History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic

At a certain point, in the 1930s, hydrofoils, a futuristic expression of the Adriatic to come, and the old vessels that gave the impression of a continuing Middle Ages could be seen at Zadar at the same time. The image was the same in 1940 from Fano to Senigallia, Šibenik and Ragusa: a line-up of prows, a forest of rigging, faces of sailors and fishermen; each prow painted with two eyes, the last signs of an ancient tradition.

There existed, therefore, a koinè and a tradition that we must recognize and that undoubtedly united the Adriatic world of the past. It nonetheless did not ignore the diversity between each individual segment of shore when considering their maritime, economic and social dimensions. In other words, there was participation in the overall maritime world of the Adriatic, which was one of the most maritime seas in the Mediterranean, a maritime transport territory. From ancient times, the east coast was more seafaring: from Trieste to the Bay of Kotor, a multitude of small settlements lying on the sea characterized the jagged coastline and the islands, with respect to the west coast and the present-day Albanian coast, which is mainly uninhabited. It might be said there were active and passive shores when considering their maritime nature. The Venetian lagoon holds its own special place, largely inhabited and part of an Adriatic world from the late Middle Ages. It is therefore unsurprising that the Venetian lagoons, Istria and Dalmatia were linked by a common maritime synergy for 2,000 years. It was a transversal dynamism that also occurred in Apulia with respect to the Albanian and Greek coasts from antiquity to the nineteenth century.

      It seems as though for centuries everyone knew one another in this Adriatic conceived and perceived as a maritime world. Consulting the notary deeds of the sea cities and the coastal towns, there are constant references to peoples on the opposite coast. A Schiavone was as much at home in Ancona and Pescara as in Venice. The term ‘Schiavone’ does not only mean Slav; it was also used to refer to people who came from Schiavonia, a name used in the western Adriatic to refer to Dalmatia. Dalmatia and Illyria were terms used in European geography in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. It was in Illyria that Sebastian and Viola, the protagonists of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, were shipwrecked. Nevertheless, for both coastal peoples, as for all coastal populations, the sea represented the route to a universal maritime world, to the Mediterranean and then on to the oceans. Awareness of the oceans began from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when Dutch, British and Nordic ships manned by sailors who spoke non-Mediterranean languages became a common occurrence, especially along the east coast. If antiquity and the Middle Ages necessarily had a Mediterranean boundary in the Adriatic, the Modern and Contemporary Ages reflected the oceanic dimension, therefore a worldwide prospect, even though on a local scale.

This Adriatic, which might be seen as traditional, has been replaced in the last two centuries by an increasingly scientific Adriatic, conceived as a well-defined maritime space, an ecological system or organism. The earliest maps of the Adriatic, which represented the sea as a symbolic concept, are found in the late medieval portolan maps. The Adriatic is clearly represented in Fra Mauro’s Mappamondo (c. 1450) in the Marciana Library in Venice, in the maps of the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius from Anvers (1570), and especially in the magnificent map of Europe by Mercator (Gerhard Kremer from Rupelmonde in Flanders) in 1554.¹⁴ In the late fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun portrayed the Adriatic as the Gulf of Venice, while in the sixteenth century the Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis showed the Adriatic as a fundamental segment of the Mediterranean. The famous Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli provided a detailed description of the Adriatic coasts and the eighteenth-century hinterland. The great French engineer and cartographer Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré introduced a scientific approach in the calculation of the distances and the depth of the sea in his map of the coast, from Trieste to the Bay of Kotor, a reconnaissance carried out between 1806 and 1809, one of the first in the world.¹⁵

      The entire Adriatic was systematically measured in 1826–1827 by a joint scientific expedition of the Kingdom of Naples, Great Britain and the Austrian Empire. Other Austrian and Italian expeditions followed in the late nineteenth century. The data collected were elaborated in the nautical maps of the hydrographic institute of the Italian navy in Genoa, which has been active since 1872, and focused on the Apennine area of the Adriatic. The Austrian (Austro-Hungarian) institute in Pula (Pola), active since 1866, conducted studies on the eastern part of the sea. This was the situation up until 1918. The Austrian work was then taken up by the Yugoslav navy hydrographic institute in Split which operated from 1923, and from 1991 by the Croatian navy.

Since the eighteenth century, the Adriatic has attracted scientists, fascinating scholars such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Vitalino Donati and Alberto Fortis. The first Zoologia adriatica was published in Bassano in 1792 by Abbot Giuseppe Olivi.¹⁶ Regular study of marine biology was established during the nineteenth century. It was formally adopted first by private initiatives or local associations, then after 1860 by the coastal states which decided to incorporate the sea as a regular feature of the land territory. The Civic Museum of Natural History was founded in Trieste in 1852, and in 1874 the Adriatic Society of Natural Science. In 1869, the governing heads of Austro-Hungary promoted a commission for the scientific study of the Adriatic, and in Trieste an institute of hydrobiology funded by the monarchy was set up in 1875. In 1891, this was matched in Rovinj in Istria by a zoological research institute of the Berlin aquarium, owned in fact by Germany. Of considerable importance in the scientific history of the Adriatic are the four joint expeditions in 1911–1914 by the Austrian navy ship Najade and the Italian naval ship Ciclope, which studied the physical and natural features of the Adriatic, conducting numerous geological, hydrological, biological and marine zoological surveys. In addition to the stations of Trieste and Rovinj (which was Italo-Germanic from 1930 to 1945), in 1930 the Yugoslav Institute of Oceanography was founded in Split. After the Second World War, oceanography grew exponentially on a world scale, equal to the exploitation of maritime resources. The geological and geophysical features of the Adriatic were further studied for the purposes of the utilization of natural gas. From the 1960s, the Italian National Research Council, often with the collaboration of the navy and in line with international research projects aimed at investigating the Mediterranean, has intensified studies in the Adriatic. There have been numerous expeditions with international collaboration. From the 1970s, the objective to monitor known areas – the closed seas, such as the Mediterranean and the Adriatic – was intensified. Today, the Adriatic is monitored transversally by national and international institutes in a research network which includes geology, seismology, climatology, ecology and biological oceanography.¹⁷

The progressively scientific approach to the Adriatic has uncovered many features of the sea, and there are few mysteries left. Distances and depths are measured by Global Positioning System (GPS), and there are regular weather forecasts in real time. It is now generally accepted that the sea is a natural and geological system, a living organism put to the test by human activity. At the same time, the morphological transformation of the seabeds in the upper Adriatic, the pollution due to fertilizers, the climate changes to the marina flora and fauna, the increasingly dramatic fate of Venice, anthropization, the total urbanization of the Italian coast that has created an Adriatic city 1,400 kilometres long, all testify to the fragility of this system.¹⁸ So-called ‘littoralization’, demographic and economic clustering along the coasts, leading to their disfigurement, the widespread banalization of seaside non-places and the commercial exploitation of every point with a sea view are now a fact of life. The geographic, scientific, economic and ecological finiteness of the Adriatic is now clear. Today, this is the first and often univocal perception of the Adriatic world which, in the collective imagination, covers the meanings and the symbologies that the sea has had in the past. Yet, in regard to all this, the history of the Adriatic as a concept, research and narrative has become a route we can no longer ignore in order to rediscover and therefore rethink this sea.

Notes

      1  1 Limits of Oceans and Seas (Monte Carlo: International Hydrographic Organization, 1953), 17; ‘Jadransko more’, Pomorska enciklopedia 6 (Zagreb: Jugoslavenski leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 1985), 135–214.

      2  2 W. Cavazza, F. M. Roure, W. Spakman, G. M. Stampfli and