Lena Sadovski’s book is divided into eight chapters: Introduction (1-35); The Hinterland of Spalato (36-106); The Counts of Poglizza (107-133); Administrative Writing and Chancelleries between Town and Hinterland (134-185); The Economic Relations between Spalato and the Surrounding Territories (186-208); The Social Structures of Almissa (209-238); Spalato and Poglizza after Ottoman Takeover in 1514 (239-248); and Conclusion (249-256); followed by a Bibliography (257-282) and Indices of Subjects, Places and Names (283-297).
In the introduction, the author gives a very good overview of the literature so far that dealt not only with Split and its surroundings, but also with the whole of Dalmatia, including some of the more important contributions on the history of Dubrovnik. The author’s great advantage is that she knows Croatian, which allows her to use literature that is inaccessible to many Western authors, which is why they then unjustifiably neglect it. On the other hand, as Sadovski warns, especially older literature, created on both sides of the Adriatic, that is, in the Italian and South Slavic cultural circles, was often burdened with nationalism and the appropriation of Dalmatia. In a methodological sense, when it comes to Venetian rule in Dalmatia, many works were focused on studying normative sources such as city statutes, or on the history of political relations. In the last few decades, this has gradually changed thanks to the works of some Croatian historians, such as Tomislav Raukar, but also the research circle around Oliver Jens Schmitt, in which, for example, works related to Korčula were created, and to which the author of this book also belongs. While methodological innovations from the late 1970s onwards have mainly concerned social and economic history, this book opens up a completely new perspective on the history of Venetian Dalmatia, especially on the relationship between the central Venetian authorities, their representatives in Split, and local administrative bodies in the Split area, in the so-called Republic of Poljica (actually principality, kneštvo), and in the city of Omiš.
Using a microhistorical approach, the author seeks to show how the system of Venetian administration and limited self-government of the Split commune, or lower levels of social organization, influenced the everyday life of ordinary people in Split and its surroundings that were under Venetian domination. A particular subject of her interest is the linguistic relation between the city with a Romanesque elite and the almost exclusively Slavic / Croatian surroundings. Since Venice did not impose its language as the only official one, pragmatic literacy used Latin, Italian of the Venetian dialect, but also Croatian, which all functioned very well in relation to one another. It should be noted that the language of the documents does not reflect the linguistic relations in Split, because it reflects power relations, as well as Split’s affiliation to the Italian cultural circle, while the majority of the common people, but also some of the patricians, used Croatian. The author emphasizes that even the wives of the patricians often did not know Italian or Latin, but exclusively used Croatian. The most important humanist from Split, Marko Marulić, writes in Latin, but also in the Slavic language, which he calls Croatian. When describing the Poljica Statute from 1440, which regulates relations within the Poljica community, Sadovski calls the language in which the statute was written Croatian or Bosnian Church Slavonic of the Ikavian-Čakavian dialect. However, this is a literary stylized Ikavian Štokavian dialect of Poljica of that time, with some remnants of Čakavian and only slight traces of Church Slavonic.
Among the most interesting results of this book is the author’s demonstration that the change of borders and government in this microregion had less impact on the daily lives of the inhabitants than one might expect. Split and its surroundings changed masters during the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, the most prominent of which were Venice, the Hungarian-Croatian kings, the Bosnian kings, the Croatian and Bosnian nobles, and the Ottomans. In addition, local authorities, especially in Split and Poljica, had the opportunity to make independent decisions at certain rare moments. With the change of government, the borders also changed, which was especially evident when the Ottoman Empire expanded to a large part of the area. Based on newly discovered material in the archives of Split, Zadar, and Venice, Sadovski shows that the inhabitants continued to communicate and trade; business relations and marriages were maintained; and houses and land remained in the possession of their owners, regardless of which side of the border they were on.
Another important result of the book is that the author has shown that Venice, contrary to the opinions in traditional Croatian historiography, did not ruthlessly impose its system of government in Dalmatia, but respected local legal norms and local administration to the extent that it also recognized the Slavic legal system, which still relied to some extent on oral tradition. Thus, in the Split area, the service of the bailiff (pristav) continued, who, as a witness, confirmed the validity of a legal act. It is also interesting how the authorities in the Venetian area and those outside it, in the area of the Hungarian-Croatian Kingdom or even the Ottoman Empire, cooperated in providing legal security to their subjects.
The author can be criticized for a certain neocolonial discourse, although this was certainly not her intention. As she explained, she uses Italian names for places in Dalmatia because they are more common in (western?) literature and because they are easier to search for, given that they do not contain Croatian letters such as š or ž. I think that Croatian names should be used in literature today unless they are recent in origin, which is not the case with any of the localities mentioned here. It would be good if the book, as is often the case, included a comparative table with not only Croatian and Italian, but also Romance geographical names.
Although the Kingdom of Croatia ceased to exist as an independent state in 1102 when it was united with Hungary through a common king, and later with the Habsburg lands of Ferdinand I and his successors, it still existed not only as a geographical concept, but also with a certain self-government: an assembly (sabor) and a viceroy (ban). Sadovski uses the term “Dalmatia” without defining what it means in a particular period and what its relationship was with Croatia, so the Kingdom of Croatia, or the Kingdom of Dalmatia and Croatia, as it was called from the tenth / eleventh century, almost completely disappeared from her text (it is mentioned, for example, on 37). Instead, she speaks of the Kingdom of Hungary, but this gives the impression that the hinterland of Split was ruled by Hungarians, not Croatian nobles. Only in one place, writing about Poljica and the local nobility, does she warn that the term “Hungarians” does not mean Hungarians, but the nobility under the rule of the Hungarian crown. The problem also arises because in English-speaking literature the term Hungarian is also used to designate the Kingdom of Hungary, which existed until 1918 as a multi-ethnic community composed of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia, as well as for the Hungarian ethnos, or modern Hungary. In Croatian, a distinction is made between the Kingdom of Hungary and the Hungarian / Magyar people. Therefore, it would be clearer to say that the Klis fortress was a fortress in Croatia, but under the rule of the Hungarian king, and not that it is a Hungarian fortress, because an uninformed reader may get the wrong impression that Klis was inhabited by Magyars. It would be helpful if the author explained how the concept of Dalmatia changed precisely with the expansion of Venetian rule and that today’s geographical Dalmatia was shaped after the Venetian successes in the wars with the Ottomans only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while in the early Middle Ages it was a Byzantine possession that encompassed a very narrow area around coastal cities and islands. It would also be worth explaining that Croatia and Dalmatia were almost synonymous until the second half of the fifteenth century, and that only the Venetian conquest of Dalmatian cities and islands resulted in a consistent, though never complete, separation of the two concepts.
It would exceed the given scope of this book, but it would be interesting if the author had at least briefly commented on the relationship between Split and neighbouring Trogir, which was also a Venetian possession, but in a legal sense equal to Split. Both cities were often in conflict during previous centuries, mostly over land ownership, so it would be interesting to see how the overarching Venetian authority influenced their mutual relations.
Lena Sadovski’s book is an important contribution to the knowledge of Venetian administration and everyday life in the area of present-day central Dalmatia / southern Croatia. Its value lies not only in the use of previously unused archival sources and the reinterpretation of known sources, but also in its methodological innovation, which can serve as a guide for future research into medieval Dalmatia and Croatia.