Dalmatia

Dalmatia is a historical region, not an official administrative division, along the eastern Adriatic coast of modern Croatia and Montenegro, named for the ancient Illyrian tribe of the Dalmatae who inhabited the area in classical antiquity. It runs as a narrow coastal belt from the island of Rab in the north to the Bay of Kotor in the south, with a hinterland as much as 50 kilometers wide in the north narrowing to just a few kilometers in the south, backed inland by the rugged Dinaric Alps. Roughly 79 islands and about 500 islets, including the large islands of Brac, Pag, and Hvar, run parallel to the coast, and the region's largest city is Split, followed by Zadar, Sibenik, and Dubrovnik. Dalmatia was romanized under Roman rule, later formed a Byzantine theme, and subsequently passed under Venetian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian control before becoming part of Croatia after the First World War.