History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic
even on a world scale, have so many contrasting yet connotative aspects been brought together over time and space, with so many references to different civilizations and the presence of apparent opposites: Syracusan Greeks and Germanic emperors, Latins and Slavs, dervishes and Jesuits, papal coast and Turkish coast, tolerance and crusades, holy wars and communist revolutions, lingua francas and language frontiers, the Renaissance and pastoral civilizations, localisms, tribalisms, the eastern question and modernity. The time of the Adriatic tends to elude conventional chronologies. It is a striking collection of historical periods, if quantified and aligned: over a thousand years of Venetian history, first a duchy and commune, then a republic; over a thousand years of the Papal States, 850 years of the Holy Roman Empire, 816 years of the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, 730 years of the Kingdom of Naples, 670 years of Byzantium, 542 years of the Habsburg dynasty, 443 years of the Ottoman Empire, 400 years of the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 150 years of unified Italy, 135 years of Montenegro, over 100 years of Albania, 73 years of Yugoslavia, 30 years of Slovenia and Croatia. This does not take into consideration the economic cycles of the sea as a whole and of its coasts, the long periods of small-scale coastal navigation and transhumance and the many centuries of Adriatic trade fairs and religious pilgrimages. In short, there is more history than geography in the Adriatic.
How can such a history be interpreted? How can the historical sense of a sea be interpreted? Braudel’s lesson is well known: identify different intrinsic economic, social and political periods in the sea, considered as a territory and the subject of historical interpretation. From Braudel’s starting point, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have attempted to move forward, formulating the definition of the Mediterranean as The Corrupting Sea, insofar as it influences local contexts that it unites through countless synergies dictated by a generic sense of uncertainty and subsistence, a series of several minimal realities.6 The Mediterranean has therefore been a collection of microsystems with exceptions and specificities, yet all tending to engage with one another and develop networks of synergies from a smaller scale of proximity to a larger scale of transmaritime connections. Diversity in unity: the Mediterranean encompasses a multitude of contexts and at the same time represents a plurality of processes that connect and create through ‘Mediterraneanization’, a Mediterranean system from the individual places that form it.7 According to Horden and Purcell, the time has come for a shift in the approach to historical research. To date, it has mainly been a question of history in the Mediterranean, a history that has narrated what happened around the Mediterranean shores. Today, it is a question of doing historical research of the Mediterranean, conceived as a maritime unity with its own characteristics that are to be examined as they developed over time.
It is hard not to agree with this approach. The Adriatic has indeed a history as a sea that corrupts, constantly connecting its coasts and the people who live there. However, the sea is not merely an organism or a mechanism. It undoubtedly brings together goods and people but also ideas, languages and cultures. It unites, but it also divides: it is a symbolic space into which both local and national communities project themselves, and its coasts are subjected to systems of political sovereignty. The Adriatic is all this, the crossroads of different and often contrasting experiences of civilization. Therefore, it is acceptable to talk of the history of the Adriatic, the sea as an organism, but it cannot be separated from the history in the Adriatic, from the world that has experienced it.
Like all seas, the Adriatic is a liquid plain – to use Braudel’s term – in which the trade routes, the shipping flows, the relations between coasts, the traffic of goods, migrations, use of resources, fishing, political, strategic and military control, sovereignty and the struggle for hegemony can all be traced over time. It is the sea of seafaring people and those who ruled them: maritime and economic history and political history. The Adriatic is also and most importantly coastal lands, or rather a network of regional coastal systems, a kind of membrane that is the water front for those coming from the hinterland and the land front for those arriving from the sea. It is a habitat that is almost everywhere populated, even with small settlements, not necessarily looking only to the sea but also to the hinterland. The coast, therefore, always has a double connotation. The maritime association is the more elusive and requires a reversal of the usual perception of the Adriatic world: an island or liquid peninsula traversed by shipping routes, and the coast a facade facing the continent. It is therefore a liquid island with a series of shores that surround it. It is this narrow strip a dozen kilometres wide, made up of dunes, lagoons, river mouths, inlets and promontories, cliffs and island systems, which represents the human Adriatic, the territory, the landscape transformed by humans in which people have lived with the sea, and still do so, as is evident in Venice, Ancona, Trieste, Split (Spalato), Rijeka (Fiume), Bari, Durrës and in other ports and islands, and entire lagoon and coastal contexts. Although it is clear that living beside the sea does not mean necessarily being seafarers, it does epitomize a maritime civilization. There are some places that are more maritime than others: for instance, along the western Adriatic coasts, only some ports (Trani, Ancona, Chioggia, Venice); along the eastern coasts, entire regions (Istria, Dalmatia).
Finally, just as there is a great Mediterranean, there is also a great Adriatic, a kind of crown of hinterland regions with a more or less close connection with the sea. It is a wide area, the limits of which are not easy to define, as it might lie as far as 30 kilometres from the coast, a day’s walk, or it could also include apparently distant places, such as Macerata, Ferrara and Padua. Even more remote capitals of states lying on this sea, such as Rome, Naples, Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade, were also, in some aspects, Adriatic cities.
In short, as always within and around a sea, there are three levels: the liquid element, the coast and the surrounding territories. The regional coastal systems, made up of shores, islands, populations, economies and cultures, are the fundamental fabric of a complex maritime region, places in which intrinsic unity with and diversity from a sea is measured. The coastal systems are regions in and of themselves; many are well known and identifiable, regardless of the Adriatic. Let’s start to list them: on the western Adriatic, the Salento region, the Tavoliere Plain and the Gargano area in present-day Apulia; the long Apennine coast between Termoli and Pesaro, i.e. ancient Picenum, present-day Molise, Abruzzo and Marche, which have similar landscapes but are historically divided between two Italies. Then there is the lower coast of Romagna, the Po Delta, the Venetian lagoon between the Po River and the mouth of the Isonzo River, a sea outlet for the Veneto and Friuli plains. On the eastern Adriatic lie the cliffs of the Karst region (Carso) with Trieste; the Istrian peninsula and region; Dalmatia, a historic region made up of a widespread archipelago of more than a thousand islands and skerries, and of a continental area, between the Zadar (Zara) Plain, Ragusa or Dubrovnik, and the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro). The Croatian Littoral, parallel to the archipelago, opens up between Rijeka (Fiume) and the Velebit Canal, known to the Venetians as the Morlach Canal, whereas inland from southern Dalmatia lies Herzegovina, a Balkan land untouched by the sea but Mediterranean in its landscape and therefore an Adriatic region, although the only non-maritime one. Beyond Dalmatia, further south, lies the Montenegrin coastline down to the Bojana River where the coastline dips and the Albanian riviera begins, with its sandy beaches and wetlands. The rocky Karaburun peninsula, the mouths of the Butrint River in Albania, and Corfu, the gateway to the Adriatic, complete the sea. In all, there are a dozen regional segments with specific historical characteristics; segments in which we measure civilizations and empires, states and nations. This was and remains the basis of the Adriatic. However, there is also another, more conceptual Adriatic.
Since 2006, there has been an Adriatic Euroregion, renamed since 2014 as the Adriatic–Ionian Euroregion, which brings together the regional and local authorities of the seven coastal countries. It is an association that includes higher education bodies, municipalities and chambers of commerce. The concept of a geographical network stems from the past even when reference was made to the Gulf of Venice. Undoubtedly, it is a cultural proceeding and model. The very monde méditerranéen, the Mediterranean region, was created first by geographers (Carl Ritter, Friedrich Ratzel, Alfred Philippson) and then by historians (Henri Pirenne, Fernand Braudel), later followed by the concept of a Mediterranean cultural region, a mixture of archaeology, imaginaries, mentalities, customs, lifestyles – a common place.8 For decades, cultural anthropologists have unsuccessfully