Ragusa also produced Latin poets, and a race of historians, among whom may be mentioned Cervario Tuberone, Nicolas Ragnina, and, greatest of all, Anselmo Banduri, whose name is of European renown. The breadth of the Ragusan genius is illustrated by the fact that her additions to the exact sciences are as splendid as the works of her imagination. Her citizens Gazoli, Antonius Medus, Ghetaldi, and at a later period Boscović, rank among the patriarchs of astronomy and mathematics. Marino Ghetaldi, born at Ragusa in 1566, anticipated Descartes in the application of algebra to geometry, and lays a claim to the invention of the telescope. Amongst other feats he tested the experiment of Archimedes, and is said to have consumed a boat with his burning-glass. On the shore of a bay to the south of Ragusa is still pointed out the fern-valanced cavern where Ghetaldi loved to pursue his discoveries; and such was the impression wrought by the man of science on the popular mind, that to this day the sailor, as he passes the mouth of Ghetaldi’s cave, invokes St. Blasius to frustrate the incantations of the magician.
The literary and commercial bloom of Ragusa continued to the middle of the seventeenth century, little abated by a plague, which in 1526 destroyed twenty thousand of the population in six months; or by the loss of many ships in the Spanish service. But Ragusa had already received warnings of a more tremendous catastrophe, such as had befallen her Roman ancestress Epidaurus. In 1520, 1521, 1536, and 1639, the city had suffered from shocks of earthquake.
It was half-past eight o’clock on the morning of April the 6th, the Wednesday in Holy Week, 1667. The Maggior Consiglio was about to hold a session, for the purpose of according grace to delinquents, and the Rector of the Republic, Simeon Ghetaldi, and some of the councillors, were already preparing to take their places. The inhabitants of Ragusa were mostly at home, or in the churches at morning prayer, when, without a moment’s warning, a tremendous shock of earthquake overwhelmed the whole city and entombed a fifth of the population in the ruins. The Rector of the Republic, five-sixths of the nobles, nine-tenths of the clergy, a Dutch ambassador with his suite of thirty, then on his way to Constantinople, and six thousand citizens, were buried. Marble palaces—the accumulated embellishments of ages of prosperity—valuable libraries, archives, irreplaceable manuscripts—all alike perished. The sea left the harbour dry four times, and rising to a mountainous height, four times threatened to engulf the land. The ships in the port were sucked into the vortex of the deep, or dashed to pieces against each other or the rocks. The wells were dried up. Huge cliffs were split from top to bottom. The sky was darkened by a dense cloud of sand. The earthquake was succeeded by a fire, and a strong gale springing up spread the flames over every quarter of the ruins. Finally, to complete the catastrophe, the wild Morlachs descended from the mountains and pillaged what remained.
Ragusa never recovered from the blow. Her commerce was for long reduced to the coast-traffic of small trabaccoli. Her literature, indeed, partly revived; and during the early years of the French war the neutrality of Ragusa secured for her once more much of the Mediterranean carrying trade, and by the end of the last century her population amounted to 15,000. But, in 1806, Napoleon seized Ragusa, and two years later an adjutant of General Marmont announced that the Republic of Ragusa had ceased to exist. It yet remained for the diplomatists of the Allied Powers to consummate in cold blood what Buonaparte had perpetrated in the frenzy of his ambition; and at the Congress of Vienna an English plenipotentiary set his signature to a document by which the ancient Republic was handed over to what was then the most brutal and despotic government in Europe. Since that date Ragusa has been the head town of a ‘circle,’ and the stately palace of her Rectors has sunk into the ‘bureau’ of an Austrian ‘Kreis-chef!’
And yet how fascinating is Ragusa still! It far surpassed our most sanguine expectations. We entered the once sovereign city by the Porta Pille, one of two gates which form the north and south poles of the little town, and are the only public openings in the circuit of its massive walls. From a niche above this portal the old saviour of the Republic, St. Blasius, looked down upon us benignantly, with finger raised aloft in the act of benediction; and the same figure of his saintship occurs at intervals all round the walls, which have been likened to a girdle of amulets. The Porta Pille passed, we found ourselves in the Stradone or Corso, the main street of Ragusa, and the finest and widest in Dalmatia.
From the student of Ragusan history this street claims a peculiar interest. Originally it was nothing else than a narrow channel of sea—the ‘silver streak’ that moated off the Roman rock asylum of Lavve from the more rustic dwellings of Serbian Dubrovnik, scattered among the pine-trees on the rocky steep of the adjoining mainland. But in the thirteenth century, when the antagonism between Serb and Roman had already ceased, and the Serbian language had become the mother-tongue of the descendants of the Epidauritan refugees, the channel was filled in and the site levelled to make room for an airy piazza,[355] where, in the succeeding age, stately palaces of four or five storeys rose on either side, and rivalled those of Venice in their magnificence. Thus what had originally been a barrier between two hostile nationalities, has since become a bond of union, as the favourite meeting place and social promenade for all classes of Ragusan citizens. The lofty palaces of the original Piazza were overwhelmed by the great earthquake, and their loftiness made them terribly destructive of life, so that when the Senate rebuilt this part of the city the height of the new houses was limited to two, or at most three, storeys. The Piazza itself shrank into the present Stradone, in sympathy with the straitened circumstances of New Ragusa; but, shadow as it is of its former majesty, it still forms a noble thoroughfare.
Every building on either side, as indeed throughout the town, is of fine stone, and the street—like all other streets of Ragusa—is paved with large deftly squared slabs, which take the polish of marble, and caused us to slip more than once. Immediately on entering we passed on the right a fifteenth-century cistern[356] decorated with quaint heads of dragons; it is from this that Ragusa derives her water supply, brought hither by a conduit from a mountain source fifteen miles off. Opposite is the Chiesa del Redentore, in classic Venetian style, the elaborate carvings of its façade thrown into exquisite reliefs by the golden colours of the stone; and above its portal an inscription recording the building of the church (legend says that the matrons of Ragusa brought hither the material) after the earthquake of 1536—ad avertendam cœlestem iram in maximo terræ tremore. Alas! it averted not a greater ruin, though by some strange irony of fortune it survived the earthquake of 1667, to stand a monument of disregarded piety. Next is the Franciscan convent in several tastes, and then, on either side of the road, a vista of solid stone houses, built with great regularity in a plain but dignified style, with classic cornices.
A five minutes’ walk—such a little place is this!—brought us to the other end of the city, the street terminating abruptly in the Porta Plocce, the sea-gate, and otherwise the south-pole of Ragusa. But just before reaching this, the Stradone opens on the right on to a small Piazza, where the most beautiful and interesting edifices in Ragusa are congregated.