Crossroads of the Adriatic | A History of Ulcinj

A town of twenty thousand souls. Twenty-five centuries of history. Six different names.
On a rocky peninsula at the southern edge of Montenegro stands one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on the Adriatic — and one of the strangest stories in European history.
The most famous false messiah in Jewish history died within its walls. Sabbatai Zevi, who convinced a third of world Jewry that redemption had come, spent his last exile here and was buried in the town in 1676.
Cervantes may have been imprisoned in its cells. The town has told the story for three centuries: that the author of Don Quixote was held here, and that Dulcinea took her name from Dulcigno. This book cross-examines that legend with the care it deserves — and finds that almost every beam of it is sound history, even where the conclusion is not.
For a century and a half it was the most feared name on the Adriatic. After 1571 the town was refounded by North African corsairs, and its captains raided from Sicily to the Levant. Its slave market became the largest on the Adriatic. Its African community remained part of the town's fabric into the twentieth century.
In 1880 it stopped the Great Powers of Europe. Six navies anchored in the roadstead to compel a town of a few thousand to accept a line drawn in Berlin. The town refused. The crisis occupied prime ministers, made front pages across Europe, and became a founding moment of Albanian national memory.
Crossroads of the Adriatic tells the full story of Ulcinj: Illyrian stronghold and Roman ally, Byzantine fortress and seat of the Balšić lords of Zeta, Venetian Dulcigno and Ottoman Ülgün, Yugoslav resort and Montenegrin city.
Along the way it follows an improbable cast: Gasparo Bruni, the first Albanian Knight of Malta, who commanded the Pope's own galley at Lepanto; his nephew Bartolomeo, who rose from these lanes to become the power behind a Carpathian throne; Lika Ceni, the corsair captain whose descendants still live in the town; Hafiz Ali Ulqinaku, the boatman's son who became a mufti and gave Albanian its first translation of the Mawlid; and the thousands who left for Istanbul, Shkodra, and New York, and never stopped sending money home.
What emerges is an argument. Ulcinj's genius was never conquest. It was absorption — the capacity to take in castaways, corsairs, refugees, and captives and make them, within a generation, part of what the town meant by us. This book does not soften the catastrophe of 1571, or the slave market, or the divisions of the war years. It argues that the continuity is more remarkable for having survived them.
Includes nearly 40 historical maps, engravings, and photographs; a complete roster of the Venetian governors of Dulcigno, reconstructed from the Republic's records; a detailed timeline; a glossary of Albanian, Turkish, Venetian, and Slavic terms; and a candid note on sources that separates what the documents prove from what the town remembers.
For readers of Mediterranean and Balkan history, of Noel Malcolm and Predrag Matvejević — and for anyone who has stood on a sea wall and wondered who else has stood there.