NON BENE PRO TOTO LIBERTAS VENDITUR AURO reads an inscription on the Lovrjenac Fortress, built into the crags along the coast of Dubrovnik, Croatia. “Liberty,” it loosely translates, “can’t be sold for all the gold in the world.” For 10 centuries or more, the city prided itself on the exercise of a certain, inalienable independence, one of many favours bestowed upon it by nothing less than a divine force. Along the Dubrovnik promontory, the Sun and the sea glimmer so captivatingly, so dazzlingly, one almost approaches it as if drawn towards a mirage. One imagines it 600 years ago, in the full flush of its riches and greatness, a beacon of hot, stony, amber iridescence that one was drawn towards almost inexorably. This allure, too, must have seemed divinely bestowed
This ancient city was founded in two parts. On the coast lived the Roman refugees from Epidaurum, today’s Cavtat; slightly inland, at the foot of Mount Srdj, lived the Slavs. In the 11th century, the canal separating them was filled and Dubrovnik became a consolidated settlement, positioned perfectly to act as a go-between for Middle Eastern and European traders. This gave it considerable leverage against the roll call of empires who wished to claim it as their own. In the 12th century alone, the Byzantines, Normans, and Venetians all asserted their right to Dubrovnik. They were hardly the last to do so. Each time, the city played coy, made whatever deals it needed to make, in order to maintain its posture as a functional city-state with its own currency, its own laws, and its own government.
It became known for some time as Ragusa, after its founding name of Rausa, but the name Dubrovnik came into wide usage after the 14th century, distinguishing the city from the Republic of Ragusa, of which Dubrovnik was the prized seat of its government, its beating heart. The name derives from a root word meaning “oakwood”; Dubrovnik is a territory of forests and trees, greenery emboldened by a hefty helping of sunlight. Picturesque parks around the city encapsulate its dazzling natural endowment, including the Velika Forest Park in Lapad, on the outskirts of which one can now find a constellation of hotels.
Trade was how Dubrovnik enriched itself; smart diplomacy was how it secured those riches. Silver and lead mined from nearby Bosnia and Serbia was shipped off to other Mediterranean trading posts: Genoa, Pisa and Venice in Italy, as well as cities and ports across France and Spain. Meanwhile, the Ragusan authorities began signing a series of trade deals, safeguarding their territory and ensuring the hundreds of boats in the Republic’s fleet could keep shipping out. Inevitably, the boats came back toting money, goods, books, even languages. These were the early days of Dubrovnik’s cosmopolitanism.
Only a small city-state, Dubrovnik relied on the machinations of seafaring to expand its cultural and artistic aspirations, with itsItalian influence being of particular importance. Given the almost impossible fact that there was not a single printing press in Dubrovnik until the late 18th century, all knowledge—transported in the form of books—came from Italian printed material. During the Renaissance, this led to a brief but significant flourishing in Dubrovnik across all the areas one would expect. The city became a hub for Latinists, humanists, scholars and poets. Great Florentine and Venetian painters were sent for, housed and patronised at the expense of the government. Italian tutors came at the behest of the Ragusan patriciate. The Petrarchan sonnet turned a generation of Ragusan literati into tormented love poets. “I gave to you my word so true to serve you and all my livelong days / and after death be joined to you; o may you e’er fare well, my love!” wrote Džore Držić, one 15th-century poet. Another exemplary work came from a town clerk who, bored at work, scribbled some lines into the margins of one of his statute books. “Now I am left amid the ocean,” he wrote, “the waves soak me, while the rain pours down furiously from the skies.”
All this melancholy seems peculiar amidst the beauty of Dubrovnik’s sea and skies, but if there has ever been a key to the Balkan temperament it is that certain contemplative melancholy of theirs, that sense of circumspection. Ruin and torment were certainly not unknown to Dubrovnik. Visitors to the city will no doubt notice the hillsides dotted with abandoned hotels, remnants of stone walls, and old castles. Dubrovnik has been sieged by Saracens, again by the Serbs, devastated by fires, and attacked from land and sea. (One doesn’t erect those titanic walls just for show.) Another lesser-known inscription from the Lovrjenac Fortress, removed but recorded in the archives, reads: “If a new divine force should come upon us, may these walls have the Typhon.”
Dubrovnik has been rebuilt several times, most completely after the earthquake of 1667 and its attendant disasters: a tsunami that inundated the port and a weeks-long fire fanned by constant winds. Though Dubrovnik’s record of artistic activity now looks sallow, this is likely because much of its heritage was destroyed. Once, there were 7500 books in the Franciscan library and 150 polyptychs adorning the altars of its churches. Then came 1667. What the earthquake didn’t crumble, the fire surely finished off: the books were destroyed and only 15 polyptychs still remain.
In many ways, Dubrovnik’s is a rise and fall more or less typical of any erstwhile power, and indeed, it was just that—a great powerhouse of trade and cosmopolitanism. Its peak was between the 12th and the 14th centuries, when its ships sailed regularly to and from other Mediterranean ports, its fortresses were erected, and Venetian, Croatian, Latin, Albanian and Italian could all be heard in the streets. Seven centuries later, Dubrovnik appears to be on the upswing again. Millions are coming every year—by plane, by boat, by bus, by foot—to inspect the golden mirage themselves. Now, the city is a kind of multinational hub, where crowds gaze in stone-faced wonder, where modernity’s sleek, oblong forms compete with the patterned, textured stonework of its Baroque past. Everyone wants a piece of what Lord Byron called “The Pearl of the Adriatic.” Another poet, a 16th-century Dubrovnik local, put it even more lavishly: “And fortunate is he / And most great his honour / Who spends his life faithfully / Beneath the flag of Dubrovnik.”
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