guides, historical and contemporary local newspapers. My great love for Roman archaeology also provided me with a certain familiarity with ancient landscapes.

      I have travelled the east and west coasts on public transport; I have sailed among the islands, crossed the sea at night and flown over the sea on clear days. A Yugoslavian military manual on techniques and strategies of disembarkation on the Adriatic coasts proved to be very useful, as was the journal Cimbas on Picene seafaring.¹ For an understanding of its history, the journals of Italian regional history deputations and associations on the west coast are indispensable, as are the journals of research institutions on the east coast.² It was necessary to walk through the main churches, basilicas and cathedrals around the sea in which the epochs of the Adriatic are revealed in a concentration of art that is perhaps unique in the Mediterranean. In addition, there are the languages and dialects of the Adriatic with which, perhaps with the exception of Albanian, I have been familiar for years. And then literary works, forgotten documentaries and television programmes, and rare radio broadcasts (especially those dedicated to folklore along the coasts). Not all these sources are essential to a historical study, but it is a question of capturing, while it is still possible, the rapidly disappearing evidence of an Adriatic that changed so quickly in the late twentieth century.

      The world of local perspectives is essential for understanding both the detail and the larger picture. The context of the coastal inhabitants remains, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean with the exception of the large ports, enclosed and self-referential but at the same time universal. Everyone has their own sliver of sea, their own Mediterranean, which is after all the essence of the Mediterranean. Studying the Adriatic has involved my returning to it. I owe much to my father, a true Homo adriaticus, who grew up amongst Chioggian, Dalmatian and Istrian fishermen, familiar with their languages. He taught me about the ancient practices of the sea and to love the Adriatic, which he looked out over every day and considered his home, his fatherland. The sea of my father.

This work turned out to be a more difficult and time-consuming task than expected. I am grateful to Ugo Berti for his helpfulness, his belief in the project and his patience with respect to my postponing the conclusion. And I owe a lot to my family, who have endured my absence for a long time. I am also grateful to Franco Luxardo and to Società Dalmata di Storia Patria, Venice, for supporting the English translation. The book is dedicated to the memory of my father.

Notes

      1  1 Zapadna obala Jadrana i Tarantski zaliv (vojnogeografski priručnik) (Split: II Odeljenje komande IV armijske oblasti, Poverljivo, 1968). Cimbas. Rivista dell’Istituto di ricerca delle fonti per la storia della civiltà marinara Picena (1995–2013). I am grateful to Gabriele Cavezzi for the pdf version of the review.

      2  2 Historical reviews dealing with the Adriatic area: Archivio storico pugliese, Bullettino Deputazione abruzzese di Storia patria, Atti e memorie Deputazione di Storia patria per le Marche, Proposte e ricerche, Atti e memorie Deputazione di Storia patria per le province di Romagna, Studi romagnoli, Atti e memorie Deputazione provinciale ferrarese di Storia patria, Archivio veneto, Studi veneziani, Memorie storiche forogiuliesi, Quaderni giuliani di storia, Atti e memorie Società istriana di archeologia e Storia patria, Acta Histriae, Histria, Atti Centro di ricerche storiche Rovigno, Annales Series historia et sociologia, Problemi sjevernog Jadrana, Jadranski zbornik, Historijski zbornik, Povijesni prilozi, Dubrovnik Annales, Radovi Zavoda za povijesne znanosti HAZU u Zadru, Radovi Zavoda za hrvatsku povijest Filozofskoga fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Atti e memorie Società dalmata di Storia patria, Istorijski zapisi, Balcanica, Studime historike.

Introduction: The Historical Sense of a Sea

      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