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passes in the west to the Dravinja-Savinja watershed in the east.
In 1335, the Habsburgs assumed direct lordship over Carniola, and in 1338 Albrecht II
granted “our lords, knights and squires in our Land of Carniola” a charter of privileges
affirming older rights and awarding new ones. The 1338 charter is the basic document for the
old Carniolan constitution. As princes of Carniola, the Habsburgs upheld the charter in the
form of a Handfeste (a collection of the Land’s privileges) until the middle of the eighteenth
century. Yet the Habsburg Land of that time, with its prince, territorial law, and territorial
court, did not cover Carniola in its entirety. Most of lower Carniola was excluded, a belt of
territory stretching north to the Sava (east of Ljubljana) along the upper Krka river, and into
White Carniola to the Kolpa. It was here in the first half of the fourteenth century that a
special Land developed from the possessions and judicial districts of the Albertiner Gorizia
counts, the “County in the March and White Carniola” (Grafschaft an der March und in der
Möttling), which had its own prince (the count of Gorizia), and all the instruments typical of a
Land such as its own territorial law, a territorial court in Metlika, and a captain as
representative of the prince of the Land. In 1365, the count of Gorizia, Albert III, granted a
special privilege to the nobility in the county as its prince, which affirmed existing rights and
granted new ones, similarly to the Carniolan charter of 1338. The nobility in Albert’s other
small territory, the County of Pazin in Istria, received the same privileges at the same time.
When the Habsburgs acquired the County in the March and White Carniola 1374,
succeeding Count Albert III of Gorizia, their princely jurisdiction expanded to the Kolpa, but
they did not incorporate the county into the Carniolan lordship, instead upholding the charter
of privileges of 1365. They expressly stated that the territorial court in Metlika (in White
Carniola), and not the Ljubljana court, had jurisdiction for the nobles in the county. The legal
independence of the Land of the County in the March and White Carniola was therefore
recognised and would remain throughout the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century, the area
was still not part of Carniola, but was considered as “adjoined” to it. The nobles did appear at
diets of the Carniolan Estates, but even then, their special status was emphasised, and the
same applied to the County of Pazin. Archduke Charles again affirmed a charter of privileges
for each of the three Länder – Carniola, Istria and the County in the March – separately in
1567. Only in 1593 did Emperor Rudolf II affirm the privileges of Carniola, the County in the
March, and Istria together in a single Handfeste.
In 1382, exactly one hundred years after the Habsburgs had taken their first step into
the Danube and eastern Alpine region, they acquired Trieste, making it the only northern
Adriatic city not under Venetian sway. The final stage of the Habsburg expansion to the sea
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related to the acquisition of seigneuries on the Karst and their incorporation into Carniola. Yet
the rivalry between the houses of Habsburg and Luxemburg for primacy within the empire set
off a crisis that threatened to shake the Habsburg powerhouse from the inside. German kings
and emperors of the Luxemburg dynasty began to acknowledge immediate status (making
them directly subject to the emperor rather than to the prince of the Land) for some of the
Habsburg’s most important vassals, whose large estates lay in Carniola and Slovene territory
in general. This Luxemburg policy led to a weakening – and in the worst case even the end of
– the Habsburgs’ princely authority over individual noble families and their territories. The
possibility of new Länder developing was increased. First, in 1395, King Wenceslaus (the
Lazy) granted the Ortenburgs the right to exercise blood justice over all their seigneuries; then
in 1417, king Sigismund also recognised the immediate status of the Ortenburg seigneuries.
Two years before, Sigismund also proclaimed the county of Gorizia and other fiefs held by
the counts of Gorizia as imperial fiefs. One that was specifically mentioned was the
Carinthian palatinate, which the Gorizian counts had actually received in fief from the
Habsburgs as dukes of Carinthia, and not from the empire. In 1434, Emperor Sigismund
bestowed the privilege of exercising blood justice to the Wallsees, as he had to the Ortenburgs
in 1395. The Wallsees had become lords of Duino through inheritance at the end of the
fourteenth century and held extensive seigneuries in Kvarner and on the Karst.
The counts of Cilli were the most illustrative case of this Luxemburg policy. In
November 1436, Emperor Sigismund raised their status to that of imperial princes, and made
their counties and seigneuries into the principality of Cilli. This threatened the collapse of
Carniola as the Cillis, who succeeded the Ortenburgs in 1420, now ruled most of lower
Carniola between the Kolpa and the Ljubljana marshlands and, through four smaller unitary
territories, a significant part of upper Carniola. A new Cilli Land was starting to develop in the
territory of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and the results of the Habsburgs’ farsighted and
successful policy of building princely authority over 150 years were seriously threatened; all
the more because, with the empire’s support, the Wallsees were also starting to manoeuvre
themselves out of subjection to the Habsburgs and Carniola. In the middle of the fifteenth
century, the Wallsees were already claiming the title “lords of Duino and the Karst” and
granting it to a captain, while they even called Duino a “county”. It may well be due to this
major crisis in Habsburg power that Carniola (or more accurately its nobility) only received
its Golden Bull – affirmation of its Land privileges from Frederick III, prince of the Inner
Austrian Länder – in 1460, 16 years after Carinthia and Styria. While in 1443 or 1444 the
circle of the Habsburgs’ Carniolan nobility was rather small, the position in 1460 was