We have spoken in a former article of the general aspect and the historical position of the city and commonwealth of Ragusa, her hills, her walls, her havens, her union of freedom from the lion of Saint Mark with half dependence on the crescent of Mahomet. But this ancient and isolated city has yet something more to tell of. There are several of the municipal and domestic buildings of the fallen republic, buildings which, as far as we know, have never been described or illustrated in detail in any English work, and of which no worthy representation can be found on the spot. In the work of Eitelberger much will be found; but for the ordinary English student there is no help at all. Yet, on the strength of these buildings, Ragusa may really claim a place among those cities which stand foremost in the history of architectural progress. And this fact is the more remarkable, and the more to be insisted on, because of the seemingly general belief that there is little ornothing to see at Ragusa in the way of architecture. But the truth is that far more of the old city escaped the earthquake of 1667 than would be thought at first sight. Because the cathedral is later, because the general aspect of the main street is later, the idea is suggested that nothing is left but the municipal palace. That alone would be a most important exception, but it is by no means the only one. If the traveller leaves the main street and turns up the narrow alleys which run from it up the hills on either side, alleys many of them which, at present at least, lead to nothing, he will find many scraps of domestic architecture which must belong to times earlier than the great blow of the seventeenth century. Signs of that blow are seen in many places in the form of scraps of detail of various kinds irregularly built up in the wall; but there are a great number of pointed doorways still in their places which no man can think are later than 1667. Some of these are simply pointed; others combine the pointed arch with the tympanum, sometimes with both the tympanum and the spandril. There is also a not unpleasing type ofRenaissancedoorway, a lintel resting on two pilasters with floriated capitals, which one can hardly believe are due to a time so late as the days after the earthquake. At all events, if they are later than the earthquake, they only go to strengthen the generalposition which we have to lay down, namely the way in which early forms lived on at Ragusa to an amazingly late date. This same examination of the narrow streets will also bring to light a few, but only a few, windows of the Venetian Gothic. The strength of Ragusa, as far as scraps of this kind are concerned, undoubtedly lies in its doorways.
Franciscan Church, RagusaTOWER OF FRANCISCAN CHURCH, RAGUSA.
TOWER OF FRANCISCAN CHURCH, RAGUSA.
In the churches too there is more left than the mere scraps which are built up again. Parts at least of the tall towers—neither of them detached—of the Franciscan and Dominican churches, the former in the main street, the latter near the eastern gate, are also earlier. In the former the line of junction between the older tower and the ugly church which has been built up against it is clearly to be seen. The upper stage of this tower, and the small cupola which crowns it,maybe later than the earthquake; but if so, they have caught the spirit of earlier work in an unusual degree, and all the lower part is in a form of Italian Gothic less unpleasing than usual. Both this tower and that of the Dominican church show how long the general type of the earliest Romanesque campaniles went on. Save in the small cupola, this tower has the perfect air, and almost the details, of a tower of the eleventh century: three ranges of windows with mid-wall shafts rise over one another; only they are grouped under containing arches inwhat in England we should call a Norman fashion. But, as this tower forms part of a Dominican monastery, it cannot be earlier than the thirteenth century, and its smaller details also cannot belong to any earlier date. Yet the general effect of this tower, even more than of the other, is that of a tower of the Primitive type. The Dominican church also keeps some details of Italian Gothic which must be older than the earthquake, and the cloister is one of the best specimens of that style. Its groupings of tracery under round arches, the poverty of design in the tracery itself, strike us as weak, if our thoughts go back to Salisbury or to Zürich; but the general effect is good, and the cloister—as distinguished from the buildings above it—may almost be called beautiful. Of more importance in the history of Ragusan architecture is the Franciscan cloister. Being Franciscan, it cannot be earlier than the thirteenth century, and it may well be much later. But it is essentially Romanesque in style. The general effect of the tall shafts which support its narrow round arches differs indeed a good deal from the general effect of the more massive Romanesque cloisters to which we are used elsewhere. But it is essentially one with them in style, and it is one of the many witnesses to the way in which at Ragusa early forms were kept in use till a late time.
But the architectural glory of Ragusa is certainly not to be looked for among its churches. The most truly instructive work that Ragusa has to show in any of its ecclesiastical buildings does not show itself at first sight, and its full significance is not likely to be understood till the civic and domestic buildings of the city and its suburbs have been well studied. When this has been done, it will be easily seen that certain arches and capitals in the subordinate buildings of the Dominican church have their part in the history of Ragusan art; but the great civic buildings must be seen and mastered first. Of these two of the highest interest escaped the common overthrow. They both show the Italian Gothic in its best shape; but they also show something else which is of far higher value. They show that peculiar form ofRenaissancewhich can hardly be calledRenaissancein any bad sense, which is in truth a last outburst of Romanesque, a living child of classical forms, not a dead imitation of them. Examples of this kind often meet us in Italy; we see something of it in the north side of the greatpiazzaat Venice as compared with the southern side; but the Ragusan examples go beyond anything that we know of elsewhere. Give the palace of Ragusa—the palace, not of a Doge, but of a Rector—the same size, the same position, as the building which answers to it at Venice, and we shouldsoon see that the city which so long held her own against Venice in other ways could hold her own in art also. The Venetian arcade cannot for a moment be compared to the Ragusan; the main front of the Ragusan building has escaped the addition of the ugly upper story which disfigures the Venetian. As wholes, of course no one can compare the two in general effect. Saint Blaise must yield to Saint Mark. But set Saint Blaise's palace on Saint Mark's site; carry out his arcade to the same boundless extent, and there is little doubt which would be the grander pile. The Venetian building overwhelms by its general effect; the Ragusan building will better stand the test of minute study.
Palace, RagusaPALACE, RAGUSA.
PALACE, RAGUSA.
The palace of the Ragusan commonwealth was begun in 1388, and finished in 1435, in the reign, as an inscription takes care to announce, of the Emperor Siegmund. What name shall we give to the style of this most remarkable building, at all events to the style of its admirable arcade? Here are six arches—why did not the architect carry on the design through the whole length of the building?—which show what, as late as the fifteenth century, a round-arched style could still do when it followed its natural promptings, instead of either binding itself by slavish precedents or striving after a helpless imitation of foreign forms. Never mind the date; here is Romanesque in all itstruth and beauty; here, in the land which gave Rome so many of her greatest Cæsars, the arcade of Ragusa may worthily end the series which began with the arcades of Spalato. Siegmund, the last but one to wear the crown of Diocletian in the Eternal City, has his name not quite unworthily engraved on a building less removed in style than a distance of more than eleven centuries would have led us to expect from the everlasting house of Jovius. Does some pedantic Vitruvian brand the columns as too short? The architect has grasped the truth that, as the arch takes the place of the entablature, the height of the arch may fairly be taken out of the height of the column. Does he blame the massive abaci? They are wrought to bear the greater immediate weight which the arch brings upon the capital, and they avoid such shifts as the Ravenna stilt and the Byzantine double capital. Does he blame the capitals, which certainly do not follow the exact pattern of any Vitruvian order? Let us answer boldly, Why should art be put in fetters? A Corinthian capital is a beautiful form; but why should the hand of man be kept back from devising other beautiful forms? The Ragusan architect has ventured to cover some of his capitals with foliage which does not obey any pedantic rule; in others he has ventured—like the artists of the noble capitals which may still be seenin the Capitol and in Caracalla's baths—to bring in the forms of animal and of human, as well as of vegetable, life. In one point his taste seems slightly to have failed him; on some of the capitals the winged figures with which they are wrought savour a little of the vulgarRenaissance. But who shall blame the capital long ago engraved and commented on by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in which however a neighbouring inscription shows that tradition was right in seeing the form of Asklêpios, and not that of a mere mortal alchemist, though tradition was certainly wrong in believing that Asklêpios had been brought ready made from his old home at Epidauros? And the capitals bear arches worthy of them, round arches with mouldings and ornaments, which thoroughly fit their shape, though, like the capitals, they do not servilely follow any prescribed rule. Altogether this arcade only makes us wish for more, for a longer range from the same hand. Compare it with the vulgar Italian work of the two neighbouring churches. Pisa and Durham might have stretched out the right hand of fellowship to Romanesque Ragusa before the earthquake; they would have held it back from Jesuited Ragusa after it.
The rest of the front cannot be called worthy of this admirable arcade. The windows behind the arcade are of the worse, those above it are of the better, kindof Italian Gothic. These last in fact are about as good as Italian Gothic can be. They are well proportioned two-light windows with Geometrical tracery, and in the general effect they really agree better than could have been looked for with the admirable arches below. Still they are Italian Gothic, and at Ragusa we should not welcome the loveliest form of tracery that Carlisle or Selby could give us. A Pisan arcade, pierced for light wherever light was wanted, would have been the right thing for the columns and arches to bear aloft. He who duly admires the arcade will do well to shut his eyes as he turns round the corner by the west front of the cathedral; but let him go inside, and the court, if not altogether worthy of the outer arcade, is no contemptible specimen of the same style. It contains one or two monuments of Ragusan worthies. The figure of Roland, which lay there neglected when we first saw Ragusa, has since been set up again in the openpiazza. And, strange to say in these lands, it ventures to proclaim itself as having been set up, as it might have been in the old time, by the free act of thecommuneof Ragusa, without any of those cringing references to a foreign power which are commonly found expedient under foreign rule. The court is entered by a side door with two ancient knockers, one of them a worthy fellow of the great one at Durham or of that which we saw morelately at Curzola. But its chief interest comes from its strictly architectural forms, and from the comparison of them with those which are made use of on the outside. The court is very small, and it is surrounded on all sides, save that which is filled by the grand staircase, by an arcade of two, supporting a second upper range. The composition is thus better than that of the front itself, as there are two harmonious stages in the same style, without any intrusion of foreign elements, like the pointed windows in the front; but the arcades themselves, though very good and simple, do not carry out the wonderful boldness and originality of the outer range. Columns with tongues to their base with flowered capitals, showing a remembrance, but not a servile remembrance, of Corinthian models, support round arches. Over these is the upper range of two round arches over each one below, resting on coupled shafts, the arrangement which, from the so-called tomb of Saint Constantia, has spread to so many Romanesque cloisters and to so many works of the Saracen. Were this range open, instead of being foolishly glazed, this design of two stages of a true Romanesque, simpler, but perhaps more classical, than the outer arcade, would form a design thoroughly harmonious and satisfactory.
Now when we come to examine this inner court more minutely, we shall find that it is certainly oflater date than the outer arcade, and that it supplanted earlier work which formed part of the same design as the outer arcade. It is impossible to believe that the court is later than the great earthquake; but 1667 was not the only year in which Ragusa underwent visitations of that kind; and it is an allowable guess that a rebuilding took place after an earlier earthquake in the beginning of the sixteenth century. That some change took place at some time is certain. There are preparations for spanning arches at one point of the outer wall of the court, which could never have agreed with the position of the present columns. And we have a most interesting piece of documentary evidence which carries us further. In a manuscript account of the building of the palace, it is mentioned that at the entrance were two columns, on the capital of one of which was carved the Judgement of Solomon, while the other showed the Rector of Ragusa sitting to administer justice after the model of Solomon. Now this cannot refer to the outer arcade, where none of the capitals show those subjects. Still less is there anything like it in the arcade of the court, nor can there have been since the present arrangement was made. But the description is no freak of the imagination; both capitals are in being; one of them is still within the palace. The capital showing the Rector in his chair dispensing justice to his fellow-citizensis built in at a corner in the upper story of the court. And a capital of exactly the same style, and with the Judgement of Solomon carved on one face of it, may still be seen in the garden of a house outside the city of which we shall have presently to speak. It is thus perfectly plain that the inner court was rebuilt at some time later than the days of Siegmund, and that this rebuilding displaced an inner design more in harmony with the outer arcade, and of which these two capitals formed a part.
To our mind this palace, to which Sir Gardner Wilkinson hardly does justice, and of which Mr. Neale takes no notice at all, really deserves no small place in the history of Romanesque art. It shows how late the genuine tradition lingered on, and what vigorous offshoots the old style could throw off, even when it might be thought to be dead. One or two capitals show that the Ragusan architect knew of the actualRenaissance. But it was only in that one detail that he went astray. In everything else he started from sound principles, and from them vigorously developed for himself. And the fruit of his work was a building which thoroughly satisfies every requirement of criticism, and on which the eye gazes with ever increased delight, as one of the fairest triumphs of human skill within the range of the builder's art.
But the palace must not be spoken of as if it stoodaltogether alone among the buildings of the city. There is another civic building, which, though it does not reach the full perfection of its great neighbour, must also be treated as a true fruit, in some sort a more remarkable fruit, of the same spirit which called its greater neighbour into being. This is the building which acted at once in the characters of mint and custom-house, the second character being set forth by its name wrought in nails on the great door. This building stands just where the main street and thepiazzajoin, close by the arch leading to the town-gate. Here we have an arcade of five, the columns of which are crowned with capitals, Composite in their general shape, but not slavishly following technical precedents, nor all of them exactly alike. They have a heavy abacus, which, as well as the soffit of the round arch, is enriched with flowered work. One or two of them are none the better for being new chiselled in modern times. Here is something which is quite unlike Northern Romanesque, but which still is absolutely identical with it in principle. The column and the round arch are there in their purity, and the enrichment is of a kind which we instinctively feel is in place at Ragusa, though it would be out of place at Caen or Mainz or Durham. Whatever the date may be, the thing is thoroughly good, incomparably better than either the Italian Gothic or the cosmopolite Jesuitstyle. Above the arcade are windows with the usual Venetian attempt at tracery, a large square window between two with ogee arches; above is a stage with square windows, which we may hope is a later addition. The merits of the three stages lessen as they get higher. Yet from the date, when we come to find it out, it seems not impossible that the arcade and both the stages above it may really be of the same date. In the inner court there are no such discordant elements as there are without, though the forms of different styles are quite as much mingled. Octagonal piers support round arches; pointed doorways with thoroughly Ragusan tympana open into the chamber behind them. On this arcade rests another, with round arches on the short sides of the court, and pointed arches on the long sides, rising from columns and square piers alternately. Above is a range which might as well be away. Square windows, round Ragusan windows, might well be endured; butRenaissanceshields andRenaissanceangels show that the infection had begun. Now this beautiful piece of Romanesque work—we give it that name in defiance of dates—was finished in 1520, when the world on the southern side of the Alps was, for the most part, running after the dreariest forms of the mere revived Italian. This amazingly late date makes this building even more wonderful than the palace, though it certainlyis not its rival in beauty. The arcades, good as they are, cannot be compared to those of the palace, and the Venetian work above is still more inferior. Still, the later the date, the more honour to the architect who designed such a work at such a time. And the later the date, the more likely that he built his arcade according to the promptings of his own genius, and added the two ranges of windows in deference to the two rival fashions of his time.
Dogana, RagusaDOGANA, RAGUSA.
DOGANA, RAGUSA.
The arcade of this building, taken alone without reference to the windows above, is the last link in a chain which shows that the preservation of good architectural ideas at so late a time is no mere accident. Indeed, if we pass from public buildings within the city to private buildings outside of it, we shall begin to doubt whether thedoganais the last chain, and whether there are not still later buildings which are fairly entitled to the Romanesque name. The best of the houses of the Ragusan patricians are to be found, not within the city, but by the port at Gravosa, and further on on the way to Ombla. Several of those, while their other features are Venetian Gothic, or even later still, have—commonly in their upperloggie—a column or two supporting a round arch, which are certainly not vulgarRenaissance, and which keep on the sound tradition of the palace and thedogana. The finest of these is the house of the Counts Caboga, knownas Batahovina, on the coast on the way to Ombla. Here, as in the palace, as in thedogana, an arcade of this late local Romanesque supports an upper story of Venetian Gothic, very inferior and most likely much later than that in either of the civic buildings. It has however at each end an openloggiamatching the arcade below. The columns, plain and with twisted flutes—distant kinsfolk of Waltham, Durham, Dunfermline, and Lindisfarn—have capitals such as we might look for in much earlier Romanesque.
Caboga House, GravosaCABOGA HOUSE, GRAVOSA.
CABOGA HOUSE, GRAVOSA.
This, we may note by the way, is the house in whose garden the column from the palace, wrought with the Judgement of Solomon, still lies hid. Indeed we might go further away from the palace than theloggieof the houses. At Ragusa art extends itself to objects which might have been thought hardly capable of artistic treatment. Stone is common, and it is used for all manner of purposes. Among other things stone vine-props are common. In not a few cases these take the form of columns, slenderer doubtless than the rules of classical proportion, realizing the description of Cassiodorus about the tall columns like reeds, the lofty buildings propped as it were on the shafts of spears. Sometimes the columns are fluted or twisted; in a great many cases they have real capitals, with various forms according to taste. It often happens that a row of such columns, whether on a house-top or in a vineyard,really becomes an architectural object, a genuine colonnade. Here the style, the construction at least, is Greek rather than Romanesque; but the principle is the same. A good and rational artistic form is kept in use, and is applied to a purpose for which it is fitted.
All these examples, the palace, thedogana, the houses, the remains in the Dominican church, we might almost say the vine-props, look one way. All point to the existence of a Ragusan style, to an unbroken Romanesque tradition, which could not wholly withstand the inroads of thepseudo-Gothic of Italy, but which could at least keep its place alongside of the intruder. All help us to see how instructive must have been the course of architectural developement at Ragusa, and how much has been lost to the history of art by the destruction of so many of the buildings of the city in the great earthquake. It is easy to see that for a long time the struggle between the genuine Romanesque tradition, the Italian Gothic, and the new ideas of theRenaissance, must have been very hard. How long real Romanesque went on, bringing in new developements of its own, but remaining still as truly Romanesque by unbroken succession as anything at Pisa or Durham, is shown by the noble arches of the palace, and the still laterdogana. The slight touch ofRenaissancein some of the capitals of the palacein no sort takes away from the general purity of the style. Still over these noble arcades are windows of Venetian Gothic, and one of the most characteristic features of the Ragusan streets are the flat-headed doorways. But these, alternating as they do with pointed ones, help to make out our case. On the other hand, it is equally plain that in some cases theRenaissancecame in early. A little chapel by the basin at Ombla, bearing date 1480, is in a confirmedRenaissancestyle, and looks more like 1580. Yet of trueRenaissancethere is very little. One large house in the city, older than the earthquake, stands quite alone as the kind of thing which might easily have been built in Italy or copied in England. But at Ragusa, in the near neighbourhood of several native doorways of different shapes, of many native vine-props, of several native wells—for wells too take an artistic style and copy the form of a capital—the regular trim Palladian building looks strangely out of place. Even in theStradone, where in the houses there is little architecture of any kind, a touch of ancient effect is kept in the form of the shops, with their arches and stone dressers, thoroughly after the mediæval pattern. And some architectural features never died out. The round window with tracery goes on long after every other feature of Romanesque or Gothic is forgotten. It is to be seen in endless littlechapels of very late date in the city and suburbs, sometimes standing apart, sometimes attached to private houses.
The plain conclusion from all this is that at Ragusa the use of the round arch for the chief arcades never went out of use; that it always remained as a constructive feature, passing from Romanesque toRenaissance, if fully developedRenaissancecan at Ragusa be said to exist at all, without any intermediate Gothic stage, and continuing to invent and adopt any kind of ornament which suited its constructive form. In windows and doorways, on the other hand, the forms of the Italian Gothic came in and stood their ground till a very late date. In most cases we wish the Venetian features away; in the upper story of the palace they may be endured; but conceive palace,dogana, Caboga house, with smaller arcades and windows to match the great constructive arches. Such buildings as these, now so few, make us sigh over the effects of the great earthquake, and over the treasures of art which it must have swallowed up. If Ragusa, in her earlier day, contained a series of churches to match her civic arcades, she might claim, in strictly artistic interest, to stand alongside of Rome, Ravenna, Pisa, and Lucca. Her churches of the fifteenth century must have been worthy to rank with anything from the fourth century to the twelfth.One longs to be able to study the Ragusan style in more than these few examples. It is not indeed absolutely peculiar either to Ragusa or to Dalmatia. Many buildings in Italy and Sicily show a good native Romanesque tradition, holding its own against the sham Gothic, and showing a good fight against theRenaissance. Not a few arcades, not a few cloisters, of this kind may be found here and there. But it would be hard to light on another such group of buildings as the palace, thedogana, and their fellows. In any case the Dalmatian coast may hold its head high among the artistic regions of the world. It is no small matter that the harmonious and consistent use of the arch and column should have begun at Spalato, and that identically the same constructive form should still be found, eleven ages later, putting forth fresh and genuine shapes of beauty at Ragusa.
[This paper, as giving the impressions of a first visit to the soil of Herzegovina, during an early stage of the war, has been reprinted, with the change of a few words, as it was first written.]
The first step which any man takes beyond the bounds of Christendom can hardly fail to mark a kind of epoch in his life. And the epoch becomes more memorable when the first step is taken into an actual "seat of war," where the old strife between Christian and Moslem is still going on with all the bitterness of crusading days. In Europe it is now in one quarter only that such a step can be made by land with somewhat less of formality than is often needed in passing from one Christian state to another. It is now only in the great south-eastern peninsula that the frontier of the Turk marches upon the dominions of any Christian power; and, now that Russia and the Turk are no longer immediate neighbours, the powers on which his frontier marches are, with one exception, states which have been more or less fully liberated from his real or asserted dominion. That exceptionis to be found in the Hadriatic dominions of Austria; and certainly no more striking contrast can be imagined than that which strikes the traveller as he passes on this side from Christian to Moslem dominion. Let us suppose him to be at Ragusa, with his ears full of tales from the seat of war, all of which cannot be true, but all of which may possibly be false. The insurgents have burned a Turkish village. No; it was a Christian village, and the Turks burned it. The Turks have murdered seven Roman Catholics. The Turks have murdered seventy Roman Catholics—a difference this last which may throw light on some cases of disputed numbers in various parts of history. The Turks have threatened Austrian subjects. Austrian subjects have attacked the Turks. An Italian has had his head cut off by the Turks just beyond the frontier. A Turkish soldier has been found lying dead in the road a little further on. These two last stories come on the authority of men who have seen the bodies, so that we have got within the bounds of credible testimony. Meanwhile the one thing about which there is no doubt is the presence and the wretchedness of the unhappy Herzegovinese women and children whose homes have been destroyed either by friends or by enemies, and who are seeking such shelter as public and private charity can give in hospitable Ragusa. All these things kindle a certaindesire to get at least a glimpse of the land where something is certainly going on, though it may not be easy to know exactly what. Between Ragusa and Trebinje there is just now no actual fighting; the road is reported to be perfectly safe; only it is advisable to get a passportviséby the Turkish consul. The passports arevisé, but, so far for the credit of the Turks, it must be added that, though duly carried, they were never asked for. The party, four in number—three English and one Russian—presently set forth from Ragusa. It is now as easy to get a carriage at Ragusa as in any other European town. So our party sets out behind two of the small but strong and sure-footed horses of the country, to get a glimpse of what, to two at least of their number, were the hitherto unknown lands of Paynimrie.
As long as we are on Austrian territory there is nothing to fear or to complain of but those evils which no kings or laws can cure. The day was rainy—so rainy that a word was once or twice murmured in favour of turning back; but it was deemed faint-hearted to turn again in an undertaking which had been once begun. On the Austrian side the rain was certainly to be regretted, as damping the charm of the glorious prospect from the zigzag road which winds up from Ragusa to the frontier point of Drino. Ragusa, nestling among hills and forts and castles,the isle of La Croma keeping guard over the haven which has ceased to be a haven, the wide Hadriatic stretching to the horizon, form a picture surpassed by but few pictures even in the glorious scenery of the Dalmatian coast. On the other side, it was perhaps no great harm if the rain made the savage land between Drino and Trebinje seem more savage still. At the top of the height the Austrian guard-house is reached, a guard-house which the line of the frontier causes to be overlooked by a Turkish fort above it. The guardians of the borders of Christendom look wild enough in their local dress; but the wildness is all outside, though one certainly does not envy them their watch on so dreary a spot. Hard by is the place where the Italian lost his head; but the Italian was openly in the ranks of the insurgents; so, though the thought is a little thrilling, our present travellers feel no real danger for their heads. The frontier is now passed; we are in the land where the Asiatic and Mahometan invader still holds European and Christian nations in bondage. We see no immediate sign of his presence. The Turkish guard-house is at some distance from the Austrian, in order to watch the pass on the other side, where the road begins to go down towards Trebinje, as the Austrian guards the road immediately up from Ragusa. But, if as yet we see not the Turk, we feel his presence in anotherway. In one point at least we have suddenly changed from civilization to barbarism. The excellently kept Austrian road at once stops—that is to say, its excellent keeping stops; the road goes on, only it is no longer mended in Austrian but in Turkish fashion—a fashion of which the dullest English highway board would perhaps be ashamed. We presently begin to see something cf the land of Herzegovina, or at least of that part of it which lies between Ragusa and Trebinje. It may be most simply described as a continuous mass of limestone. The town lies in a plain surrounded by hills, and it would be untrue to say that that plain is altogether without trees or without cultivation. Close to the town tobacco grows freely, and before we reach the town, as we draw near to the river Trebenitza, the dominion of utter barrenness has come to an end. But the first general impression of the land is one of utter barrenness, and for a great part of our course, long after we have come down into the lower ground, this first general impression remains literally true. It is not like a mountain valley or a mountain coast, with a fringe of inhabited and cultivated land at the foot of the heights. All is barren; all is stone; stone which, if it serves no other human purpose, might at least be used to make the road better. That road, in all its Turkish wretchedness, goes on and on, through massesof limestone of every size, from the mountains which form the natural wall of Trebinje down to lumps which nature has broken nearly small enough for the purposes of MacAdam. Through the greater part of the route not a house is to be seen; there are one or two near the frontier; there is hardly another till we draw near to the town, when we pass a small village or two, of which more anon. Through the greater part of the route not a living being is to be seen. In such a wilderness we might at least have looked for birds of prey; but no flight of vultures, no solitary eagle, shows itself. As for man, he seems absent also, save for one great exception, which exception gives the journey to Trebinje its marked character, and which brings thoroughly home to us that we are passing through a seat of war.
It will be remembered that, early in the war, the insurgents were attacking the town of Trebinje, and, among later rumours, were tales of renewed attacks in that quarter. But at the time of our travellers' journey the road was perfectly open, and no actual fighting was going on in the neighbourhood. Trebinje however was on the watch: the plain before the town was full of tents, and, long before the town or the tents were within sight, the sight of actual campaigners gave a keen feeling of what was going on. Flour is to be had in the stony land only by seeking itwithin the Austrian frontier, and to the Austrian frontier accordingly the packhorses go, with a strong convoy of Turkish soldiers to guard them. Twice therefore in the course of their journey, going and coming back, did our travellers fall in with the Turkish troops on their way to and from the land of food. For men who had never before seen anything of actual warfare there was something striking in the first sight of soldiers, not neat and trim as for some day of parade, but ragged, dirty, and weather-stained with the actual work of war. And there was something more striking still in the thought that these were the old enemies of Europe and of Christendom, the representatives of the men who stormed the gates of the New Rome and who overthrew the chivalry of Burgundy and Poland at Nikopolis and at Varna. But the Turk in a half-European uniform has lost both his picturesqueness and his terrors, and the best troops in Europe would be seen to no great advantage on such a day and on such a march. And perhaps Turkish soldiers, like all other men and things, look differently according to the eyes with which they are looked at. Some eyes noticed them as being, under all their disadvantages, well-made and powerful-looking men. Other eyes looked with less pleasure on the countenances of the barbarians who were brought to spread havoc over Christian lands.All however agreed that, as the armed votaries of the Prophet passed before them, the unmistakeable features of the Æthiop were not lacking among the many varieties of countenance which they displayed. But the Paynim force, though it did no actual deed of arms before the eyes of our party, did something more than simply march along the road. The realities of warfare came out more vividly when, at every fitting point, skirmishers were thrown off to occupy each of the peaked hills and other prominent points which line the road like so many watchtowers.
The armed force went and came back that day without any need for actually using their arms. Insurgent attacks on the convoys are a marked feature of the present war; but our travellers had not the opportunity of seeing such a skirmish. Still before long they did see one most speaking sign of war and its horrors. By the banks of the Trebenitza a burned village first came in sight. The sight gives a kind of turn to the whole man; still a burned village is not quite so ugly in reality as it sounds in name. The stone walls of the houses are standing; it is only the roofs that are burned off. But who burned the village, and why? He would be a very rash man who should venture to say, without the personal witness of those who burned it, or saw it burned. Was it a Christian village burned by Turks? Was it a Turkish villageburned by Christians? Was it a Christian village burned by the insurgents because its inhabitants refused to join in the insurrection? Was it a Christian village burned by its own inhabitants rather than leave anything to fall into the hands of the Turks? If rumour is to be trusted, cases of all these four kinds have happened in the course of the war. All that can be said is that the village has a church and shows no signs of a mosque, and that, while the houses were burned, the church was not. The burned village lay near a point of the river which it is usually possible to ford in a carriage. This time however, the Trebenitza—a river which, like so many Greek rivers, loses itself in akatabothra—was far too full to be crossed in this way, and our travellers had to leave their carriage and horses and get to Trebinje as they could. After some scrambling over stones, a boat was found, which strongly suggested those legends of Charon which are far from having died out of the memory of the Christians of the East. A primitive punt it was, with much water in it, which Charon slowly ladled out with a weapon which suggested the notion of a gigantic spoon. Charon himself was a ragged object enough, but, as became his craft, he seemed master of many tongues. We may guess that his native speech would be Slave, but one of the company recognized some of his talk forTurkish, and the demand for the two oboli of old was translated into the strange phrase of "dieci groschen." To our travellers the words suggested was the expiring coinage of the German Empire; they did not then take it how widely thegroathad spread its name in the south-eastern lands. At first hearing, the name sounded strange on the banks of the Trebenitza; but in the absence of literalgroatsorgroschen, the currency of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was found in practice to do just as well. Then our four pilgrims crossed and crossed again, the second time with much gladness of heart, as for a while things looked as if no means of getting back again were forthcoming, and it was not every one of the party that had a heart stout enough even to think of trying to swim or wade. Charon's second appearance was therefore hailed with special pleasure.
From the crossing-place to Trebinje itself our travellers had to trudge as they could along a fearfully rough Turkish path—not rougher though than some Dalmatian and Montenegrin paths—till they reached the town itself, which this delay gave them but little time to examine. The suburbs stretched along the hillside; below, the tents of the Turkish troops were pitched on one side; the Mahometan burial-ground lay on the other. After so much time and pains had been spent in getting to Trebinje, a glimpse of Trebinjeitself was all that was to be had. But even a glimpse of Eastern life was something, particularly a glimpse of Eastern life where Eastern life should not be, in a land which once was European. It is the rule of the Turk, it is the effect of his four hundred years of oppression, which makes Trebinje to differ alike from Tzetinje and from Cattaro. The dark, dingy, narrow, streets, the dim arches and vaults, the bazaar, with the Turk—more truly the renegade Slave—squatting in his shop, the gate with its Arabic inscription, the mosques with their minarets contrasting with the church with its disused campanile, all come home to us with a feeling not only of mere strangeness, but of something which is where it ought not to be. It is with a feeling of relief that, after our second trudge, our second voyage, our second meeting with the convoy, we reach the heights, we pass the guard-houses, and find ourselves again in Christendom. Presently Ragusa comes within sight; we are in no mood to discuss the respective merits of the fallen aristocratic commonwealths and of the rule of the Apostolic King. King or Doge or Rector, we may be thankful for the rule of any of them, so as it be not the rule of the Sultan. The difference between four hundred years of civilized government and four hundred years of barbarian tyranny has made the difference between Ragusa and Trebinje.
[I have left this paper, with a few needful corrections, as it was published in March 1876. Since then, it must be remembered, much has changed, especially in the way of boundaries—to say nothing of a carriage-way to Tzetinje. Neither Cattaro nor Budua is any longer either the end of Christendom or the end of the Dalmatian kingdom of the Austrian. That kingdom has been enlarged by the harbour of Spizza, won from the Turk by Montenegrin valour and won from the Montenegrin by Austrian diplomacy. But Christendom must now be looked on as enlarged by the whole Montenegrin sea-coast, a form of words which I could not have used either in 1875 or in 1877. Of this sea-coast I shall have something to say in another paper.]
The end of a purely Dalmatian pilgrimage will be Cattaro. He who goes further along the coast will pass into lands that have a history, past and present, which is wholly distinct from that of the coast which he has hitherto traced from Zara—we might say from Capo d'Istria—onwards. We have not reached the end of the old Venetian dominion—for that we must carry on our voyage to Crete and Cyprus. But we have reached the end of the nearly continuous Venetian dominion—the end of the coast which, saveat two small points, was either Venetian or Ragusan—the end of that territory of the two maritime commonwealths which they kept down to their fall in modern times, and in which they have been succeeded by the modern Dalmatian kingdom. After Cattaro and the small district of Budua beyond it, the Venetian territory did indeed once go on continuously as far as Epidamnos, Dyrrhachion, or Durazzo, while, down to the fall of the Republic, it went on, in the form of scattered outposts, much farther. But, for a long time past, Venice had held beyond Budua only islands and outlying points; and most of these, except the seven so-called Ionian Islands and a few memorable points on the neighbouring mainland, had passed away from her before her fall. Cattaro is the last city of the present Austrian dominion; it is, till we reach the frontier of the modern Greek kingdom, the last city of Christendom. The next point at which the steamer stops will land the traveller on what is now Turkish ground. But the distinction is older than that; he will now change from a Slavonic mainland with a half-Italian fringe on its coast to an Albanian, that is an Old-Illyrian, land, with a few points here and there which once came under Italian influences. It is not at an arbitrary point that the dominion in which the Apostolic King has succeeded the Serene Republic comes to an end. With Cattaro then the Dalmatianjourney and the series of Dalmatian cities will naturally end.
Cattaro is commonly said to have been the Ascrivium or Askrourion of Pliny and Ptolemy, one of the Roman towns which Pliny places after Epidauros—that Epidauros which was the parent of Ragusa—towards the south-east. And, as it is placed between Rhizinion and Butua, which must be Risano and Budua, one can hardly doubt that the identification is right. But though Ascrivium is described as a town of Roman citizens, it has not, like some of its neighbours, any history in purely Roman times. It first comes into notice in the pages of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and it will therefore give us for the last time the privilege of studying topography in company with an Emperor. In his pages the city bears a name which is evidently the same as the name which it bears still, but which the august geographer seizes on as the subject of one of his wonderful bits of etymology. Cattaro with him is Dekatera, and we read:
ὅτι τὸ κάστρον τῶν Δεκατέρων ἑρμηνεύεται τῇ Ῥωμαίων διαλέκτῳ ἐστενωμένον καὶ πεπληγμένον.
We are again driven to ask, Which is the dialect of the Romans? What word either of Greek or of Latin can the Emperor have got hold of? At the same time he had got a fair notion of the general position of Cattaro, though he runs off intobits of exaggeration which remind us of Giraldus' description of Llanthony. The city stands at the end of an inlet of the sea fifteen or twenty miles long, and it has mountains around it so high that it is only in fair summer weather that the sun can be seen; in winter Dekatera never enjoys his presence. There certainly is no place where it is harder to believe that the smooth waters of the narrow, lake-like inlet, with mountains on each side which it seems as if one could put out one's hand and touch, are really part of the same sea which dashes against the rocks of Ragusa. They end in a meadow-like coast which makes one think of Bourget or Trasimenus rather than of Hadria. The Dalmatian voyage is well ended by the sail along theBocche, the loveliest piece of inland sea which can be conceived, and whose shores are as rich in curious bits of political history as they are in scenes of surpassing natural beauty. The general history of the district consists in the usual tossing to and fro between the various powers which have at different times been strong in the neighbourhood. Cattaro—τὰ κάτω Δεκάτερα—was in the reign of Basil the Macedonian besieged and taken by Saracens, who presently went on unsuccessfully to besiege Ragusa. And, as under Byzantine rule it was taken by Saracens, so under Venetian rule it was more than once besieged by Turks. In the intermediatestages we get the usual alternations of independence and of subjection to all the neighbouring powers in turn, till in 1419 Cattaro finally became Venetian. At the fall of the Republic it became part of the Austrian share of the spoil. When the spoilers quarrelled, it fell to France. When England, Russia, and Montenegro were allies, the city joined the land of which it naturally forms the head, and Cattaro became the Montenegrin haven and capital. When France was no longer dangerous, and the powers of Europe came together to part out other men's goods, Austria calmly asked for Cattaro back again, and easily got it. To this day the land keeps many signs of the endless changes which it has undergone. We enter the mouth of the gulf, where, eighty years ago, the land was Ragusan on the left hand and Venetian on the right. But Ragusa and Venice between them did not occupy the whole shore of theBocche; neither at this day does the whole of it belong to that Dalmatian kingdom which has taken the place of both the old republics. We soon reach the further of the two points where Ragusan jealousy preferred an infidel to a Christian neighbour. At Sutorina the Turkish territory nominally comes down to the sea; nominally we say, for if the soil belongs to the Sultan, the road, the most important thing upon it, belongs to the Dalmatian King. And if the Turkcomes down to theBoccheat this end, at the other end the Montenegrin, if he does not come down to the water, at least looks down upon it. In this furthest corner of Dalmatia political elements, old and new, come in which do not show themselves at Zara and Spalato. In short, on theBocchewe have really got into another region, national and religious, from the nearer parts of the country. We have hitherto spoken of an Italian fringe on a Slavonic mainland; we might be tempted to speak of Italian cities with a surrounding Slavonic country. On the shores of theBocchewe may drop those forms of speech. We can hardly say that here there is so much as an Italian fringe. We feel at last we have reached the land which is thoroughly Slavonic. TheBocchesiat once proclaim themselves as the near kinsmen of the unconquered race above them, from whom indeed they differ only in the accidents of their political history. For all purposes but those of war and government, Cattaro is more truly the capital of Montenegro than Tzetinje. In one sense indeed Cattaro is more Italian than Ragusa. All Ragusa, though it has an Italian varnish, is Slavonic at heart. At Cattaro it would be truer to speak of a Slavonic majority and an Italian minority. And along these coasts, together with this distinct predominance of the Slavonic nationality, we come also, if not to the predominance,at all events to the greatly increased prominence, of that form of Christianity to which the Eastern Slave naturally tends. Elsewhere in Dalmatia, as we have on the Slavonic body a narrow fringe of Italian speech, art, and manners, so we have a narrow fringe of the religion of the Old Rome skirting a body belonging to the New. Here, along with the Slavonic nationality, the religion of Eastern Christendom makes itself distinctly seen. In the city of Cattaro the Orthodox Church is still in a minority, but it is a minority not far short of a majority. Outside its walls, the Orthodox outnumber the Catholics. In short, when we reach Cattaro, we have very little temptation to fancy ourselves in Italy or in any part of Western Christendom. We not only know, but feel, that we are on the Byzantine side of the Hadriatic; that we have, in fact, made our way into Eastern Europe.
And East and West, Slave and Italian, New Rome and Old, might well struggle for the possession of the land and of the water through which we pass from Ragusa to our final goal at Cattaro. The strait leads us into a gulf; another narrow strait leads us into an inner gulf; and on an inlet again branching out of that inner gulf lies the furthest of Dalmatian cities. The lower city, Cattaro itself,τὰ κάτω Δεκάτερα, seems to lie so quietly, so peacefully, as if in a world of its own from which nothing beyond the shores ofits ownBocchecould enter, that we are tempted to forget, not only that the spot has been the scene of so many revolutions through so many ages, but that it is even now a border city, a city on the marchland of contending powers, creeds, and races. But, if we once look up to the mountains, we see signs both of the past and of the present, which may remind us of the true nature and history of the land in which we are. In some of the other smaller Dalmatian towns, and at other points along the coast, we see castles perched on mountain peaks or ledges at a height which seems almost frightful; but the castle of Cattaro and the walls leading up to it, walls which seem to leap from point to point of the almost perpendicular hill, form surely the most striking of all the mountain fortresses of the land. The castle is perhaps all the more striking, nestling as it does among the rocks, than if it actually stood, like some others, on a peak or crest of the mountain. One thinks of Alexander's Aornos, and indeed the name of Aornos might be given to any of these Dalmatian heights. The lack of birds, great and small, especially the lack of the eagles and vultures that one sees in other mountain lands, is a distinct feature in the aspect of the Dalmatian hills and of their immediate borders, Montenegrin and Turkish. But, while the castle stands as if no human power could reach it, much less fightagainst it, there are other signs of more modern date which remind us that there are points higher still where no one can complain that the art of fighting has been unknown in any age. Up the mountain, during part of its course skirting the castle walls, climbs the winding road—the staircase rather—which leads from Cattaro to Tzetinje. On it climbs, up and up, till it is lost in the higher peaks; long before the traveller reaches the frontier line which divides Dalmatia and Montenegro, long before he reaches the ridge to which he looks up from Cattaro and its gulf, he has begun to look down, not only on the gulf and the city, but on the mountain castle itself, as something lying far below his feet. From below, Cattaro seems like the end of the world. As we climb the mountain paths, we soon find that it is but a border post on the frontier of a vast world beyond it, a world in whose past history Cattaro has had some share, a world whose history is not yet over.
The city of Cattaro itself is small, standing on a narrow ledge between the gulf and the base of the mountain. It carries the features of the Dalmatian cities to what any one who has not seen Traü will call their extreme point. But, though the streets of Cattaro are narrow, yet they are civilized and airy-looking compared with those of Traü, and the little pavedsquares, as so often along this coast, suggest the memory of the ruling city. The memory of Venice is again called up by the graceful little scraps of its characteristic architecture which catch the eye ever and anon among the houses of Cattaro. The landing-place, themarina, the space between the coast and the Venetian wall, where we pass for the last time under the winged lion over the gate, has put on the air of aboulevard. But the forms and costume ofBocchesiand Montenegrins, the men of the gulf, with their arms in their girdles, no less than the men of the Black Mountain, banish all thought that we are anywhere but where we really are, at one of the border points of Christian and civilized Europe. If in the sons of the mountains we see the men who have in all ages held out against the invading Turk, we see in their brethren of the coast the men who, but a few years back, brought Imperial, Royal, and Apostolic Majesty to its knees. The same thought is brought home to us in another form. The antiquities of Cattaro are mainly ecclesiastical, and among them the Orthodox church, standing well in one of the open places, claims a rank second only to theduomo. Here some may see for the first time the ecclesiastical arrangements of Eastern Christendom; and those who do not wish to see a church thrown wide open from end to end, those who would cleave alike to the rood-beam of Lübeck, thejubéof Albi, and thecancelliof Saint Clement, to the old screen which once was at Wimborne and to the new screen which now is at Lichfield, may be startled at the first sight of the Easterneikonostasisblocking off apse and altar utterly from sight. The arrangements of the Eastern Church may indeed be seen in places much nearer than Cattaro, at Trieste, at Wiesbaden, in London itself; but in all these places the Eastern Church is an exotic, standing as a stranger on Western ground. At Cattaro the Orthodox Church is on its own ground, standing side by side on equal terms with its Latin rival, pointing to lands where theFilioqueis unknown and where the Bishop of the Old Rome has ever been deemed an intruder. The building itself is a small Byzantine church, less Byzantine in fact in its outline than the small churches of the Byzantine type at Zara, Spalato, and Traü. The single dome rises, not from the intersection of a Greek cross, but from the middle of a single body, and, resting as it does on pointed arches, it suggests the thought of Périgueux and Angoulême. But this arrangement, which is shared by a neighbouring Latin church, is well known throughout the East. The Latinduomo, which has been minutely described by Mr. Neale, is of quite another type, and is by no means Dalmatian in its general look. A modern west front with two westerntowers does not go for much; but it reminds us that a design of the same kind was begun at Traü in better times. The inside is quite unlike anything of later Italian work. It seems like a cross between a basilica and an Aquitanian church. It is small, but the inside is lofty and solemn. The body of the church, not counting the apses and the western portico, has seven narrow arches, the six eastern ones grouped in pairs forming, as in so many German examples, three bays only in the vaulting. The principal pillars are rectangular with flat pilasters; the intermediate piers are Corinthian columns with a heavy Lucchese abacus, enriched with more mouldings than is usual at Lucca. As there is no triforium, and only a blank clerestory, the whole effect comes from the tall columns and their narrow arches, the last offshoots of Spalato that we have to record. For the ecclesiologist proper there is a prodigiousbaldacchino, and a grand display of metal-work behind the high altar. A good deal too, as Mr. Neale has shown, may be gleaned from the inscriptions and records. The traveller whose objects are of a more general kind turns away from this border church of Christendom as the last stage of a pilgrimage unsurpassed either for natural beauty or for historic interest. And, as he looks up at the mountain which rises almost close above the east end of theduomoof Cattaro, and thinks of the land andthe men to which the path over that mountain leads, he feels that, on this frontier at least, the spirit still lives which led English warriors to the side of Manuel Komnênos, and which steeled the heart of the last Constantine to die in the breach for the Roman name and the faith of Christendom.
The solemn yearly marriage between the Venetian commonwealth and the Hadriatic sea had much more effect on the eastern shore of that sea than on the western. On the eastern side of the long gulf there are few points which have not at some time or other "looked to the winged lion's marble piles," and for many ages a long and nearly continuous dominion looked steadily to that quarter. On the western shore Venice never established any lasting dominion very far from her own lagoons. Ravenna was the furthest point on that side which she held for any considerable time, and at Ravenna we are hardly clear of the delta of the Po. In the northern region of Italy her power struck inland, till at last, defying the precepts of the wise Doge who could not keep even Treviso, she held an unbroken dominion from Bergamo to Cividale. That she kept that dominion down to her fall, that that dominion could live through the fearful trial of the League of Cambray, may perhaps show thatVenice, after all, was not so unfitted to become a land-power as she seems at first sight, and as Andrew Contarini deemed her in the fourteenth century. Yet one might have thought that the occupation of this or that point along the long coast from Ravenna to the heel of the boot would have better suited her policy than the lordship over Bergamo and Brescia. And one might have thought too that, amid the endless changes that went on among the small commonwealths and tyrannies of that region, it would have been easier for the Republic to establish its dominion there than to establish it over great cities like Padua and Verona. Yet Venice did not establish even a temporary dominion along these coasts till she was already a great land power in Lombardy and Venetia. And then the few outlying points which she held for a while lay, not among the small towns of the marches, but within the solid kingdom which the Norman had made, and which had passed from him to kings from Swabia, from Anjou, and from Aragon. It is this last thought which gives the short Venetian occupation of certain cities within what the Italians calledthe Kingdoma higher interest in itself, and withal a certain connexion in idea with more lasting possessions of the commonwealth elsewhere. At Trani and at Otranto, no less than in Corfu and at Durazzo, the Venetian was treading in the footsteps of theNorman. Only, on the eastern side of Hadria the Republic won firm and long possession of places where the Norman had been seen only for a moment; on the western side, the Republic held only for a moment places which the Norman had firmly grasped, and which he handed on to his successors of other races. And, if we pass on from the Norman himself to those successors, we shall find the connexion between the Venetian dominion on the eastern and the western side of the gulf become yet stronger. The Venetian occupation of Neapolitan towns within the actual Neapolitan kingdom seems less strange, if we look on it as a continuation of the process by which many points on the eastern coast had passed to and fro between the Republic and the Kings of Sicily and afterwards of Naples. The connexion between Sicily and southern Italy on the one hand and the coasts and islands of western Greece on the other, is as old as the days of the Greek colonies, perhaps as old as the days of Homer. The singer of the Odyssey seems to know of Sikels in Epeiros; but, if his Sikels were in Italy, we only get the same connexion in another shape. A crowd of rulers from one side and from the other have ruled on both sides of the lower waters of Hadria. Agathoklês, Pyrrhos, Robert Wiscard, King Roger, William the Good, strove alike either to add Epeiros and Korkyra to a Sicilian dominion or to addSicily to a dominion which already took in Epeiros and Korkyra. So did Manfred; so did Charles of Anjou. And after the division of the Sicilian kingdom, the kings of the continental realm held a considerable dominion on the Greek side of the sea. And that dominion largely consisted of places which had been Venetian and which were to become Venetian again. To go no further into detail, if we remember that Corfu and Durazzo were held by Norman Dukes and Kings of Apulia and Sicily—that they were afterwards possessions of Venice—that they were possessions of the Angevin kings at Naples, and then possessions of Venice again—it may perhaps seem less wonderful to find the Republic at a later time occupying outposts on the coasts of the Neapolitan kingdom itself.
It was not till the last years of the fifteenth century, when so many of her Greek and Albanian possessions had passed away, that the Republic appeared as a ruler on the coasts of Apulia and of that land of Otranto, the heel of the boot, from which the name of Calabria had long before wandered to the toe. It was in 1495, when Charles of France went into southern Italy to receive for himself a kingdom and to return,—only to return without the kingdom,—that the Venetians, as allies of his rival Ferdinand, took the town of Monopoli by storm, and one or twosmaller places by capitulation. What they took they kept, and in the next year their ally pledged to them other cities, among them Trani, Brindisi, Otranto, and Taranto, in return for help in men and money. These cities were thus won by Venice as the ally of the Aragonese King against the French. But at a later time, when France and Aragon were allied against Venice, the Aragonese King of the Sicilies, a more famous Ferdinand than the first, took them as his share in 1509. We cannot wonder at this; no king, or commonwealth either, can be pleased to see a string of precious coast towns in the hands of a foreign power. Again in 1528 Venice is allied with France against Aragon and Naples, and Aragon and Naples are now only two of the endless kingdoms of Charles of Austria. For a moment the lost cities are again Venetian. Two years later, as part of the great pageant of Bologna, they passed back from the rule of Saint Mark to the last prince who ever wore the crown of Rome.
So short an occupation cannot be expected to have left any marked impress on the cities which Venice thus held for a few years at a late time as isolated outposts. These Apulian towns are not Venetian in the same sense in which the Istrian and Dalmatian towns are. In those regions, even the cities which were merely neighbours and not subjects of Venice may be called Venetian in an artistic sense; theywere in some sort members of a body of which Venice was the chief. Here we see next to nothing which recalls Venice in any way. The difference is most likely owing, not so much in the late date at which these towns became Venetian possessions, as to the shortness of time by which they were held, and to the precarious tenure by which the Republic held them. As far as mere dates go, Cattaro and Trani were won by Venice within the same century. But, as we have seen, the architectural features which give the Dalmatian towns their Venetian character belong to the most part to times even later than the occupation of Trani. Men must have gone on building at Cattaro in the Venetian fashion for fully a century and a half after Trani was again lost by Venice. There are few Venetian memorials to be seen in these towns; and if the winged lion ever appeared over their gates, he has been carefully thrust aside by kings and emperors. More truly perhaps, kings and emperors rebuilt the walls of these towns after the Venetian power had passed away. Still the occupation of these towns forms part of Venetian history, and they may be visited so as to bring them within the range of Venetian geography. Brindisi is the natural starting point for Corfu and the Albanian coast, and Brindisi is one of the towns which Venice thus held for a season. The two opposite coasts are thus brought into directconnexion. The lands which owned, first the Norman and the Angevin, and then the Venetian, as their masters, may thus naturally become part of a single journey. We may have passed through the hilly lands, we may have seen the hill-cities, of central Italy; we may have gone through lands too far from the sea to suggest any memories of Venice, but which are full of the memories of the Norman and the Swabian. We find ourselves in the great Apulian plain, the great sheep-feeding plain so memorable in the wars of Anjou and Aragon, and we tarry to visit some of the cities of the Apulian coast. The contrast indeed is great between the land in which we are and either the land from which we have come, or the land whither we are going. Bari, Trani, and their fellows, planted on the low coast where the great plain joins the sea, are indeed unlike, either the Latin and Volscian towns on their hill-tops, or the Dalmatian towns nestling between the sea and the mountains. The greatest of these towns, the greatest at least in its present state, never came under Venetian rule. Bari, the city which it needed the strength of both Empires to win from the Saracen, is said to have been defended by a Venetian fleet early in the eleventh century, when Venetian fleets still sailed at the bidding of the Eastern Emperor. Further than this, we can find few or no points of connexion betweenVenice and these cities, till their first occupation at the end of the fifteenth century. But that short occupation brings them within our range. We are passing, it may be, from Benevento to fishy Bari, as two stages of the "iter ad Brundisium." Thence we may go on, in the wake of so many travellers and conquerors, to those lands beyond the sea where the Lords of one-fourth and one-eighth of the Empire of Romania, and the Norman lords of Apulia and Sicily, the conquerors of Corfu and Albania, were alike at home. Between Benevento and Bari the eye is caught by the great tower of Trani. Such a city cannot be passed by; or, if we are driven to pass it by, we must go back to get something more than a glimpse of it. And Trani is one of the towns pledged to Venice by Ferdinand of Naples. In the midst of cities whose chief memories later than old Imperial times carry us back to the Norman and Swabian days of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, we find ourselves suddenly plunged into the Venetian history of the end of the fifteenth.
Trani then will be our introduction to the group of towns with which we are at present concerned. At the present moment, it is undoubtedly the foremost among them; but it is hard to call up any distinct memory of its history till we reach the times whichmade it for a moment a Venetian possession. Trani, like other places, doubtless has its history known to local inquirers; but the more general inquirer will very seldom light upon its name. It is hard to find any sure sign of its being in Roman times, but it must be the "Tirhennium quæ et Trana" of the geographer Guido. Let us take such a common-place test as looking through the indices to several volumes of Muratori and Pertz till the task becomes wearisome. Such a task will show us the name of Trani here and there, but only here and there. We do by searching find it mentioned in the days of King Roger and in the days of the Emperor Lothar, but it is only by searching that we find it. The name of Trani does not stand out without searching, like so many of the cities even of southern Italy. Yet Trani is no inconsiderable place; it is an archæpiscopal see with a noble metropolitan church; and in our own day, though much smaller than its neighbour Bari, it seems to share in the present prosperity of which the signs at Bari are unmistakeable. The visitor to Trani will find much to see there, but he will not find the stamp of Venice on the city. Trani, like its fellows, had received its distinctive character long before it had to do with Venice, and that character was not one that was at all marked by Venetian influences. The city is not without Venetian monuments; the memory of its Venetian days is notforgotten even in its modern street nomenclature. There is aPiazza Gradenigo, and an inscription near one of the later churches records the name of Giuliano Gradenigo as the Venetian governor of Trani in 1503, and as having had a hand in its building. The castle might be suspected of containing work of the days of the Republic; but a threatening man of the sword forbids any study of its walls even with a distant spy-glass; not however till the chief inscription has been read, and has been found to belong to days later than those of Venetian rule. There is no knowing what may not happen to places when they have once fallen into the hands of soldiers; to the civilian mind it might seem that, when a king writes up an inscription to record his buildings, he wishes that inscription to be read of all men for all time. It is hard too to see how an antiquary's spy-glass can do anything to help prisoners confined within massive walls to break forth, as Italian—at least Sicilian—prisoners sometimes know how to break forth. The metropolitan church of Trani is happily not in military hands; neither are the streets and lanes of the city, the houses, the smaller churches, the arcades by the haven, the buildings of the town in general. All these may therefore be studied without let or hindrance; civil officials, even cloistered nuns, see no danger to Church or State if the stranger draws the outside ofa window or copies an inscription on an outer wall. But though we may find at Trani bits of work which might have stood in Venice, it is only as they might have stood in any other city of Italy. There is nothing in Trani, besides the memorial of Gradenigo, which brings the Serene Republic specially before the mind. The great church, the glory of Trani, bears the impress of that mixed style of art which is characteristic of Norman rule in Apulia, but which is quite different from anything to be found in Norman Sicily. It has some points in common with its neighbours at Bitonto and Bari, and some points very distinctive of itself. It is undoubtedly one of the noblest churches of its own class. If we were to call it one of the noblest churches of Christendom, the phrase would be misleading, because, to an English ear at least, it would suggest the thought of something on a much greater scale, something more nearly approaching the boundless length of an English minster or the boundless height of a French one. In southern Italy bishops and archbishops were so thick upon the ground that even a metropolitan church was not likely to reach, in point of mere size, to the measure of a second-class cathedral or conventual church in England or even in Normandy. But mere size is not everything, and, as an example of a particular form of Romanesque, as an example of difficulties ably grappledwith and thoroughly overcome, the church of Trani might almost claim to rank beside the church of Pisa and the church of Durham. And higher praise than that no building can have.