Abstract
The state authorities of late medieval and early modern Dubrovnik used processions as a cultural tool to create a collective remembrance of traumatic historical experience, such as conspiracy, pestilence, or earthquake. Until the sixteenth century, the commemoration was amalgamated with the saint’s cult (“watermark” model), while in the last two centuries of the Republic the link to an underlying historical event became explicit. This shift may be accounted by the growing dominance of the secular over ecclesiastical authorities, and the increasing ambition of the state to manage its self-representation.
When in 1437, on the very day of the Feast of Saint John the Baptist the plague epidemic ended, the Major Council of Dubrovnik (Ragusa) decided to aggrandise the festivity with a splendid procession “in praise, glory and commemoration of the cessation of pestilence” (ad laude, gloria et commemoracion del cessar della pestilentia). 1 The preambles of the Ragusan laws introducing processions after traumatic experiences for the City express both the gratitude for divine salvation and a wish to memorize the event for the posterity (e.g., et ut memoria ad posteros nostros continuis temporibus transferatur). 2 While the first element fits in the tradition of thanksgiving processions, the latter opens an interesting question about the use of the processions in establishing and feeding of collective memory.
For more than half a century, social memory studies based on concepts such as “collective memory,” “cultural memory,” and “public memory” have booked substantial results. 3 In his seminal book, Voices of Collective Remembering, James Wertsch defines collective remembering as a mediated action that involves active agents (memory makers) who master cultural tools (or mediational means) available in a particular sociocultural setting. 4 In this article, I will examine how the state authorities of late medieval and early modern Dubrovnik acted as memory makers by using processions to commemorate certain historical events. 5 By investigating the features of the processions and the historical circumstances in which they were created or reshaped, I hope to lay bare the link a historical event—commemorating procession—and elucidate the transformation of this relationship over the centuries.
Needless to say, processions were only one among the many ways of transferring the memory on important events. For example, from the mid-fourteenth century on, Ragusan chancellors occasionally recorded noteworthy things, such as earthquakes or plagues, on the interior of the cover of the official registers of which they were in charge. 6 Therefore, the practice of “archiving” important events in writing did exist but not the urge to disseminate the memory outside the state offices. The aim to memorize events crucial for the community’s past also provided an impetus to the writing of medieval chronicles and, later on, of the first historiographic accounts of the City’s history. When reporting on contemporary events, the local chronicles were heavily biased and even far less reliable when describing the previous times, historical facts being contaminated with legends and myths. However, a modern scholar should bear in mind that he is dealing with historical narratives aimed at constructing a “usable past.” 7 In his book The Dangers of Ritual, Phillippe Buc rightly warns about the anthropologists who are prone to reading medieval sources on rituals without a profound understanding of medieval textual practices, urging the scholars to approach them “with full and constant sensitivity of their status as texts.” 8 But there is more to it than that: city chronicles and the first historical accounts with critical ambitions are both a child of a quite limited “textual community,” 9 consisting of learned people from the patrician stand, clergy, and a group of wealthy merchants, in which those narratives came to be and were divulgated. Processions, however, could reach the public who did not read the chronicles, let alone official records, because processions spoke in a universal language of symbols and were performed in public places, which makes them a privileged cultural tool for the shaping of collective memory. 10
Having in mind Buc’s and Wretsch’s caveat, city chronicles can still be a worthy textual source on ceremonial practice and its context. However, the core of information for my analyses comes from the official documents produced by state institutions. Especially valuable information on the origin of processions, on what they were supposed to commemorate, and in which way the public performance was woven into the urban fabric is provided by the deliberations of the City councils, preserved since the fourteenth century. 11
In my article, I will center on state-managed processions (civic processions) 12 as a mediator between a specific historical event and the collective memory. 13 However, I will leave aside the procession on the Feast of St. Blaise, City’s patron, which did not originate from a single event but was a fruit of a complex process of shaping of the collective identity of Dubrovnik as commune and archbishopric, and its negotiating of a new position within the framework of the Byzantine Empire in the first decennia of the eleventh century. 14 Anyhow, it is questionable whether the procession was an original element of the feast, as it cannot be traced in the documents before the early fifteenth century. 15 The Feast of Saint Marc seems not to be linked to any particular historical event either but may have been introduced as a symbol of the supreme rule of Venice over Dubrovnik, established in 1205. Interestingly enough, it continued to be celebrated well after Dubrovnik had gained independence in 1358. 16
The Processions and the Construction of New State Feasts around a Saint’s Day (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries): A “Watermark” Model
The first state-designed feast with procession to be followed in documents dates from the mid-fourteenth century and was established to commemorate the day when a relic of the Arm of St. Blaise was acquired for the Cathedral Treasury in 1346. 17 The new acquisition of the patron’s relic had a special symbolic value, as in the mid-fourteenth century the shaping of Dubrovnik’s civic identity entered a very dynamic stage: the Venetian dominion over the City had gradually weakened and was increasingly questioned by the local elite, flanked by the Church authorities headed by the energetic archbishop Ilija Saraca. 18 The political shift from Venice to Hungarian king on the Eastern Adriatic shore 19 had its impact on Dubrovnik too, resulting in the formation of two factions among the nobility (pro-Venetian and pro-Angevin). 20 The relic of St. Blaise’s left arm thus reached the City at a very delicate moment. It should be emphasized that the Treasury had already kept several relics of the patron, the relics of the throat bone and of the right arm being acquired in the fifteenth century, but none of them were celebrated by a specific feast day or procession. 21 This clearly indicates that the establishment of the feast in 1346 was generated by particular historical circumstances and played a role in reinforcing the feeling of civic identity and unity, although it had the appearance of a devotional occasion, that is, the commemoration of the translatio of the patron’s relic.
Under Angevin protection from 1358, Dubrovnik started to exhibit all the distinctive features of a city-state. A very vivid period of institutional development and territorial expansion made way and diplomatic contacts with foreign centers intensified. This resulted in mounting self-awareness and the ambition to orchestrate state ceremonies as a tool to convey the image of the community and its values, probably also influenced by the European process of formalization of public behavior. 22
The dawn of the fifteenth century marked a driving period when new processions were created with the aim of providing a perpetual remembrance on a specific event. In 1400, Dubrovnik saw the establishment of the Feast of the Forty Martyrs 23 to commemorate the day when a conspiracy of a group of patricians and the lords from Dubrovnik’s surroundings was revealed and frustrated. 24 The procession, in which participated both the secular authorities (Senate) and the clergy, was followed by a eulogy of liberty and civic virtues, commissioned from the Cathedral’s preacher with the purpose to refresh the memory of the event (ad memoriam illorum reducitur). 25 Actually, on several other occasions in Ragusan history the stability of the Republic and its government was jeopardized by conspiracy or struggle between two competing patrician factions, but they were, if not completely covered up, not considered to be a proper material for the state ceremony. By the fifteenth century, the ideology of Dubrovnik developed toward a myth of social harmony preserved thanks to the prudent rule of the patrician class, whereas after 1400 the perpetual remembrance of the less glorious episodes no longer fitted into the master narrative.
With the solemn procession in the honor of SS Peter and Paul, established in 1416, 26 begins a series of processions created to commemorate the end of pestilence that often ravaged the trade-oriented city. To SS Peter and Paul an important church was dedicated, with the oldest layer probably from the tenth century, 27 and they were honored with the state feast at least since the fourteenth century. 28 The procession was introduced in 1416 as a new element devised to express eternal thanksgiving and memorize the protection of the two saints, whose intercession provided for the epidemic to stop. A series of newly designed processions to memorize the cessation of plague continued in 1422 with a magnificent procession of Corpus Christi. Following the expansion of the devotion to the Holy Eucharist across Europe, 29 the festivity had already been celebrated in Dubrovnik and a more modest procession seems to have been its original element, 30 but in 1422, after a terrifying outbreak of plague, 31 the celebration was redesigned and made more pompous, “following the example of other honorable cities.” 32 In fact, it was one of the highest points of the calendar of the state festivities, and it was the most extended Ragusan procession in terms of the number of participants and the route it took, 33 indeed similar to the practice in other European areas. 34 The level of the feast’s solemnity was elevated for the second time in 1465 by including the vigil and compulsory fasting. The reason for that was twofold: a new wave of plague ceased, followed, on the very day of Corpus Christi, by a sudden (“miraculous”) withdrawal of the Ottoman army from the Ragusan borders. When passing the regulation on the feast, the Senate was explicit about the wish to transmit to the posterity the remembrance of the event ([ut] … miraculorum memoria ad posteros nostros continuis temporibus transferatur). 35 The transformation of the Feast of SS Simeon and Jude followed a similar paradigm. When in 1430, on the eve of their feast, a difficult period of several months during which the City was ravaged by the plague, a series of earthquakes, and the war with the powerful lord Radoslav Pavlović came to an end, 36 the already observed feast received new, more solemn features, the procession being one of them. 37 Almost the same occurred with the Feast of Saint John the Baptist: when in 1437 on that very day the plague epidemic ended, the feast was expanded with a splendid procession. 38 Some documents suggest that the pestilence of 1457 gave a new impetus to the celebration of the Feast of Immaculate Conception, 39 and possibly only then the procession was introduced. 40 In 1527, during one of the worst outbreaks of plague in Dubrovnik’s history, the Ragusan Senate introduced several measures to secure the protection of the saints, among which was the vow to build the church of Saint Rochus and the introduction of the official celebration of the saint’s day, 41 with a procession in which the Rector and the Minor Council, as well as the archbishop and his entourage, joined the members of the confraternity of Saint Rochus. 42 During the next outbreak of plague in 1533, Ragusan authorities commissioned a construction of a votive church of the Annunciation, and another epidemic in 1572–1573 was the motive to expand the vow and introduce a new annual procession to the church. 43 A pestilence of 1586 again prompted the Ragusan authorities to establish a permanent votive procession on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (May 3). 44
The procession introduced in 1520 to remember an earthquake appears as an intruder on this long list of processions commemorating epidemics, but in fact it followed the same pattern: the celebration of the Ascension Day, a feast with a well-established tradition in Dubrovnik, was expanded with an annual procession to engrave divine salvation in collective memory. 45
In sum, until the end of the sixteenth century, almost all the Ragusan processions, besides the ones held on the major Church feasts such as Good Friday, were rooted in a historical event—mostly the end of pestilence or a happy epilogue of another traumatic collective experience. However, they were articulated in a way to express worship and gratitude to a particular saint or other object of devotion, without directly “quoting” in their symbolic language the historical occasion behind. I think that the phenomenon might be properly rendered by the metaphor of the “watermark”: the historic event was amalgamated with the saint’s cult, and not visible on the surface.
The Processions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Explicit Construction of Collective Memory
In the seventeenth century, the function of Ragusan processions as vehicles of memory substantially changed in character, by starting to openly commemorate important historical events, as documented by the following examples.
The first procession with a new frame was introduced in 1610, after a lightning hit the part of the Rector’s Palace where the armory was kept. The explosion consumed most of the arms and caused great damage to the building, especially to the Senate Chamber. Every year on June 20, the senators were obliged to participate in a procession and attend the high mass with special prayers to thank Saint Blaise and the Virgin for having prevented the fire to spread throughout the City. 46 Remarkably, the new feast was not linked to any saint celebrated on the day of June 20, a “perfect candidate” being Saint Giovanni di Matera, canonized in 1177. 47 Because of the very old and important links with Apulia in general, and Saint Giovanni’s abbey in Pulsano in particular, 48 his day could have easily been used as the nucleus of the new feast. But it was not, and the procession commemorated the historical event explicitly.
The existence of Dubrovnik was challenged again in the summer of 1639, when a series of earthquakes struck the City, inflicting considerable damage. It was not the first time for the City to experience the seismic vulnerability of its location, but the successive quakes unchained a somewhat extreme reaction of the government. The blame was put on the negligence of older devotional votes and general sinking of moral values (extramarital relations, magic, blasphemy, etc.), and thus processions, collective prayers, and other acts of faith were immediately introduced to appease the anger of God. Also, to commemorate the day of the hardest seismic waves, July 28, an annual procession was established. 49 Bearing in mind the earlier practice, here again one might expect that the event would have been permanently memorized as the Feast of Saint Celsus, whose relic had already been present in Dubrovnik in the treasury of Saint Frances friary, 50 but it did not happen.
Of all the memorial days and processions introduced in the seventeenth century, certainly the most important was the one related to the Great Earthquake of April 4, 1667. It was the most traumatic episode in Dubrovnik’s entire history, as it caused massive material and population losses. 51 Once again, divine protection of the City from total destruction and combustion was commemorated transparently, in the form of a memorial day with procession, 52 and not concealed in the form of a saint’s feast, as so often was the case in the Middle Ages. However, the very earthquake of 1667 was at the origin of the second procession, that to the church of Our Lady of Mt Carmel, 53 because it was believed that the intercession of the Virgin helped stop the conflagration—which devastated the City after the earthquake—in the vicinity of her church, thus not reaching Saint John’s fortress where the gunpowder was stored. Our Lady of Mt Carmel was officially proclaimed to be the Advocate and Protector of the Republic, a vow was made about the reconstruction of her church, and an annual procession was created. 54 Thus, here the link with the saint’s cult stemmed from topographical symbolism. In the summer of 1677, 55 to express gratitude for the conservation of the Republic and its liberty during the very serious crises in its relations with the Ottoman Empire, 56 the solemnity of both processions was elevated.
The cessation of the plague in 1691, which paralyzed the City for months, was again commemorated with an official festivity and procession on January 9, not associated with any saint’s day. 57
An explicit “memorial procession” being in that period a rule, there are two processions that do not fit completely in the dominant pattern. In his work on the history of the Ragusan Church, S. M. Cerva mentions that the celebration of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin included a (votive) procession only from 1612, but provides no clue about the reasons behind. 58 The feast was certainly solemnly celebrated much earlier, as the Cathedral of Dubrovnik was dedicated to the Assumption at least from the construction of a Romanesque church in the twelfth century. 59 However, Cerva might be right about the late introduction of the procession. 60 A long-drawn-out rift between two factions of the Ragusan nobility culminated in the “Great Conspiracy,” which was defeated in 1612. 61 A Venetian envoy noted that the event triggered a big commotion in the City, and that the government organized processions and collective rogations, 62 so that it is perfectly plausible that an annual thanksgiving procession to the Cathedral was introduced in that context, once the stability was secured.
A second “exception” is the annual procession established at the beginning of the eighteenth century on Saint Lawrence’s Day. The feast was listed in the official calendar from the early fifteenth century, but its celebration remained quite modest until the introduction of a procession in 1703, to celebrate good news about the negotiated diminution of the tribute the Republic had to pay to the Porte. 63
It should be noted that both “exceptions” actually concerned the days when an official feast had already been celebrated. By adding processions, they were merely redesigned.
In short, most of the new feasts with processions introduced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were constructed as an explicit memorial day. As I have shown, the possibilities of finding a “convenient” saint’s cult were not missing, but they were left unexploited.
A comparison with Venice, whose social structure was similar and whose state remained as a model for the institutional system of Dubrovnik, is instructive. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two very important feasts were introduced in Venice, both occasioning the end of plague. 64 The first, established in 1577, was dedicated to the Redeemer, and has solemnly been celebrated with the procession ever since on the third Sunday in July. On the same occasion, the Senate vowed the construction of the magnificent Redentore church on the island of Giudecca, designed by Andrea Palladio. 65 The feast is absent from the general calendar of saints, 66 and its veneration in Venice is based on the local devotion created to remember this great epidemic. A new outbreak of plague in 1630 was managed in the same way, with the vow to build the church of Santa Maria della Salute, and the establishment of a special feast day with the procession. 67 Here a specific variant of the cult to the Virgin is created, with its distinctive title (Our Lady of Salvation), being part of a more general type that expressed Mary’s willingness to dispense protection and favors. 68 Contrary to the Ragusans, the Venetians gave their two important new feasts a religious name, but by promoting a local cult and not a devotion of a general type, they emphasized a specific, Venetian historical experience behind.
Shaping the Processions, Managing the Collective Memory
As argued in the previous sections of my paper, the authorities of Dubrovnik made a careful choice as to which events to commemorate and which not, and their decision depended on the perception of relevance of a certain event or experience for the collective identity and “public memory,” this perception itself being a product of the historical circumstances. For example, the purchase of one of the relics of the City’s patron in 1346 was permanently commemorated by a feast and procession, because it was then crucial for the building and nurturing of the civic identity, while a similar occasion a century later failed to have any echo in public rituals. Or, two disastrous explosions that almost completely demolished the Rector’s Palace in the fifteenth century 69 were not stamped on the commemorative ceremonies, while the one of 1610 was, possibly because the authorities of the time were concerned about the politically unstable situation.
How did the processions serve as a cultural tool to print the events on the collective memory? First of all, a specific composition of the procession could indicate who was involved in the commemorated historic event: if it was an outbreak of plague, citizens of all stands would be expected to take part in it, although special position could be reserved for a specific confraternity devoted to a saint who was credited for the salvation. On other occasions, only the Rector and the Minor Council were included, representing again the community of citizens and the state. If the event to be commemorated was of political nature—like a suppression of the rebellion of 1400—the procession was designed to display the vigilance of the Senate, whose members were asked to take part in it. It was through the orchestration of the participants that the authorities gave the public a clue about the object of remembrance.
In his concept of the “site of memory” (lieu de mémoire), Pierre Nora emphasizes the mnemonic potentiality of space: when public performances were staged to stimulate collective memory, they borrowed the meaning the place already had for the local community, and added a new symbolism to it. 70 In fact, from the Roman times through the Renaissance the connection between memory and space was felt as close, as it was thought that memory could be stimulated by spatial images. 71 It is certain that some Ragusan public ceremonies of the time were articulated by using the already extant symbolism of the places, as I have shown for penal rituals. 72 With at least some processions it was also the case, as they had an itinerary connected to a specific place in the urban fabric, for example, the line along which the fire stopped after the Great Earthquake of 1667. 73 However, most processions commemorated historical events that involved the whole community, and therefore they adopted two “standard itineraries” with hardly any variants. The starting and ending point of the processions were always staged in the very center of public life—the Communal Square (Platea Communis)—which stretched in front of the two buildings housing the government institutions (Rector’s Palace and Council Hall), the two most important churches (Cathedral and St. Blaise), and included the area with the Loggia, Orlando’s Column, market, etc. 74 A number of processions did not actually leave this center of civic life, while others adopted a long itinerary, stretched to encompass the main street called Platea magna (today Placa or Stradun) that connected the two main City ports, and symbolically represented the whole City.
Ragusan material gives some insight into the question as to how processions proved in practice to be useful mnemonic agents. In an eighteenth-century description of processions by S. M. Cerva, the word memory (memoria), or expressions such as “it preserves the memory of ” (memoria recolitur) or “so that it would never be forgotten” (ne …. umquam oblivisceretur) are used quite often, 75 confirming that the author—a local polyhistor with ambition of writing a critical account on the history of the Church of Dubrovnik—was also aware of the mark the processions left on collective memory. He also knew that with the procession on St. John the Baptist, the plague of 1436 and the regained health of the City were commemorated, proving that four centuries later the link of historical event―mnemonic procession was still readable and effective. 76 But he might have drawn his information from the narrative sources, 77 and not from the urban performance itself.
A better example of how the memory on a historical event was assisted through the performance of processions is given by the Italian teacher Filippo Diversi in his description of the City of 1440 (Situs aedificiorum, politiae et laudabilium consuetudinum inclitae civitatis Ragusii) Diversi gives considerable space to the local festivals and processions and mentions accurately the year and the occasion of the introduction of a new procession he witnessed (St. John the Baptist, 1437). 78 More importantly, he notes that the procession on the Feast of Blessed Peter, Lawrence, and Andrew was also established in commemoration of an epidemic of plague. 79 City chronicles of that time had still to be written, and Diversi comments that he heard about it (ut audivi). From the preserved council deliberations, we can determine that the epidemic in question was the one of 1363, after which, indeed, the construction of the church to the saints was committed and the procession introduced to officially express gratitude for the salvation. Eighty years later, Diversi informed himself about the origin of the procession he described and was told about its historical context. Here actually the procession triggered an oral explanation, but it is certainly thanks to the procession and its annual repetition that the remembrance of the events was preserved, which otherwise would have vanished from “living memory.” 80
Ragusan Processions and Collective Memory: A Relationship in Transformation
In the central part of my paper, I aimed to explain that the way of managing the public processions in late medieval and early modern Dubrovnik significantly changed over the centuries, and that the turning point for this transformation was the seventeenth century.
Looking at the reasons of this change in the construction of the collective remembrance by state-designed processions, one part of the explanation might be that in early modern Dubrovnik—despite its conservative Catholicism—the secular authorities succeeded in increasing their influence and bringing under their control many important Church matters, such as property issues and bequests to the religious institutions, the activities of the confraternities, the influence on the nomination of the archbishop, and its suffragan bishops. 81 The fact that the new processions were not always articulated around a devotion to the saints might be a part of this process.
However, I think that far more important was the growing ambition of the state to manage its self-representation. As early as the Renaissance, the Republic of Dubrovnik started to shape through several media a discourse on liberty, republican values, etc., creating and conveying a certain image about its history, tradition, and statehood. 82 In the same period, another process was on its way: the state administration gradually multiplied and formed an early-modern semiprofessional bureaucratic structure that filled its ranks from an exclusive group of citizen families. 83 The third interconnected phenomenon was the mushrooming of ceremonial occasions, not only in the European monarchies but also within the republican framework. 84 With all that, a more abstract notion of state emerged. 85 Actually, these developments can be discerned in different early modern European states, although they did not progress overall with the same pace. Minor centers took part in this general process, but with some delay: for the Republic of Lucca, the turning point was reached in the seventeenth century. 86 The same period saw also in Dubrovnik the growth of systematic care for public ceremonies, which acquired certain professional features: a permanent office of Master of Ceremonies was introduced in 1676, and a Book of Ceremonies—an official register on ceremonial practice on the occasion of various feasts, state funerals, etc.—was compiled around 1700. 87 Another facet of the same process was—I believe—a new, self-confidential style in constructing the “collective memory” by directly referring to the historical events of its past, as visible in the transformation of Dubrovnik’s processions.88
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Mrs. Vesna Baće, who was kind enough to improve the English style of this essay, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: IP-11-2013-5106, Croatian Science Foundation.