Serb-Catholic movement in Dubrovnik
Initially spearheaded by intellectuals who espoused strong pro-Serbian sentiments, there were two prominent incarnations of the movement: an early pan-Slavic phase under Matija Ban and Medo Pucić that corresponded to the Illyrian movement, and a later, more Serbian nationalist group that was active between the 1880s and 1908, including a large number of Dubrovnik intellectuals at the time.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, Dubrovnik grew into an oligarchic republic, and benefited greatly by becoming a commercial outpost for the rising and prosperous Serbian state.
Between the 14th century and 1808, Dubrovnik ruled itself as a free state, although it was a tributary from 1382 to 1804 of the Ottoman Empire and paid an annual tribute to its sultan.
In 1808 Marshal Marmont issued a proclamation abolishing the Republic of Ragusa and amalgamating its territory into the French Empire's client state, the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy.
[14] The cultural and political movement of Serbs in Dubrovnik was started around this time, notably by Nikolajević's 1838 article in the newspaper Srbsko-Dalmatinski Magazin (published in Zadar by Božidar Petranović), where he claimed the entire Ragusan Slavonic literary corpus for Serbian literature.
[15] In 1841, Medo Pucić, a writer from an old Catholic noble family, became acquainted with pan-Slavists Ján Kollár and Pavel Jozef Šafárik, and started to espouse a Serb national sentiment.
[16] Medo Pucić was the first person to publicly call himself a Serb, while at the same time believing that the Croatian name for the language he spoke was merely a synonym of the Serbian name, so he was effectively an adherent of slovinstvo, a pan-Slavic view of South Slavic nationalities.
[17] They were not, however, met with uniform acceptance - Jovan Sterija Popović and others, with support of the Church in Serbia, protested against their ideas and by extension against Vuk Karadžić's notion that Serbian language and nationality extended beyond Orthodoxy.
[21] Three decades after Ban and Pucić, in the 1880s a sizable group of Ragusan intellectuals independently developed a Serb-Catholic feeling, but at that point it was a political movement that was openly hostile to the Croats and whose leaders cooperated with the pro-Italian Autonomist Party (i.e. it was not pan-Slavic).
[26] The movement gradually shut down because the process of general political alignment of Croats and Serbs that happened in the beginning of the 20th century had eliminated its reason for existence, as the creation of Yugoslavia accomplished an integration with Serbia.
Nikodim Milaš (d. 1914) in his memoirs negatively wrote about the movement in the context of the late 1890s, that "They imagined that all the liberal Croats would have been attracted by their programme and that they would have become 'Catholic Serbs' too.
[14] Maciej Czerwiński [pl] stated that the Serb-Catholic movement had inconsistencies and shortcomings in the linguistic, cultural and ethnic proving of the Serbian identity of Dubrovnik.
