Ebook: The Myth of Dubrovnik (Ragusa): Civic Identity of an Adriatic City-State in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period

The goal of this study is to investigate how medieval and renaissance Ragusans spoke about themselves as a community. In other words, it seeks to reconstruct different strategies of collective self-representation which emerged in the culture of the Ragusan Republic in the period between the 14th and 17th century. In doing so it draws on a broad array of sources, from historiography, literature, diplomatic correspondence all the way to civic ritual and visual monuments. The various utterances made regarding Ragusa during this period can be classified into three major discourses on identity. Defined by specific themes, these three discourses are: the discourse on origin, statehood, and frontier. In other words, in the vast majority of cases when Ragusans spoke about their city state they did one of the following: they either thematized its origin and formative first centuries, reflected on its political independence and republican constitution, or described its perilous position and specific missions on the frontier with Orthodoxy and Islam.