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not rule. When Herman of Cilli gave his son Frederick six castles, he did so “that he himself
could rule and that he would have his own court.” The importance of castles in forming the
Länder and establishing princely authority over them is signalled by the fact that a number of
castles that were the seats of princely houses gave their names to actual Länder: for example,
the castles of Tyrol near Merano and Steyr on the Enns, which gave their names to Tyrol and
Styria (Steiermark, Štajerska) respectively. The castles protected the nascent Land outwardly,
while internally supporting the exercise of princely authority. They therefore played a major
role in the formation of this authority. Achieving the sole right to built castles within one’s
own area of lordship – the regalian right to castle-building – was one of the main objectives
for an aspiring prince, and also one of the main signs of their authority. Once this exclusive
right existed, the nobility within individual Länder could build castles only with the express
permission of the prince of the Land. One of the earliest codifications of territorial law in the
wider region, from the Land of Austria in the thirteenth century, clearly states “that no one
may build a house or castle without the will and permission of the prince; people may
construct what they want on their own inherited land up to a height of two storeys, which may
not have a perimeter wall or merlons [raised parts of a projecting parapet with battlements],
and the moat around it may be no wider than nine and no deeper than seven feet.” Noble
residences of this kind were no more than lightly fortified village manors, in which many
knights from the lowest ranks of nobles lived. The building of a new castle (which began to
symbolise the social status of its resident or owner), and even the rebuilding or extension of a
castle, was associated with immense costs that only the richest and most important lay lords
and bishops could afford. It is no coincidence, then, that it is the Older or Upper Castle of the
counts and princes of Cilli that is Slovene most representative castle complex, a synthesis, and
also the summit, of medieval castle architecture in Slovene territory.
Before the rise of the castle in the Central Middle Ages, the archetypal noble residence
was a manor (curtis, dvor) in a village, and manors were one of the oldest and most central
components of the developing seigneuries. The use of the term curtis for Karnburg in the
ninth century indicates that manors already served as noble residences in the Old Slovene era.
They were also (at least partly) the residences of kosezi, who formed a privileged Old Slovene
social group. A detailed study and reconstruction of a group of five kosezi residences in a
place on the eastern edge of Ljubljana with the illustrative name of Zadvor has shown that it
was a (subsequently divided) kosez manor covering around 100 hectares, the origins of which
can be dated to before 1000, when the Slovene name of dvor for curtis is already documented.
In 970, Emperor Otto I granted Archbishop Frederick of Salzburg a “curtis known in the
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Slavic language as Dolenji Dvor, and in German Niedrnhof” (
curtem ad
Vduleniduor...Nidrinhof), and the appertaining 50 royal
mansi in the south of present-day
Austrian Styria.
The castles (or rather fortified and protected strongholds), which the Slavs generally
referred to as a
gradišče, did not have a residential function in the Frankish period – unlike
the relatively small noble castles – but, as a large complex with buildings of earth and wood,
they served to shelter the wider population in the event of danger. A document of King Arnulf
(in 888) is very revealing in this regard, clearly defining, both functionally and legally, the
status of Carolingian strongholds in the Bavarian Eastern March, which included most of
present-day Slovene territory. The king granted immunity to his ministerial Heimo for allodial
possessions on the Danube, making his hereditary possessions exempt from the public-law
jurisdiction of the local margrave, Aribo. To ensure the security of these border marches
facing the Moravians, Heimo’s dependents were required to work together with the margrave
to build a stronghold (
urbs, gradišče) in a place he selected and to assume responsibility for
its protection and defence; in case of danger they could retreat into it with their belongings.
This urbs was not a noble castle or the centre of a seigneury, as was typical of the Central
Middle Ages, but a fortified refuge (Fliehburg, bežigrad) for the entire population of the
border area, where memories of the bloody war between Svatopulk and Arnulf from 882 to
884 were still fresh, and where there was a constant threat of renewed conflict. The immunity
granted did not affect the obligation to build, guard and defend this refuge, which was a form
of enclave of margravial rights and jurisdiction within the immune possessions of Heimo,
whose life was very closely tied to Carantanian history. He belonged to Arnulf’s inner circle
and was a member of one of the leading noble families in Bavaria and the Eastern March; his
household were of German, Slav and Roman origin. Heimo's father, Witigowo, was a count in
Carantania in around 860, while his sister, Tunza, who was married to a Carantanian Slav
noble, Georgius, received an estate as dowry from her brother, which lay south of Wörthersee
and had probably belonged at one time to the prince of Carantania.
The end of the Carolingian period was also a decisive period in the beginnings of
noble castles, although one of the oldest castles in present-day Slovenia is that at Bled, which
was mentioned in 1011 as the centre of a seigneur held in the area by the bishops of Brixen. A
“castle, known locally as Bosisen,” was mentioned even earlier, in 973, on the border of the
Škofja Loka seigneury of the Freising bishops, but it cannot be more clearly placed or
identified. It may have had the same defensive function as the castle of Solkan (near Gorizia)
m
entioned in 1001, which closed off the Soča valley at the point it spreads out into flatlands,