The thesis studies the rural communities of the Veneto-Ottoman frontier in the Southeast Adriatic from the late 17th to the late 18th century. Traditional scholarship has depicted these communities at once as ‘primitive tribes’ and precocious pioneers of South Slavic national liberation. This thesis, however, approaches them in terms which would have been available to their own inhabitants to frame their subjectivity and agency.
Drawing from an abundance of political papers produced in interaction between the Venetian and Ottoman states, local bishops, urban elites, and rural leaderships, the thesis reconstructs the normative language in which rural frontiersmen represented their communal identities, claims, and grievances. In the next step, this shared space of textual representation is sounded to examine the institutional makeup of rural communities and their participation in imperial administration, flow of information, and warfare.
The communities emerge as distinct subjects of frontier politics, constituted around assemblies of their members and in relation to the collective duties they performed for the early modern states, in proportion to which they could obtain special status and privileges. The most privileged communities, normally charged with military duties, were marked by direct subordination to state representatives (to the exclusion of urban elites) and by standing administrative and judicial bodies within their assemblies. Acting either collectively or through delegated members, the rural assemblies served as autonomous legislative, judicial, and political fora, whether in obedience or defiance to the state.
Rather than an image of isolation, the thesis paints the complex interdependence between the rural communities and their sovereigns, as well as their wider Adriatic, Mediterranean, Balkan, and East European connexions. Exceptionally well-recorded by the Venetian archives, the patterns of rural communal life observed here may not have, after all, been unique or exceptional, inviting further comparison with contemporary borderlands and hinterlands.