Turn where we will among the pages of Ragusan history, we find ourselves amongst a grave and sober people—a people who are never carried away with success, and who support adversity with calm endurance. The heroes of Ragusa are of the majestic Roman type, and her greatest is a second Regulus. Her peculiar genius reflects itself in her arts and sciences, which are severe and practical. Her Senate forbids the erection of a theatre. The fine arts here fall into the background, and mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy take the lead. Ragusan nobles are mathematicians, and her poets are also merchants; the masterpieces of her muse are stately epics. Her sympathies are with the dignified spirit of the East, and the noblest homage of her bards is rendered to a Turkish Grand Signior. But Ragusa nowhere displayed the severe gravity of her manners more conspicuously than in the education of her children. Palladius,[340] writing in the middle of the fifteenth century, says of the Ragusans: ‘To make manifest how great is the severity and diligence of the Ragusans in the bringing up of their children, one thing I will not pass over, that they suffer no exercises to exist in the city, but literary. And if jousters or acrobats approach they are forthwith cast out, lest the youth (which they would keep open for letters or for merchanding) be corrupted by such low exhibitions.’ Truly, in mediæval Ragusa, Jack must have been a dull boy!
The same sober and religious spirit asserts itself in the laws, and the philanthropic and industrial institutions of mediæval Ragusa. Few indeed were the towns which could boast of a City Police and Sanitary Board in the middle ages! There was a ‘Curates’ Augmentation Fund’ here in the fourteenth century;[341] this city lays claim to having possessed the first foundling hospital[342] and the first loan-bank in the civilised world, and the annual revenues of the pious institutions of Ragusa amounted to 800,000 ducats. If we except the early English legislation which put a stop to the human exports of Bristol, Ragusa was the first state to pass laws abolishing the slave trade. In the year 1416 the great council of Ragusa, hearing that several Ragusan merchants residing on the Narenta were in the habit of selling those under them as slaves, passed a law—by a majority of seventy-five in a house of seventy-eight—that anyone who henceforth sold a slave should be liable to a fine and six months’ imprisonment: ‘Considering such traffic to be base, wicked, and abominable, and contrary to all humanity, and to redound to the no small disgrace of our city—namely, that the human form, made after the image and similitude of our Creator, should be turned to mercenary profit, and sold as if it were brute beast.[343] During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, large sums were left by philanthropic citizens of Ragusa to be spent in purchasing the freedom of slaves.
Perhaps the stability of the Ragusan government is due as much to her peculiar situation as to the sobriety of her citizens. Ragusa is well described by mediæval writers as a ‘Palmyra between great empires.’ She had to preserve her independence in turn from Byzantine Cæsars, the pirate state of the Narentines, the queen of the Adriatic, the Serbian Czar, the kings of Hungary, and finally from the Turks and Spaniards. She had to be perpetually on her guard against the ambitious designs of the most powerful states of the mediæval world. When her neighbours quarrelled, she was continually placed in the most difficult position, and the ramifications of her trade put her at the mercy of the most remote assailant. Thus it was that in her government foreign affairs were of supreme importance; there was constant necessity for secret discussion, prompt decision, and the wisdom of a hereditary caste of statesmen. A state whose empire is mercantile must be mighty indeed to afford the luxury of popular government. Ragusa was too small, too closely bordered by powerful empires; and the sterling sense of her citizens acquiesced in the necessity of an aristocratic constitution.
Nothing, indeed, is more wonderful in the history of the Republic than the tact with which these hereditary diplomatists conducted foreign affairs. In an earlier stage of her history, and a ruder state of society, we have seen the obstinacy with which the Senate clung to the Ragusan rights of asylum. In a later and more diplomatic age the City of Refuge becomes the champion of the rights of neutrals. We are lost in wonder at the skill with which the Republic preserves its neutrality between Venice and the Greeks, Venice and the Narentines, Venice and the Hungarians; between the Serbian Czar and Byzantine Cæsar, between the Turks and the Hungarians, the Turks and the Venetians, the Turks and the fleets of Charles V. It appears to have been a secret of Ragusan policy to yield a certain suzerainty to that Power which was strong on the mainland. While Venice is omnipotent in Dalmatia, Ragusa recognizes the overlordship of the Doge; Czar Dūshan stretches the Serbian empire to the sea, and Ragusa transfers to him her homage. The Serbian empire breaks up; the Hungarian flag floats on the walls of the Dalmatian cities in place of the lion of St. Mark; and from 1358 to 1483 Ragusa accepts the suzerainty of the kings of Hungary. But with admirable perception the statesmen of Ragusa turn towards the rising sun; and already, in 1370, when the rest of Eastern Europe was hardly conscious of the existence of its future conquerors, the Ragusans sent an embassy to Broussa, in Asia Minor, to the successor of Orchan,[344] Emir of the Turks, in which, in return for a yearly payment of 500 sequins, they obtained a firman of trade privileges, still preserved in the archives of Ragusa, and laid the foundations of a friendship which afterwards saved the small Republic when the empire of Byzantium, the despotates of Serbia and Albania, and the kingdoms of Hungary and Bosnia, were swept away. The treaty was renewed with Bajazet, and on his final conquest of the Herzegovina in 1483, Ragusa, true to her policy, transfers her suzerainty to the Porte.
It was the vast commerce of Ragusa with the interior of the Balkan peninsula which made her government so sedulous in securing friendly relations with the dominant power of the mainland. The citizens were repaid tenfold for their deference to the ruling caste by the benefits which their trade reaped from the keen foresight and the marvellous powers of negotiation displayed by their government. The friendship of Serbian, Bosnian, Hungarian, and later on of Turkish potentates, enabled them to plant their factories throughout the Sclavonic lands that lie between the Adriatic and the Black Sea. At the time of the Turkish conquests the Ragusans possessed mercantile colonies at the Serai in Bosnia, Novipazar in Rascia, Novibrdo and Belgrade in Serbia, at Bucharest and Tirgovisce in Wallachia, at Widdin, Rustchuk, Silistria, and Sophia in Bulgaria, and in the original capital of Turkey-in-Europe, Adrianople. To these colonies the Turks conceded a special jurisdiction, and even the right to build cathedral churches. Ragusan caravans passed without let or hindrance throughout all these lands; and the Pope himself granted the Ragusans permission to trade with the infidels. An astounding monument of the industry of these colonists is found in a treaty between George Branković, despot of Serbia, and the Republic, by which the Ragusan government leased the working of the three gold mines of Novibrdo, Janovo, and Kratovo, for a yearly rent of 300,000 ducats—an enormous sum for those days.
Besides this trade with the Sclavonic interior, Ragusa conducted a maritime traffic with the Levant, and as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century had concluded treaties of commerce with the sultans of Egypt, Syria, Iconia, and Bythinia. Ragusan factories existed in the great Italian cities of the Romagna, the Marches, and Abbruzzo, and throughout Sicily and Naples, and much of the transit trade between those countries and the Levantine ports was conducted in Ragusan bottoms. Of these commercial colonies in Italy, the most important was that which gave the name Strada de’ Ragusei to a street of Florence, and the Messinese, established at Syracuse, which gave the name of Ragusa to a castle that rose above the ruins of Camarina. Her merchants penetrated not only to France and Spain, but even to our shores, whence they transported English wares, especially cloths and woollens, to the south and east.[345] Ragusan merchants were settled in England in the sixteenth century, and later on Cromwell granted the Ragusans trade privileges in English ports. The mighty merchantmen of Ragusa ‘with portly sail, like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,’[346] have added a word to the English language. Our ‘argosy,’[347] once written ‘Ragosie,’ meant originally nothing but a Ragusan carrack. Nor was it only in the peaceful paths of commerce that our forefathers made acquaintance with the stately vessels of Ragusa. As the price of many trade privileges, the Republic was forced to recruit the navies of Spain with her ships and take part in her enterprises. The loftiest carracks in the Spanish Armada sailed forth from the old harbour of Ragusa, and in 1596 twelve Ragusan three-masters fought the English in the Indian Ocean.
By the end of the fifteenth century the commercial bloom of Ragusa had reached its prime, and the city must have been amongst the most flourishing in Europe. As early as 1450 the merchant navy of Ragusa consisted of 300 vessels. ‘There is no part of Europe,’ says the contemporary Palladius, ‘so hidden or so hostile to strangers that you will not find there merchants of Ragusa.’ And this commercial prosperity abroad was supplemented by manufacturing enterprise at home.
In 1490 a Florentine weaver was called in to instruct the Ragusans in cloth-weaving. Mills were built, a Neapolitan constructed a conduit to aid the dyeing, machinery was set in motion by water-power, and in five years a new manufacture was in full operation. A few years later[348] the silk manufacture was introduced by an enterprising citizen of Ragusa from Tuscany. Besides these and such minor industries as supplied the neighbouring Turkish provinces with wax, hides, salt, and sandals, there was the cannon foundry, the powder mill, the docks, the coral fishery, the glass manufactory, and the production of that filagree work of gold and silver, in which the Ragusans excelled, to divide the energies of the citizens. At the end of the fifteenth century the population of Ragusa is reckoned at 40,000, the treasury of the Republic is said to have contained a reserve of seven million sequins, and the merchants of a single quarter of the city, called Prieko, were possessed of capital amounting to two hundred million ducats.
At this time an additional lustre is shed over the ancient City of Refuge by the nobility of those who sought refuge within her walls. After the fall of Constantinople and the overthrow of the Sclavonic kingdoms of the interior, Ragusa was thronged with fugitive princes of Eastern Europe. Scions of the imperial houses of Byzantium, the families of Lascaris and Cantacuzene, the Comneni and Palæologi, the wife of the Despot of Serbia, the widowed Queen of Bosnia, with a host of lesser rank, sought and found a haven in these hospitable streets; and the name of Stephen, duke of St. Sava, is still to be seen inscribed on the roll of Ragusan nobility in the Specchio del Maggior Consiglio.