Ragusa

“ The heroes of Ragusa are of the majestic Roman type, and her greatest is a second Regulus. Her peculiar genius reflects itself in her arts and sciences, which are severe and practical. Her Senate forbids the erection of a theatre. The fine arts here fall into the background, and mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy take the lead. Ragusan nobles are mathematicians, and her poets are also merchants; the masterpieces of her muse are stately epics. Her sympathies are with the dignified spirit of the East, and the noblest homage of her bards is rendered to a Turkish Grand Signior. ”

“ Then it was that the survivors of the Roman population fled to the rocky site on the other horn of the gulf on which Ragusa stands. Every morning the same migration from Old to New Ragusa takes place on a smaller scale. A bevy of bright Canalese market-women, in their clean white crenellated caps, and their more sombre husbands—who, with their black turbans, jackets, and trouser-leggings, look like Turks in mourning—embark before dawn in the broad trabaccolo, that they may sell their fruit and vegetables in the Ragusan market. ”

“ A conspicuous architectural feature of the city is its defences. The town walls form a most perfect circuit, of a beauty and completeness rarely surpassed, even in Italy. From whichever side we approach Ragusa, whether from the sea or by the land gates, we are confronted by an imposing mass of battlemented towers, solid bastions, thick walls and escarpments, which conceal the whole town save the steeples and one or two churches. ”

“ All this is as it was; modern military art has added to the defences of Ragusa, but it has not taken away her elder bulwarks. But her haven is now of the very smallest, and admits only vessels of the smallest size. The modern haven is at Gravosa, and the road which Sir Gardner Wilkinson describes as so well kept, but as useless because no carriages went upon it, is still as good and more useful. At this moment Ragusa bears the honourable character of a city of refuge for the unhappy ones who seek shelter under the government of a civilized state from the barbarian rule beyond the mountains. ”

“ As we pass by and look on the city—no city surely fronts the sea more proudly than Ragusa—as we turn round to the island of La Croma, lying off what was Ragusa's harbour, the island which suggests the names of Richard of Poitou and of Maximilian of Mexico—the scene is so peaceful and lovely, the warlike defences look such mere things of the past, that it is hard indeed to believe that, just beyond the mountain barrier, warfare is going on in its bitterest and yet its noblest form—the struggle of an oppressed people to cast off the yoke of ages. ”

“ I think one might search the world over in vain to find just such another fascinating street as that broad street of Ragusa, with its exquisitely proportioned buildings that gave one a sense of gladness, the extraordinary great fountain, the miniature palace of the Doges, the noble churches and the colourful shops brilliant with strange, embroidered costumes exposed for sale, Eastern jewelry, and quaint, ferocious-looking weapons. ”

“ We draw near to Ragusa; the eye is struck by no such prominent object; the memory seizes on no such prominent fact. But there is Ragusa; there is the one spot along that whole coast from the Croatian border to Cape Tainaros itself, which never came under the dominion either of the Venetian or of the Turk. Ragusa will be found at different times standing in something like a tributary or dependent relation to 221 both those powers, but it never was actually incorporated with the dominions of either. In this Ragusa stands alone among the cities of the whole coast, Dalmatian, Albanian, and Greek. ”

“ Venice was the nearest centre of civilisation to Ragusa, and the fountain-head of art. In spite of the jealousy and suspicion which the little Republic always felt towards its powerful neighbour, many Ragusan artists received their training in Venice, while many Venetians came to execute work on the public and private buildings of Ragusa. Venice was not, however, the only city which thus influenced Ragusa; other Italian towns, such as Ancona, Florence, Padua, and Naples, contributed towards her artistic development, in which even Hungary had some small share. ”

“ Ragusa is the natural port of the Illyrian interior—the born interpreter between the Italian and Sclave. Those only who have traversed the barbarous lands between the Adriatic and the Save can adequately realise how intimately the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina is bound up with the future of Ragusa. The plodding genius of the Serbs needs to be fanned into energy by these fresh sea-breezes—their imagination languishes for want of this southern sunshine! ”

“ The above-mentioned writer, Benedetto Ramberti, gives a curious description of Ragusa as it appeared to him in 1533. Being a Venetian his account is somewhat contemptuous and not altogether flattering. “It is well populated,” he writes, “and in a beautiful situation by the sea, on the Dalmatian mainland. It possesses a small harbour and a very small mole.... It is exposed to winds and earthquakes, and is exceedingly cold in winter. The women are not very handsome, and dress very badly, or rather they wear clothes which suit them ill. ”

“ The homeward voyage and captivity of Richard had some effect on 222 the general affairs of the world; his special visit to Ragusa affected only the local affairs of Ragusa. Ragusan history then may either be taken in at a glance, and a most striking glance it is; or else it may be studied with the minute zeal of a local antiquary. There is no intermediate point from which it can be looked at. ”

“ But certainly the ways of Ragusa swarm with religious. Nevertheless,—one thinks of Rome, with its crowds of priests and its crowds of free-thinkers,—the inhabitants of Ragusa seem to be very devout. In almost all of the many churches, at all times of the day, people may be found praying, meditating, telling their beads, worshiping at shrines of the saints. ”

“ It is the literature of Ragusa that lives still in the minds of men in days when her commerce has deserted her, and her own nobility has been extinguished with her liberty.
We have seen Ragusa by her very birth partly Roman and partly Sclave. Bit by bit the ‘city of the rock’ becomes fused with the forest-town outside. In her vast and varied intercourse with the Sclavonic interior Roman Ragusa becomes Serbian Dubrovnik. From the beginning of the fourteenth century the Serbian language, so vigorously proscribed by earlier laws, may be considered the mother-tongue of Ragusa. ”

“ In 1023 the Benedictine Order came to Ragusa from the Tremiti Islands under one Peter, and established itself on the island of Lacroma. Various Serb princes and Ragusan citizens made gifts of land to the monastery.
The Ragusans were essentially a commercial people, and trade, both inland and sea-borne, formed the chief source of their wealth. In the Byzantine period, however, we only find the germs of their future commercial development. We have already alluded to the part played by Ragusan shipping, first in the Greek expedition to Apulia in 848, and then at the battle of Durazzo. ”

“ Ragusa is situated on the coast of Southern Dalmatia, about forty kilometres to the north-west of the Bocche di Cattaro.19 It is built partly on a precipitous rocky ridge jutting out into the Adriatic, and partly on the mainland, ascending the steep slopes of the Monte Sergio. The original town was limited to the seaward ridge, which was formerly an island divided from the mainland by a marshy channel where the Stradone now runs. There was also a settlement of Bosnians or Vlachs on19 the Monte Sergio opposite. ”

“ It wants it all the more because it is so closely connected with early Venetian history, than which no history is more utterly untrustworthy. But we may safely gather that Ragusa had its origin in the destruction of the Greek city of Epidauros, now Ragusa Vecchia. The old Epidaurian colony fell, like Salona, before the barbarians. Its inhabitants had no ready-made city to flee to, but they founded a city on the rocks which became Raousion or Ragusa. Whether any part of the Ragusan peninsula had ever become a dwelling-place of men at any earlier time it is needless to inquire. ”

“ The model shows us the Ragusa of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, not very different from that of to-day, save for the Duomo and the church of San Biagio, which have been rebuilt, and the little church of the Three Martyrs of Cattaro in the Stradone, which has disappeared. Many of the houses in that street have gabled fronts and some have projecting pents to shelter the shops. The Orlando column supports a huge standard. ”

“ The most truly instructive work that Ragusa has to show in any of its ecclesiastical buildings does not show itself at first sight, and its full significance is not likely to be understood till the civic and domestic buildings of the city and its suburbs have been well studied. When this has been done, it will be easily seen that certain arches and capitals in the subordinate buildings of the Dominican church have their part in the history of Ragusan art; but the great civic buildings must be seen and mastered first. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The figure of Roland, which lay there neglected when we first saw Ragusa, has since been set up again in the open piazza. And, strange to say in these lands, it ventures to proclaim itself as having been set up, as it might have been in the old time, by the free act of the commune of Ragusa, without any of those cringing references to a foreign power which are commonly found expedient under foreign rule. ”

“ They end, so far as they give any character to the scene, in the group which lies off the mouth of the inlet of Gravosa and Ombla, the ordinary path to Ragusa. But he who would really take in the peculiar position of Ragusa will do well to pass by the city on his outward 219 voyage, to go on to Cattaro, and to take Ragusa on the way back. The wisdom of so doing springs directly out of the history of the city. The haven, which is said—and we have no better derivation to suggest—to have given its name to argosies, could certainly not give shelter to a modern argosy. ”

“ The pleasure of seizing the goods of a weaker neighbour is doubtless enough in either case.
One point in the history of Ragusa which needs a more thorough explanation than it has yet found is 232 the fact that the Roman or Greek city, founded by men who had escaped from barbarian invaders—who must surely have been largely Slavonic—has become so pre-eminently a Slavonic city. There is no Italian party at Ragusa. Not that the city is strongly Panslavonic; the memory of local freedom has survived through both forms of foreign rule. ”

“ The Republic was in constant danger from the powerful enemies which surrounded it on all sides. The Venetians, who claimed the monopoly of the Adriatic, were ever anxious to increase their influence and to become absolute masters of the city, as they were of the other Dalmatian towns, and after their retirement from Ragusa in 1358 they made many attempts to reinstate their authority. On the mainland there was the King of Servia, the Banus of Bosnia, the Lord of Hlum, watching for an opportunity to occupy Ragusa, whose splendid harbour they envied. ”

“ A form of art which flourished exceedingly at Ragusa was goldsmith’s work. The goldsmiths and silversmiths of Dalmatia were famous, and many of the church treasuries in the country are very rich and splendid. That of the cathedral of Ragusa is one of the finest, in spite of the earthquake and the depredations of the freebooters after that calamity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 619 they destroyed Salona, whose inhabitants, or at least such of them as escaped from the fury of the barbarians, for the most part took refuge in the walls of Diocletian’s palace at Spalato. But a few wandered southwards and established themselves on an island rock, where Ragusa now stands. About the year 656 the Avars swept down on Epidaurum and razed it to the ground, the surviving inhabitants flying to Ragusa. ”

“ Nor would Ragusa fail to play her allotted part of interpreter between Rome and the southern Sclaves. It is not to be wondered at that in these neighbourhoods Christianity of a purely Roman character should have taken root: and in the days of heresy this connection with Catholic Ragusa would perpetually keep alive influences favourable to the Church.
We can well understand that the superior civilization and wealth of these mining districts would react on the indigenous nobility. ”

“ A third feature intimately connected with the last is Ragusa’s character as a haven of refuge. While all6 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. ”