Dalmatia

• 1. Introduction

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  Dalmatia changed hands for cash in 1409, when a defeated claimant to the throne of Naples sold his rights to the region to the Republic of Venice for a mere 100,000 ducats. It was one transaction among many shifts of power along this narrow strip of the eastern Adriatic coast. The land runs from the island of Rab in the north to the Bay of Kotor in the south, backed by the rugged Dinaric Alps and lined with seventy-nine islands and about five hundred islets. Its largest city, Split, sits alongside Zadar, Šibenik, and Dubrovnik as the anchors of a coastline whose exact borders are still debated by geographers and historians today. The region's name comes from the Dalmatae, an Illyrian tribe, yet scholars still argue over what that tribal name originally meant. Rome, Byzantium, Croatian kings, Venice, the Ottomans, Napoleon, the Habsburgs, and two twentieth-century world wars all left their mark on this same stretch of coast. What holds together a place whose borders keep shifting and whose name outlived every empire that once claimed it?

• 2. Borders Nobody Agrees On

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  Ancient Rome's province called Dalmatia stretched from Istria in the north all the way to modern-day Albania in the south, far larger than the region carrying that name today. Today's Dalmatia is only a historical label. It has no formal legal existence within Croatia, and its edges shift depending on who draws the map. Lena Mirošević and Josip Faričić, two researchers at the University of Zadar, describe the modern perception of Dalmatia as largely following the old Austrian Kingdom of Dalmatia, with two notable exceptions. The island of Rab is left out, since it is tied more to the Kvarner and Littoral-Gorski Kotar areas, and the Bay of Kotor is excluded too, because it was annexed to Montenegro after the First World War. In 1922, when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia carved its territory into oblasts, the whole of that bay, from Sutorina to Sutomore, was folded into the Zeta Oblast. Meanwhile, southern Lika and the upper Pounje area, regions never part of Austrian Dalmatia, ended up inside Zadar County instead. The Encyclopaedia Britannica draws the southern line at what it calls the narrows of Kotor, the Prevlaka peninsula at the tip of continental Croatia. Other references, such as the Treccani encyclopedia and the Rough Guide to Croatia, still count the Bay of Kotor as part of Dalmatia. The island of Rab, together with the smaller islands of Sveti Grgur and Goli Otok, once belonged to the Kingdom of Dalmatia but is now administered as part of the Croatian Littoral. A narrower definition equates Dalmatia with four Croatian counties: Zadar, Šibenik-Knin, Split-Dalmatia, and Dubrovnik-Neretva. That version drops the Bay of Kotor and Rab entirely, and it excludes northern Pag, which belongs to Lika-Senj County. Yet it still folds in the Gračac municipality, an area historically tied to Lika rather than Dalmatia. Even the modern border with Bosnia and Herzegovina traces back to a line called the Linea Mocenigo, fixed by the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718. That treaty settled a border on paper. The region's very name had already been unsettled for centuries.

• 3. What The Name Means

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  The Dalmatae were the Illyrian tribe whose name gave the region its label, and their chief settlement, Delminium, produced a closely related word. Several scholars link the tribal name to the Albanian word dele, meaning sheep, and its Gheg dialect form delmë, tracing a possible link to delmer, an Albanian word for shepherd. Vladimir Orel disputes this, arguing that delmë has little in common with Dalmatia's name, since it descends from dele plus a suffix traced back to proto-Albanian dailā. Danilo Savić raises a separate objection, noting that ancient written sources offer no compelling evidence that Delmatae actually derives from a word for sheep at all. Near the ancient towns of Bylazora and Stobi, in the middle Vardar valley, an old name called Dalmana carries the same disputed root further into Illyrian territory. A related, later Slavic name survives nearby too, the medieval toponym Ovče Pole, meaning plain of sheep in South Slavic. According to István Schütz, the town of Delvinë in Albania carries a toponym tied to that same root, dele. Centuries after the Dalmatae themselves had vanished, Roman scholars were still arguing over the correct spelling of their name. The second-century writer Appian noted that Dalmatia and its people were already known under variant forms. His contemporary, the grammarian Velius Longus, insisted the correct form was Delmatia. Velius pointed to Marcus Terentius Varro, writing two centuries earlier, who had used that same form because it matched Delminium, the tribe's chief town. That settlement's name survives today in the town of Duvno, reached in Croatian through a medieval intermediate form, Delminio. Latin settled on Dalmatia, and English inherited that spelling directly. Other languages shifted it: Venetian rendered the word as Dalmàssia, modern Italian as Dalmazia, Croatian as Dalmacija, and Serbian Cyrillic as Далмација. Long before any of these later spellings existed, the Dalmatae were already fighting Rome itself for control of this same coastline.

• 4. Rome's Furthest Shore

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  The Dalmatae inhabited the eastern Adriatic coast during the first millennium BC, part of a wider Illyrian kingdom until the Illyrian Wars, fought between 220 and 168 BC. That conflict ended with the Roman Republic setting up a protectorate south of the river Neretva. The name Dalmatia itself came into use sometime after the mid-second century BC, and certainly by the early first century BC, marking a coastal strip between the Krka and Neretva rivers. Rome absorbed the territory gradually, and the province of Illyricum was formally established around 32 to 27 BC. In 9 AD, the Dalmatians joined the Pannonians in the last of a series of revolts against Roman rule, but the uprising was crushed. A year later, in 10 AD, Illyricum was split into Pannonia and Dalmatia, with the new Dalmatia expanding inland to cover the Dinaric Alps and most of the eastern Adriatic coast. The historian Theodor Mommsen wrote in his book The Provinces of the Roman Empire that Dalmatia was fully romanized by the fourth century AD. Archaeological evidence tells a more selective story. Coastal and inland urban centers became almost completely romanized, but the countryside stayed markedly different. There, Illyrians kept their own language, gods, and tribal political structures, adapting to Roman rule only where it was unavoidable. Rome's western half collapsed soon after, and the Migration Period brought Gothic rulers Odoacer and Theodoric the Great to power over Dalmatia, from 480 to 535 AD, until Emperor Justinian I restored the region to Byzantine rule. Byzantine control would not go unchallenged for long. Within a century, Slavic tribes were pressing into the same hinterland Rome had only partly tamed.

• 5. Croats, Kings, and Venice

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  By the early Middle Ages, the Byzantine province of Dalmatia reached north as far as the river Sava, forming part of the Praetorian prefecture of Illyricum. Slavic migrations into the Balkans, running from the middle of the sixth century into the early seventh, pushed the Romance-speaking descendants of Romans and Illyrians toward the coast and islands. By 619, Slavs and Avars had destroyed the capital, Salona, along with the towns of Asseria, Varvaria, Burnum, Scardona, and Epidaurum. That destruction opened the way for the nearby settlement of Diocletian's Palace at Spalatum, today's Split, and for the founding of Kotor and Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik. The newly arrived Croats, Serbs, and other Slavic groups founded the Sclaviniae of Croatia, Pagania, Zachlumia, Travunia, and Konavle. By 820, the administrative meaning of Dalmatia had shrunk to a cluster of fortified, Romance-speaking city-states along the coast, known as the Byzantine theme of Dalmatia. Those cities carried their own Latin names: Jadera for Zadar, the theme's capital, Spalatum for Split, Tragurium for Trogir, Arba for Rab, Ragusium for Dubrovnik, and Cattarum for Kotor. Latin law and language eventually gave way to a homegrown neo-Latin tongue, Dalmatico, which survived there until the late nineteenth century. According to the Royal Frankish Annals, Serbs came to hold a great part of Dalmatia by the mid-ninth century, a claim reflected in the emergence of two Serbian principalities, Duklja and Travunia, positioned around the Bay of Kotor to command its trade routes. In the first half of the tenth century, Duke Tomislav had Croatia elevated to a kingdom and extended his reach into Zachlumia, earning recognition from Byzantium as Protector of Dalmatia. The chronicler Thomas the Archdeacon records that King Stephen Držislav, who ruled from 969 to 997, took the title King of Dalmatia and Croatia, a style every later ruler kept. In the year 1000, Doge Pietro II Orseolo led a Venetian fleet that took the Dalmatian cities and islands with little resistance, styling himself Duke of Dalmatia and launching Venice's colonial empire. His forces secured the Gulf of Kvarner, Zadar, Trogir, and Split, then defeated the Narentine pirates in a naval battle to take Korčula and Lastovo. In exchange for protection, Dalmatian cities such as Arbe, today's Rab, paid annual tribute to Venice, in one case ten pounds of silk or five pounds of gold, while keeping their own magistrates, bishops, and Roman law. Byzantium clawed back several coastal cities in the 1030s, only for Croatian king Petar Krešimir IV to retake much of the coast and add King of Croatia and Dalmatia to his own title. He expanded his holdings further by 1069, the same year he gave the island of Maun to the Monastery of St. Chrysogonus. Hungarian king Coloman absorbed the Croatian and Dalmatian lands by 1102, after a period of anarchy following the death of King Demetrius Zvonimir. The Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241 sent King Béla IV fleeing as far south as the Fortress of Klis, and Mongol forces harried the Dalmatian cities for several years before withdrawing empty-handed. Dubrovnik broke free of Venetian rule entirely in 1358, founding the Republic of Ragusa. Republican independence, though, would soon face a far larger power pressing up from the south.

• 6. Ottomans, Venice, and Napoleon

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  Ragusa, having won its independence in 1358 through the Treaty of Zadar, switched allegiance to the Ottoman Empire in 1481, gaining access to Black Sea trade and becoming Venice's fiercest merchant rival through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Latin had long served as the Republic's official language, but Italian came into administrative use in the 1420s, and the Republic's own tongue was shaped by both Venetian and Tuscan influence. By the 1520s, the Ottoman Empire had seized most of the Dalmatian hinterland from the Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom, organizing it first as a Croatian vilayet after the Siege of Klis in 1537, and later folding it into the Bosnia Eyalet. Venetian Dalmatia now bordered Ottoman territory directly, an inland zone Venetians still called Banadego, the lands of the Ban. From the sixteenth century onward, Slavicized Vlachs, Serbs, and other South Slavs arrived in the region both as Ottoman auxiliaries called martolos and as refugees fleeing into Venetian Dalmatia, while some inhabitants of Ottoman Dalmatia converted to Islam to gain freedom and privilege. The border between Venetian and Ottoman territory kept shifting until the Morean War, when Venice's capture of Knin and Sinj fixed the line close to its present course, formalized by the Linea Grimani in the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. Calmer decades followed, bringing economic and cultural growth and renewed trade with the hinterland, until the fall of the Republic of Venice itself in 1797. Napoleon's troops then swept through the region, ending the independence of the Republic of Ragusa as well. In 1805, Napoleon folded the former Venetian Dalmatia into his new Kingdom of Italy, adding the just-conquered Ragusa to it in 1808. A year later he detached Dalmatia again, forming the Illyrian Provinces under France and naming Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult Duke of Dalmatia. French rule brought heavy taxation and provoked rebellions, but it also modernized the legal system and infrastructure and produced the first Croatian-language newspaper, published in Zadar. Napoleon himself blamed his governor, Marshal Auguste de Marmont, for spending too freely on the territory. The Habsburgs took Dalmatia back by 1814, and the Congress of Vienna formalized Austrian rule the following year, establishing the Kingdom of Dalmatia. For centuries, Italian and Slavic communities there had simply called themselves Dalmatians, without much sense of separate national identity. That shared label was about to come under enormous strain.

• 7. Nations, Wars, and New Borders

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  In 1848, the Croatian parliament in Zagreb published the People's Requests, demanding both the end of serfdom and the unification of Dalmatia with Croatia, with Dubrovnik the most vocal of all the Dalmatian communes in support. The following year, the Dubrovnik paper L'Avvenire ran a campaign for a federal Habsburg system and Slavic brotherhood, while the city's own almanac carried Petar Preradović's poem Pjesma Dubrovniku, celebrating the Croatian cause. Emperor Franz Joseph's March Constitution blocked unification outright, and the movement stalled. Many Italian-speaking Dalmatians instead looked to Italy's Risorgimento, and after Austria ceded Veneto and Friuli to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1866, Italian irredentists in Dalmatia began demanding union with Italy too. That same year, at a Council of Ministers meeting on the 12th of November 1866, Emperor Franz Joseph I ordered a deliberate campaign to replace Italian officials, judges, and press influence with German or Slavic influence in Dalmatia and elsewhere. Austrian censuses recorded the effect starkly: Italian speakers fell from 12.5 percent of Dalmatia's population in 1865 to just 2.8 percent in 1910, with the steepest local declines in towns like Pag, where the Italian-speaking population dropped from 787 to 23 between 1890 and 1910. Croatian only became an official language in Dalmatia in 1883, alongside Italian, after Austria's 1870 electoral reforms let the Slav majority finally vote in numbers. Even so, Zadar, known then as Zara, remained the one Dalmatian city with an Italian majority. In 1861, delegates from Kotor traveled to Dubrovnik to join the unification campaign, and Dubrovnik's own delegate, Niko Pucić, carried the demand for a united Croatian Sabor all the way to Vienna. When the First World War broke out, both Italy and Serbia set their sights on Dalmatia, and Italy's 1915 Treaty of London promised it a large share of the coast in exchange for joining the Allies. Italian forces reached Vis, Lastovo, and Šibenik in early November 1918, and by the 17th of that month had taken Rijeka as well, prompting Admiral Enrico Millo to declare himself Italy's Governor of Dalmatia. The nationalist writer Gabriele D'Annunzio sailed into Zadar aboard an Italian warship that December in support of the seizure. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points overturned the London bargain at the peace talks of 1919 and 1920, leaving Italy only Zadar while the rest of Dalmatia joined the new Yugoslavia. In 1927, Italy struck a deal with the Croatian fascist Ustaše movement, which agreed that once in power it would hand over more of Dalmatia and the Bay of Kotor in exchange for Italian support. That bargain came due in 1941, when Axis forces occupied Yugoslavia and the puppet Independent State of Croatia ceded Dalmatian territory to Italy under the Treaties of Rome, creating a second Italian Governorate stretching from north of Zadar to south of Split. Italian occupiers Italianized place names, banned Croatian cultural societies, and seized mineral, industrial, and business assets, provoking a resistance that drove many Dalmatians into the Partisan ranks; roughly 80,000 Dalmatians, about 12 percent of the population, passed through Italian concentration camps as a result. After Italy's surrender in 1943, German forces retook much of the coast in a brutal campaign before Partisans finally secured Dalmatia in 1944. Some 350,000 Italians fled Istria and Dalmatia afterward in what became known as the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus. Postwar Dalmatia became part of the People's Republic of Croatia within Yugoslavia, with only the Bay of Kotor going to Montenegro, and those borders held when Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991. During the Croatian War of Independence that followed, the Yugoslav People's Army and Serb forces held the area around Knin and parts of the far south, until Croatia retook the south in 1992 and the north in 1995 through Operation Storm. Dalmatians within the Yugoslav Partisan movement had once floated their own postwar autonomy plan, only to see Croatian Communists shut the idea down for good.

• 8. Land and Living Culture

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  The Dinaric Alps run northwest to southeast through most of Dalmatia, their parallel ridges giving rise to the geographic term Dalmatian concordant coastline. Along the shore the climate is Mediterranean, turning moderately Mediterranean further inland, with frosty, snowy mountain winters giving way to milder conditions in the south. Centuries of deforestation left much of the terrain covered in bush and brush rather than forest, though evergreen vegetation still lines the coast and olives and grapes flourish despite generally poor soils. Dinara, at 1,913 meters, is the highest peak in present-day Dalmatia, while the highest coastal peaks are Biokovo's Sv. Jure at 1,762 meters and Velebit's Vaganski vrh at 1,757 meters, the latter technically sitting in Lika-Senj County. Brač, Korčula, Dugi Otok, Mljet, Vis, and Hvar rank among the largest islands, fed by the Zrmanja, Krka, Cetina, and Neretva rivers, and the coastline's water quality and countless coves draw nautical tourism to national parks like the Kornati archipelago and the Krka river rapids. Of the four counties making up modern Dalmatia, Split-Dalmatia is by far the largest, recording 454,798 residents in the 2011 census, 97.08 percent of them ethnic Croats. Zadar County counted 170,017 people, Dubrovnik-Neretva 122,568, and Šibenik-Knin 109,375, each retaining a small Serb minority alongside smaller Bosniak and Albanian communities in the south. Split itself remains the largest city, with 161,312 residents, ahead of Zadar's 70,829, Šibenik's 42,589, and Dubrovnik's 41,671. Culturally, the region's coastal city dwellers, nicknamed Fetivi, share a Mediterranean outlook with island communities known as Boduli, setting both apart from the more numerous Hinterland population, dubbed Vlaji after the Vlachs despite no real ethnic link. The seventeenth-century poet Jerolim Kavanjin called Dalmatia his homeland and identified himself simply as Dalmatian, though historian John Fine reads this as something short of true nationalism. During Austrian rule, the Autonomist Party rejected union with Croatia and instead championed a multicultural Dalmatia of Croats, Serbs, and Italians, a vision defended by figures like Stipan Ivičević even as critics accused the party of masking pro-Italian sympathies. In the 1861 elections, the Autonomists still outpolled Croatian nationalists twenty-seven seats to fourteen. Dalmatians within the Yugoslav Partisan movement raised the question of regional autonomy once more during the Second World War, only for Croatian Communists to shut the proposal down for good.