Dubrovnik, and the republic that paid its way out of war

For more than four hundred years, the small maritime city-state that grew into modern Dubrovnik ran its own affairs while much larger powers fought over the territory around it. The Republic of Ragusa, as it was then known, kept its independence not through military strength, which it never had in any serious quantity, but through a careful policy of paying tribute to whichever empire currently held the upper hand in the region, first Venice, then Hungary, and for the longest stretch, the Ottoman Empire, whose protection the Republic bought annually rather than risk the alternative.

It was a pragmatic, occasionally humiliating arrangement, and it worked remarkably well. Ragusan merchants traded across the Mediterranean and beyond under a flag that both Christian and Ottoman powers found it easier to leave alone than to fight over, and the city grew wealthy enough to fund one of early modern Europe's more sophisticated administrations: an elected rector who served for only a month at a time to prevent any single figure accumulating too much power, an early form of quarantine system that gave the English word "lazaretto" much of its modern meaning, and a legal code that abolished the slave trade within the Republic's territory in 1416, centuries ahead of most of Europe.

The Republic's diplomacy extended to keeping a permanent, professional class of merchant-officials rather than relying on the nobility alone, and its ships, distinctive enough to have given English the word "argosy", a corruption of "Ragusa", carried goods across a trading network that stretched from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and beyond. That wealth built not just the walls but the Rector's Palace, the Sponza Palace that housed the Republic's customs and treasury, and Onofrio's Fountain, whose fresh water was piped into the city from a spring some twelve kilometres away, a considerable feat of engineering for a state that never had much territory to draw on beyond its own city and a thin strip of coast.

The walls that still ring the old city

The fortifications that visitors walk today, nearly two kilometres of continuous stone circling the old town, were built up over centuries precisely because the Republic knew it could never win a war by force alone; the walls needed to make the cost of attacking Dubrovnik high enough that tribute and diplomacy remained the cheaper option for everyone involved. They worked. Dubrovnik was never successfully stormed by a besieging army during the Republic's independent existence, a record few fortified cities in Europe can claim over a comparable stretch of time.

What finally broke the city, and what came after

The Republic's end, when it came in 1808, arrived by paperwork rather than siege: Napoleon's forces, already occupying the region, simply abolished it, folding Ragusa into his short-lived Illyrian Provinces. By then the city had already survived a far more physically devastating blow, the earthquake of 1667, which killed a large part of the population and destroyed much of the old Gothic and Renaissance city that had grown up over the preceding centuries. The Baroque Dubrovnik visible today, including the cathedral and much of the rebuilt old town, is largely the product of that reconstruction rather than the Republic's medieval prime, though the walls and the layout within them survived largely intact.

A more recent scar, from the 1991 to 1995 siege during the breakup of Yugoslavia, is marked today mainly by a small museum and a map near the city gate showing which roofs were damaged by shelling and have since been carefully restored with matching tile, a quieter and more recent reminder that the walls, however famous, were never quite as invincible as the Republic's long run of luck suggested.

Visit in spring or September, when the walls, a strenuous walk of roughly two hours around their full circuit, are considerably more bearable than in the height of summer's heat and crowds.