Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/191

 Byzantine weights in her monetary system, the coins of which bore the Byzantine image of Christ surrounded by Greek script: many Greek works remained in use, legal terms as well as words of the every-day vocabulary. The Byzantine Saint Blasius, successor of the old Illyrian and Hellenic deities, remained the protector of the commonwealth. Here and there eastern influences may be seen in the Gothic forms of Ragusan art.

This unchangeable fidelity was not only directed towards the idea of empire and to Byzantine forms. Any influence, in any field, which recalled Byzantium, i. e, the Roman domination or the Roman law, was sure to find a welcome both in ancient and latterday Ragusa. The submission to Venetian rulers, which began in the days of the campaigns of the Doge Orseolo against the pirates of the Adriatic, was renewed more than once before the establishementestablishment [sic] of the Latin (Franco-Venetian) Empire in Constantinople was to become an enduring reality in the 13th century. The cession of all Venetian rights to the Crown of Hungary, as the rightful heir of Charlemagne, in the year 1358, was only the admission of another form of adherence to the Empire, as far as Dalmatia was concerned. The Venetian rule was imposed because Venice, a Byzantine city on the Italian shore of the Adriatic, governed by Doges who at first were appointed by the Emperor, and enjoyed at the hands of Byzantium a commercial monopoly in the waters of this sea, was, in the sight of Dalmatia and others, only an instrument of Byzantine rule. In rendering obedience to the functionaries sent from Venice — the character of whose rights cannot be otherwise explained — the old Ragusans felt that they were only treading the straight path of fidelity to their Emperor. When the Roman Kings in Southern Italy, (who were de facto rulers over all Italy, but at the same time