VENETIAN SUPREMACY
the immediate neighbourhood of the city it possessed the valleys of Gionchetto (Sumet), Bergato (Brgat), and Ombla (Rijeka), with the bay of Gravosa and the Lapad peninsula, but the frontiers were very near, and on the crest of Monte Sergio, immediately behind the city, watchmen were posted day and night. Part of this territory had been acquired in the earliest times, but small additions had been made at intervals. Beyond the Ombla the citizens owned the stretch of coast known as Starea or Astarea.1 Of the islands, they possessed in the thirteenth century Mercana—a small rock opposite the promontory of Ragusavecchia, with a monastery of St. Michael2—and Isola di Mezzo, Calamotta, Daksa, and S. Andrea of the group known to the ancients as the Elaphites Insulse were added in 1080.3 In 1218 the more distant island of Lagosta had been acquired, and at an early date that of Meleda had been granted by the Servian king to the Benedictine monks, with the condition that the civil government should be entrusted to the Republic. Stephen the First-Crowned gave them Giuppana in 1216. Between 1220 and 1224 Stephen, Nemanja’s son, granted the same monks a stretch of land about ¿rnovica and Ombla. As a consequence of the Ragusan alliance with Michael Asen, the Bulgarian Tsar, against Stephen Uros I., King of Servia, in 1254, the Republic’s southern frontiers were extended so as to include the vineyards of Breno and the peninsula on which
   1	From Astaria, a mediaeval Latin word meaning a flat tract of sea-coast. In Du Cange “ maritima, campus planus mari adjacens.”
   2	Mentioned in 1254.
   3	Gelcich, I Conti di Tuhelj, p. 22.