A few miles farther south is Dulcigno,[236] which was also an autonomous oligarchical Republic, albeit less important than Antivari. Here the Roman element was always mixed with the Albanian. After the Turkish conquest it became a nest of pirates. Close by was the Golfo dello Drino, into which the two rivers Bojana and Drim (Drino) flowed. Eighteen miles up the course of the former was the great Benedictine monastery of San Serge and St. Bacchus, round which stood warehouses, customs offices, salt stores, shops, and booths, forming a centre called San Sergio by the Italians, Sveti Srgj by the Serbs; it retained its importance until the sixteenth century.[237] At the time of Queen Helena, the widow of Stephen Uroš I., the settlement was under a “Bajulus Regine at Portum Sancti Sergii.”[238] Here the ships unloaded their cargoes, which were forwarded to all parts of the interior by caravan; goods designed for Scutari, however, were sometimes transhipped into smaller boats and thus carried up to the lake and town. The caravan route went past Scutari to the castle of Danj (now Daino) on the Drim, where the Servian kings sometimes resided, and where the route joined that from Alessio (Lissos, Alexium, Slav- and Alb-Lješ[239]) at the mouth of the Drim. Thence the caravans proceeded to Prizren, which they reached in thirty-three hours by a road reputed to be one of the most difficult in the Albanian mountains.[240] The chief halting-places were Pilot and Spas, where there was a custom house. Prizren, which is on the Bistrica, some distance east of the junction of that river with the White Drim, is still a large town, on the site of the Roman Therenda.[241] Nemanja conquered it from the Eastern Empire; in 1204 it was in Bulgarian hands; in the course of the century it came once more into Servian possession, and was one of the chief cities of the kingdom. King Milutin and the Tsars Dušan and Uroš frequently made it their residence, and many ruined castles are found in the vicinity. Here was the chief commercial factory of the Ragusans for Albania, and they erected two Latin churches. From Prizren the routes crossed a fertile and well-populated plain, over the watershed between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, and into the plain of Kossovo. At Lipljan (Ulpiana and Justiniana Secunda in Roman times) it crossed the route from Bosnia to Salonica, reached Novobrdo, and finally Sofia, one of the Bulgarian capitals. The first mention of a Ragusan merchant in this city is in 1376; the Ragusan colony became very important at the end of the century in Turkish times, when Sofia was the residence of the Beglerbeg of Rumelia.[242]