Abstract
On Wednesday 6 April 1667, an earthquake occurred, and severely affected a large area of the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, also known as southern Dalmatia, in today Croatia, and part of Montenegro. This paper summarizes the seismological data existing today on this large earthquake, with special attention to how such data were gathered by means of investigating hitherto not considered historical sources of earthquake records. The obtained set of 37 macroseismic intensities in European Macroseismic Scale-EMS98 was processed, to obtain an epicentre located not far from the most damaged places, amongst them Ragusa (today Dubrovnik), and an Mw value of 6.4 ± 0.3.
Highlights
The scientific challenge faced by historical seismology is to reconstruct an earthquake by making use of written observations of its effects, taking into account that such records were not originally intended to be used for seismological purposes
Some misunderstandings contained in previous interpretations of the historical documents have been corrected, and for instance, it was excluded that damage did reach Zara (N Dalmatia), as well as that the earthquake triggered any seawave
The spatial distribution of intensity values was extended in a significant way, especially to the south of Ragusa/Dubrovnik (Croatia), in the area ruled by the Ottoman Empire
Summary
The scientific challenge faced by historical seismology is to reconstruct an earthquake by making use of written observations of its effects, taking into account that such records were not originally intended to be used for seismological purposes. The Ottoman Empire, or “Sublime Porte”, which ruled all over the Balkans and most of Hungary at the time, in a sense enveloping, from the mainland, the territories of the Republics of Venice and Ragusa Such an international stage asked for a research concentrated on retrieving as many contemporary written accounts as possible, in their original version and pristine language (Albini 2015). In the days immediately after the earthquake, the stretch of sea running parallel to the eastern Adriatic Sea became a very-well travelled route by Venetian envoys and officers, heading either away from or towards the affected areas (Fig. 3) The motive of this bustle was that about 80 km to the southeast of Ragusa was located another important town of that time, Cattaro, ruled by the Republic of Venice.
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