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king who ruled over a “small area”. Eight princes of the Carantanians from the second half of
the eighth century and first third of the ninth century are known to us by name. At that time,
Carantania was already subject to the Franks or Bavarians as a tributary or client principality,
one of many that lined the eastern Frankish border. Internally, the principality retained its
tribal constitution, one of the clearest examples of which was the oldest part of the installation
ceremony of the prince of Carantania. It was the Carantanians (or the class responsible for
political decisions, populi) themselves, albeit with the permission of their Frankish king, who
made Gorazd and then Hotimir their prince. The first three Carantanian princes known by
name were related, and princely authority was therefore, with respect to the (at least formal)
elections, hereditary within a ruling dynasty. The Carantanian prince was installed in all his
dignity with a ceremony that involved him being placed on the Prince’s Stone, which once
stood in the military camp at Karnburg. The Prince’s Stone – actually the base of an ionic
column turned upside down – is today displayed in the Klagenfurt, and is the oldest preserved
symbol of power in the entire eastern Alpine region. It was therefore at a very early stage (the
mid-eighth century) that the Carantanians established a constitutional model, combining their
tribal customs with the authority of the Frankish king, which would become widespread in the
ninth century among Slavic tribes along the eastern and southern Frankish border.
In addition to the prince and his dynasty, there was another high-ranking social class,
the nobility. Informations dating from a somewhat later period, in sources from Salzburg,
Freising and Brixen, are particularly informative and specific about the Carantanian and wider
Alpine Slavic area. These sources indicate the existence of Slavic nobility before the end of
the eighth century, and provide significant evidence of its survival into the Frankish period.
For example, in 830, a certain Baaz from Slavic Carantania (de genere Carontania
Sclavaniorum) bequeathed properties he had held in Bavaria to the church of Freising. There
are many reasons to support the idea that Baaz was the descendant of one of the ‘noble’
hostages who had accompanied the son and nephew of the Carantania prince to Bavaria in
743. This and other similar examples – e.g. the marriage around 860 of a Carantania Slav with
the Greek name Georgius, which was probably acquired at baptism, into the noble line of
Witigowo, a count in Carantania – indicate that groups existed within the Slavic community
that were considered by neighbouring nobility to be of sufficient standing for acceptance into
their ranks and even their families. To apply a modern term, one could say that even in the
Early Middle Ages, the nobility, and particularly the high nobility, were international, just as
in later times.
A specific, very sensitive, and as yet unresolved, issue within the social history of the
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Alpine Slavs is presented by the group known as
kosezi. The group was a specifically Alpine
Slav feature, as the places in which they lived, or the settlements with names relating to them,
are found between the upper Enns river to the north and the Kolpa river to the south, i.e.
within the area of Alpine Slavic colonisation. They appear relatively late in written sources,
with the oldest mention (Koséntzes) dating from the mid-tenth century. According to Croat
tradition, recorded in De Administrando Imperio, the work of the Byzantine Emperor
Constantinus Porphyrogenetus, Koséntzes was the name of the one of the brothers who led
the Croats to the hinterland of the Dalmatian cities. The Germans called this social class
Edlinger (noble people)
, while Aquileian writers, connecting themselves to the Lombard
tradition in Friuli, referred to them with the term arimanni, which the Lombards used to
describe a special military class. Both terms indicate that it was some form of privileged
social group. However, the evidence available that can be followed in sources from the
Central Middle Ages onwards suggests that the group’s social status continually declined. In
documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the kosezi are still equal to the
ministerial class, but by the Late Middle Ages they were merely peasants with some special
privileges. The peasant charged with installing the duke of Carinthia in the Late Middle Ages,
was a kosez. At the same time, there is no doubt that the kosezi class goes back to the Early
Middle Ages. The origin of the kosezi name – on which there are many theories – is not
Slavic, despite their being an Alpine Slav phenomenon. It is not possible to determine whether
it was just the name that was imported into the eastern Alpine area, or also the group that bore
it. The name precludes a Germanic etymology, nor can kosez be a new formation derived from
Edlinger. The kosezi therefore already existed when the Bavarians took them to be nobles,
during their first contacts with the Alpine Slavs. Furthermore, the ceremony in which a kosez
peasant on the Prince’s Throne symbolically handed over power in the Duchy of Carinthia to
a new duke dressed in peasant clothing – therefore symbolically the same as him – could only
have its origin in pre-feudal times. The direct contact between the kosezi and the Carantanian
princ or/and later Carinthian duke, and their connection with military services, makes the
theory that they were a form of military retinue for the Carantanian prince very attractive, and
quite acceptable. Of course, many other possible explanations exist.
CARNIOLA
The polyethnic, but predominantly Slavic, principality of the Carantanians was not the
only tribal union to form in the Early Middle Ages within the Slavic settled area in the eastern