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Brixen – the fifth big ecclesiastical landowner on Slovene territory. The centre
of its lands,
which had come from Hemma, lay in Kozjansko. The main fiefs (feuda principalia) of the
Diocese of Gurk were Lemberg pri Dobrni, Planina, Rogatec, Podsreda and Kunšperk at
Sotla. However, Hemma’s relatives, such as the powerful Asquinus, advocate of the Gurk
monastery, or his nephew Starchand II – as margrave of Savinja he held the title previously
held by Hemma’s husband, Wilhelm II – still had sufficient land, power and reputation to be
described by a chronicler at the end of the eleventh century as “the most powerful lords in all
Carinthia, who no mortal could contradict.” Only the victory of the papal party, with the
archbishop of Salzburg first among them, in the Investiture Crisis in the eastern Alps led to
them “losing all their previous power.” The Crisis in the first decade of the twelfth century
also led to consolidation by the Spanheims. Numerous ruling noble families of the Central
and Late Middle Ages in the wider eastern Alpine area either descended from the “line of
Hemma” or benefited from their rich heritage. These include the noble Pris family of Puchs
and their descendants the counts of Weichselburg (Višnja Gora), the counts of Haimburg, the
counts of Plain and counts of Pfannberg, and perhaps also the Freiherren of Sanegg (Žovnek),
the later counts of Cilli.
This was how the basic land-owning structure became established in modern-day
Slovene territory by the end of the eleventh century, though of course it was subject to
continual change. It was also at this time that the historical processes encompassed by terms
such as colonisation, Germanisation, and assimilation, as well as feudalisation at the very
lowest levels of society began to develop in Slovene territory. Their common feature was that
they took place within seigneuries. The main tendency of these processes, which did not
develop separately, but were continually interweaving, was for individual lords to increase the
return on their extensive newly acquired estates, which were cultivated by the local Slavic
population. The first step in this direction was the introduction in Bavarian and other German
lands of the already tested mansus system (German: hube, hufe), which produced a larger
return in combination with triennial fallow rotation. The establishment of farms in Slovene
territory was related to the dismantling of the previous Slavic economic and social structures,
which, according to the most acceptable hypotheses, took the following form: a Slavic higher
nobility and lower nobility (kosezi) possessed manors and were recognised as nobles with
private property even according to western, Frankish-Bavarian concepts, while the remainder
of the population was organised into župe under župani. This was a much less formal concept
of shared land that had developed differently from the western European model despite a very
extensive economy; this land was not considered as under ownership, and hence was deemed
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royal property. In
contrast to Slavic manors, to which recipients of seigneurial territories had
no rights, the wide sweeping process of establishing seigneuries incorporated the lands of the
župe for which there was no recognised private ownership. The population of the
župe had to
submit to a new economic system, where the land was reorganised and returned to its
previous users in the form of mansi. Since the local population was often too small to effect
the desired colonisation, the seigneur brought settlers in from elsewhere, though generally
from their own estates. The difference between the local and the introduced settlers largely
tallied with the difference between Slovene and German-speaking settlers. However, this did
not play any great role in the settlement, as initially the economically more advantageous
areas with better climate, such as plains, valleys and hilly areas, were settled more intensely
by both groups of settlers. Only later, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, did
colonisation spread into the mountainous, harder to access, economically less attractive and
more forested areas.
The colonisation-related migration of a German-speaking agrarian population also led
to the Germanisation of a large part of the territory that had been settled in the tenth century
predominantly by predecessors of modern-day Slovenes. Due to the fully understandable
focus of colonisation on more favourable areas of settlement and living, Germanisation,
which was the consequence of this economically based process of shaping the cultural
landscape, did not expand from the ethnic border towards the interior, but rather German
settlers ‘leapfrogged’ over the Slavic settlement areas in the mountainous areas of upper
Carinthia and upper Styria into the basins and valleys of lower Carinthia and middle Styria.
Only on that basis did two homogenous ethnic blocs (Slovene to the south, German to the
north) develop in the Late Middle Ages, after the conclusion of higher altitude colonisation
which largely spread from the nearest valleys, the previously ethnically mixed territory. A
linguistic border developed between the two groups that remained essentially stable from the
end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. It ran along the Gailtal Alps to the Dobratch
Massif, turning past Villach to the Ossiacher Tauern, then north from Maria Saal to
Magdalensberg, then forward to the Saualpe and Koralpe, and then tracing the north side of
the foot of Slovenske Gorice to Radgona. Another concept that can be added to colonisation
and migration is assimilation. This means that the ethnic element that quantitatively
predominated in the older cores of settlement started to predominate across the entire region,
which the continued existence of individual linguistic islands did nothing to change. However,
the linguistic islands created by the later high-altitude colonisation (rovtarska kolonizacija)
remained far longer than those in open countryside; not because they were settled later but