and seaways and hated by the native population, which is Slavic with a sprinkling of Italian, both races being antagonistic to the ruling power.
That Dalmatia has been badly governed, no one denies. It has been purposely kept out of touch with the mainland, the old motherland behind it, Croatia. Only by the sea had it access to other peoples, to whom it rarely went and who seldom came to it.
Of all Dalmatian cities, Ragusa is the proudest, even as it is the poorest. Once the seat of a virile republic, she sent out armadas for conquest, watched from her sea-girt walls the struggles between Venice and the Ottomans, and, by force of arms, helped to decide the destinies of nations.
Ragusa’s glory was short, but memory is long; although her harbour is choked and useless, her sea-wall in ruins, and her pavements grass-grown; still under marble porticoes half-sunk into the ground, sit the grandees of the city, smoking the Turkish czibuk and musing over those golden days when Ragusa called herself the “Queen of the Adria,” and fought with Venice for its supremacy.
On the corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, there stood all day long an old minstrel, who strummed monotonous strains on the gusla, while he sang the epics inspired by centuries of conflict. As he sang, the grandees smoked and mused; while the lesser folk cobbled opankee, embroidered garments after Oriental fashion, and wove tiny strands of silver into crude filigree.
The old guslar was minstrel, poet, and historian. It was he who told me marvellous stories of the time when in each of those palaces on the Stradone there lived a statesman-soldier, at war politically with one half his world and in social rivalry with the other half. The city’s gentlefolk were divided into the Salamanchesi and the Sorbonnesi; those who sent their sons to the University of Salamanca and those who sent them to the Sorbonne.
These divergent cultural currents kept the nobility apart and gave ample cause for petty quarrels; many a Ragusan Romeo’s love for his Juliet has furnished material for a romance and for a beautiful funeral.