A RECENT VISIT TO THE DALMATIAN COAST. 65 
Our next stopping place on the Dalmatian coast was Ragusa, a 
city which was an independent Republic of considerable im- 
portance during the middle ages, and which in fact survived down 
to the beginning of this century, when it only ceased to exist at 
the tyrannical and capricious bidding of Napoleon. 
It is the one spot on these coasts which boasts that it has never 
come under the dominion of either Venetian or Turk, although I 
believe there are historical grounds for believing that at various 
times it was in more or less tributary relation to both these 
powers. It certainly, however, never lost its autonomy, always 
retaining during all its vicissitudes its old form of government. 
This was an aristocratic Republic, resembling much in its con- 
stitution that of Venice. The head of the Republic was the 
Rector, who was the chief magistrate, and resided in the palace, 
to which I shall presently draw your attention. As Sir Gardner 
Wilkinson has said, “ The whole career of the Ragusan Republic 
was a struggle for self-preservation, and the maintenance of 
independence in the midst of constant danger.” In this particular 
also she resembled her powerful neighbour Venice. 
The geographical limits of the old Ragusan Republic are still 
indicated in our modern maps in a very curious way. Before I 
visited these border lands of the Adriatic, and had occasion to 
study a map on a fairly large scale, I had imagined that the 
Austrian territory of Dalmatia extended in a continuous but ever 
narrowing strip as far south as a little beyond Cattaro. As a 
matter of fact, however, there are two very small breaks in this 
strip, one at the Gulf of Klek, on the narrow inlet formed by the 
peninsula of Sabioncello, the other at Sutorina on the Bocche di 
Cattaro. At both these points Herzegovina, a country which 
until lately was nominally Turkish, comes down to the Adriatic, 
this small piece of territory so severed from Dalmatia being 
exactly co-terminous with the ancient Republic of Ragusa, and 
these severances owe their origin, as pointed out by Freeman, to 
the medizeval Ragusans being willing to allow the territory of the 
Turk to touch her own sea coast rather than have a common 
frontier with her hated rival Venice. 
