LITMIR.BIZ

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still the borderland between the Catholic and the Orthodox religions, and also between the two branches of the South-Slavonic people—the Croatians and the Serbs.

      The Dalmatian townships had many features in their development similar to those of the towns of Italy, especially of the maritime republics. But, unlike their Italian sisters, they were always on the threshold of barbarism, and this fact imparts to their history its peculiar character. They were essentially border fortresses, keeping watch and ward to save their civilisation from being swept into the sea by the advancing tide of Slave and Turk.

      Of all these towns, that in which this feature is most marked is Ragusa. Ragusa’s development shows in every way a stronger individuality than that of any other. For three characteristics above all is this city remarkable, characteristics which enabled it to attain and preserve such a peculiar position in the Adriatic. The first is its geographical situation. Ragusa was, as it were, the gate of the East, the meeting point of Latin and Slave, of the Eastern and Western Churches, of Christian and Muhamedan. One of the chief commercial highways from the coast to the interior had its terminus at Ragusa, while the sheltered position of its harbour, and of that of the neighbouring Gravosa, indicated it as meant by nature for a great commercial centre. Here the Slaves from the interior found their nearest market, and the nearest spot where civilisation and culture flourished. Ragusa was the means of spreading the beginnings of progress among the benighted Servian lands, for with the caravans of Western goods which made their way into the Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Servia, Western ideas penetrated as well, and to Ragusa came the sons of Slavonic princelings and nobles to be educated. Here there were schools where learned professors and famous men of letters from Italy taught. Italy came to impart Italian culture to the Ragusans and the Slaves.

      Even to-day, when trade follows other routes, and Ragusa, no longer a great commercial centre, is reduced to a humble position, it is still the meeting point of many races. Italians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Turks, and Greeks throng its streets and piazzas on market days, filling them with brilliant costumes. Now that the railway from Mostar and Sarajevo has reached Gravosa, there is reason to hope that the ancient city of St. Blaize may once more become a trading centre of some importance. The prosperity of the hinterland which Austria-Hungary has reclaimed to civilisation cannot fail to have a favourable effect on Ragusa. Had not the Turkish invasion swept over the Balkans in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, Ragusa’s position as a civilising influence would have been still more considerable. Later its rôle changed to that of intermediary between the Christian Powers and the Sultan, and in its history we see reflected on a small scale the vast struggle which convulsed Europe for four hundred years.

      The second characteristic of Ragusa is its natural position. It is one of nature’s fortresses, being surrounded by the sea on three sides, and the rocks on which it is built drop sheer down to the water’s edge. It seemed indeed a suitable spot on which to erect a city, in days when security was the first, almost the only, consideration. As we approach Ragusa from the south, it stands out a mass of rocks rising up from the sea, crowned with towers, bastions, and walls, which have defied ages of storm and stress, still imposing, still beautiful.

      A third feature intimately connected with the last is Ragusa’s character as a haven of refuge. While all around there was chaos and strife, at Ragusa there was peace. The original inhabitants had fled from the ruins of Epidaurum and Salona, and fortified themselves here; subsequently other refugees from all parts of the country helped to increase the population, for the hospitality of its walls was denied to none. The Ragusans were ever ready, as they proved many a time, to undergo any risk rather than give up those who had placed themselves under the protection of the rock-built city. Even in recent times Ragusa remained true to its past; when in 1876–77 there was revolution in the Herzegovina, and the savage Turkish soldiery were at their accustomed work of massacre and torture, the luckless Christian rayahs found shelter and protection at Ragusa, as their ancestors had done before them.

      Ragusa was a small city, and its history is all on a small scale. At best she can only be regarded as a second-class city of the first rank. In size, wealth, and intellectual and artistic development she was far inferior to the city republics of Italy; but her close proximity to a world of barbarism, and the vastly important events in which she played a part, however small, make it loom large. Moreover, while the other republics of Dalmatia, with the exception of the tiny Poljica, were all absorbed by Venice, while those of Italy were a constant prey to civil wars, and lost their freedom and even their independence after a few centuries of chequered existence, Ragusa, after two hundred and fifty years of Venetian tutelage with internal autonomy, remained free, now under the nominal protection of this Power, now of that, for 450 years, actually surviving her mighty rival of the Lagoons.

      

      The beginnings of Dalmatian history are purely legendary, and very little is known of the ethnographical character of its original inhabitants. Wanderers from pre-Homeric Greece are said to have settled along its shores, followed later by the Liburnii, who had been driven from Asia, whence part of the country was called Liburnia by the Romans. In the seventh century B.C. a Celtic invasion took place.2 In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. a number of Greek colonies were planted among the islands at Issa (Lissa), Pharos (Lesina), and Kerkyra Melaina (Curzola), and others along the coast at Epidamnos (Durazzo), Epidauron (Ragusavecchia), and Tragyrion (Traù). In the third century Illyria3 was welded by a native ruler into a powerful kingdom, which ere long came into contact with the Romans. The latter made several attempts to conquer the country, but met with a most stubborn resistance before they finally subdued it. In the year 180 B.C. the Dalmatians, a people inhabiting the middle part of modern Dalmatia,4 revolted from the Illyrian kingdom and became independent. Their territory was comprised between the rivers Naro (Narenta) and Titius (Kerka); beyond the latter Liburnia began. During the second and first centuries B.C. the Romans waged no less than ten wars in Illyria, which was not completely reduced until the year A.D. 9.

      In the meanwhile a number of Latin colonies had been settled along the coast, supplanting those of the Greeks. Their splendour and importance may be gauged from the magnificent Roman remains, especially those of the great palace built by Diocletian, himself an Illyrian, at Spalato, and of Salona,5 the ancient capital of the province.

      Roman Dalmatia included besides the modern region of that name the whole of Bosnia, the Herzegovina, Montenegro, and parts of Croatia and Albania. Diocletian divided it into two provinces, Dalmatia proper to the north, and Prævalis or Prævalitana to the south. At the time of the partition of the Roman Empire Dalmatia was apportioned to the Western division, the neighbouring provinces of Dardania, Mœsia Superior, and Prævalis to the Eastern. When the barbarian hordes began to pour down into Southern Europe the latter province remained under Roman rule until early in the sixth century, but Dalmatia was conquered in 481 by Odovakar, and added to the Gothic kingdom of Italy. Both these facts emphasise Dalmatia’s character as an outpost of the West in the Eastern world. But the Slaves, the last of the barbarians to march westwards and southwards, soon began to press ever more closely against the Roman settlements, and the colonists were driven from the interior to the coast towns. From the letters of Pope Gregory I. we see that at his time (590–603) Epidaurum, Salona, Doclea, and a few other Roman cities still survived. But in 600, in a letter to the Bishop of Salona, he expressed great sorrow that Dalmatia was hard pressed by the barbarians. “De Sclavorum gente, quae vobis imminet, affligor vehementer et conturbor.”6 The whole province was becoming desolate. In 535 the Byzantine Greeks reconquered it from the Goths together with Pannonia. In 539 it was overrun by Huns, Bulgarians, and Slaves, liberated by Narses in 552, and added to the Exarchate of Ravenna. Later it was made into a separate Exarchate; but after the death of the Emperor Maurice the Slaves became masters of the greater part of the country.

      When the Eastern Empire was divided into themes, the remaining fragments of the Roman colonies on the Illyrian shore were erected into the Themes of Dalmatia and Dyrrhachium. The former is described at length by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in his De Administrando Imperio,7 written in 949; it consisted of little more than a few cities and islands, all the rest of the land being peopled by barbarians.

      The capital of the Dalmatian theme was no longer Salona, which together with

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