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in some places. Records from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries frequently name villages
that no longer exist, having been abandoned for a number of reasons. The form of a village
and layout of land parcels can be used to deduce when a village developed, or when an older
village and related land was converted to the new mansus system. This type of study of
villages is generally based on maps from the Franciscan cadastral survey (named after
Emperor Francis I) carried out from 1817 to 1827, which fixes in time a conservative agrarian
environment whose main features had remained unchanged over the centuries, before the
arrival of the major changes that would later affect rural areas. If parcels are irregular shapes
with a cluster distribution, they are usually related to older ‘clustered villages’, where houses
are generally located without any particularly order. These villages preserve traces of
prefeudal times in their field layout. If the parcels are formed into long, narrow geometrical
strips, with houses generally in a row along the road (known as a ‘linear village’), it usually
indicates a later form of colonisation, although some clustered villages also formed later.
Linear villages with fields distributed in rectangular strips indicate planned colonisation
overseen by a seigneur, at a time when the plough was allready used intensively.
In many but not all parts of Slovene territory, the elder of a village community was
known as a župan at the end of the Middle Ages, and well into the modern era, although the
term could also be used for the head of a group of villages, and sometimes even for the head
of a group of disparate peasants. The late medieval župan is linked by title to the Old Slavic
župan, first documented in 777 in the founding charter of a monastery in Kremsmünster, on
Old Bavarian land west of the Enns. Duke Tassilo III of Bavaria granted the monastery a
group of Slavs (decania Sclauorum), headed by two actores, Taliup and Sparuna, while the
župan (jopan) Physso reported the boundary of the deaconry under oath. It is quite possible
that Physso’s Slavic group had fled onto Bavarian territory from the Avars around 750 and
been brought under the duke’s territorial lordship. The word župan is known to most Slavic
languages, and so must have been familiar to most Slavic groups before the first major
population movements. This does not exclude the borrowing of the word (and/or its function)
from neighbours with whom Slavs came into contact, but the etymology has yet to be clearly
and satisfactorily resolved. The sparse, and above all late, written sources, primarily urbarial
records from a time in which župani had already become an institution of feudal society,
means that an understanding of the role of the župan in Old Slovene society can only be
hypothetical, although the later sources do permit a certain amount of retrospective deduction.
The introduction of seigneuries to the Slovene settlement area in the tenth and
eleventh centuries led to a major change in the Old Slovene socioeconomic structure. Land
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organised as a
župa was subordinate to the seigneury and placed under a
župan; if someone
wanted to continue tilling the land they would sooner or later have to accept some from the
lord under the new mansi system, with all the consequences in terms of obligations and
personal dependence. Put simply, Old Slavic župani gradually became the lower officials of
the seigneuries, similar to the village elders known in German areas, though they retained a
few special characteristics. At least in some places in Slovene territory, particularly in the
Styrian-Savinja region, the prototype of the seigneury župan was an untaxed župan who held
two mansi i.e. a župan who had twice as much land to cultivate as other peasants, but who
was not subject to the seigneur’s taxes. This can be explained as a reward from the seigneur
for fulfilling the župan role in the reorganisation from co-operative village into the mansus
system, and for supervising the new economy. The župan gradually lost these privileges and
towards the end of the Middle Ages one finds taxed župani with one mansus, their only
distinction from other peasants being in the amount of taxes due.
Some examples indicate that the župan could have several roles: as an agent of the
seigneury, an agent of village self-governance, as well as an agent of the local territorial court
(i.e. the court of lower justice, for the unprivileged classes) in which they would sit. The
involvement of župan as an agent of village self-governance in a local territorial court was the
highest level that this form of self-governance could reach during the Middle Ages. A
particular and remarkable exception were the župani in the County of Pazin, in the Habsburg
interior of Istria. The nobles of the county acquired their own noble court of higher justice in
the charter of privileges issued by Count Albert III of Gorizia in 1365. Yet, since there were
too few Istrian nobles to sit in their own court, they preferred to give testimony before a local
court presided over by a župan than to be subordinate to the territorial court of Ljubljana. The
fact they had to appear before a župan in civil cases against Istrian nobles was a particular
annoyance to Carniolan nobles, who therefore appealed to the emperor at the start of the
sixteenth century to make the Istrian nobles subordinate to the Ljubljana territorial court.
Burghers and Towns
The towns, and the related burgher culture, that developed in Slovene territory in the
thirteenth century in particular were a phenomenon that completely changed the traditional
face of feudal society in the Central Middle Ages. The reawakening of a monetary economy,
and the related development of trade and crafts, which became separate from agrarian
production, led to the development of concentrated settlements whose inhabitants were