For Fernand Braudel, the early modernadriaticappeared, as it did on Venetian maps, as the Golfo di Venezia. Venice, ruling also over the Dalmatian coast and the Ionian Islands, controlled shipping on the Adriatic and made the Adriatic into the Venetian basis for commercial activity all over the eastern Mediterranean. Braudel also credited to Venice the establishment of an Italian cultural sphere of influence around the Adriatic: “The gulf was Venetian, of course, but in the sixteenth century it was more than this; it was the sphere of a triumphant Italian culture. The civilization of the peninsula wove a brilliant, concentrated web along the east coast of the sea.”Footnote 1 Braudel, carrying out his research in the 1930s and publishing in 1949, might have been well aware that the Italian trans-Adriatic presence, even when triumphant—as in the case of Mussolini's occupation of Dalmatia—might not be something to celebrate as brilliant. Furthermore, reconsidering the early modern Adriatic, one might today wonder whether the term “Italian”—with its modern national meaning—should be used with caution in describing early modern cultural influence. Indeed, one might simply suggest that Venetian power on the Adriatic was the vehicle of Venetian culture—not Italian culture—on the Adriatic, an early modern imperial rather than a modern national idiom, and present even at Ragusa, which was independent of Venice.
Braudel, in any event, argues for a cultural unity that transcended linguistic, political, and religious differences on the early modern Adriatic, and that unity prevailed to some degree right up until the abolition of the Republic of San Marco in 1797. The second half of the twentieth century, on the other hand, witnessed an emphatically divided Adriatic, which became one of the geopolitical boundaries between Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the age of the Cold War. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” declaimed Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in the 1946 Iron Curtain speech, using the Adriatic as one of the markers of European separation. Trieste appeared as the hinge of a deeply divided sea with Communist Yugoslavia to the east and post-Fascist Italy to the west. Hence, when Braudel published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, in 1949, Adriatic unity was no longer evident; it could only be the object of historical research or regional nostalgia. The three papers under discussion here, by Dominique Reill, Borut Klabjan, and Igor Tchoukarine, all fit into the intervening period between the abolition of the Venetian Republic of San Marco in 1797 and the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II. They are also all concerned with the tensions that gradually and eventually took the Adriatic region from early modern unity to modern conflict and division. That division would be both political and cultural, with nationalism especially playing a large role in producing perspectives of embattled difference.
Dominique Reill, from the very first lines of her article, reminds us that the conception of the modern Mediterranean was not just a matter of geography, economics, or society, but of poetry, sentiment, and fantasy. She cites Francesco Dall'Ongaro's 1842 poem “The Origin of the Bora,” whose title referred to the powerful Bora wind of the Adriatic. Hence, the issues of climate, environment, and geography that shaped Braudel's material Mediterranean could be recomposed as Romantic poetry in the nineteenth century. Through the figure of Dall'Ongaro, Reill describes a small but hugely significant Adriatic shift in perspective from Venice to Trieste in the early nineteenth century. Both cities now belonged to the Habsburg monarchy, but in Venice, where Dall'Ongaro worked as a young priest in the splendid quattrocento Renaissance temple of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, he still lived within a world governed by the early modern perspective of San Marco, remembering Venice as the ruler of an Adriatic empire. In Trieste, established as a Habsburg free port in 1719, Dall'Ongaro would become partly liberated from the Venetian perspective and, with the founding of the journal Favilla, would become engaged with a modern nineteenth-century perspective on the Adriatic as a multinational maritime space. Moving just a huntred miles to the east, from Venice to Trieste, in the 1830s, Dall'Ongaro found himself more balanced in his perspective between the two coasts of the sea, and both his poetry and his politics now followed a sentimental course of complex reconciliation between Italians and Illyrians, under the aegis of Habsburg rule.
Striking in Reill's discussion is the power of Venetian ideas, and a Venetian conception of the Adriatic, half a century after the demise of Venice. One should note that it was Paolo Sarpi who provided the content and inspiration for Dall'Ongaro's Bora poem and that his 1847 drama The Dalmatians, which created so much bad feeling toward the poet, was the product of a mythology that dated back to the demise of the republic in 1797. It was at that very moment, in both Venice and Dalmatia, that the legend of the loyal Dalmatians was born—so loyal that they were supposedly the only subjects ready to fight against Napoleon on behalf of the republic. That same loyalty was further dramatized in the tale of the lowering of the flag of San Marco at Perast, near Kotor (today in Montenegro) when a Dalmatian captain supposedly orated in a spirit of nostalgia (and in Venetian dialect) about the Venetian-Dalmatian connection: “ti con nu, nu con ti” (you with us, we with you).
In the nineteenth century, the Habsburgs would seek to adapt this proverbial Dalmatian loyalty to their own purposes, and the poet Dall'Ongaro would use such themes for literary purposes in his drama The Dalmatians. It is interesting to observe that the legacy of San Marco was still powerful during the Romantic decades of the early nineteenth century. Relevant to this subject is the recently published volume Nostalgia: Memoria e passaggi tra le sponde dell'Adriatico [Nostalgia: Memory and Passages between the Shores of the Adriatic], edited by Rolf Petri (Rome, 2010), and Reill's essay may also be read with interest in the context of David Laven, Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815–1835 (Oxford, 2002) and Konrad Clewing, Staatlichkeit und nationale Identitätsbildung: Dalmatien in Vormärz und Revolution (Munich, 2001).
Reill poses the question of what it meant to lay claim to the Adriatic in the modern age. In the early modern Mediterranean world, Venice could claim the sea by virtue of possessing a fleet that dominated commerce on the sea, together with strategic ports around the sea, from Venice itself to Dalmatia and the Ionian islands. The Habsburgs sought to construct a similar claim to the Adriatic through maritime commercial domination from Trieste, but in the modern world, territorial claims were more and more linked to national populations residing on the shores of the sea—and not necessarily those populations that possessed naval or commercial power.
Borut Klabjan's article on the “Scramble for Adria” again stresses the importance of early modern Venice, when he notes that the lapsing of the republic created a “power vacuum in the Adriatic space.” There was not too much scrambling during the nineteenth century, as Habsburg territorial rule remained relatively stable, with Italian national rule emerging on the western coast, and an Ottoman presence still maintained in Albania. The shifting of Venice from Habsburg to Italian rule in 1866 was hardly a scramble, though during the Balkan Wars in 1912 something like a scramble emerged as Serbia and Montenegro sought an outlet to the sea, and Albania was provoked to declare its independence. Klabjan, however, also describes the scrambled “discourses of appropriation” with which different national communities laid claim to lands along the sea, and therefore also claimed some social, economic, political, and (at least) symbolic share of the sea itself. Not just the Italian and the Habsburg states, but also Croatian and Slovene communities within the Habsburg monarchy staked a claim, and, considering the very tiny Slovene Adriatic coast today, one might be surprised to learn from Klabjan's research about such Slovene journals as Jadranska Zarja (Adriatic Dawn), Jadranka (Adriatic Woman), and Jadranski Almanah (Adriatic Almanac).
Echoing the poetry of Dall'Ongaro from the 1840s, the Slovene poet Simon Jenko composed in the 1860s a poem about the Adriatic Sea, celebrating in nostalgic poetry and historical fantasy a former age in which the Adriatic belonged to the Slavs. Klabjan shows how the claim of the South Slavs to the sea became more generally a claim of the Slavs, such that even the remote and land-locked Czechs considered themselves to be in some sense Adriatic, as they established a commercial presence in Trieste during the Habsburg period. Klabjan notes that, even after World War I, independent Czechoslovakia continued to claim some rights to an Adriatic outlet as guaranteed by the postwar treaties. What clearly scrambled the discourses of appropriation in the nineteenth century were the competing claims of actual states and of national communities, a competition that arose from the problematic question of what constituted a maritime claim in the modern age. Klabjan notes that in the generation before World War I, the Triple Alliance of Italy, the Habsburg monarchy, and the German empire, could be said to have collectively controlled the Adriatic, inasmuch as Italy and the Habsburgs controlled most of the coast between them.
Yet, the tensions within that allied control were considerable, as related in Luciano Monzali's recent study The Italians of Dalmatia: From Italian Unification to World War I (Toronto, 2009; Florence, 2004). Monzali suggests that Article VII of the alliance, promising compensations to preserve the balance of power in southeastern Europe, sustained Italian interest in the possibility of territorial adjustments on the Adriatic, which eventually broke the alliance during World War I and led to fierce contestation over Dalmatia at the peace conference. As for the Germans who claimed a place on the Adriatic through the Triple Alliance of the late nineteenth century, their moment in the sun would come in the later twentieth century with the establishment of FKK nudist beaches for German vacationers all along the Dalmatian coast. There was also the Nazi Adriatic—Adriatische Küstenland—from 1943 to 1945.
Igor Tchoukarine's article focuses entirely on the interwar period and describes the history of the Adriatic Guard, a Yugoslav association of citizens mobilized in support of their government's presence on the sea. Such an association would certainly not have existed were it not for the fact that the Dalmatian coast was contested at the peace conference and that Italy still maintained a revisionist interest in Dalmatia. With 180,000 members in the 1930s, the very existence of the Adriatic Guard clearly responded to the Wilsonian notion of democratic national self-determination, here peculiarly applied to the sea. Tchoukarine notes that the Adriatic Guard was self-consciously Yugoslav, claiming to represent “all of us, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” in relation to the Adriatic, and was therefore susceptible to the same national tensions that gnawed at the interwar Yugoslav state as a whole. In fact, the public—as represented by the Adriatic Guard—was apparently more dedicated to Yugoslavia's Adriatic interests than the Yugoslav state itself, and Tchoukarine points out that the Belgrade government was not inclined to invest heavily in the roads that would connect the sea more closely to inland Yugoslavia. At the same time, the Yugoslav commitment of the Adriatic Guard was also complicated by regionally Dalmatian and nationally Croatian interests on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, while all of those overlapping perspectives jostled one another within the same citizens’ association.
Tchoukarine describes the dramatic moment in 1932 when Italian-Slavic tensions in Dalmatia led to the destruction of the sculpted Venetian lions at Trogir, the emblems of the Republic of San Marco which had ceased to exist in 1797. The effort required to destroy these stone monuments suggests the strangely enduring potency of their early modern Venetian symbolism, even as modern political movements sought to define a modern perspective on the Adriatic Sea. In Timothy Snyder's study The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (Yale, 2004), the author analyzes how modern nations emerged from the territory and population of the defunct Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ceased to exist in 1795, just two years before the abolition of the Venetian Republic of San Marco. The articles of Reill, Klabjan, and Tchoukarine point toward a similar project, the analysis of how modern nationalism reshaped the early modern imperium of San Marco—but, in this case, the question was not just territorial. In the case of the Adriatic, historians must try to understand how modern political forces and ideologies reshaped a region while operating not just on land, but also in the more fluid circumstances of a body of water.
You have
Access
For Fernand Braudel, the early modernadriaticappeared, as it did on Venetian maps, as the Golfo di Venezia. Venice, ruling also over the Dalmatian coast and the Ionian Islands, controlled shipping on the Adriatic and made the Adriatic into the Venetian basis for commercial activity all over the eastern Mediterranean. Braudel also credited to Venice the establishment of an Italian cultural sphere of influence around the Adriatic: “The gulf was Venetian, of course, but in the sixteenth century it was more than this; it was the sphere of a triumphant Italian culture. The civilization of the peninsula wove a brilliant, concentrated web along the east coast of the sea.”Footnote 1 Braudel, carrying out his research in the 1930s and publishing in 1949, might have been well aware that the Italian trans-Adriatic presence, even when triumphant—as in the case of Mussolini's occupation of Dalmatia—might not be something to celebrate as brilliant. Furthermore, reconsidering the early modern Adriatic, one might today wonder whether the term “Italian”—with its modern national meaning—should be used with caution in describing early modern cultural influence. Indeed, one might simply suggest that Venetian power on the Adriatic was the vehicle of Venetian culture—not Italian culture—on the Adriatic, an early modern imperial rather than a modern national idiom, and present even at Ragusa, which was independent of Venice.
Braudel, in any event, argues for a cultural unity that transcended linguistic, political, and religious differences on the early modern Adriatic, and that unity prevailed to some degree right up until the abolition of the Republic of San Marco in 1797. The second half of the twentieth century, on the other hand, witnessed an emphatically divided Adriatic, which became one of the geopolitical boundaries between Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the age of the Cold War. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” declaimed Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in the 1946 Iron Curtain speech, using the Adriatic as one of the markers of European separation. Trieste appeared as the hinge of a deeply divided sea with Communist Yugoslavia to the east and post-Fascist Italy to the west. Hence, when Braudel published The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, in 1949, Adriatic unity was no longer evident; it could only be the object of historical research or regional nostalgia. The three papers under discussion here, by Dominique Reill, Borut Klabjan, and Igor Tchoukarine, all fit into the intervening period between the abolition of the Venetian Republic of San Marco in 1797 and the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II. They are also all concerned with the tensions that gradually and eventually took the Adriatic region from early modern unity to modern conflict and division. That division would be both political and cultural, with nationalism especially playing a large role in producing perspectives of embattled difference.
Dominique Reill, from the very first lines of her article, reminds us that the conception of the modern Mediterranean was not just a matter of geography, economics, or society, but of poetry, sentiment, and fantasy. She cites Francesco Dall'Ongaro's 1842 poem “The Origin of the Bora,” whose title referred to the powerful Bora wind of the Adriatic. Hence, the issues of climate, environment, and geography that shaped Braudel's material Mediterranean could be recomposed as Romantic poetry in the nineteenth century. Through the figure of Dall'Ongaro, Reill describes a small but hugely significant Adriatic shift in perspective from Venice to Trieste in the early nineteenth century. Both cities now belonged to the Habsburg monarchy, but in Venice, where Dall'Ongaro worked as a young priest in the splendid quattrocento Renaissance temple of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, he still lived within a world governed by the early modern perspective of San Marco, remembering Venice as the ruler of an Adriatic empire. In Trieste, established as a Habsburg free port in 1719, Dall'Ongaro would become partly liberated from the Venetian perspective and, with the founding of the journal Favilla, would become engaged with a modern nineteenth-century perspective on the Adriatic as a multinational maritime space. Moving just a huntred miles to the east, from Venice to Trieste, in the 1830s, Dall'Ongaro found himself more balanced in his perspective between the two coasts of the sea, and both his poetry and his politics now followed a sentimental course of complex reconciliation between Italians and Illyrians, under the aegis of Habsburg rule.
Striking in Reill's discussion is the power of Venetian ideas, and a Venetian conception of the Adriatic, half a century after the demise of Venice. One should note that it was Paolo Sarpi who provided the content and inspiration for Dall'Ongaro's Bora poem and that his 1847 drama The Dalmatians, which created so much bad feeling toward the poet, was the product of a mythology that dated back to the demise of the republic in 1797. It was at that very moment, in both Venice and Dalmatia, that the legend of the loyal Dalmatians was born—so loyal that they were supposedly the only subjects ready to fight against Napoleon on behalf of the republic. That same loyalty was further dramatized in the tale of the lowering of the flag of San Marco at Perast, near Kotor (today in Montenegro) when a Dalmatian captain supposedly orated in a spirit of nostalgia (and in Venetian dialect) about the Venetian-Dalmatian connection: “ti con nu, nu con ti” (you with us, we with you).
In the nineteenth century, the Habsburgs would seek to adapt this proverbial Dalmatian loyalty to their own purposes, and the poet Dall'Ongaro would use such themes for literary purposes in his drama The Dalmatians. It is interesting to observe that the legacy of San Marco was still powerful during the Romantic decades of the early nineteenth century. Relevant to this subject is the recently published volume Nostalgia: Memoria e passaggi tra le sponde dell'Adriatico [Nostalgia: Memory and Passages between the Shores of the Adriatic], edited by Rolf Petri (Rome, 2010), and Reill's essay may also be read with interest in the context of David Laven, Venice and Venetia under the Habsburgs, 1815–1835 (Oxford, 2002) and Konrad Clewing, Staatlichkeit und nationale Identitätsbildung: Dalmatien in Vormärz und Revolution (Munich, 2001).
Reill poses the question of what it meant to lay claim to the Adriatic in the modern age. In the early modern Mediterranean world, Venice could claim the sea by virtue of possessing a fleet that dominated commerce on the sea, together with strategic ports around the sea, from Venice itself to Dalmatia and the Ionian islands. The Habsburgs sought to construct a similar claim to the Adriatic through maritime commercial domination from Trieste, but in the modern world, territorial claims were more and more linked to national populations residing on the shores of the sea—and not necessarily those populations that possessed naval or commercial power.
Borut Klabjan's article on the “Scramble for Adria” again stresses the importance of early modern Venice, when he notes that the lapsing of the republic created a “power vacuum in the Adriatic space.” There was not too much scrambling during the nineteenth century, as Habsburg territorial rule remained relatively stable, with Italian national rule emerging on the western coast, and an Ottoman presence still maintained in Albania. The shifting of Venice from Habsburg to Italian rule in 1866 was hardly a scramble, though during the Balkan Wars in 1912 something like a scramble emerged as Serbia and Montenegro sought an outlet to the sea, and Albania was provoked to declare its independence. Klabjan, however, also describes the scrambled “discourses of appropriation” with which different national communities laid claim to lands along the sea, and therefore also claimed some social, economic, political, and (at least) symbolic share of the sea itself. Not just the Italian and the Habsburg states, but also Croatian and Slovene communities within the Habsburg monarchy staked a claim, and, considering the very tiny Slovene Adriatic coast today, one might be surprised to learn from Klabjan's research about such Slovene journals as Jadranska Zarja (Adriatic Dawn), Jadranka (Adriatic Woman), and Jadranski Almanah (Adriatic Almanac).
Echoing the poetry of Dall'Ongaro from the 1840s, the Slovene poet Simon Jenko composed in the 1860s a poem about the Adriatic Sea, celebrating in nostalgic poetry and historical fantasy a former age in which the Adriatic belonged to the Slavs. Klabjan shows how the claim of the South Slavs to the sea became more generally a claim of the Slavs, such that even the remote and land-locked Czechs considered themselves to be in some sense Adriatic, as they established a commercial presence in Trieste during the Habsburg period. Klabjan notes that, even after World War I, independent Czechoslovakia continued to claim some rights to an Adriatic outlet as guaranteed by the postwar treaties. What clearly scrambled the discourses of appropriation in the nineteenth century were the competing claims of actual states and of national communities, a competition that arose from the problematic question of what constituted a maritime claim in the modern age. Klabjan notes that in the generation before World War I, the Triple Alliance of Italy, the Habsburg monarchy, and the German empire, could be said to have collectively controlled the Adriatic, inasmuch as Italy and the Habsburgs controlled most of the coast between them.
Yet, the tensions within that allied control were considerable, as related in Luciano Monzali's recent study The Italians of Dalmatia: From Italian Unification to World War I (Toronto, 2009; Florence, 2004). Monzali suggests that Article VII of the alliance, promising compensations to preserve the balance of power in southeastern Europe, sustained Italian interest in the possibility of territorial adjustments on the Adriatic, which eventually broke the alliance during World War I and led to fierce contestation over Dalmatia at the peace conference. As for the Germans who claimed a place on the Adriatic through the Triple Alliance of the late nineteenth century, their moment in the sun would come in the later twentieth century with the establishment of FKK nudist beaches for German vacationers all along the Dalmatian coast. There was also the Nazi Adriatic—Adriatische Küstenland—from 1943 to 1945.
Igor Tchoukarine's article focuses entirely on the interwar period and describes the history of the Adriatic Guard, a Yugoslav association of citizens mobilized in support of their government's presence on the sea. Such an association would certainly not have existed were it not for the fact that the Dalmatian coast was contested at the peace conference and that Italy still maintained a revisionist interest in Dalmatia. With 180,000 members in the 1930s, the very existence of the Adriatic Guard clearly responded to the Wilsonian notion of democratic national self-determination, here peculiarly applied to the sea. Tchoukarine notes that the Adriatic Guard was self-consciously Yugoslav, claiming to represent “all of us, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” in relation to the Adriatic, and was therefore susceptible to the same national tensions that gnawed at the interwar Yugoslav state as a whole. In fact, the public—as represented by the Adriatic Guard—was apparently more dedicated to Yugoslavia's Adriatic interests than the Yugoslav state itself, and Tchoukarine points out that the Belgrade government was not inclined to invest heavily in the roads that would connect the sea more closely to inland Yugoslavia. At the same time, the Yugoslav commitment of the Adriatic Guard was also complicated by regionally Dalmatian and nationally Croatian interests on the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, while all of those overlapping perspectives jostled one another within the same citizens’ association.
Tchoukarine describes the dramatic moment in 1932 when Italian-Slavic tensions in Dalmatia led to the destruction of the sculpted Venetian lions at Trogir, the emblems of the Republic of San Marco which had ceased to exist in 1797. The effort required to destroy these stone monuments suggests the strangely enduring potency of their early modern Venetian symbolism, even as modern political movements sought to define a modern perspective on the Adriatic Sea. In Timothy Snyder's study The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (Yale, 2004), the author analyzes how modern nations emerged from the territory and population of the defunct Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ceased to exist in 1795, just two years before the abolition of the Venetian Republic of San Marco. The articles of Reill, Klabjan, and Tchoukarine point toward a similar project, the analysis of how modern nationalism reshaped the early modern imperium of San Marco—but, in this case, the question was not just territorial. In the case of the Adriatic, historians must try to understand how modern political forces and ideologies reshaped a region while operating not just on land, but also in the more fluid circumstances of a body of water.