A slovene history society politics culture
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65 the Puster valley, in modern-day East Tyrol, which had been in Freising hands since the end of the eighth century, to settle in the far western hilly edge of one of the two valleys (Selška Dolina). The mountainous and remote nature of this area undoubtedly played a decisive role in ensuring that the German community retained its linguistic identity into the nineteenth century. The older and more numerous Bavarian settlement on the flatlands of the Škofja Loka seigneury had succumbed to the process of assimilation early, although at the end of the sixteenth century the German population was still strong enough for the parish priest to be preaching in Slovene and German. Even the polymath Johann Wiechard Valvasor reports in the second half of the seventeenth century that in his time in Bitnje, a place founded and deliberately settled by Bavarians, people spoke a unique mix of Slovene and German. He offers the following sentence as an example: “Nim du mr
take the net, I’ll take the rifle, and we’ll hunt birds,” where nim, du, ich, die, wermer and fangen are German words, the rest Slovene. The most tenacious group was the Gotschee (Kočevje) Germans, descendants of German- speaking settlers who had deforested and settled the Kočevje region in the fourteenth century, who retained their cultural and linguistic identity until their ill-fated resettlement during the Second World War. This was the largest German-speaking agrarian colony in the Late Middle Ages in Carniola; it was founded under the leadership of the counts of Ortenburg, the seigneurs of the territory. They introduced the first settlers in the 1330s, from their estates in upper Carinthia. The initially small number of German settlements soon multiplied when, in around 1350, Emperor Charles IV granted the count of Ortenburg 300 families of rebellious Frankish and Thuringian farmers.
FROM MARCHES TO LÄNDER The Middle Ages was a period without national consciousness and national identity in today’s understanding of those terms. Instead, in the early Middle Ages there was a very strong sense of identification with a specific tribe (gens) and later to a specific territory (terra), most accurately referred to by the German term Land (plural: Länder). Both kinds of identification were linked to the forms with which the law of a specific community was exercised. Under the earlier tribal law, the personal principle applied, with each individual carrying their own law with them. Later, as the Land and its law prevailed, the territorial principle developed, according to which a law applied to a specific territory, regardless of the
66 tribal identity of the individual, a principle that still applies today. For the people of the wider central European region during the Middle Ages, Länder provided the framework within which their lives took place. This applied particularly to legal, political and military life, and to religious life too from the time of the Reformation. Since the Länder developed from a base that was independent of ethnic or national identity, the consciousness of belonging to an individual Land, which was not generally an ethnically homogeneous unit, was much more important at that time than ethnic identity. A good illustration of this – though from a later period – is the polymath Johann Wiechard Valvasor: by birth his origins lay in Bergamo in northern Italy; in his writing he was above all a German; he spoke German and Slovene, and lived in a Land where most of the people were Slovene; and he identified himself as a Carniolan. Certain parts of his Latin correspondence with the prestigious group of scientists, the Royal Society of London, of which he was a member, are particularly illustrative in this regard. In 1685, he mentions the Idrija mine and Lake Cerknica “in my homeland, that is Carniola.” The following year, he wrote: “We have some animals, known in German as Bilch, and in our Carniolan language as polhi,” and the following year: “This lake was known to ancient writers as Lugea palus, more recently Lacus Lugeus, to today’s Latin writers it is Cirknizensis, to Germans Zirknitzer See, and to us Carniolans it is Cerkniško jezero.” Valvasor’s homeland – as well as the homeland of each and every upper or lower Carniolan peasant, both Slovene and German speaking – was Carniola. Valvasor created an impressive and lasting testament to Carniola in his historical and ethnographical work Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, the work that was to leave him bankrupt. The formation of the Länder in the Middle Ages is one of the most important results of historical development within the large area framed by the medieval Roman-German empire. The eventual result of this development can be seen in today’s German and Austrian constitutional federalism, while in Slovenia the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1918 and the establishment of a national state also signalled the end of the historical Länder, though a powerful identification with the Land has remained to this day among Slovenes in the form of regional identity. A Land was more of a political than a geographical concept, and as such is a category of constitutional law. The extent of the Land depended on the sphere across which its laws (the territorial law) applied i.e. the legal norms recognised by the nobility, the political stratum with decision-making power. The ruler of a Land, or prince, was a person who had succeeded in establishing judicial and military authority over the territorial nobility. The former was expressed by presiding over the territorial court of nobles (Landschranngericht), the latter Yüklə 2,45 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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