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empire, and their power becomes more evident in the sources in
the second half of the tenth
century. The Ebersbergs’ connections with Carniola probably reached back to the Carolingian
period. The majority opinion among historians is that the protection of the “Carantanian
border”, which Emperor Arnulf entrusted to Ratold of Ebersberg, meant the upper Sava river
basin. This assumption is confirmed by the powerful subsequent position of the Ebersbergs in
the region, and their familial ties provide further supporting evidence. In 1011, when Henry II
gave the Brixen church a second royal grant relating to Bled, the Carniolan margrave was
Ratold’s nephew Ulrich (d. 1029). When Freising received the two major grants constituting
the Loka seigneury in 973, the Carniolan margrave was Ulrich’s brother-in-law, Pabo, while
Ulrich’s other sister was married to Markquard of Eppenstein. Ulrich was, therefore, the uncle
of Adalbero, the duke of Carinthia and margrave of the Carantanian March. It was as a direct
result of Adalbero’s murder (in 1036) of Hemma’s husband, the margrave of Savinja,
Wilheim II, that the March of Savinja came under the sway and the jurisdiction of the
Carniolan margrave – probably already under Ulrich’s son and successor, Eberhard. The
imperial policy that had given royal grants of land to the margravial dynasty, rather than to the
office of margrave, to the extent that the allodial lands of the line of Hemma almost
overlapped with the border of the march, was thus proved to have been short-sighted. The
immense family heritage, the lion’s share of which belonged to the monastery and then to the
diocese of Gurk, was fragmented, and there were no longer sufficient royal lands available in
the March of Savinja for a grant to a new margrave, meaning that the material basis for the
authority of a margrave in this march had been undermined. By 1058, under Eberhard’s
successor, Ulrich I of Weimar-Orlamünde – the grandson of Eberhard’s sister, Williburg, who
was married to Weriand (Wecelin), count of Friuli and Istria – places in old Savinja territory
were described as lying “in the March of Carniola, and in the county of Margrave Ulrich.”
From that time, the size of Carniola, which now stretched from the Karst passes of
Hrušica and Javorniki in the west to the Savinja-Dravinja watershed in the east, had doubled.
The incorporation of the March of Savinja explains the later-attested double name for
Carniola: Carniola and the Slovene or Wendish March (Carniola et Marchia Sclavonica que
vulgo Windismarch dicitur). The term Slovene March could refer to
the old March of Savinja
within the expanded Carniola, but was more frequently used to refer just to the territories of
the former March of Savinja south of the Sava, that is modern-day lower Carniola (Dolenjska)
between the Krka and Sava east of Ljubljana. Since Ulrich Weimar-Orlamünde was also
margrave of Istria from 1061 at the latest, the three marches to the southeast of the empire
were combined in a powerful dynastic polity that controlled the routes from Italy into the
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central Danube area and the Balkans, and, it seems, that was also capable
of taking the
offensive against Croatia. It was probably during the war between the German and Hungarian
kings, Henry IV and Bela I, in 1063, that eastern Kvarner (Quanero), and later Merania, were
added to the Roman-German empire. This moved the empire’s border in Istria eastward, from
the Raša river to the Rječina river east of Rijeka, where it was to remain for centuries.
Ulrich’s uniting of the two margravial offices prefigured links that would be made and remade
in the region on numerous occasions in the coming centuries. The first occasion was in 1077,
when Henry IV granted the margravates Friuli, Istria, and Carniola into the “ownership and
jurisdiction” of the church of Aquileia and its patriarch Sigeard, his former chancellor. This
triple union was somewhat reminiscent of the Carolingian March of Friuli from the start of
the ninth century, which extended as far as Pannonia to the east. Yet this was just a brief
interlude. Aquileia soon lost Istria and Carniola again; in 1093, it was once more entrusted
with the latter, but only regained Istria in 1208/10. By the start of the twelfth century, the
Aquileian church had become the major landowner in Istria. In 1102, the son of the Istria-
Carniolan margrave Ulrich (d. 1070), Ulrich II Weimar-Orlamünde, who had not succeeded
his father as margrave, retreated from Istria to his family’s hereditary lands in Thüringen-
Saxony, and left the Aquileian church almost all the family estates in Istria; all north and
northeastern Istria, with more than ten castles.
The patriarchate had few estates in Carniola, and they were scattered from the upper
Savinja valley in the east to the wider Cerknica region in inner Carniola (equating to
Slovenia’s present-day region of Notranjska) to the west. And worse, the main Aquileian
possession in Carniola, which lay near Lož and Cerknica, was extremely peripheral, and much
better connected to Aquileian estates on the Karst and in Friuli than to the Carniolan
hinterland. In stark contrast to the Styrian margraves, the Traungauer-Otakars, who, having
acquired an extensive territorial seigneury, and brought numerous free noble families into
subordination, managed to achieve territorial supremacy over a Land by the second half of the
twelfth century, the Aquileian patriarchate allowed even the power it had held as margrave of
Carniola to slip from its hands. In reality, it was representatives or deputies who ruled in
Carniola, and the patriarch had to cede margravial jurisdiction and provide the Kranj fief to
these deputies as a benefit of office.
We are very poorly informed about this form of governorship in Carniola. The history
of the institution, initially linked, it seems, to the old March of Savinja territory within the
expanded Carniola, probably stretches back to the end of the eleventh century or the start of
the twelfth. On one side, it was based on the traditional independence of the March of Savinja