Republic of Ragusa

The Republic of Ragusa was an aristocratic maritime republic centered on the city of Dubrovnik, called Ragusa in Italian and Latin, on the coast of South Dalmatia in what is now southernmost Croatia, existing from 1358, when the Treaty of Zadar secured its independence from Venice, until 1808. The republic reached its commercial peak during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and governed itself under the motto Liberty is not well sold for all the gold, but by 1808 it counted only about thirty thousand inhabitants, roughly five thousand of them within the city walls. Napoleon's French Empire conquered the republic in 1806 and formally annexed it into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy in 1808, ending its independence.