RAGUSA, a city of Dalmatia ; on the E. shore of the Adriatic, 100 miles S. E. of Spalato and opposite the Gulf of Man fredonia in Italy. It is surrounded with strong walls, and contains several strik ing and interesting buildings, chief among them being the palace of the rec tors in the Gothic and Classic Renais sance styles between 1435 and 1964; the custom house and mint, dating from be fore 1312; the Dominican church (1306) and monastery (1348), the former con taining a picture by Titian, the Fran ciscan church and monastery (1317) ; the Church of St. Biagio (Blaise), the patron saint of the town, built in 1348 1352, rebuilt in 1715; and the churches of San Salvatore and Alle Dance.
The city seems to have been colonized by refugees from Epidaurus, Salona, and other Grieco-Roman towns destroyed by the Slav invaders of the Balkan penin sula. For some centuries Ragusa was a Roman outpost on the edge of the Slav states, and flourished greatly under the suzerain protection of Byzantium. To ward the end of the 12th century Ragusa was made to acknowledge the supremacy of Venice. In 1358 Venice ceded her Dalmatian possessions to Hungary, and from that time down to the era of the Napoleonic wars Ragusa was generally accustomed to look to Hungary (i. e., the
German empire) for help against her enemies, though from the beginning of the 15th century she was a free and in dependent republic. Ragusa took a prominent place among the trading states of the Mediterranean, due to her position between the Christian powers and the empire of the Turks, and the privileges she enjoyed of trading freely with the subjects of the Sultan. Her "argosies" (i. e. "vessels of Ragusa": see ARGOSY) as far as the Baltic. Ragusa was the home from the middle of the 15th century of a remarkable lit erary movement, stimulated by the Renaissance (see SERBIA) . During the course of the Napoleonic wars the French entered the city in 1805; this led the Russians to bombard the place. But in 1808 Napoleon declared the republic of Ragusa to be at an end, and in the fol lowing year incorporated it in the king dom of Illyria. Since 1814, like the rest of the Dalmatian seaboard, it has be longed to Austria. Ragusa had, how ever, long before this declined from her former greatness. Pop. about 15,000.