Novigrad is a small historical town on the southern shore of the Novigrad Sea, whose geographic position follows the natural landscape patterns, seeing as it is located in the interior of a deep, narrow gulf. The Novigrad fort, known as the Fortica, was erected on a steep cliff overlooking the sea, and the settlement that developed below was walled in the late 15th century. An ancient Roman tower in the location of the present-day Novigrad fort was restored in 1220 and named Castrum Novum, Latin for New Fort (the city’s name, Novigrad, roughly has the same meaning in Croatian). In the late 13th century (1282), Grgur Kurjaković, Lord of Lika and Krbava, thoroughly remodelled this tower and erected a new fort to defend his lands around Novigrad. The imprisonment of Queen Mary of Hungary and Croatia, daughter of Louis I, and her mother Elizabeth, daughter of Bosnian Ban (Viceroy) Stjepan II Kotromanić, at the fort in 1386 put Novigrad on the map of European and world history. Queen Elizabeth was murdered according to some accounts and died of natural causes according to others, while Queen Mary was eventually freed. Following Mary’s liberation from captivity, the Kurjaković family, who were the opponents of the newly crowned king, Ladislaus of Naples, lost Novigrad in the war of dynasties for the throne of Hungary and Croatia, and it became a royal city in 1403. Zadar, Novigrad, Vrana and the island of Pag were the only remaining possessions of Ladislaus of Naples when he sold them to Venice, along with all his rights to Dalmatia, for 100,000 ducats in 1409.
Under Venetian rule, the fort of Novigrad was governed by a castellan, and later by a proveditor, and it was the seat of the Novigrad District. The Novigrad Codex of Early Croatian Common Law was written in Novigrad in 1452. The Novigrad Fort played an important role in the Ottoman-Venetian Wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, earning the reputation of the only impregnable fortress in the hinterlands of Zadar. The Ottoman Turks still managed to conquer Novigrad at the beginning of the War of Candia in 1646 and to hold on to it briefly for nine months.
After the fall of the Republic of Venice in 1798, Novigrad became the seat of the Justice of the Peace Court. It was shut down in 1806 and replaced with a local governing body until a municipality was established there in late 1811. Several economic and cultural associations were founded in Novigrad from the 1870s to the beginning of World War I. In this period, Novigrad developed distinctively urban features, acting as the administrative, economic and cultural centre of its wider surroundings.
