In 1420, the island of Korčula on the Dalmatian coast (today in Croatia) came under the administration of Venice. Its exceptionally rich archives allow us to paint the "total" picture of a small society living on the edge of the Venetian maritime empire in the 15th century, facing Ragusa (Dubrovnik), the rival: how did this microcosm of peasants and Has shepherds, fishermen and seafarers traders, city patricians and countryside folk been transformed by its insertion in the economic and political space of the great Mediterranean power?In these three lectures given at the Collège de France in 2010, Oliver Jens Schmitt, professor at the University of Vienna, historian of the Balkans, crosses micro-history with the great. You can read the story of the loves of Dragačić, leader of the populares, and of Franuša, daughter of a patrician - a true political novel worthy of a Boccaccio, in which the Doge of Venice himself intervenes. We learn how the patrician families make a fortune in smuggling, vital for the inhabitants of an island in permanent need of wheat. Through the reports of the field guards and the port registers, we get into all the details of the island's daily life, with its stories of washerwomen and ship captains, sheep stolen from beaches and forests voluntarily set on fire. And we come to understand that |