Forte Mare in Eight Phases

In 1382 Tvrtko I Kotromanić, King of Bosnia, founded a fortified settlement at the mouth of the Bay of Kotor and dedicated it to Saint Stephen. Nobody used that name for long. In the records it is simply Novi — the new one — and in Latin and Italian hands Castrum Novum, Castelnuovo.

The motive was commercial before it was military. Tvrtko wanted a saltworks and a salt harbour outside the grip that Dubrovnik and Kotor held on the trade. A king who intends to move salt past two hostile republics needs a gun platform at the water’s edge — and that platform is the origin of Forte Mare. The fortress and the town were one project from the first day, which is why the fortress is older than almost everything around it, including the city’s own name.

That name arrived sixty-seven years later. In 1448 the regional magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača took the title herceg, upgrading it a year later to Herceg of Saint Sava after the saint buried in his lands. Novi became a Kosača winter residence, and eventually the duke’s title was welded onto the town: Herceg Novi. His son Vlatko inherited in 1466 and held on until the Ottoman army arrived.

The strong tower

Ottoman forces took Novi in 1481–82 and held it, with one violent interruption, for a little over two centuries. The fortress changed language along with its owner: Jaka kula and Kula Abaspaše. This is the period that did the heavy building. Archival work on the Old Town records fortification campaigns in 1493–94 and 1508, and a further expansion around 1551 that added fortress belts with artillery platforms — walls thick enough to stand a cannon on, which is a different engineering problem from walls built to stop a ladder.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because most descriptions of Forte Mare skate past it. When you photograph this fortress you are mostly photographing Ottoman military engineering wearing a nineteenth-century Austrian hat. Its bulk, its wall height, its crenellated crown and its gun ports are all Ottoman work.

In October 1538 the Holy League fleet under Andrea Doria — Genoese, Venetian, Spanish and Papal galleys — took Castelnuovo and left roughly 3,500 Spanish veterans in it, the Tercio of Castelnuovo, under Francisco de Sarmiento. Then the alliance came apart. It had already lost at Preveza; Venice withdrew; the garrison was left on a rock at the mouth of a bay with no fleet coming.

Hayreddin Barbarossa arrived on 18 July 1539 with something on the order of 50,000 men, 200 ships and 44 heavy siege guns.

Around 200 men of 3,500–4,000 survived. Half the prisoners and all the clergy were executed to satisfy an army that had lost somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 dead. Captain Machín de Munguía, whom Barbarossa had watched fight at Preveza, was offered a command in the Ottoman fleet, declined it, and was beheaded on the beak of the admiral’s galley. Twenty-five of the enslaved survivors escaped Constantinople six years later and reached Messina.

Militarily it ended the League’s eastern Mediterranean project. Culturally it did the opposite of disappearing.

Their blessed death deserved envy more than any victory.

Gutierre de Cetina, A los huesos de los españoles muertos en Castelnuovo — to the bones of the Spaniards who died at Castelnuovo, written within a generation of the siege

Herceg Novi is still, to Spanish military memory, Castelnuovo. A fortress on the Montenegrin coast has a permanent address in another country’s literature because of twenty days in 1539.

The Venetian siege opened on 1 September 1687, during the Morean War. Girolamo Corner, Venice’s Captain-General at Sea, worked with Montenegrin forces under Vuceta Bogdanović, beat the Ottomans in the field outside the town, and pressed the fortress for a month. The detail that decided it is small and brutal: the Holy League drained the spring at the foot of the fortress. The garrison capitulated on 30 September, ending two centuries of Ottoman rule.

Venice repaired the walls and renamed the sea tower Forte di Mare. It is a bureaucratic act with an extraordinarily long tail. The Republic died in 1797; Austria, Russia, France, Austria again, Yugoslavia and Montenegro have all held this rock since — and every one of them kept calling it by its Venetian name.

Under Venice the fort softened. Herceg Novi was administered as part of Albania Veneta; the town became a port rather than a frontier. In 1702 Venice closed the promontory below with the Citadela, also called Macel or Mezzaluna, the crescent — the southernmost element of the medieval defensive system, in the form it would keep for the next 277 years.

The Habsburg silhouette

The Habsburgs treated Forte Mare as live infrastructure. They raised and reinforced the upper works so the fortress could cover the entrance to the bay properly, reworked the northern entrance, and used it as a military signalling and communications point in a bay stiff with naval installations.

A restoration in 1833 carries a striking local claim: that cement was used at the fortress entrance for the first time anywhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and was afterwards applied to Old Town façades for waterproofing. The claim comes from Herceg Novi’s own heritage and tourism sources and has not been corroborated elsewhere.

Italy annexed the town in 1941 and Germany followed; it was liberated on 28 October 1944. Seven years after that, the fortress found the job it still does. In 1952 Forte Mare was converted into a summer stage, and film screenings have run there every season since — by common reckoning one of the oldest open-air cinemas in Europe still in use. For a stretch of later decades it also worked as a night-time disco, which is its own kind of heritage.

On 15 April 1979 the Montenegro earthquake hit the coast. Forte Mare was badly damaged. The Citadela below it was almost entirely destroyed and has never been rebuilt; its stone still spills off the promontory into the sea, visible from the fortress wall.

Reconstruction followed a 1984 project supervised by the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of Montenegro. Later heritage scholarship has been openly critical of it: the restoration applied one uniform masonry treatment across every construction phase, so a building that had spent six centuries visibly disagreeing with itself now reads as a single object. If you go looking for the argument between empires in the stonework, what you are largely looking at is 1984 — which is precisely why a phase drawing is worth making.

Today the fortress is a cultural venue run through the municipal institution JUK Herceg Fest. It is a principal open-air screen of the Herceg Novi Film Festival — Montenegro Film Festival, whose line runs back to the first Yugoslav Festival of Film Direction in 1987. It opens daily in season for a small entrance fee, and the terrace looks straight down the throat of the bay toward Mamula and Luštica — which is, after all, exactly what it was built to do.