Dubrovnik: The Republic That Defended Itself Without an Army

You are at the Pile Gate, the main entrance to the old town. Look above the arch: a small statue of a bearded bishop holds a model of the city. It is Saint Blaise, Dubrovnik's patron saint. Before crossing, notice the bridge. It was a drawbridge. Every night it was raised and the city was sealed. For more than four hundred and fifty years, this was not Croatia, nor Venice, nor the Ottoman Empire. It was an independent state: the Republic of Ragusa. It had some thirty thousand inhabitants and a tiny territory. To the north, Venice, the great power of the Adriatic. To the east, the Ottomans, …

Look at Fort Lovrijenac, on a rock almost forty meters high that drops into the sea. It protected the city from the west. The story goes that in the early eleventh century the Venetians planned to build a fortress on this very rock to dominate the city. The Ragusans found out. In three months they built their own first. When the Venetian ships arrived with materials, the rock was already taken. If you climb up, look over the door for a Latin inscription: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro. Freedom is not well sold for all the gold in the world. Notice another detail. The walls facing…

You are facing the Large Onofrio Fountain, a round sixteen-sided stone dome. Water spouts from the mouth of a carved mask on each side. It was finished in 1438. An Italian architect, Onofrio della Cava, designed it. It was the end point of an aqueduct about twelve kilometers long bringing water from a mountain spring. For a walled city, water was a matter of survival. A city without its own water surrenders in a siege. Ragusa thought about everything in terms of independence. Water, grain, salt, walls. It stored grain in huge granaries to hold out for months without help. Notice that the m…

You are at the entrance to the Franciscan monastery. If you go in, you will find a lovely cloister, with paired columns and capitals carved with animals and faces. In one corner of the monastery is a pharmacy. It opened in 1317 and has never closed. It is one of the oldest working pharmacies in Europe. At first it served the friars. Very soon it began to serve the whole city. There is a small museum with jars, mortars and recipe books centuries old. Ragusa took health seriously. It had physicians paid by the republic from the fourteenth century. A public orphanage. A system for controlling …

You are on the walls, near the Minčeta Tower, the great round tower at the highest point. From here you see the whole city: the Stradun, the domes, the harbor and the sea. The walls are almost two kilometers long and in places more than twenty meters high. They were completed between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, each time a new threat demanded it. The Minčeta Tower was strengthened in the fifteenth century, when the Ottomans took Constantinople and their cannons changed the rules of war. Now look at the rooftops. Notice the colors. Some tiles are a bright, new orange. Others ar…

You are on the Stradun, Dubrovnik's main street. Look at the ground: limestone polished by centuries of footsteps, so shiny it looks wet at night. Now look at the houses on both sides. Notice they are almost identical. Same height, same arched doorways, same windows. That is no accident. On 6 April 1667, an earthquake destroyed the city. Palaces, churches and houses collapsed. Then came a fire that burned for days. Thousands died, close to half the population. Among them the rector, the republic's highest authority, and many nobles. The Venetians and the Ottomans smelled an opportunity. So…

You are on Luža Square, facing the Sponza Palace. Look at the columned portico, the Gothic windows on the first floor, the Renaissance balcony above. It is one of the few buildings that came through the 1667 earthquake intact. It was the republic's customs house. All goods arriving through the port were brought and weighed here: salt, cloth, silver, spices. Go into the courtyard and look for a Latin inscription on one of the arches. It says, roughly: our weights do not allow us to cheat or be cheated. When I weigh goods, God weighs me. That was Ragusa's foundation. A reputation for commerci…

You are facing the Rector's Palace. Look at the loggia with its carved column capitals. It was the seat of the republic's government. The rector was head of state. But his office was strange. He was elected for a single month. Afterward, he could not be re-elected for two years. During that month he lived in this palace. And he could not leave without permission, except on official business. His family stayed at home. He stayed shut in with power. Ragusa feared one thing more than the Ottomans or Venice: someone inside accumulating too much power. If you go in, look over the door that led …

You are facing the Cathedral of the Assumption, with its great baroque dome. The one you see was built after the 1667 earthquake. The earlier one collapsed. Tradition says the first cathedral was paid for by an English king. In 1192, Richard the Lionheart was returning from the Crusades when a storm wrecked his ship off this coast. Richard came ashore on the island of Lokrum, which you will see at the end. In gratitude, he vowed to build a church. The Ragusans persuaded him to build it here, in the city. It is a legend, but it says a lot about how Ragusa used the powerful. Even a shipwreck …

You are at the foot of the Jesuit Stairs. Look how they curve upward, with stone balustrades, to the church of Saint Ignatius. They were built in 1738, inspired by the Spanish Steps in Rome. Game of Thrones fans recognize them at once. Queen Cersei came down this way, naked, as the crowd shouted shame. Dubrovnik was the main location for King's Landing. Since then, millions of tourists have come to walk where the characters walked. The series transformed the city. On some days the old town, home to a few thousand people, received tens of thousands of cruise ship visitors. The city had to l…

You are at the old harbor. Look at the wooden boats, the ships heading out to the islands and, opposite, the green outline of Lokrum. From this harbor, Ragusa's ships sailed all over the Mediterranean, to the Black Sea, to the Atlantic. It was one of the largest merchant fleets of its time. But Ragusa's secret was not the sea. It was diplomacy. When the Ottoman Empire conquered the Balkans, Ragusa did not fight. It negotiated. From the mid-fifteenth century it paid the sultan an annual tribute. In return, its merchants could move freely throughout the empire. At the same time, it sought pr…

You are facing the Lazareti, a row of long, low stone buildings by the sea, outside the walls. Today they hold galleries and concert halls. For centuries they were something else. In 1348, the Black Death killed a large part of the city's population. It came back again and again. Ragusa, which lived by trade, could not close its harbor. In 1377, the Great Council passed a new law. Ships and travelers arriving from plague areas had to stay isolated for thirty days on nearby islands before entering the city. It was one of the first quarantine laws in history. Later the period was extended to …

You have reached Lokrum, the green island facing the city. Walk among pines and olive trees to the ruins of the Benedictine monastery. You will meet peacocks wandering freely. Tradition says Richard the Lionheart came ashore on this island in 1192. From here you see the city as arriving ships saw it: walls, domes, bell towers. For centuries, the island belonged to Benedictine monks. When the French arrived in the early nineteenth century, they expelled them. Legend says the monks, before leaving, walked in procession around the island holding their candles upside down. And they cursed anyon…