Merchants of the Adriatic: Zadar's Trading Community Around the mid-16th Century

The article gives an overview of the mercantile community of the city of Zadar (Zara) in the mid-sixteenth century. The city, then the capital of Venice‘s Albanian-Dalmatian double province, has been chosen because of its multi-ethnic and poly-confessional society, embedded into the larger framework of the imperial possessions of the Republic of St Mark. Situated at the peripheral frontiers of Latin Europe, the Adriatic elements of the Stato da mar constituted multi-facetted and dynamic urban societies existing in-between the two universal monarchies Spain and the Ottoman Empire, with often overlapping cultural, ethnic, and religious contexts. The timeframe of the proposed paper will not exceed the Cyprus War (1570 to 1573), as a number of border changes and the events leading up to the establishment of the Scala di Spalato in the 1590s significantly eroded Zadar‘s status as a commercial hub. In a first step the size and origins of the city‘s merchants are detailed based upon the protocols of Zadar's public notaries, preserved in the local branch of the Croatian State Archives. Then their interactions with the local noblemen, artisans, and commoners as well as their potential integration into the host culture are analysed. In addition, the codified communal law, first published in Venice in 1563, provides the legal framework for the mercantile endeavours of the merchants of the Adriatic. Taken together, the methods, sources, and geographical location shed new light upon the trading communities in early modern Dalmatia, a region which, so far, has yet to attract renewed interest by the scientific community.