Nor was this medieval city-state a democracy in the sense that we would use that term. This system worked so well that there was no orphanage established in Ragusa until the end of the fifteenth century. The rationale was that a man would assume no responsibility for a child born of a street rape, but a child sired by a servant girl’s master would be taken care of by the household. The Ragusans were not concerned with protecting their women, but rather with the protection of children. While a female servant could not be accosted in public, she was fair game for her employer. But this protection was not extended to the home. Public order was an important aspect of life in the republic, and women could walk the streets in greater safety than in the other cities of Christendom, for any man who molested a woman was swiftly punished, even if she was a serving maid and he of high birth. The streets were cleaner than those he’d have been accustomed to in Europe, and medical care was probably better, for the Ragusans imported physicians from the celebrated medical school at Salerno. Richard would have found a prosperous, peaceful city. But the government structure was the same. The office of rector was not formed until the fourteenth century, though Richard would have met the Count of Ragusa. They served by turns on the great council and elected one of their own to serve as rector, limited to very brief terms. It was an oligarchy, ruled by a small elite of patricians-all male, of course. It had an old and proud history that dated back to the seventh century, and during its Golden Age in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it rivaled the much larger cities of Venice and Genoa. Ragusa was a fiercely independent republic, nominally under the suzerainty of what we today call the Byzantine Empire, known in Richard’s time as the Empire of the Greeks. I was both surprised and intrigued to discover that Richard’s Ragusa was my Dubrovnik. His first shipwreck was on the island of Lokrum, just outside the harbor of Ragusa. When he was attempting to make his way back to England after the end of the Third Crusade, Richard Lionheart ran into more drama in the span of weeks than most people do in the course of a lifetime-storms at sea, an encounter with pirates, two shipwrecks, a mad dash through enemy territory with just twenty men, and then betrayal and capture, an imprisonment that blatantly violated Church law. But that may be changing, thanks to a man dead more than eight hundred years. In all honesty, I never truly expected to make it, though. Whatever the reason, for as long as I can remember, Dubrovnik has been on my Bucket List of places to visit before I die. It may have been the sheer beauty of the locale-the white medieval walls, the red tile roofs, the turquoise of the Adriatic Sea, the mountains rising up in the distance. I am not sure why, for I knew little of its history. I have always been interested in the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik.
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