History of the Adriatic. Egidio Ivetic

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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.

      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.

      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 eastern coasts, entire regions (Istria, Dalmatia).

      In short, as always within and around a sea, there are three levels: the liquid element, the coast and the surrounding territories. The regional coastal systems, made up of shores, islands, populations, economies and cultures, are the fundamental fabric of a complex maritime region, places in which intrinsic unity with and diversity from a sea is measured. The coastal systems are regions in and of themselves; many are well known and identifiable, regardless of the Adriatic. Let’s start to list them: on the western Adriatic, the Salento region, the Tavoliere Plain and the Gargano area in present-day Apulia; the long Apennine coast between Termoli and Pesaro, i.e. ancient Picenum, present-day Molise, Abruzzo and Marche, which have similar landscapes but are historically divided between two Italies. Then there is the lower coast of Romagna, the Po Delta, the Venetian lagoon between the Po River and the mouth of the Isonzo River, a sea outlet for the Veneto and Friuli plains. On the eastern Adriatic lie the cliffs of the Karst region (Carso) with Trieste; the Istrian peninsula and region; Dalmatia, a historic region made up of a widespread archipelago of more than a thousand islands and skerries, and of a continental area, between the Zadar (Zara) Plain, Ragusa or Dubrovnik, and the Bay of Kotor (Cattaro). The Croatian Littoral, parallel to the archipelago, opens up between Rijeka (Fiume) and the Velebit Canal, known to the Venetians as the Morlach Canal, whereas inland from southern Dalmatia lies Herzegovina, a Balkan land untouched by the sea but Mediterranean in its landscape and therefore an Adriatic region, although the only non-maritime one. Beyond Dalmatia, further south, lies the Montenegrin coastline down to the Bojana River where the coastline dips and the Albanian riviera begins, with its sandy beaches and wetlands. The rocky Karaburun peninsula, the mouths of the Butrint River in Albania, and Corfu, the gateway to the Adriatic, complete the sea. In all, there are a dozen regional segments with specific historical characteristics; segments in which we measure civilizations and empires, states and nations. This was and remains the basis of the Adriatic. However, there is also another, more conceptual Adriatic.

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