Introduction: The Historical Sense of a Sea

The Adriatic is another sea within the Mediterranean; it is the Mediterranean of the Mediterranean. In the past defined as a sinus, a bay or a gulf, the Adriatic is the maritime corridor that has united East and West for over a thousand years. Stretching out to the south-east, it delineates Italy and the Balkan peninsula. From here, it is possible to perceive the sky of the Levant, see the Alps and imagine central Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was still widely thought that the Near East began at the Balkan shores.1 And the idea persists that, despite the integrations of recent years, the Adriatic is a frontier between Western and Eastern Europe; the memories of the Cold War and old antagonisms are still fresh.2 Today, seven of the ten European Mediterranean states overlook the Adriatic: Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and Greece.

The Adriatic shares its central position in the Mediterranean with Italy and the destiny of the Eastern Mediterranean with the Balkans. It can therefore be considered to lie at the crossroads between three continents or, according to world history, the central point of a single African-European-Asian continent. The role of the Adriatic in world history narrative is as part of the Mediterranean crossroads; it is one of the characteristic aspects of Mediterranean Europe. It was the South for those who travelled from north of the Alps. It was Goethe's first sea when he saw it from the top of St Mark's bell tower in Venice. It was instead the Latin West for those who landed in Apulia first from the Byzantine, then from the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean. In the Modern Age, it was considered one of the three branches of the Mediterranean, together with the Western (Ponent) and the Eastern Mediterranean (Levant). For Fernand Braudel, incomparable scholar of Mediterranean history, the Adriatic was 'perhaps the most unified of all the regions of the Mediterranean Sea. On its own and by analogy, it poses all the problems implicit in the study of the whole Mediterranean'.3 In the view of Predrag Matvejevic: 'The Atlantic and the Pacific are seas of distance, the Mediterranean is a sea of propinquity, the Adriatic is a sea of intimacy.'4 The Adriatic is, to all effects, the Mediterranean Sea on a smaller scale, a minor or minimal Mediterranean.

There are many meanings, indeed. Nevertheless, as for the Mediterranean, it is history which has shaped the Adriatic identity that everyone recognizes but few truly know. Although the geography of the Adriatic, its elongated narrow form and two generally linear coasts, suggests a certain simplicity, in fact the Adriatic has fractures that have divided worlds and layers of a complex past. It is the complexity of being at the crossroads for events with distant epicentres.5 On the world map, according to areas of partition between religions and confessions, it is evident that in the western Balkans, defined by the Adriatic, the eastern borders of Catholic Christianity intersect with the western borders of Orthodoxy and the northern borders of Islam. Nowhere else in the world is there such a node of coexistence. And the history of the eastern Adriatic reveals these superimpositions. Numerous empires had their most distant borders in the Adriatic: the Byzantine Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Empire, the Austrian Empire and so on. Like other closed frontier seas, such as the Baltic and the Black Sea, the Adriatic has been a zone of mediation between diversities.

A silent witness to the course of civilization, the Adriatic has been the background to extraordinary histories: the history of Venice, for example, the history of Italy, and that of the Balkans. In very few contexts, even on a world scale, have so many contrasting yet connotative aspects been brought together over time and space, with so many references to different civilizations and the presence of apparent opposites: Syracusan Greeks and Germanic emperors, Latins and Slavs, dervishes and Jesuits, papal coast and Turkish coast, tolerance and crusades, holy wars and communist revolutions, lingua francas and language frontiers, the Renaissance and pastoral civilizations, localisms, tribalisms, the eastern question and modernity. The time of the Adriatic tends to elude conventional chronologies. It is a striking collection of historical periods, if quantified and aligned: over a thousand years of Venetian history, first a duchy and commune, then a republic; over a thousand years of the Papal States, 850 years of the Holy Roman Empire, 816 years of the Kingdom of Hungary and Croatia, 730 years of the Kingdom of Naples, 670 years of Byzantium, 542 years of the Habsburg dynasty, 443 years of the Ottoman Empire, 400 years of the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 150 years of unified Italy, 135 years of Montenegro, over 100 years of Albania, 73 years of Yugoslavia, 30 years of Slovenia and Croatia. This does not take into consideration the economic cycles of the sea as a whole and of its coasts, the long periods of small-scale coastal navigation and transhumance and the many centuries of Adriatic trade fairs and religious pilgrimages. In short, there is more history than geography in the Adriatic.

How can such a history be interpreted? How can the historical sense of a sea be interpreted? Braudel's lesson is well known: identify different intrinsic economic, social and political periods in the sea, considered as a territory and the subject of historical interpretation. From Braudel's starting point, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have attempted to move forward, formulating the definition of the Mediterranean as The Corrupting Sea, insofar as it influences local contexts that it unites through countless synergies dictated by a generic sense of uncertainty and subsistence, a series of several minimal realities.6 The Mediterranean has therefore been a collection of microsystems with exceptions and specificities, yet all tending to engage with one another and develop networks of synergies from a smaller scale of proximity to a larger scale of transmaritime connections. Diversity in unity: the Mediterranean encompasses a multitude of contexts and at the same time represents a plurality of processes that connect and create through 'Mediterraneanization', a Mediterranean system from the individual places that form it.7 According to Horden and Purcell, the time has come for a shift in the approach to historical research. To date, it has mainly been a question of history in the Mediterranean, a history that has narrated what happened around the Mediterranean shores. Today, it is a question of doing historical research of the Mediterranean, conceived as a maritime unity with its own characteristics that are to be examined as they developed over time.

It is hard not to agree with this approach. The Adriatic has indeed a history as a sea that corrupts, constantly connecting its coasts and the people who live there. However, the sea is not merely an organism or a mechanism. It undoubtedly brings together goods and people but also ideas, languages and cultures. It unites, but it also divides: it is a symbolic space into which both local and national communities project themselves, and its coasts are subjected to systems of political sovereignty. The Adriatic is all this, the crossroads of different and often contrasting experiences of civilization. Therefore, it is acceptable to talk of the history of the Adriatic, the sea as an organism, but it cannot be separated from the history in the Adriatic, from the world that has experienced it.

Like all seas, the Adriatic is a liquid plain - to use Braudel's term - in which the trade routes, the shipping flows, the relations between coasts, the traffic of goods, migrations, use of resources, fishing, political, strategic and military control, sovereignty and the struggle for hegemony can all be traced over time. It is the sea of seafaring people and those who ruled them: maritime and economic history and political history. The Adriatic is also and most importantly coastal lands, or rather a network of regional coastal systems, a kind of membrane that is the water front for those coming from the hinterland and the land front for those arriving from the sea. It is a habitat that is almost everywhere populated, even with small settlements, not necessarily looking only to the sea but also to the hinterland. The coast, therefore, always has a double connotation. The maritime association is the more elusive and requires a reversal of the usual perception of the Adriatic world: an island or liquid peninsula traversed by shipping routes, and the coast a facade facing the continent. It is therefore a liquid island with a series of shores that surround it. It is this narrow strip a dozen kilometres wide, made up of dunes, lagoons, river mouths, inlets and promontories, cliffs and island systems, which represents the human Adriatic, the territory, the landscape transformed by humans in which people have lived with the sea, and still do so, as is evident in Venice, Ancona, Trieste, Split (Spalato), Rijeka (Fiume), Bari, Durrës and in other ports and islands, and entire lagoon and coastal contexts. Although it is clear that living beside the sea does not mean necessarily being seafarers, it does epitomize a maritime civilization. There are some places that are more maritime than others: for instance, along the western Adriatic coasts, only some ports (Trani, Ancona, Chioggia, Venice); along the...