ABSTRACT

The Adriatic Sea has been an important trading route ever since the end of the eighth century when Venetian merchants started sailing regularly to Palestine and Constantinople. Already in the early medieval period, sailors preferred the eastern shore of the Adriatic with its numerous islands and ports where shelter could be found more easily than on the western shores.1 Although very little work has been done on the history of the Adriatic as a whole, it is still widely accepted that Byzantium had lost its maritime primacy to Venice by the eleventh century. For some time Venetians had to fight for supremacy in the Adriatic against local competitors (such as the city of Zadar/Zara), Croatian and later Hungarian kings, the patriarchs of Aquileia, pirates (such as those from the mouth of the neretva river or the town of Omiš) or their traditional Italian enemies (first Pisa, then Genoa and the kingdom of naples). Finally, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, they managed to become the only maritime power operating in the so-called Gulf of Venice.2 This triumph was preceded by a period of fifty years, during which Venice had to abandon all of her possessions on the eastern coast, from the Quarnerian islands to the gulf of Kotor, according to the peace treaty of Zadar/Zara (1358). This put an end to the victorious campaign of Louis of Anjou, king of Hungary, Dalmatia and Croatia, against Venice on the Terra Ferma. Louis was the first Hungarian king who after a long time showed an interest in Adriatic affairs, for he tried to connect the Angevin Italian and Central-European realms, via Dalmatia and the Adriatic seas.3 His reign was also the beginning of a flourishing period of late Gothic, pre-renaissance and renaissance art, architecture, and literature

2 Pierre Cabanes et al., Histoire de l’Adriatique (Paris, 2001), 13-22; neven Budak, ‘Die Adria von Justinian bis zur Venezianischen republik: Wandlungen der Verkehrsrichtungen’, Saeculum: Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte, 56/2 (2005), 199-213.