The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage (26 page)

But it was only a veneer really, and Dubrovnik does not feel Venetian for long. Its people never gave up their Serbo-Croat language, so that all the influences of the Italian Renaissance were subtly mutated here, and the city remained pure Slav at heart. Its famous central street, the Placa, is austere and metallic, like a parade ground. Its Rector’s Palace lacks the voluptuous festivity
of the Venetian touch. Its pervading style, for all its fineness of detail, is somehow defensive, as though it is conscious of being all alone in the world, and its citizens, who have always loved it with a peculiar intensity, talk about it even now almost as though it is an independent republic, beleaguered by change.

Indeed it was a prodigy of European history, and in his day St Blaize, its patron saint (who had the particular ability to cure the common cold), was almost as powerful a protector as St Mark of Venice. Today there is another Dubrovnik outside its walls: the holiday villas spill along the coastline north and south and clamber up the hills above the great Dalmatian Highway. During the great days of its power, though, Dubrovnik consisted simply of the little walled city itself, perhaps half a mile across or two miles in circumference; yet such were the skills of its statesmen, its economists and its seamen that this remote and minute state became a world power, one of the great maritime forces of its day.

At the end of the sixteenth century Dubrovnik tonnage was probably as great as Venice’s, and Dubrovnik ships, men and merchants cropped up all over the world. Here is a Ragusan converted to Islam, defending the Indian fort of Diu against the Portuguese at the start of the sixteenth century. Here is one sailing from Lisbon in command of a Spanish Armada ship, and another making his fortune in the Potosi silver mines of Peru. Merchants from Dubrovnik were active all over the Balkans, with hundreds of trading colonies in Bulgaria, Serbia, the Danube provinces, Constantinople, and they were well-known in England too. So many Dubrovnik gentlemen went abroad to be educated that the two orders of the hierarchy were dubbed the Salamanchesi, after Salamanca University, and the Sorbonnesi, after the Sorbonne, and Dubrovnik diplomats tacked so adeptly between the world’s chanceries that cynics nicknamed their state the
settebandiere,
the Republic of the Seven Flags.

It was true that every year a train of noblemen set off over the mountains to pay the city’s tribute to the Sultan in Constantinople, but in fact this was a particularly independent little republic. It was governed by its aristocracy, generally speaking, with remarkable enlightenment. Slave trading was outlawed very early. Torture was forbidden. A civic home for old people was
founded in 1347 and there was a high standard of education. Patriotic feeling was intense; there are no records of revolution, and the Ragusan republic outlived that of Venice itself.

Dubrovnik never exactly went to war with Venice, but there were skirmishes now and then, and relations were always cold between the two powers, Ragusan captains habitually disregarding Venetian pretensions to command of the sea. The Venetians built a series of watchful fortresses around the perimeter of the little state: the Ragusans for their part were so anxious to distance themselves from Venetian territory that in 1699 they actually ceded to the Turks two strips of their own land, north and south of the city, to form a
cordon sanitaire
between Saints Blaize and Mark. The Ragusans were not in the least expansionist – theirs was the purest sort of merchant state, living entirely by its wits and its trade. Nor were they xenophobic – they generally employed foreigners as state secretaries (and among unsuccessful applicants for the job was Machiavelli). But they were jealous of their separateness and maintained it successfully, through the powerful climax of Venice, all through the long decline, until a French sergeant, reading out a Napoleonic declaration in 1806, declared the extinction of Ragusa as a state.

They gained much over the centuries by this brave detachment, but perhaps they lost something too. They gained no doubt in self-esteem and social well-being, and did more to assimilate western progress into their native culture than did any of their subjugated neighbours of the coast. But they lost, I suppose, that sense of wider unity, comity and purpose that can be the saving grace of imperialism. Dubrovnik was to remain always a lonely kind of place, with the prickliness that isolated communities often have, and a certain wistfulness too. Few citizens of Dubrovnik would admit it now, just as few Ragusans would have allowed it then: but one misses the winged lion on the walls of this determined little city, and with it that warmth of the Venetian genius which, with all its faults, brought its own light, pride and fantasy wherever it settled.

Grit on the foreshore: high in the mountains above, an enigma which the Venetians never quite solved. Above the Gulf of Kotor,
almost within sight of Dubrovnik, stood the Black Mountain, Crna Gora in the Serbo-Croat, Monte Negro in the Venetian dialect. Going home weary after the making of the world, God took with him a sack of unused stones, but the sack burst on his way across the skies, and so Montenegro was made. Bears lived up there in the mighty pile of rocks, lynxes, wolves, tree frogs, vultures, great wild boars, Illyrian vipers and monstrous trout in mountain lakes. And up there too lived the most baffling of Venice’s neighbours in Dalmatia, the Montenegrins, who were sometimes enemies, occasionally allies, but always to be kept at arm’s length.

For most of the Venetian period the Montene∗∗∗grins possessed no coastline of their own, and they looked down resentfully upon the Venetian settlements around the Gulf of Kotor from the high eyrie of their homeland, the mountain massif of Lovćen, in whose inaccessible and unlovely recesses they built their village-capital, Cetinje. The way there from the gulf was daunting, but thrilling too. The Venetian town of Kotor huddled beneath the very flank of the mountain, in shadow half the day, rushed past by a mountain stream like an Alpine village: immediately behind it a dizzy zig-zag path clambered up the sheer face of Lovcen in a series of seventy-three narrow and precipitous loops. To strangers this rough mule-track looked impossible, but it was the only way to Cetinje from the sea, and up and down it travelled all the limited commerce of Montenegro, on the backs of mules and donkeys, on the shoulders of men, so that at any time of day, if you looked up the mountain face from the quayside at Kotor, you might see small black figures crawling along the rock-face far above.

The track was called the Ladder of Cattaro, and though nowadays it starts in a different place and is a road with only twenty-five rather less disconcerting loops, it is still startling enough. To imagine what the journey must have been like for the Venetian merchants, diplomats and spies who reluctantly climbed their way to Cetinje over the years, it is best to make it at the beginning of winter, when the snows have fallen on the high ground but have not yet blocked the highway. The world shifts then as you climb. At the bottom it is the Mediterranean world –
towers and villas the Venetians built, oleanders beside the sea. At the top it is the Balkans, white, stony and uncertain. As you round the last bend in that twisty road, you find all about you a blasted sort of landscape, corrugated here and there with what look like the runnels of ancient avalanches, waterless, apparently soil-less, and stubbled only in sporadic patches with arid and thorny shrubs. This is the Black Mountain. You pass one windswept settlement, crouched in a declivity in the snow plain, and there is nothing more, not a hut, not a barn, until suddenly in the middle of the wasteland you see before you, in its own cold scoop among the hills, the village of Cetinje.

From here the Montenegrins projected their unyielding defiance against all comers, and particularly against the Turks. For generations they were the first line of Christian defence against Islam and alone in the Balkans they never gave in, decorating their streets with the skulls of Turks and inculcating their children with patriotic ferocity. They were ruled in their heyday by prince-bishops, Vladikas, fighting prelates who combined all authority, spiritual and secular, in one mighty office, and unlike the Venetians they believed strongly in the power of individual personality. Bards sang the praises of Montenegrin chieftains, not at all the Venetian practice, and the greatest of their heroes, the Prince-Bishop Petar Njegoš, would not long have survived the cautious safeguards of the Venetian constitution: a learned theologian, a gifted linguist, a scholarly jurist, a crack shot, the first poet of Montenegrin literature, six feet six tall, he was the idol of his people and was buried flamboyantly at his own wish on the very top of Mount Lovćen itself, where his mausoleum remains. Swaggering, boastful and terribly superstitious, the Montenegrins were armed to the teeth always, and their bearing was described by an English writer, as late as 1911, as being ‘soldier-like and manly, though somewhat theatrical’. The Venetians viewed them with predictable ambiguity. They were Christians, after all. They were doughty enemies of the Turks. Also Kotor was their only outlet to the world and they brought business to its bankers, merchants and agents. It was Venetian money that enabled the Montenegrins to raise the ransom for their Prince-Bishop Danilo, when he was condemned
to crucifixion by the Turks. It was a Venetian press which, in the year 1493, in the Montenegrin monastery of Obod, printed the first book in the Serbo-Croat language, less than half a century after the invention of printing. Rich Montenegrins, tiring of their perpetual siege-life in the mountains, sometimes retired to Venice, and several Montenegrin chiefs were ennobled by the Republic.

On the other hand they were exceedingly difficult neighbours. Their yearning for a sea-outlet was a running threat to the Venetian position on the coast, and the houses of Kotor and Perast had to be fortified against the more lawless of their guerilla bands. At the same time the Venetians, pursuing their generally ambivalent policy towards the Turks, were chary of allying themselves too closely with such uncompromising enemies of Islam, and they repeatedly rebuffed the Montenegrins, deceived them or left them in the lurch – refusing to help when their armies were on the point of annihilation, letting them down in diplomatic negotiations, and once actually colluding with the Turks in a plot to assassinate their Vladika.

Yet it could be said that only the furious determination of the Montenegrins, during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saved the Adriatic coast, and so possibly Venice itself, from the Turks. To the very end of the Venetian empire the Montenegrins were fighting up there, and you can feel this heroic heritage still in the windy streets of Cetinje. There is a raw challenge in the air. Peter Njegoš’ barracks-like palace, called the Biljarda after the billiard-table laboriously conveyed to it, by order of the Tsar of Russia, up the Ladder of Cattaro, still crouches comfortless beneath the slope of the hill: on the white summit of Lovćen, deep in snow, you can still make out his lonely tomb.

Unfortunately long after the Venetians had left the Gulf of Kotor a later prince of Montenegro, Nicolas, gave the little capital a very different significance, for he aspired to join the egregious company of monarchs who then lorded it all over Europe, and in 1910 proclaimed himself a king. The powers took him seriously. The King of Italy married one of his daughters, the King of Serbia another, two more became the pair of Grand Duchesses who introduced Rasputin to the Russian court. Grandiose legations
were erected in the village streets of Cetinje and Nicolas built himself a palace stuffed to every corner with the signed portraits, the chivalric orders, the mementos of Tsars, Empresses and Queen Victorias essential to every royal home. So the capital of the Montenegrins, which had so tantalized the Venetians down the mountain, became in the end the capital of Rumania: until World War I, that mighty scourer of pretension, swept all away to oblivion, leaving only museums behind.

This (by the way) is the manner in which, in the year 1484, the son of the Prince Ivo the Black of Montenegro married the daughter of the Doge Pietro Mocenigo of the Venetian Republic:

The Prince wrote to the Doge thus: ‘Harken to me Doge! As they say that thou hast in thy house the most beautiful of roses, your daughter, so in my house there is the handsomest of pinks, my son. Let us unite the two.’ And the Doge replied, ‘Yea, let us,’ and Ivo the Black went to the palace of the Doge in Venice with handsome gifts of gold, and the wedding was arranged for the following autumn. ‘Friend Doge,’ said Ivo, ‘then thou shalt see me with six hundred choice companions, and if there is among them a single one who is more handsome than my son Stanicha, then give me neither bride nor dowry.’ The Doge was much pleased and Ivo sailed away to Montenegro.

But as autumn approached, Stanicha was stricken with a terrible smallpox, and his face was pitted hideously, and all his beauty destroyed. Ivo the Black told the Doge nothing of this, but when there came a message from Venice saying that all was ready for the nuptials, he assembled his 600 men to go to Venice: and they were the handsomest of all men, with lofty brow and commanding look, from Dulcigno and from Antivari, the eagles of Podgoritza and all the finest young men as far as the green Lim.

‘What say you, brothers,’ asked Ivo of them, ‘shall we put one of you in place of Stanicha for the nuptials, and allow him on our return half the rich presents which will be given to him as the supposed bridegroom of the Doge’s daughter?’ The young men approved, and Obrezovo Djuro was declared the handsomest of them all, and elected to play the part. So they embarked for Venice crowned with flowers.

They arrived in Venice and the Doge Mocenigo was struck with amazement at the beauty of Obrezovo Djuro, whom he took to be the prince’s son. ‘Surely he is the handsomest of them all,’ said he, and so the wedding was celebrated, and there was feasting and festivity for a whole week. ‘Friend Doge,’ said Ivo at the end of the week, ‘we must return to our mountains,’ and the Doge gave to Djuro, whom he took to be Stanicha, a golden apple as a token of wedlock, and two damasced fusils, two tunics of finest linen wrought with gold, and much besides, and so they sailed away with the Doge’s beautiful daughter back to the Black Mountain.