Dukes of Dalmatia – Korčula – pragmatic
imperialism – the lion-house – navy towns –
on pirates – a piece of grit – a puzzle – a fable
by the way – aesthetics – a shimmer in the distance
Now, leaving the twin peaks of Corfu Town behind us, moving cautiously northwards through the Corfu channel, where the binoculars of the Albanians, we may be sure, like the cannon of the Turks before them, are trained upon our passage, murmuring a prayer as we pass the sailors’ church at Kassiopi, we sail through the Otranto Strait and enter home waters. Everything in the Adriatic points towards Venice at its head, and we are swept northwards, in the twentieth as in the fifteenth century, irresistibly by the magnetism of the lagoon.
The Venetians seldom kept footholds for long on the western shore of the sea, the flat Italian shore, but never throughout the whole course of their imperial history, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, were they without ports and bases on the eastern shore, what is now Yugoslavia. This magnificent coast, which they called generically Dalmatia, was predominantly Catholic by religion, and they regarded it almost as an extension of their own island estates, just as they regarded the Adriatic as a sort of magnification of their lagoon. Duke of Dalmatia was the very earliest of the Doge’s external honorifics, and it was to regain Venetian control of Zadar, halfway down the coast, that the Fourth Crusade first veered off its course to the Holy Land.
It is a vastly complicated coast. The shoreline of Yugoslavia, from Istria in the north to the Albanian frontier in the south, is rather more than 400 miles long as the gull flies; but it is 2,000 miles long if you follow all its island shores and inlets –‘a co-efficient of indentedness’, says my Yugoslav handbook, ‘of 9.7’. There are said to be 725 islands, sixty-six of them inhabited, and 508 reefs and crags. Ethnically it was complex too – in Venetian times the hinterland people were all Slavs, but the Roman Empire had left a deposit of Latins in the coastal towns – and politically it was precarious: sometimes the Hungarians pushed down to the shore in one of their periodic spasms of expansion, and later the inevitable Turks pressed upon it from over the mountains.
For several centuries, though, the Venetians were effectively its suzerains, giving a territory here, gaining one there, ruling sometimes by direct force, sometimes by delegacy or persuasion, baffled sometimes by opponents too tough to crack, but never giving up, from start to finish. If they lost the mastery of this coast they lost the Adriatic too, and they were willing to fight any enemy, Byzantines, Magyars, Turks or common pirates to retain their authority over it – just as, in later years, the British were willing to risk any ignominy to keep control of the routes to their Indian Empire.
As India became to the British, so the Slav shore of the Adriatic Sea became to the Venetians – almost a part of themselves, linked by so many bonds and images, by such ancient associations, that the one seemed indivisible from the other, like a villa and its garden. Critics of the Venetians liked to call them ‘Slavs and fishermen’, and this is why: for the traffic was reciprocal, and if Venice profoundly affected the look and feel of Dalmatia, Dalmatia irrevocably influenced the character of Venice.
There is scarcely a mile of that tortuous shore, scarcely one even of its 659 uninhabited isles, which does not possess some token of Venice, a campanile, a name, or just the ghostly score of prows and keels on a sandy beach, where the galleys once careened. Let us, as we sail up the coast ourselves, put in first at one of the most Venetian of all its seaports, to stand for all the others: the island town of Korčula, Curzola to the Venetians, or Korkyra Negra, which lies some 300 miles north of Corfu, and was once its dependency.
I first arrived in Korčula late on a winter evening, and the little town looked very dark, almost deserted, piled on its hillock above the sea, and guarded still by its circuit of walls. There was dim light and muffled movement outside the walls, where the supermarkets are, and the cafés around the bus station; but up the steep steps to the Land Gate, through the little piazzetta inside, into the crooked lanes beyond, I met not a soul. Only when I reached the tall shape of the cathedral, in its cramped square in the centre of the town, did I hear the sound of organ music: so I pushed open its creaking door and went inside.
If we had been on the planet Mars I would have known that the Venetians had got there first. The cathedral of St Mark at Korčula is not exactly a clone of its greater namesake, for physically there is not much resemblance, but it has inherited every essential characteristic of the Basilica. A handful of nuns were singing a hymn when I entered, in very screechy voices, led by a solitary priest at the altar and accompanied at the harmonium by a sister of substantial physique and deliberate tempi. It was very dim in there, but all was familiar to me. The mosaic floor heaved beneath my feet, like the ancient chipped images on the floor of the Basilica; the stone seemed to be glowing in the half-light, like the substances of San Marco; all around me I sensed, rather than saw, those tall columned monuments, gilded and grandiloquent, by which the Venetians loved to remember their servants of state.
All Korčula is like that – full of allusions and reminders, rather Proustian in fact to those who have ever tasted the Venetian madeleine. The town is built to an ingenious crooked grid, like the skeleton of a fish – skew-whiff to prevent the winter sea-winds sweeping through the transverse streets from one side of town to the other. Time, though, has fretted the edges of the plan, with balconies and protrusions, with substitutions and decay, and today wandering around the little place, which is only a few hundred yards across, is a very Venetian experience. Ships show sometimes at the end of shadowy streets. The cathedral bell rings the centuries away, clang-clong-clang through the day and night. Ever and again a Korčulan cat, descended without a doubt from ship-borne forebears of Giudecca or Cannaregio, moves from gutter to dustbin with the true Venetian slink.
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From such places, from Budva and Kotor in the south, from Split and Zadar, from Fiume and Pula in the far north, the Venetians maintained their adamant control of the coast. They seldom ventured far from the towns: their frontier was the grey-white wall of the karst, running parallel with the sea a few miles inland, and even the coastal plains between the ports they generally left alone. Their system was pragmatic, sometimes fumbling. In earlier times they generally allowed the local authorities, landowners, churchmen, to keep their dignities, simply requiring the promise of support in wartime, and some symbolic annual tribute – oil for the Basilica from Pula, for example, marten skins from Vis, raw silk from the isle of Rab.
Gradually, however, they took over. They did not at first abolish the local offices of authority: instead they arranged that Venetian nominees should occupy them – local worthies first, later, more often than not, noblemen sent from Venice. One by one the semi-independent townships of Dalmatia, often enjoying civic dignities they had inherited from Roman times, were transformed into Venetian colonies. Venetians assumed all the important offices, loyal locals were mutated into honorary Venetians, or even admitted into the Golden Book of the metropolitan aristocracy.
To achieve this hegemony the Venetians had to beat off, or eventually buy off, the Hungarians, but once it was done they never let go, and used Dalmatia with energy to the end. They stripped the forests in their insatiable demand for ship-timber. They shipped mountains of Istrian stone to build their houses. They despoiled whole landscapes to make clear fields of fire for their garrisons. They shamelessly exploited the maritime skills of the Dalmatians, paying their locally recruited sailors far less than other nations did. They obliged the local ruling classes to speak Italian, further separating the towns from their countrysides: in Trogir (Trau in those days) specially-imported language teachers instructed the nobles, and the names of local families were compulsorily Venetianized – Cubranović, for instance, into Cipriani. The Venetians even filched the sacred relics of the coast: an arm of St Ivan (some say for the sake of the ring upon its hand), a foot of St Trifone and for a time the remains of a singularly obscure martyr called St Euphemia, of whom nothing whatever is known except that she was a martyr.
They put down rebellions with their usual enthusiasm. Dandolo himself set the standard when he threw the whole weight of the Fourth Crusade against Zadar, sacking the town, setting it on fire and destroying all its fortifications. Thereafter the Venetians were always tough with their Dalmatian dissidents. ‘Proceed against the culprits,’ Vincenzo Capello was instructed, when sent to put down a rising in Hvar in 1514, ‘with whatever severe censure is in keeping with justice and the dignity of our state, bearing in mind the security of our interests’: which, being interpreted by the commanders of punitive expeditions, meant wholesale hangings and exiles. Here, as in Corfu, the secret denunciation was a tool of policy and the local Venetian governors, variously entitled Counts, Captains or Podestas, were autocrats within their walls.
Yugoslavs like to say that the Venetians gave Dalmatia nothing but the habit of blasphemy, and certainly they always remained aliens along this shore, inhabiting small castellated beachheads on the edge of the Slavic world. But if there was frequently disaffection with their rule, there was much loyalty too. Over 500 years and more the Dalmatians grew accustomed to their dependency. Venice was their overlord, but also their customer: produce from leather to vegetables flowed ceaselessly northward to the lagoon – the sailors of the island of Brac used to load their ships with wine and operate them as floating saloons on the canals of Venice. Besides, the existence of the empire gave their men of talent boundless opportunities to rise above that narrow strip of shore below the karst. Dalmatian architects became European figures. Dalmatian artists fulfilled themselves in Venice. We read of a Dalmatian archbishop of Famagusta, and the traitor who tried to betray Khalkis to the Turks in Chapter Three was a gunner from Korčula.
Certainly when the time came for Venice to go, there were regrets here and there along the coast. In Istria in the north the loyalty never faded, and flickers on even today in a longing for Italy. At Perast in the south, when the Venetians left at last, the people buried the banner of St Mark with a solemn requiem beneath their church altar. It was another century and a half before the Dalmatians, their memories soured by later wars and occupations, began to chip the winged lion from its plaques and entablatures.
The winged lion! The lion of St Mark first went into action on the Venetian flag, it is thought, during an early expedition to Dalmatia, and along this coastline is the supreme collection of his images, stamped upon its structures in a thousand different styles, moods and postures.
Architecturally he was a blessing – so elegant but so muscular, he gave class to any rampart and admirably finished off the most meticulous arch. He was the symbol sometimes of peace, sometimes of war; he was religious by origin, distinctly secular by intent; sometimes he carried a flag, sometimes a sword, sometimes the Doge’s hat and nearly always, awkward though it sometimes was for the composition, the gospel of St Mark open or closed between his paws. If it was closed, it was an ominous sign of Venetian displeasure, a record of punishment, a threat of retribution, or perhaps just a reminder of Venetian military power. If it was open, with its serene slogan, pax tibi marce, evangelista meus – ‘Peace to you Mark, my evangelist’ – it was a pledge of protection and order, even sometimes of justice, that everyone understood. (The book in the paws of the huge lion outside the Arsenal in Venice was open – but blank.)
Winged lions of innumerable sub-species were erected in Dalmatia, and many are still there. Occasionally only a gap remains where the lion once stood, or his entablature has been filled instead by the red star of Communist Yugoslavia. His face may have been gouged off, or his rump removed. Generally, though, even now he remains anatomically complete and provides a sort of leitmotif for any journey up the Dalmatian shore. Sometimes he is elongated, sometimes he is squashed into rectangularity, as in a distorting mirror. Sometimes he offers a somewhat sickly smile, like those in rare photographs of Queen Victoria or Lord Kitchener. Sometimes he faces one way, sometimes the other, and sometimes his wings are curved sinuously behind his tail, or under his belly. Sometimes he is symbolically amphibious, backfeet in the sea, forefeet on land; sometimes he is only just a lion at all, but is more like a mangled sort of griffin, or a frog.
There was a lion at Trogir whose book said: ‘Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered.’ There was a lion at Rovinj whose book said: ‘Vittoria Tibi Marce, Evangelista Meus.’ There was a lion at Budva who seemed to have two books. There was a lion at Piran with the inscription: ‘Behold the winged lion! I pluck down earth, sea and stars…’ The mightiest of all the lions of the Stato da Mar, I think, is the one above Sanmichele’s Land Gate at Zadar, for many years the Venetian headquarters on this coast; on the other hand among the least successful is a late example on the loggia down the street, which was erected in 1792 and is depicted front-face – he grins toothlessly, points at his book with what appears to be a hoof, is surrounded by plumped-out feathers, like a turkey, and bears on his head a lightning conductor in the form of a palm tree.
The Trogir lion, it is claimed, miraculously closed his book when the Republic fell, and long afterwards, among the simpler Slavs, the beast retained magic powers, and was affixed to peasant houses, in ever cruder copies, to keep the worst at bay.
This is a sailor’s coast. It grows sailors as other lands grow farmers or miners, and its waters run with ships. Everywhere the ferryboats labour to and fro, the holiday hydrofoils streak away, the fishing boats hurry home with the evening catch. Sometimes, round a point, you come across a bay jammed tight with ships under refit – big Russian liners on stilts out of the water, tankers assaulted by swarms of welders. On remote island shores or in unexpected creeks you discover little country shipyards, like garages, with a solitary tall-funnelled steamer in dry dock, perhaps, or a crane protruding above the pines. Small grey warships cluster at jetties. Steady old steamers convey their villagers, animals, trucks, motorbikes and crates of garden produce patiently between the islands.
As it is now, so it was in Venetian times. Dalmatia was the true source of the Republic’s naval power; half the crews of Venetian ships came from Dalmatia, seamen whose sea-going experience was unrivalled in the Mediterranean and who were later to man most of the Austrian navy too. The towns of this coast were navy towns. Hvar, Lesina then, was the headquarters of the Venetian Adriatic Fleet, and had an arsenal to arm its ships, and a theatre to keep its sailors happy. Poreč, Parenzo in Istria, was the headquarters of the Guild of Venetian Pilots: proud to be so perhaps, for the guild-men were very, very grand, especially those super-pilots, the pedotti grandi, who were alone permitted to guide the great galleasses in and out of the lagoon.
Many of the proudest civic memories concerned triumphs at sea in the Venetian cause. Lepanto in particular was the Trafalgar of this shore, to be remembered by old men in chimney-corners and commemorated municipally. Hardly a cathedral of Dalmatia lacks its memorial to the local heroes of the battle, and the mementos are inescapable. Here is a galley lantern perhaps; here an angel made of captured cannons; here an escutcheon won by courage of arms that day. The ceremonial Land Gate at Korčula, through which I passed a page or two back, was erected to commemorate Lepanto. So was the column of St Justina at Koper, old Capodistria, at the other end of the coast. On the Sea Gate at Zadar a plaque recalls the glorious reception given to the city’s galleys when they returned cock-a-hoop from the battle, and in a shadowy gateway at Trogir an old cock’s head on a wooden hand, once a Turkish figurehead, has been displayed ever since 1571 as civic booty of the victory.
At the southern end of the Yugoslav coast, near the Albanian frontier, the line of the shore is dramatically disrupted by a vast sea-fiord, the Gulf of Kotor – Cattaro to the Venetians – which breaks into the land mass there in a volcanic sort of way. What seems at first to be just another bay turns out, when you sail into it, to be a theatrically gloomy pair of salt-water lakes, connected one with the other only by a narrow channel, the Verige Strait, and towered over by the Lovćen mountains of Montenegro. This sombre haven was for many generations a familiar base of the Venetian navy: they closed the Strait with chains to give the inner lake absolute security, and at Lepantani, on the spit between the lakes, they maintained what would now be called a rest and recreation centre – the name is supposed to be a corruption of le puttane, ‘the harlots’.
On the east shore of the gulf there is a place called Perast which played a particularly important part in Venetian naval history. It is hardly more than a hamlet, strung out along the waterfront, with the statutory Venetian campanile, a café or two beside the road, a palm tree here and there, scattered solitary cypresses on the bare hill above. Perast though was always a favourite retreat of sea-captains in the Venetian service, and they gave the place a certain stature, building their pleasant villas on terraces above the water, where they are mostly crumbling away now in flower-scent, bird-song and cock-crow, and are reached by crooked stone stairways clamped with iron. Some were consequential enough to have coats-of-arms above their doorways; one or two were proper little palaces, balconied and trellised, and in their heyday I would think, looking as they do boldly across the water, prominently telescoped too.
At this highly nautical place a school for sailors was established in a big house on the waterfront, watched over by the retired salts all around. For many years it produced officers in the Republic’s service, so successfully that Perast-trained seamen included many of the best-known Venetian professionals. In 1626 Peter the Great of Russia, laying the first foundations of the Russian Navy, noted this old record of accomplishment, and sent his first naval cadets to be trained at Perast: he went to England to learn how warships should be built, but he looked to this Venetian sea-hamlet of the Adriatic to acquire for his empire, in its turn, the arts of seamanship.
Pirates of many sorts infested the shore – Genoese, Catalan, Arab, Turk, even English and Dutch sometimes. In the period between 1592 and 1609 alone seventy ships bound for Venice were taken by pirates within the Adriatic: sometimes their seamen resisted strongly, sometimes they preferred to rely upon their insurance and abandoned ship at once. As early as the tenth century Slav pirates had raided Venice itself, carrying off all the brides from a mass wedding taking place in the church of San Pietro di Castello, and in successive centuries the pest was never quite stamped out – driven out of one den, the pirates simply set up their base somewhere else. In 1571, Lepanto year, the Sultan Selim II actually installed a pack of Arab pirates at Ulcinj, south of the Gulf of Kotor, to harass Venetian shipping; they brought their Negro slaves with them, and the black people you sometimes see in Ulcinj now are their descendants.
The most melodramatic of all these varied miscreants were the people called the Uskoks, whose fearful memory lingers around their old lair of Segna, in the north, renamed Senj now but still crouching rather frowardly over its half-moon bay. The Uskoks were indisputably ghastly. The name probably comes from the Serbo-Croat uskočiti, to jump, and the Uskoks were originally Christian refugees from the eastern side of the mountains, who had escaped from the Turks by guile and violence, and set themselves up to prosper by similar means on the Dalmatian shore. They were epic villains. Their greatest fighting leader, Ivo, was supposed to have routed 30,000 Turks with a handful of comrades and to have come home from another battle holding his own severed left hand in his right. The Venetians said they were supernaturally guided, too, by wise women in caves.
The Uskoks took to sea the same skills and prejudices that had preserved them on land. Fanatically anti-Turk and anti-Muslim, they were never averse to Christian booty either, and with their long hair and trailing moustaches, and the iron rings they sported in their ears, they became the terror of all mariners. Uskoks liked to nail the turbans of Turkish prisoners to their heads and sometimes cut out the hearts of their still living captives (we read of a Venetian commander whose heart, in fact, was the pièce-de-résistance of a celebratory banquet). Captains would often run their ships aground rather than risk such a fate: ‘as if Whale should flie from a Dolphin’, scornfully commented an English traveller, who had perhaps not himself come face to face with a long-haired, iron-earringed Uskok on the high seas. Senj became a haven for rascals and runaways from many countries and its whole community was brutalized. The priests of Senj piously blessed the pirates’ enterprises. The citizenry at large contributed financially to the cost of them and shared cheerfully in the profits, one-tenth of the loot going to the Franciscan and Dominican monasteries.
During the Uskoks’ heyday, in the sixteenth century, they enjoyed the protection of the Hapsburg dukedom in Austria, and sold their captured goods in the great international market of Trieste, from where they were distributed throughout the Hapsburg possessions. This was particularly infuriating to the Venetians, who fought the rascals with ever-increasing anger both at sea and on land – after one victory over them, they displayed the heads of luckless Uskoks on stakes all around the Piazza San Marco. But the shallow galleys of the pirates, rowed in relays by ten oarsmen each side, were exceedingly hard to catch, and it was only in the early years of the seventeenth century that they were eliminated at last: in their very last adventure of all, when only a handful of desperadoes was left to man the galleys of Senj, they seized a final Venetian ship, for old times’ sake, and made off with its cargo, worth 4,000 sequins.
So crippling was piracy to Venetian trade, during its worst periods, that the Signory cast around for alternative routes to the east, avoiding the most dangerous parts of the Adriatic. In the past Venetian merchants had often shipped their goods to Durrës, then Durazzo, on the Albanian coast, and taken them in caravans over the former Roman road, the Via Egnatia, which ran across Thessalonia and Thrace to Turkey. In the winter, too, the Venetian postal routes ran from Kotor over the Montenegrin mountains to Constantinople. In the sixteenth century the Venetians created a parallel route from Split, much further to the north, enabling them to by-pass most of the Adriatic altogether.
This was a truly imperial conception, undertaken on an imperial scale, and it was proper that it should be based upon the imperial city of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, himself a Dalmatian born and bred. Virtually the whole of Split, which the Venetians called Spalato, consisted of the emperor’s vast waterside palace, long since taken over by the citizenry and converted into a marvellous warren of houses, shops, halls and piazzas, with Diocletian’s mausoleum as a cathedral in the middle. It was a Venetian Jew, Daniele Rodrigo, who first suggested that this extraordinary place, then hardly more than a picturesque backwater, should be the base of the new route: in 1591 the Signory authorized him to make it so.
He set about it with style. An entire new town was built outside the Diocletian walls, with hostels and warehouses for merchants, customs houses, hospitals and a quarantine station. The fortifications of the port were rebuilt. The roads into the interior were developed. A new kind of galley was designed for the short sea-run between Venice and Split, shallow-drafted, manned by a relatively small crew of 120 sailors and forty soldiers. Every other month one of these ships, the container ships of their day, made the double voyage: as soon as it reached Venice to unload, its crew was shifted to another vessel and sailed immediately back to Split.
The scheme worked brilliantly. Caravans with hundreds of horses plodded down the mountains to the seashore from places as far away as Armenia, Persia and even India. For the first time silks, spices, hides, woollens, carpets and waxes reached Venice from the east overland, a smack in the eye not only for the Adriatic pirates, but also for rival merchants of the west, laboriously sailing their caravels around the Cape of Good Hope. Split never looked back, became the principal port of the Dalmatian coast for the rest of the Venetian period, and is now the liveliest and most cosmopolitan coastal town of Yugoslavia.
Credit it to the Uskoks! There were no pirates like those sea-devils: trying to stop their predatory passages through the Adriatic, a Venetian senator once cried, was ‘like trying to stop the birds flying through the air with one’s bare hands’. There are said to have been, even in their prime, no more than a thousand fighting Uskoks, but nobody would ever forget them.
One great piece of grit impeded the Venetian mechanism of authority on the Dalmatian coast: the sea-city of Dubrovnik – Ragusa then – whose merchants were so enterprising, whose fleets ranged so far, that the very word ‘argosy’ comes from the name of their port. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Dubrovnik was nominally under Venetian suzerainty, and a Venetian governor was installed there; but it was never reconciled to the Signory’s rule, presently rejected it, and alone among the city-ports of the littoral, remained a bitter rival until the end of the Venetian Republic.
If you would like a suggestion, a sort of mirage perhaps, of the medieval meaning of Dubrovnik, disembark at the peninsula village of Cavtat, which lies some ten miles south of the city across the bay of Lokrum. From there you can see the place in context. To the right the limestone mountains rise sheer and treeless, to the left is the green island of Lokrum, and half-hidden from the open sea upon its own inlet, the walled city of Dubrovnik shows like a white blur at the water’s edge. It has a very steely look from there, a private and plotting look, secreted as it is between the highlands and the sea, within its screen of islands.
A hard city it remains too, to my mind, when you cross the bay and land upon its quay, beneath its high fortifications. It is very beautiful, but hard. It lacks the yield or leniency of Venice. Built of a glittering and impermeable marble, enclosed with superb city walls, tilted slightly with the lie of the land and corrugated everywhere with battlements – tightly packed there within itself it has acquired none of the give-and-take of great age, but seems in a way a perfectly modern place, dogmatically planned and didactically displayed to visitors, like a model town in a trade fair.
Much of it was destroyed in a sixteenth-century earthquake, but it was all rebuilt, and the Dubrovnik we see today is still in all essentials the Ragusa which was so long a thorn in the side of Venice. Superficially it seems Venetian itself, and most visitors probably believe it to be Venetian. Its city fathers were inevitably influenced by the Serenissima, the force which made all this coastline look north for its examples. Though the people of Dubrovnik were Slav almost to a man, they assiduously Italianized their city. They imported artists and craftsmen from Italy, they adopted the latest Italian styles in dress, in literature, in modes of living. They even devised Italian genealogies for themselves. They based their constitution upon the Venetian pattern, though being even more vulnerable to the ambitions of potential despots, they decreed that their Doge, called the Rector, should hold office only for a month at a time and that he should leave his palace only if accompanied by a band and by twenty-four attendants in red liveries.
But it was only a veneer really, and Dubrovnik does not feel Venetian for long. Its people never gave up their Serbo-Croat language, so that all the influences of the Italian Renaissance were subtly mutated here, and the city remained pure Slav at heart. Its famous central street, the Placa, is austere and metallic, like a parade ground. Its Rector’s Palace lacks the voluptuous festivity of the Venetian touch. Its pervading style, for all its fineness of detail, is somehow defensive, as though it is conscious of being all alone in the world, and its citizens, who have always loved it with a peculiar intensity, talk about it even now almost as though it is an independent republic, beleaguered by change.
Indeed it was a prodigy of European history, and in his day St Blaize, its patron saint (who had the particular ability to cure the common cold), was almost as powerful a protector as St Mark of Venice. Today there is another Dubrovnik outside its walls: the holiday villas spill along the coastline north and south and clamber up the hills above the great Dalmatian Highway. During the great days of its power, though, Dubrovnik consisted simply of the little walled city itself, perhaps half a mile across or two miles in circumference; yet such were the skills of its statesmen, its economists and its seamen that this remote and minute state became a world power, one of the great maritime forces of its day.
At the end of the sixteenth century Dubrovnik tonnage was probably as great as Venice’s, and Dubrovnik ships, men and merchants cropped up all over the world. Here is a Ragusan converted to Islam, defending the Indian fort of Diu against the Portuguese at the start of the sixteenth century. Here is one sailing from Lisbon in command of a Spanish Armada ship, and another making his fortune in the Potosi silver mines of Peru. Merchants from Dubrovnik were active all over the Balkans, with hundreds of trading colonies in Bulgaria, Serbia, the Danube provinces, Constantinople, and they were well-known in England too. So many Dubrovnik gentlemen went abroad to be educated that the two orders of the hierarchy were dubbed the Salamanchesi, after Salamanca University, and the Sorbonnesi, after the Sorbonne, and Dubrovnik diplomats tacked so adeptly between the world’s chanceries that cynics nicknamed their state the settebandiere, the Republic of the Seven Flags.
It was true that every year a train of noblemen set off over the mountains to pay the city’s tribute to the Sultan in Constantinople, but in fact this was a particularly independent little republic. It was governed by its aristocracy, generally speaking, with remarkable enlightenment. Slave trading was outlawed very early. Torture was forbidden. A civic home for old people was founded in 1347 and there was a high standard of education. Patriotic feeling was intense; there are no records of revolution, and the Ragusan republic outlived that of Venice itself.
Dubrovnik never exactly went to war with Venice, but there were skirmishes now and then, and relations were always cold between the two powers, Ragusan captains habitually disregarding Venetian pretensions to command of the sea. The Venetians built a series of watchful fortresses around the perimeter of the little state: the Ragusans for their part were so anxious to distance themselves from Venetian territory that in 1699 they actually ceded to the Turks two strips of their own land, north and south of the city, to form a cordon sanitaire between Saints Blaize and Mark. The Ragusans were not in the least expansionist – theirs was the purest sort of merchant state, living entirely by its wits and its trade. Nor were they xenophobic – they generally employed foreigners as state secretaries (and among unsuccessful applicants for the job was Machiavelli). But they were jealous of their separateness and maintained it successfully, through the powerful climax of Venice, all through the long decline, until a French sergeant, reading out a Napoleonic declaration in 1806, declared the extinction of Ragusa as a state.
They gained much over the centuries by this brave detachment, but perhaps they lost something too. They gained no doubt in self-esteem and social well-being, and did more to assimilate western progress into their native culture than did any of their subjugated neighbours of the coast. But they lost, I suppose, that sense of wider unity, comity and purpose that can be the saving grace of imperialism. Dubrovnik was to remain always a lonely kind of place, with the prickliness that isolated communities often have, and a certain wistfulness too. Few citizens of Dubrovnik would admit it now, just as few Ragusans would have allowed it then: but one misses the winged lion on the walls of this determined little city, and with it that warmth of the Venetian genius which, with all its faults, brought its own light, pride and fantasy wherever it settled.
Grit on the foreshore: high in the mountains above, an enigma which the Venetians never quite solved. Above the Gulf of Kotor, almost within sight of Dubrovnik, stood the Black Mountain, Crna Gora in the Serbo-Croat, Monte Negro in the Venetian dialect. Going home weary after the making of the world, God took with him a sack of unused stones, but the sack burst on his way across the skies, and so Montenegro was made. Bears lived up there in the mighty pile of rocks, lynxes, wolves, tree frogs, vultures, great wild boars, Illyrian vipers and monstrous trout in mountain lakes. And up there too lived the most baffling of Venice’s neighbours in Dalmatia, the Montenegrins, who were sometimes enemies, occasionally allies, but always to be kept at arm’s length.
For most of the Venetian period the Montene∗∗∗grins possessed no coastline of their own, and they looked down resentfully upon the Venetian settlements around the Gulf of Kotor from the high eyrie of their homeland, the mountain massif of Lovćen, in whose inaccessible and unlovely recesses they built their village-capital, Cetinje. The way there from the gulf was daunting, but thrilling too. The Venetian town of Kotor huddled beneath the very flank of the mountain, in shadow half the day, rushed past by a mountain stream like an Alpine village: immediately behind it a dizzy zig-zag path clambered up the sheer face of Lovcen in a series of seventy-three narrow and precipitous loops. To strangers this rough mule-track looked impossible, but it was the only way to Cetinje from the sea, and up and down it travelled all the limited commerce of Montenegro, on the backs of mules and donkeys, on the shoulders of men, so that at any time of day, if you looked up the mountain face from the quayside at Kotor, you might see small black figures crawling along the rock-face far above.
The track was called the Ladder of Cattaro, and though nowadays it starts in a different place and is a road with only twenty-five rather less disconcerting loops, it is still startling enough. To imagine what the journey must have been like for the Venetian merchants, diplomats and spies who reluctantly climbed their way to Cetinje over the years, it is best to make it at the beginning of winter, when the snows have fallen on the high ground but have not yet blocked the highway. The world shifts then as you climb. At the bottom it is the Mediterranean world –towers and villas the Venetians built, oleanders beside the sea. At the top it is the Balkans, white, stony and uncertain. As you round the last bend in that twisty road, you find all about you a blasted sort of landscape, corrugated here and there with what look like the runnels of ancient avalanches, waterless, apparently soil-less, and stubbled only in sporadic patches with arid and thorny shrubs. This is the Black Mountain. You pass one windswept settlement, crouched in a declivity in the snow plain, and there is nothing more, not a hut, not a barn, until suddenly in the middle of the wasteland you see before you, in its own cold scoop among the hills, the village of Cetinje.
From here the Montenegrins projected their unyielding defiance against all comers, and particularly against the Turks. For generations they were the first line of Christian defence against Islam and alone in the Balkans they never gave in, decorating their streets with the skulls of Turks and inculcating their children with patriotic ferocity. They were ruled in their heyday by prince-bishops, Vladikas, fighting prelates who combined all authority, spiritual and secular, in one mighty office, and unlike the Venetians they believed strongly in the power of individual personality. Bards sang the praises of Montenegrin chieftains, not at all the Venetian practice, and the greatest of their heroes, the Prince-Bishop Petar Njegoš, would not long have survived the cautious safeguards of the Venetian constitution: a learned theologian, a gifted linguist, a scholarly jurist, a crack shot, the first poet of Montenegrin literature, six feet six tall, he was the idol of his people and was buried flamboyantly at his own wish on the very top of Mount Lovćen itself, where his mausoleum remains. Swaggering, boastful and terribly superstitious, the Montenegrins were armed to the teeth always, and their bearing was described by an English writer, as late as 1911, as being ‘soldier-like and manly, though somewhat theatrical’. The Venetians viewed them with predictable ambiguity. They were Christians, after all. They were doughty enemies of the Turks. Also Kotor was their only outlet to the world and they brought business to its bankers, merchants and agents. It was Venetian money that enabled the Montenegrins to raise the ransom for their Prince-Bishop Danilo, when he was condemned to crucifixion by the Turks. It was a Venetian press which, in the year 1493, in the Montenegrin monastery of Obod, printed the first book in the Serbo-Croat language, less than half a century after the invention of printing. Rich Montenegrins, tiring of their perpetual siege-life in the mountains, sometimes retired to Venice, and several Montenegrin chiefs were ennobled by the Republic.
On the other hand they were exceedingly difficult neighbours. Their yearning for a sea-outlet was a running threat to the Venetian position on the coast, and the houses of Kotor and Perast had to be fortified against the more lawless of their guerilla bands. At the same time the Venetians, pursuing their generally ambivalent policy towards the Turks, were chary of allying themselves too closely with such uncompromising enemies of Islam, and they repeatedly rebuffed the Montenegrins, deceived them or left them in the lurch – refusing to help when their armies were on the point of annihilation, letting them down in diplomatic negotiations, and once actually colluding with the Turks in a plot to assassinate their Vladika.
Yet it could be said that only the furious determination of the Montenegrins, during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saved the Adriatic coast, and so possibly Venice itself, from the Turks. To the very end of the Venetian empire the Montenegrins were fighting up there, and you can feel this heroic heritage still in the windy streets of Cetinje. There is a raw challenge in the air. Peter Njegoš’ barracks-like palace, called the Biljarda after the billiard-table laboriously conveyed to it, by order of the Tsar of Russia, up the Ladder of Cattaro, still crouches comfortless beneath the slope of the hill: on the white summit of Lovćen, deep in snow, you can still make out his lonely tomb.
Unfortunately long after the Venetians had left the Gulf of Kotor a later prince of Montenegro, Nicolas, gave the little capital a very different significance, for he aspired to join the egregious company of monarchs who then lorded it all over Europe, and in 1910 proclaimed himself a king. The powers took him seriously. The King of Italy married one of his daughters, the King of Serbia another, two more became the pair of Grand Duchesses who introduced Rasputin to the Russian court. Grandiose legations were erected in the village streets of Cetinje and Nicolas built himself a palace stuffed to every corner with the signed portraits, the chivalric orders, the mementos of Tsars, Empresses and Queen Victorias essential to every royal home. So the capital of the Montenegrins, which had so tantalized the Venetians down the mountain, became in the end the capital of Rumania: until World War I, that mighty scourer of pretension, swept all away to oblivion, leaving only museums behind.
This (by the way) is the manner in which, in the year 1484, the son of the Prince Ivo the Black of Montenegro married the daughter of the Doge Pietro Mocenigo of the Venetian Republic:
The Prince wrote to the Doge thus: ‘Harken to me Doge! As they say that thou hast in thy house the most beautiful of roses, your daughter, so in my house there is the handsomest of pinks, my son. Let us unite the two.’ And the Doge replied, ‘Yea, let us,’ and Ivo the Black went to the palace of the Doge in Venice with handsome gifts of gold, and the wedding was arranged for the following autumn. ‘Friend Doge,’ said Ivo, ‘then thou shalt see me with six hundred choice companions, and if there is among them a single one who is more handsome than my son Stanicha, then give me neither bride nor dowry.’ The Doge was much pleased and Ivo sailed away to Montenegro.
But as autumn approached, Stanicha was stricken with a terrible smallpox, and his face was pitted hideously, and all his beauty destroyed. Ivo the Black told the Doge nothing of this, but when there came a message from Venice saying that all was ready for the nuptials, he assembled his 600 men to go to Venice: and they were the handsomest of all men, with lofty brow and commanding look, from Dulcigno and from Antivari, the eagles of Podgoritza and all the finest young men as far as the green Lim.
‘What say you, brothers,’ asked Ivo of them, ‘shall we put one of you in place of Stanicha for the nuptials, and allow him on our return half the rich presents which will be given to him as the supposed bridegroom of the Doge’s daughter?’ The young men approved, and Obrezovo Djuro was declared the handsomest of them all, and elected to play the part. So they embarked for Venice crowned with flowers.
They arrived in Venice and the Doge Mocenigo was struck with amazement at the beauty of Obrezovo Djuro, whom he took to be the prince’s son. ‘Surely he is the handsomest of them all,’ said he, and so the wedding was celebrated, and there was feasting and festivity for a whole week. ‘Friend Doge,’ said Ivo at the end of the week, ‘we must return to our mountains,’ and the Doge gave to Djuro, whom he took to be Stanicha, a golden apple as a token of wedlock, and two damasced fusils, two tunics of finest linen wrought with gold, and much besides, and so they sailed away with the Doge’s beautiful daughter back to the Black Mountain.
When they reached the Black Mountain, the bride was shown her real husband Stanicha, ugly from the smallpox. ‘Here is your real husband, my son Stanicha,’ said Ivo the Black: but she was very angry at the deception, for half the costly presents that the Doge had given must stay with Djuro, and she had embroidered with her own hands the tunics of gold. ‘If I must be Stanicha’s wife,’ said she, ‘then Stanicha must fight Djuro to recover the last tunic of gold. If not, I will pluck a thorn, I will scratch my face with it, and with the blood I will write a letter which my falcon will carry swiftly to great Venice.’
So Stanicha killed Djuro with a javelin through the head. War followed in the Black Mountain and Ivo could see the whole plain covered afar with horses and riders cut in pieces. The young men rose so furiously on behalf of the murdered Djuro that Stanicha was forced to leave the mountains for a foreign country far away; and his bride went home to Venice a virgin.
A particular aesthetic governs the Dalmatian coast, corroded though it is in many parts by the stain of tourism. It lies partly of course in the splendour of the landscape, that incomparable combination of sea, island and limestone barrier. It is partly the climate too, generally so benign, shifting suddenly to seething seas and scudding clouds when the bora falls upon the Adriatic like the breath of fate. Perhaps it is partly the nature of the inhabitants, almost all Slavs now even in the towns, tough and stocky people, made a little more drab by the exigencies of Communism and given to particular violence in war, who slump themselves opposite you at the dining-table grim and unresponsive, but can be coaxed with patience into true bonhomie.
But what chiefly gives the coast its tang, and makes it like no other shore, is the particular blend of the Latin and the Slav which is the gift of Venice to Dalmatia. History has expunged some of it: hardly a trace of the Italian cuisine is noticeable now and the Italian language has been systematically eradicated even in those places like Zadar, Rijeka and the ports of Istria which became Italian again between the two world wars. But in the long string of towns which graces this shore one can detect a particular sinewy allure which could arise, I think, only from this particular association of temperaments. I accept absolutely the theory that Vittore Carpaccio was from Koper in Istria, for the cool spareness of his vision, so different from the exclamatory style of a Titian or a Tintoretto, or the gentle mysteries of a Giorgione, perfectly reflects the Dalmatian mix of ornate and naive, sea and karst.
There is a similarity but not a sameness to all the towns. Each has its piazza, recognizable still as the centre of Venetian power. Each is likely to have one of those elegant little loggias, pillared, tile-roofed and possibly en-lioned, which were sometimes used as lesser courts of justice and sometimes as lodging-places for travellers. There is probably a handful of patrician houses still standing, distant cousins to the palazzi of the Grand Canal, escutcheoned as often as not though long since divided into flats or handed over to People’s Consultative Syndicates. There is also certain to be, proudly in the middle of town and still an active centre of Christian devotion, a cathedral.
One cannot really call the cathedrals of Dalmatia Venetian buildings. Most of them were built, or rebuilt, under the aegis of Venice, and Venetian architects frequently worked upon them, sometimes modelling them upon Venetian originals. But their particular magic comes, nearly always, from the touch of the Slav upon the Italianate. They are very sensual buildings, almost always, made of glowing marble or soft sandstone, intimate with little side-chapels and dark chancels, curiously embellished with images sacred and profane, instructive or merely frivolous. If spiritually they sometimes seem, like the one at Korčula, miniatures of the Basilica San Marco, physically they are often boldly individualistic or even eccentric, marked by the preferences of some local artist, or conceived by local circumstance.
The cathedral of San Lorenzo at Trogir, for instance, seems at first just a singularly beautiful example of medieval Venetian architecture, from the period when Romanesque dovetailed into Gothic. Set in a neat ensemble of piazza, loggia and patrician house, like a close, it is not too hard to imagine it transferred to some campo of Venice itself. But within its heavily arched narthex, shaded deeply against the sun, an altogether alien marvel reveals itself: an elaborately, almost violently carved great porch, of a style so roughly vigorous that no Venetian artist could ever have made it. It was the work of the thirteenth-century Croatian sculptor Radovan, and it is guarded by two of the burliest-and most truculent lions of the Venetian Empire – Slav lions through and through, on guard like mercenaries.
The cathedral of Šibenik, Sebenico to the Venetians, is another declaration of independence. The principal architect of this famous building was a Dalmatian who had studied at Venice and is known by his Italian name of Giorgio Orsini; he married a Venetian and possessed houses in several Venetian territories. But his cathedral turns out to be, despite a certain initial impact of déjà vu, very un-Venetian after all. Its interior, especially, is like nothing in Venice. It rises in a series of steps from narthex to altar, but not in the graceful manner of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice: the dark nave does not glide upwards to the high altar, but rather stumps there, step by step through the twilight. Outside, too, the posture of the church, when you look at it longer, is strangely bold and muscular, a little piratical perhaps, and around the back seventy sculpted heads, said to be those of citizens too stingy to contribute to the cost of the building, gaze out at the passers-by astonishingly like the decapitated heads of captured enemies, some moustachio’d and unrepentant, some innocent and aghast.
But the most startling expression of this hybrid aesthetic is to be found in the island-town of Rab, Arbe to the Venetians, some fifty miles north of Zadar and reached by ferry from the old Uskok nest of Senj. Rab is a tiny place on a promontory, perhaps half a mile long and three narrow streets wide, but its silhouette was familiar to every Venetian mariner along this coast, and is unmistakable now. Four tall campaniles are its emblems, all in a row along its western shore, and they give the place an oddly eerie effect, even when the tourists crowd its beaches.
Wherever you walk down the spine of the town, pine-scented from the woods that edge it, those four tall towers seem to beckon you on, like markers – down the flagged and wheel-less lanes, under the old stone arches wreathed in creeper, past the dark little loggia in the middle of town, past quaint crested palaces and high-walled gardens, until at the end of your walk, near the tip of the promontory, you discover before you the ribbed Italianate façade of the little cathedral, on its own piazzetta beside the sea.
There is a little belvedere beside it, pleasantly shaded, where you may lean over the water and watch the boats go by; but your eye is not likely to wander for long, because above the main door of the church is the true focus of the whole island, the object to which, you realize now, those four grave towers have been guiding you all along. It is the starkest and saddest, perhaps the truest of Pietas, in which a grief-stricken Virgin cherishes a Christ still writhing from the pain of the cross. Nothing could be further from the ample and confident faith of Venetian Christian art. It is a chunk of the karst that is mounted there, carved with a bitter vision.
Northward through the off-shore islands, as the coast with its indentations unfolds itself to starboard: the treacherous gulf called Boiling Bay, where indeed when the wind gusts from the north the waves do seem to bubble, hiss and steam, as though there is fire beneath them; Rijeka, which used to be Fiume, where the Venetians built themselves, in the church of San Guido, a remarkably inaccurate copy of their beloved Salute; Pula, a naval base all its life, Roman, Hungarian, Austrian, Italian and now Yugoslav; until there stands to the north the bumpy peninsula of Istria. This was the nearest to home of all the possessions of the Stato da Mar, separated from Venice itself only by Trieste and the lagoon-shore of Venezia Giulia.
This is where Dalmatia ends, and now the little seaside towns are more exactly Venetian. They gave to the Doge one of the earliest of his ancillary titles, dux totius istriae, and they remained Italian until the end of World War II. They were confirmed irrevocably as Yugoslav only in 1975, when their future was settled with that of Trieste, and they have powerful sizable Italian populations still. Even today it is hard to remember that Capodistria is Koper now, Parenzo Poreč, Rovigno Rovinj. A powerful sense of nostalgia informs them, dingy as they are with Communism’s patina, and every weekend their inhabitants pour in their thousands over the frontier to Italy, to stock up not just with jeans, confectionery and spare parts, but also no doubt with the sense of style and colour to which so many centuries of Venetian rule accustomed them.
This rather melancholy peninsula – for centuries it was repeatedly ravaged by plague – was always familiar to Venice. It was only a day and night’s sailing to the lagoon, even in the Middle Ages, and more than any other imperial settlements, the Istrian seaports feel like illusions of Venice herself. Sometimes their appearance now in this still alien setting, with a splash of authentic Venetian red, perhaps, and a pattern of real Venetian machicolation on the skyline, and a perfect little replica of St Mark’s Campanile rising above the rooftops, backed by such sober hills and pine forests, and often hemmed in by modern office blocks, tourist hotels and Corbusian apartments, can be sadly unsettling.
There is an easy cure, though. You must do as the Venetians did. Climb the high ground behind Koper, say, on a fine spring day, when the sea is flecked only with little curls of foam, and the long line of coast is clear as pen-and-ink. Settle up there among the conifers with a picnic and a pair of binoculars and presently, when the sun is just beginning to set, you may make out through the glasses an indistinct grey blur upon the horizon to the west, faintly picked out perhaps, in fancy if not in fact, with a shimmer of gold. There is a stack of buildings on a waterfront, surely. There is a suspicion of a tower. Isn’t that a gilded angel there, that faint spot on the lens, that golden dust-flake?
It is no nostalgic copy this time, no extension of style, faith or strategy. It is the real thing out there. We have reached the end of our sea voyage, and we are looking at Venice.