There are several curious questions from our national past that have been bugging me for a while. This article has been long in the writing, but only now have I found the time to actually wrap it up and do some additional research. I am sure there are more interesting curiosities but, for now, these are intriguing enough.
Who was Johannes Dalmatus?
Ever since I came across his name alongside the Emperor during the last stand, I’ve been searching for more information about him. For decades, I found nothing. Only recently have deeper searches finally uncovered some results. Johanes Dalmatus — known as John the Dalmatian — almost certainly came from Poljica, a semi-autonomous military community in central Dalmatia. Nicolo Barbaro described him as being of the “Croat nation.” Poljica wasn’t just a village. Its 1440 statute codified the obligations of its peasant-nobility, and it produced hardened commanders who spent their lives raising and leading Croatian levies against the Ottomans.
That frontier warrior background made John something more than a mercenary. Constantine XI trusted him. He commanded armies levied in Croatia, men who knew Ottoman tactics from bitter experience — which is exactly why the Emperor placed them at the Mesoteichion, near the St. Romanus Gate. Generations of soldiers knew the Mesoteichion as Constantinople’s soft spot, the one stretch of wall where the defenses felt less certain. In 1453, Mehmed II drove his guns and his assaults against that same ground, again and again, until the stone finally gave way.
On 29 May, the siege reached its climax. Wave after wave hit the walls — irregulars first, then Anatolian troops, then the Janissaries. The great cannon’s final bombardment shattered the improvised earthen-and-timber barbicans at San Romano and blew open a breach. Constantine XI, Johanes Dalmatus, Don Francesco de Toledo, and Theophilus Palaiologos made their last stand there. Yet, he is never mentioned in our national history.
The fall
Then Giovanni Giustiniani took a wound and was carried from the field. Morale collapsed. The Emperor chose to die rather than flee.
John the Dalmatian stood on Constantine’s left — at least according to later Ottoman and Spanish-influenced accounts. He helped lead a final, desperate countercharge into a heap of corpses so thick it nearly blocked the gate itself. He tried to rally the fleeing defenders as Janissary reinforcements poured through the gap. It was hopeless.
Constantine XI took a blow to the face and fell. John the Dalmatian fell soon after, in the same swirling melee at the breach. His body vanished into the carnage of the Mesoteichion. No grave. No monument. Just the convergence of Venetian, Ottoman, and Spanish narratives that remember him as one of the last four men who chose death at the Emperor’s side — on the day the Roman Empire finally ceased to exist.
King Arthur was from Dalmatia?
This is relatively well documented, but it still deserves attention. Just outside Split, in Podstrana, fragments of a Roman tomb now built into a church wall record the career of Lucius Artorius Castus, a 2nd‑century officer whose life looks oddly Arthur‑like. He served in multiple elite legions, rose to senior command, led selected British detachments as a dux on at least one overseas campaign, and finished as governor of Liburnia on the Dalmatian coast with the Ius Gladii—the legal “right of the sword”—ruling from a fortified, island‑studded frontier that feels much closer to an “Isle of Apples” than a wet English hill.
The Arthur angle comes from how these facts intersect with known history and later legend: in Marcus Aurelius’s time, 5,500 Sarmatian heavy cavalry with dragon standards and sword‑centred cults were sent to Britain, probably under the administrative umbrella of commanders like Artorius, creating a historical scenario of a leader named Artorius heading dragon‑bearing horsemen on the far northwest frontier.The name “Artorius” may have slowly changed into “Arthur.” Medieval stories describe a British war leader who fought in Gaul, similar to a Roman dux. Around Split, local Slavic myths also speak of sacred swords and sleeping heroes. Together, these ideas suggest a simple but strong case for a Roman, Dalmatian origin behind the Once and Future King.
Did the Greeks colonize the Dalmatian coast for “Blue Gold”?
Imagine a land so special that it was conquered for the magical scent of a local flower? There’s a different way to read the Greek colonization of the Dalmatian coast. Forget strategy and trade routes for a moment. Follow the scent of the iris.
The flower was sacred to the goddess Iris herself — the rainbow-bridge between gods and mortals. Greeks saw its multicolored petals as the rainbow made visible on earth. They believed its hidden rhizome guided souls toward the afterlife and purified the body in life and in death. This wasn’t decoration as the iris carried serious mythological weight.
Blue Gold
It also carried serious commercial weight. The Dalmatian coast — with it’s thin limestone soils, harsh sun, brutal winds — produced something chemically remarkable. Species like Iris pallida, Iris illyrica, and Iris germanica grew here with exceptional resin content, dense in the violet-scented compounds called irones. Both Theophrastus and Pliny singled out Illyrian iris as the finest in the world. Merchants and colonizers noticed too. They called it Blue Gold.
Fresh iris rhizomes have almost no scent. The perfume emerges only after years of processing: two to three years of growth, followed by peeling, drying, and several years of aging, during which odorless precursors slowly transform into irones. It can take close to a decade before the material becomes the prized base used in luxury perfumery.
That timeline changed everything about how Greeks settled this coast. Places like Issa, Pharos, and Narona weren’t just ports — they needed iris fields, drying stores, and the river routes to move product inland and out to sea. Settlement patterns followed the flower.
The story didn’t end with the Greeks. In later Slavic tradition, the same flower became perunika — said to spring up wherever Perun’s lightning struck the earth. The sacred logic shifted from one pantheon to another, but the iris kept its charged status. In 2000, Croatia named Iris croatica its national flower.
One flower. One coast. Goddess, perfume empire, Slavic thunder myth, and modern national symbol — all threaded together across three thousand years.
Curious Question of Sunken Crusader Ship
This simply has to be true! Venice’s role in the Crusades turned the Dalmatian coast into a busy but dangerous sea corridor where many galleys and round ships carried high-value cargo—relics, money, glass, and fine goods—through narrow, stormy channels. Industrial-scale shipbuilding at the Arsenal, special transports for horses and troops, and legal tools like the Pactum Warmundi concentrated a lot of wealth on these routes, and finds such as the Byzantine wreck at Cape Stoba and the later Gagliana Grossa off Gnalić prove that luxury cargoes really did go down along this coast.
Today, conditions in the Adriatic and new technology make it quite realistic that more “treasure” wrecks will be found, with the biggest value in the intact cargo and construction details rather than in gold alone. I am confident that there must still be a wreck of Byzantine treasures that we have not yet discovered.
Hanibals coins
In 1896, villagers near Mazin stumbled on a stone-lined box packed with bronze — rough lumps, cast bars, broken jewelry, coins from Carthage, Numidia, Egypt, Italy, the Greek world. No order, no ceremony. To the Liburnians and Iapodes who buried it, that made perfect sense. Nobody out here cared which goddess stared back from the surface. Good bronze was good bronze — weigh it, trade it, melt it, stash it. Not a bank vault. A community piggy bank for people who lived by their swords, their ships, and their smithing fires.
Then add Hannibal, and everything starts making sense.
While he was burning through the Roman heartland — winning at Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae — his army still needed to eat, and it still needed men. The Liburnians were right across the Adriatic and they were seasoned fighters, master sailors, with grain and timber. Hannibal’s bronze coins, stamped with Tanit and her horse and struck in Carthage by the millions, were almost surely part of the payment. For mercenaries, supplies, the logistical lifeline that kept his campaign alive on enemy soil.
Those coins ended up here. Hundreds of them. At hillforts like Radučka glavica, Trojan and sanctuaries like Sveta Trojica, archaeologists have found Punic and Numidian coins — and crucially, they appear almost nowhere else in Croatia. This corner of North Dalmatia is the exception. That’s not coincidence and it must have been some sort of a deal.
I actually visited Tunis to see the ruins of Carthage and where these coins originated from.
What looks like lost coins scattered all over the countryside was likely a payment from one of history’s most audacious military campaigns. But not confirmed.
I am sure there are few other interesting mysteries left, but these are the ones I find the most interesting.