ABSTRACT
The history of the Republic of Ragusa was shaped in a significant way by its fidelity to the Catholic Church, which held sway throughout the centuries of the Republic's independence- from 1358, the year of its liberation from Venetian rule and formal institution of the Republic, to 1808, when the state ceased to exist. The relics possessed by the Republic of Ragusa brought the state considerable prestige and were regularly mentioned in the accounts of pilgrims and city chroniclers. Apart from the relics of the hand and leg of Saint Blaise, patron saint of the Republic, fifteenth-century pilgrims Roberto di Sanseverino, Gabriele Capodilista, and Santo Brasca made special mention of a particularly venerated object from the Holy Land, the swaddling clothes in which Jesus was wrapped when he was presented to Saint Simeon in the Temple.
