History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic

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