engleski

Discourses on Liberty in Early Modern Ragusa

The article seeks to analyze the conceptualizations of political liberty in early modern Ragusa, taking into account a long period between the 15th and 17th centuries. During these years three major issues or challenges forced Ragusans to articulate complex ideological responses centred on the concept of liberty. The first was without precedent in the republican tradition. In the mid-15th century Ragusa was forced to become a tributary state of the Ottoman Empire. From this moment until the end of the Republic, Ragusans struggled with the embarrassing question of how to reconcile their claims to republican liberty with the patronage of an “infidel” monarch. The second issue which provoked a serious rethinking of Ragusan libertas was also connected with the change in the international status of the city-state. In 1526 Ragusans ceased to recognize the nominal sovereignty of the Hungarian king and thereafter Ragusa was represented as a fully independent state. This, however, opened a permanent crisis of both legitimacy and prestige. The problem was how to ensure the acknowledgement of an equal international status for the microscopic republic in the early modern world of large and powerful monarchies. The third issue Ragusans faced had to do with liberty understood not as independence, but in its other traditional meaning of life under republican institutions. In the Ragusan case these institutions were quite peculiar, excluding the vast majority of the population from government and establishing the absolute power of what came close to being a noble caste. Such a political arrangement, of course, required justification and thus also resulted in a peculiar rethinking of libertas Ragusina.

: liberty, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), history of ideas, tributary status, republicanism

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