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example, in 948, King Lothar of Italy granted comital jurisdiction
to the bishops of Trieste,
handing over all royal possessions, and fisc lands, and judicial authority over what would later
become the medieval urban territory of Trieste. The diocese of Poreč enjoyed immunity from
the middle of the tenth century. The related exemption from the Istrian margrave’s jurisdiction
contributed to the foundation of the County of Pazin: Pazin castle and its seigneury was a fief
of the Poreč diocese that came into the possession of the counts of Gorizia, who became its
advocates from the end of the twelfth century. Pula, first among Istria’s towns in Antiquity
and the Early Middle Ages, held a similar status; there is even mention of a “county of Pula”
in the middle of the twelfth century. Patriarch Wolfger, and, to an even greater extent, his
successor Berthold (1218–1251), brother of the deposed Istrian margrave Henry IV of
Andechs, attempted to gain princely authority over Istria for the patriarchate. Berthold’s
efforts were based more on the large Aquileian seigneury than on margravial power, which
could only subsequently be exercised, and were not without some success. Legal instructions,
judgments, confirmations and charters that he received from the crown between 1220 and
1238 were aimed at removing the obstacles that lay between the patriarch and princely status.
These documents were directed against all three main opponents: against the autonomous
communes, against the influence of Venice, with which Istrian towns had been concluding
loyalty and protection pacts since the first half of the tenth century, and against the counts of
Gorizia, who were using their advocacy as a pretext for becoming involved in matters of high
justice against the patriarch’s will. A powerful patriarchal principality at the meeting point of
the Alpine and Adriatic worlds, as well as on the border between Italy and Germany, was also
in the interest of the crown, particularly when opposition to the emperor in the Lombard
lowlands closed the Alpine passes to him. As his own documents indicate, Emperor
Frederick II knew how to manage Berthold’s problems to his own benefit. This support gave
the patriarchate serious possibilities of success, but also made it completely independent of
the crown.
When the notion of an empire ruling Italy and Germany was abandoned, following the
fall of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the middle of the thirteenth century, the main foundation
of the patriarchate’s existence was removed, and it entered a slow but terminal decline.
Berthold’s death in 1251 brought an end to centuries of Aquileian patriarchs being drawn
from the ranks of the German aristocracy; Gregorio of Montelongo, the nephew of Pope
Gregory IX, was the first Italian to occupy the patriarch’s throne after the long German
dominance. He was also the head of the Guelf party in northern Italy. He was opposed by the
counts of Gorizia, Ghibellines and loyal supporters of the imperial crown. Count Meinhard IV
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of Gorizia, duke of Carinthia from 1286, was even married to Elizabeth of Bavaria from the
ducal dynasty of Wittelsbach, the mother of Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufens, who was
beheaded in Naples in 1268. In 1267, Meinhard’s brother, Albert, even captured the poor
patriarch at Rosazzo in Friuli “at dawn, when still in his bed, and carried him barefoot to
Gorizia on the back of an old nag.” By then, the counts of Gorizia in Istria were openly acting
against the patriarch and, in alliance with Koper and Piran, destroyed several of his castles in
a violent feud. They also acquired many of the patriarch’s major Istrian seigneuries north of
th
e Mirna and beyond Mt. Učka along the upper Raša river. This significantly expanded the
territorial base of their emergent
Land in the peninsula’s interior. It was in the third quarter of
the thirteenth century that Gorizian ministerials began to appear on what were originally
Aquileian estates in the area. Two generations later, in 1342, most of these lordships were
counted among the property that the counts of Gorizia (three brothers) divided between
themselves.
The Venetians also exploited the decline of Aquileian power, which was further
reflected in the fact that from the last quarter of the thirteenth century the title of margrave of
Istria, marchio Istrie, was no longer held by the patriarch himself, but by his governor in
Istria. The Republic of St. Mark began to press on the Istrian coastal towns. These towns had
perceived the patriarchate’s margravial jurisdiction, which Berthold had attempted to impose
in the first half of the thirteenth century, backed by the imperial crown, as far more of a threat
than the protectorate the Venetians had long before forced on them. Between 1145 and 1152,
Venice made loyalty and protection pacts with individual towns from Pula in the south to
Koper in the north, making them its fideles. The crisis of the patriarchate, heightened by the
sede vacante between 1269 and 1273 (after Montelongo’s death), was the awaited opportunity
for the Venetians to usher in a new regime and fully subjugate the Istrian towns. Between
1267, when Poreč fell, and 1284, when Rovinj acquiesced, every western Istrian town, except
Pula, Muggia and Trieste, acknowledged Venetian overlordship; Pula succumbed in 1331 and
Muggia in 1421, leaving only Trieste to recognise the Habsburgs as its lords (in 1382). The
old allies (fideles) were made subjects (subjecti), and Venice acquired the right to appoint
town authorities. In less than half a century, the Aquileian patriarchate’s power in Istria had
vanished, and it was only a matter of time before the peninsula was completely divided into
two.