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CURA ANIMARUM
The organisation of ecclesiastical administration is just one aspect covered by the
concept of the Church in the Middle Ages. Bishops were not only shepherds of their flocks,
but also politicians, high-ranking ‘officials’ of state, influential counsellors, princes, generals,
seigneurs, colonisers, town lords, patrons of the arts and intellectuals. In short, they were the
embodiment of a defining feature of medieval society: the complete interweaving of the
spiritual and the temporal. Take proprietary churches as an example. They were founded and
built on their own land by lay lords, who then had a decisive influence over them. Yet this
private and lay initiative formed part of the foundation from which the parish network had
developed by the end of the Central Middle Ages i.e. the basic form of ecclesiastical
organisation, in which the Church and believer met directly on a daily basis. The institute of
the lay noble advocate (advocatus, Vogt), who represented the ecclesiastical authority in
secular matters, primarily before courts, was an even more important meeting point of the
clerical and lay spheres. Further testament to this interweaving can be seen in the Crusades of
the Central Middle Ages, a pan-European chivalric movement which grew from what was
originally the purely religious idea and aim of liberating the Holy Sepulchre from 'infidels'.
Numerous knights and their squires from the territory of present-day Slovenia set off on the
long, exhausting and above all dangerous road for Jerusalem and the Holy Land,
accompanying their higher noble lords and monarch. The noted knights and nobles who never
returned home include Bernhard of Spanheim, lord of Maribor. In 1147, he was killed in a
Seljuk ambush near Laodicea in southwest Asia Minor, after he had travelled across the entire
Balkan peninsula, passing through Hungary, Belgrade, Niš, Sofia, Adrianople and
Constantinople. In fact, people in the Middle Ages travelled more and further than we often
imagine.
The Church
The migration of the Slavs into the eastern Alps at the beginning of the Early Middle
Ages led to the almost complete collapse of the ancient ecclesiastical organisation in what
subsequently became Slovene territory. The Church only persisted as an institution in the
Romanic coastal towns in Byzantine Istria, to which, in Late Antiquity, the refugees from the
interior probably introduced some of their Christian traditions from the continental hinterland
– if that can be deduced from a mention of Andrew, bishop of Celeia, among the Istrian
bishops in 680, as well as use of the name Emona/Emonia for Novigrad, where the cult of the
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‘Emonian’ martyr Pelagius was attested in the Late Middle Ages, while Maximilian of Celeia
was venerated in Piran. The medieval dioceses in the region – of main interest to us are
Trieste, Koper, Novigrad, and Pićan in the Istrian interior – at least maintained the tradition of
the urban dioceses of Antiquity and the old boundaries between them, even if there was not
always a direct continuity with those predecessors, as there was in Trieste. Elsewhere, the re-
Christianisation of modern-day Slovene territory required the ecclesiastical administration to
be rebuilt from scratch.
The defining action of the entire medieval history of the ecclesiastical structure in
Slovene territory came in 811, following the dispute between Patriarch Ursus of Aquileia and
Archbishop Arno of Salzburg regarding ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Carantania. Ursus
referred to synodal records that proved that the Carantanian region had been under Aquileian
control even before the Lombard settlement of Italy in 568, while Arno referred to charters of
privilege and affirmations from three Roman popes in the mid-eighth century that annexed
Carantania to Salzburg. Charlemagne intervened with a Solomonic judgment, dividing
Carantania between the two ecclesiastical provinces along the Drava river, “which flows
through the middle of that province.” This made the Drava the border between Aquileia and
Salzburg along its entire length, since Charlemagne’s son Pippin had already defined the
Drava as the border in Pannonia in 796 during his military campaign into Avaria, on which he
was accompanied by Arno (then bishop of Salzburg) and Ursus’ predecessor, Paulinus.
Charlemagne himself confirmed this decision in 803. The Drava remained a border for
ecclesiastical purposes for almost 1,000 years, although it soon lost that role in Pannonia
where it had first been imposed. The immigration of the Magyars and their subsequent
Christianisation led to Pannonia being reorganised ecclesiastically in the archdioceses of
Ezstergon (Ostrogon, Gran) and Kalocsa. The former was founded in 1001, the second in
1006. The northern part of modern-day Slovene Prekmurje came under Ezstergon as part of
the diocese of Györ, while the southern part came under the Kalocsa archdiocese as part of the
diocese of Zagreb (founded c. 1094; territory both north and south of the Drava fell under its
jurisdiction). The far north of the Zagreb diocese is often referred to as the districtus
Transmuranus i.e. Prekmurje, or over the Mura river, in canonical visitation records.
The 811 judgment defined a border at the highest administrative level between two
metropolitan sees. The structure of ecclesiastical organisation within these two provinces
developed from the very lowest level i.e. parishes. The intermediate dioceses and
archdeaconries were organised later. The organisation of the first parishes is unclear, but
probably began in the second half of the ninth century in Carantania north of the Drava, and