History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic

Adriatic is a privileged point of research and reflection.

      Unlike other more or less open seas, the Adriatic can be perceived as a cultural area (as in A Companion to Mediterranean History) if examined as a whole and if every single detail is connected: Venice, Ravenna, Split, Bari, Ragusa, cathedrals, places of worship, saints, artistic figures, literary figures, from Dante to Byron to Leopardi, to musical inspiration. There is a cultural history around which the Adriatic finds its unity. The sea thus becomes something more than a territorial medium, which has been noted by certain pioneering scholars. Exploring the globe and investigating encyclopaedia entries, there are few seas that manage to retrace the idea of themselves in terms of a culture, even a plural culture; these are not found at the edge of the Indian and Pacific oceans, nor is it the case of the Chinese seas (Eastern China and Southern China seas). On an Atlantic scale, it is not yet the case of the widespread fragmented Caribbean world. Naturally, there is the Mediterranean, which is inevitably constantly idealized given the importance of its history on a world scale. Then there is the Aegean Sea with its classical age and insular Greekness; the Baltic Sea involving the medieval Hanseatic League; the North Sea and its many individual seafaring populations, its coastal populations and languages. And the Adriatic which is, in this perspective, more than a sea; it could even be considered a memory.

The history of the Adriatic I am proposing here draws on all these underlying perspectives and expresses the conviction that the Adriatic is not only a sea but a sea region and a historical region of the Mediterranean and of Europe. Naturally, the Adriatic here is interpreted in its longue durée. It is a concept of history that lies in between, or as an alternative to, the canonized history of Italy and the history of south-eastern Europe. It is the second book to take on this task. There is only one earlier study, the formidable Histoire de l’Adriatique, edited by Pierre Cabanes, a very commendable work of which the importance amongst the historiographies that examine the Adriatic has not been fully understood.¹⁴ This second vision of the Adriatic past aims to be more compact in its narration, even though the time is actually ripe for a large history of the Adriatic in two or three volumes, edited by an international group of historians, as the recent AdriAtlas has suggested, for a wide post-Braudelian, truly comparative and comprehensive study of each Adriatic segment, perhaps examining a specific century.¹⁵ This volume is a pared-down synthesis, but has the purpose of providing readings of the historical and cultural layers that can be traced as much in the real Adriatic of today as in an Adriatic civilization that is perhaps not yet recognized but nonetheless exists. And, like any synthesis, this is also the proposal of a historical canon divided into periods, events and issues to consider and explore as a specific Mediterranean history.

Notes

      1  1 Ch. Yriarte, Les bords de l’Adriatique et le Montenegro (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1878); A. v. Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, Die Adria. Land- und Seefahrten im Bereiche des Adriatischen Meeres (Vienna: A. Hartleben, 1883); F. H. Jackson, The Shores of the Adriatic: The Austrian Side (London: John Murray, 1908); R. Hichens, The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople (New York: The Century, 1913); H. Hodgkinson, The Adriatic Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955).

      2  2 S. Anselmi, Adriatico. Studi di storia, secoli XIV–XIX (Ancona: Clua, 1991); E. Turri (ed.), Adriatico mare d’Europa. La geografia e la storia (Bologna: Rolo Banca, 1999); E. Turri and D. Zumiani (eds), Adriatico mare d’Europa. L’economia e la storia (Bologna: Rolo Banca, 2001); L’Adriatico. Mare di scambi tra Oriente e Occidente (Pordenone: Istituto regionale studi europei Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2003); E. Cocco and E. Minardi (eds), Immaginare l’Adriatico. Contributi alla riscoperta sociale di uno spazio di frontiera (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2007); M. Moroni, Tra le due sponde dell’Adriatico. Rapporti economici, culturali e devozionali in età moderna (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2010); P. Cabanes (ed.), Histoire de l’Adriatique (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

      3  3 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972–3).

      4  4 P. Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); F. Fiori, Un mare. Orizzonte adriatico (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2005).

      5  5 G. Bosetti, De Trieste à Dubrovnik. Une ligne de fracture de l’Europe (Grenoble: University of Stendhal, 2006); E. Ivetic, Un confine nel Mediterraneo. L’Adriatico orientale tra Italia e Slavia 1300–1900 (Rome: Viella, 2014).

      6  6 P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 9–25.

      7  7 I. Morris, ‘Mediterraneanization’, Mediterranean Historical Review 18(2) (2003): 30–55.

      8  8 W. V. Harris (ed.), Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

      9  9 J. A. Marino (ed.), Early Modern History and the Social Sciences: Testing the Limits of Braudel’s Mediterranean (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2002).

      10 10 G. Cassi, Il mare Adriatico. Sua funzione attraverso i tempi (Milan: Hoepli, 1915); R. Cessi, La Repubblica di Venezia e il problema adriatico (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1953); N. Falaschini, S. Graciotti and S. Sconocchia (eds), Homo Adriaticus. Identità culturale e autocoscienza attraverso i secoli (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1998).

      11 11 B. Klein and G. Mackenthun (eds), Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2004); P. N. Miller (ed.), The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013).

      12 12 P. Horden and S. Kinoshita (eds), A Companion to Mediterranean History (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

      13 13 D. Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); M. O’Connell and E. R. Dursteler, The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); M. Dabag, D. Haller, N. Jaspert and A. Lichtenberger (eds), Handbuch der Mediterranistik: systematische Mittelmeerforschung und disziplinäre Zugänge (Paderborn: Fink, 2015).

      14 14 Cabanes (ed.), Histoire de l’Adriatique.

      15 15 Y. Marion and F. Tassaux, AdriAtlas et l’histoire de l’espace adriatique du VIe s. a.C. au VIIIe s. p.C. (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2015).

ONE A Minimal Mediterranean

       The maritime territory

      The name ‘Adriatic’ derives from Adria, a little-known city located at the end of what the Greeks once called the Ionian Gulf (Jonois kolpos). The name Adriatike talassa, or the Adriatic Sea, was introduced from the fourth century bc, 2,500 years ago. In the Roman world it was referred to as Adriaticum Mare, and also Mare Superum, as opposed to the Tyrrhenian Sea, which was known as the Mare Inferum, both situated within Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean. Ptolemy is accredited with the first descriptions of the oikoumene, the inhabited known world in the Mediterranean perspective. This was a geography formed in about 150 ad in which the Adriatic appears as a Mediterranean gulf, the Sinus Adriaticus. The term Mare Adriatico was frequently used in the early Middle Ages, while in thirteenth-century documents it is accompanied by, or sometimes substituted with, the term Golfo di Vinegia, the Gulf of Venice. In the conventional cartography of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, there is a double reference to the Gulf of Venice once known as the Adriatic Sea, which continued until the decline of the Republic of St Mark in 1797. In Croat, Serb and Bosnian, it is called Jadransko more, in Slovenian Jadransko morje, and in Albanian Deti Adriatik. In common sayings and also in the literary traditions of the southern Slavic populations, the Adriatic is known as the ‘azure’ sea, as opposed to the ‘white’ Aegean and the Black Sea.

The Adriatic is a gulf in the Mediterranean which extends for 783 kilometres between the Gulf of Trieste and the 39°45’ north parallel, which passes through Santa Maria di Leuca, Corfu (from Cape Kephali to Cape Karagol), and the mouth of the Butrint River in Albania.