Zadar's History

Zadar found itself leading the Dalmatian cities against the increasingly ambitious Venice. Of all the cities on the Eastern Adriatic coast, Zadar offered the fiercest resistance to Venice. In 1117, Pope Alexander III visited Zadar and a document from that time noted that the inhabitants of Zadar greeted the Pope singing songs "in their Slavonic language." In 1202 the French Crusaders, who were broke, conquered and destroyed Christian Zadar as payment to Venice for boats to Jerusalem. Geoffroy de Villehardouin (1150 -1213), the French historian and commissary for the organization of the Crusades, who came to Venice in 1202 to make arrangements for transport, wrote that Zadar was "the strongest city in Slavic lands, and one of the strongest in the world." Until 1409, Zadar was the seat of the Croatian and Croatian-Hungarian Kings, with the last coronation on Croatian soil taking place in 1403.

What Venice failed to achieve by force, it achieved in 1409 by financial means. The Hungarian King Ladislav of Naples sold Zadar to the Venetians. Zadar became the seat of the administration of Dalmatia and Albania. Zadar was only permitted to export to Venice, and had to pay double customs duty for exports to other places. When Venetian Zadar came under the threat of the Turks (from 1468 to 1478 there were eleven Turkish offences in the Zadar area), the Venetians built defensive walls in the 16th century, and Zadar became the strongest Venetians fortress on the Eastern Adriatic coast. During Venetian rule, Zadar was not only settled by Latin immigrants but the authorities actually banned marriages with the local population. Also, because of their fear of rebellions, Venice banned the storage of food supplies for more than four days.

The 15th and the 16th centuries were marked by important activities of Croatian writers writing in the national language (Jerolim Vidolic, Petar Zoranic, Brne Krnarutic, Juraj Barakovic, Sime Budinic). After the fall of Venice (1797) Zadar came under the Austrian rule under which it remained until 1918, except for the period of the French rule (1805-1813), all this time remaining the capital of Dalmatia. During the French rule, the first newspaper in the Croatian language, Kraljski Dalmatin (King's Dalmatian), was being published in Zadar (1806-1812).




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