The Myth of Dubrovnik (Ragusa): Civic Identity of an Adriatic City-State in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

280 Pages·2022·2.275 MB·English

by  Kunčević Lovro

LOVRO KUNČEVIĆ
THE MYTH OF DUBROVNIK (RAGUSA)
CIVIC IDENTITY OF AN ADRIATIC CITY-STATE IN
THE LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD
Publisher
OGRANAK MATICE HRVATSKE U DUBROVNIKU
BRANCH OF MATICA HRVATSKA IN DUBROVNIK
www.matica-hrvatska-dubrovnik.com
Između polača 28, Dubrovnik
Series
THE PAST AND PRESENT
Book 56
Editor
SLAVICA STOJAN
Language Editor
VESNA BAĆE
Proofreading
RELJA SEFEROVIĆ
Cover, graphich design and layout by
BORIS JOVIĆ (DIVERSA DUBROVNIK)
ISBN 978-953-7784-70-6
CIP
Publishing of this book was supported
by the City of Dubrovnik
Publishing support:
CROATIAN SCIENCE FOUNDATION
(HRVATSKA ZAKLADA ZA ZNANOST)
within the project INTRADA, IP-2018-01-5527
Lovro Kunčević
THE MYTH OF DUBROVNIK
(RAGUSA)
Civic Identity of an Adriatic City-State in
the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
Dubrovnik, 2022.

Acknowledgments
After all the time that has passed in its making, writing acknowledgements
for this study is a serious historical enterprise in itself. Among the many kind
people who made it possible a prominent place belongs to my PhD supervisor,
Gerhard Jaritz, to whom I am profoundly grateful for unwavering support, a
sharp editor’s eye and, above all, immense amounts of academic common-sense,
distributed gently and wisely. Other people from the Department of Medieval
Studies at CEU also played an important role in the genesis of this work.
Throughout the years Katalin Szende kept surprising me with her scholarly
generosity, while János Bak motivated me through his typical awe-inspiring
charisma, known to generations of fellow students. An enormous amount of
work has been done by Judith Rasson who managed to make my pompous style
sound like proper academic English, and, on top of it all, did it amazingly fast
and with characteristic kindness. Last but far from least, I owe my warmest
thanks to Csilla Dobos who ever and again managed to turn cumbersome
bureaucratic issues into a pleasant chat among friends.
Another group of people to whom I owe a great debt are my colleagues
from the Institute for Historical Sciences of CASA in Dubrovnik. Endless
hours-long debates with the late Nenad Vekarić helped me clarify a number
of issues, especially regarding the Ragusan patriciate, while his wise policy of
laissez-faire as a director enabled me to work in ideal conditions. The amazing
altruism combined with ruthless effectiveness characteristic of Ivana Lazarević
saved me literally months of archival and other work. With her erudition
and thoroughness, Nella Lonza remains my most feared reader, for whose
imprimaturs I have developed a true addiction. Finally, I owe an enormous
debt to Zdenka Janeković-Röemer who has followed and shaped this project
from its very inception, and whose influence and works are among the principal
reasons why I decided to work on Ragusa at all.
My profound gratitude also goes to several institutions and their staff which
helped me on my way. The generous funding and support I received from
“The European Doctorate in the Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean”
enabled me to do extensive research in Venice and London, working with
eminent experts such as Gherardo Ortalli and Catherine W. Bracewell. The
scholarship from Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur
Ostmitteleuropas in Leipzig made it possible for me to get a much clearer picture
of the Ragusan tributary status in a comparative perspective. I also owe a great
debt to the kind staff of several archives, such as the Museo Civico Correr and
the State Archives in Venice, but most of all to the staff of the State Archives
in Dubrovnik (Ragusa), who created the most pleasant working ambience I
have ever known.
Last but certainly not least, I owe a great debt to my many friends, who, not
surprisingly, tend to be scholars themselves. Ana and Domagoj Madunić have
suffered the entire PhD process graciously, offering generous support which
ranged from sophisticated scholarly arguments all the way to gastronomic
comforts. Márton Zászkaliczky and Gábor Kármán each provided priceless
Central European perspectives: the first on the intricacies of the Hungarian
constitutionalism and the other on being a tribute-paying state of the Ottoman
Empire. Dóra Bobory, Ana Marinković, Luka Špoljarić, and Trpimir Vedriš
have also, each in her or his own way, helped me significantly and I offer them
my sincere gratitude. Lastly, warmest thanks go to my family, members of which
are not fully certain what this work is about, but are certainly glad it is over.
A note regarding the English edition
This is the revised English version of the book originally published in Croatian
as Mit o Dubrovniku: Diskursi o identitetu renesansnoga grada (HAZU, 2015).
I have decided not to rewrite the text because the argumentation still seems
valid, but only to slightly update the literature with most important works
published in the meantime. I wish to express my profound gratitude to Vesna
Baće for her invaluable help in improving my English style, to Relja Seferović
for his meticulous editorial work, and to Slavica Stojan for the unrelenting
enthusiasm without which this book would have never happened.
Contents
INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................9
The Problem: History of a Collective Auto-portrait ..................................9
The Context: Renaissance Ragusa and Its Patriciate ................................11
Methodology: Identity and Discourse .........................................................18
CHAPTER 1: THE DISCOURSE ON ORIGIN .........................................23
Introduction: The Relevance of Origin in
Medieval and Renaissance Culture ...............................................................23
The Foundation of Ragusa in Medieval Tradition ....................................26
The Foundation of Ragusa in Renaissance Historiography ....................31
Creating an Illustrious Predecessor:
Changes in Epidaurus’ Image .........................................................................37
The Origins of the City and the Origins of the Patriciate .......................51
Roman Past, Slavic Present: Discomfort in Ragusan Culture ................61
Projecting Independence and Christian
Religion into the Founding Moment ...........................................................69
Conclusion: The Ragusan Discourse
on Origins in Comparative Perspective .......................................................73
CHAPTER 2: THE DISCOURSE ON STATEHOOD .............................83
Introduction: The Patriciate and Its Libertas .............................................83
The First Articulations of Independence:
Ragusa and the Hungarian Kingdom...........................................................86
A Most Embarrassing Relationship:
Ragusa as an Ottoman Tributary State ......................................................104
“The Liberty Given by God’’:
Ragusa as a Fully Independent Republic ...................................................121
The “Purest” of Aristocracies:
Representations of the Ragusan Political System ....................................144
Conclusion: The Ragusan Discourse on
Statehood in Comparative Perspective ......................................................162
CHAPTER 3: THE DISCOURSE ON THE FRONTIER .....................169
Introduction: A City “In-between” ............................................................169
Ragusa as a Christian Frontier Guard in the Medieval Tradition ........171
“Shelter, Shield, and Firm Bastion of the Entire Christian Republic’’:
The Representations of Tributary Status
in Ragusan Renaissance Diplomacy ...........................................................177
Infidel Slavery or Defense of Faith: References to
the Frontier in Ragusan Renaissance Culture ..........................................194
Conclusion: The Ragusan Discourse on
the Frontier in Comparative Perspective ...................................................210
CONCLUSION: CIVIC DISCOURSES IN
THE BROADER IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXT .......................................221
EPILOGUE: RAGUSAN ECHOES ...............................................................227
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................243
Archival Sources .............................................................................................243
Published Sources ...........................................................................................245
Secondary Literature .....................................................................................253
The Myth of Dubrovnik (Ragusa) 9
INTRODUCTION
The Problem: History of a Collective Auto-portrait
The goal of this study is to investigate how medieval and Renaissance
Ragusans spoke about themselves as a community, developing a set of recognizable
ways of characterizing their city-state. In other words, it seeks to reconstruct
different discourses of collective identity, i.e., different strategies of collective
self-representation, which emerged in the culture of the Ragusan Republic. In
doing so it draws on a broad array of sources, from historiography, literature,
diplomatic correspondence all the way to civic ritual and visual monuments.
The utterances regarding collective identity found in these sources are analyzed
within a contextualizing framework which addresses their authors, the specific
circumstances of their creation, and the purposes they served.
The chronological scope of this study covers a period from the mid-fourteenth
until the early seventeenth century. Of course, like any other historiographical
delineation, this one is somewhat arbitrary. The mid-fourteenth century has been
chosen as a starting point since it was a period when Ragusa attained factual
independence and developed its peculiar aristocratic constitution, both of which
had profound impacts on its self-representation. The early seventeenth century
has been set as an ending point not only because it marked the beginning of the
city’s economic and political decline, but also because it attested the profound
cultural transformation under the aegis of the Catholic Reformation. The
two and half centuries in between were an epoch of unprecedented political
importance, economic prosperity, and cultural flourishing for Ragusa – the
city’s “golden age” – and thus seem a natural focus for this study.1
1 One important caveat has to be made regarding the chronological label “Renaissance” which
appears frequently in this work. It is used in an extremely loose – strictly speaking, even mistaken
– manner, to designate the period from the second half of the fourteenth until the early seventeenth
century. Far from implying any revolutionary understanding of these two and half centuries, the
label is simply a matter of convenience, an attempt to avoid the cumbersome expression “late medieval
and Renaissance” which should be used instead.
10 Lovro Kunčević
The various utterances made regarding Ragusa during this period can be
classified into three major discourses on identity. Defined by specific themes and
a characteristic group of commonplaces (topoi), these three discourses are: the
discourse on origin, statehood, and frontier. In other words, in the vast majority
of cases when Ragusans spoke about their city-state they did one of the following:
they either thematized its origin and formative first centuries, reflected on its
political independence and republican constitution, or described its perilous
position and specific missions on the frontier with Orthodoxy and Islam.
Such a threefold division of identity discourses provides the organizational
principle of this study: each of the three chapters is dedicated to one of the
major discourses, following its history in roughly chronological order. The
first chapter discusses the various utterances concerning the origin of Ragusa,
the ways in which the image of the city’s foundation changed through time.
Since pre-modern historical consciousness saw an origin as an epistemologically
privileged moment which revealed in nuce all the essential traits of a community,
the young Republic took great care to re-fashion its beginnings in order to
suit its contemporary concerns. Thus, the chapter reconstructs the creation of
the prestigious Classical past for the city and its patrician elite, as well as the
attempts to legitimize and glorify its independence and Catholic orthodoxy
by projecting them back into the time of the foundation. The second chapter
is dedicated to the discourse on statehood, the various historical myths and
theoretical propositions regarding the independence and the political system of
the city-state. On the one hand, it follows the gradual articulation of the claim
that Ragusa was a fully independent respublica, a status achieved through a
profound redefinition of its constitutional ties with the Hungarian Kingdom
and the Ottoman Empire. On the other, it follows the ways in which Ragusans
spoke about their aristocratic governance, usually thematized through apologetic
references to the prudent rule of the patriciate, the wise institutional system, and
the social harmony of the city. The third chapter is dedicated to the discourse
on the frontier, investigating how Renaissance authors commented on the
fact that their city was situated at the borderlands of religions, empires, even
civilizations. It analyses the immensely influential image of Ragusa as Catholic
frontier guard facing the Ottoman “infidels” and the Orthodox “schismatics,”
typically used in the city’s diplomacy. However, besides addressing the official
panegyric rhetoric, it also reconstructs less celebratory references to the city’s
behavior on the frontier, especially the fierce but hushed debate regarding its
close cooperation with the Ottomans, characteristic of historiography and
literature. The conclusion of this study considers the three civic discourses
within their broader ideological context. On the one hand, it investigates