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primarily involved in mercantile and craft activities. These settlements and their inhabitants
also represented a special community, legally distinct from the agrarian world.
Only in coastal areas, in Istria, are there concentrated settlements – some of which,
such as Trieste, were also referred to as civitates – that have a continuity of settlement with
Antiquity. Despite this, as late as the eleventh century, the northern Istrian settlements, which
were also sometimes episcopal sees, were still primarily centres for the control of trade in
agrarian products and salt, and much less centres of burgher crafts. Nevertheless, their
favourable location on the coast and ties with Venice represented a major advantage in the
development of their mercantile function, evidence of which is found in a pact between
Venice and Koper from 932. The coastal towns were characterised by a symbiosis of agrarian
and non-agrarian functions. A town in the ancient world was the administrative centre for a
wider agrarian hinterland, and the coastal towns, which had a continuity of settlement, unlike
those in the interior, retained this function into the Middle Ages. The situation was completely
different for inland towns, whose establishment in the Central Middle Ages was an act of
separation from the agrarian surroundings. These ties, or lack thereof, between a town and its
agricultural hinterland also affected the social structure of the town population. The
differences between the two types of town in Slovene territory (coastal and continental) were
large and significant. By the end of the thirteenth century, the coastal towns had developed a
town nobility or patrician class that combined elements of burgher and noble culture: the
members of this class were responsible for town governance and membership of the main
body of town autonomy, the town council, was reserved for them alone. This closed town
council, with the right to sit belonging exclusively to patrician families, was a typical
institution of nobility, as this privileged status was ensured at birth. The continental towns did
not have a patrician class. The first decades of the fourteenth century saw some attempts to
introduce such a class, but these were never well developed and there were never any councils
with membership limited exclusively, or even primarily, to town nobles. The arrival of
Habsburg rule of Carniola and Carinthia in 1335 brought an end to this tentative development
and reintroduced a strict distinction between burghers and nobles. Only a feudal lord living
primarily from landed possessions could be considered a noble, and the nobles were
completely separate from burghers; in the coastal areas, in contrast, ties with the agrarian
surroundings formed the basis for the development of burgher-nobles. The general contrast
between continuity with Antiquity and newer development, characteristic of Slovene territory,
was very clearly expressed in the differences between the coastal and continental towns.
During the Central Middle Ages, the coastal settlements were transformed from
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administrative and ecclesiastical centres, which were not economically very distinct from
their rural surroundings, into mercantile and craft centres i.e. towns in the classic sense of the
word. This led to the majority of the activities of town populations being reoriented from
agriculture to crafts. This process was also related to the advance of the Romano-Slavic ethnic
boundary to the direct hinterland of the coastal towns. The appearance of Slavic (Slovene)
personal names in the villages surrounding Trieste in the twelfth century indicates that the
Slavic farmers were already growing crops in the direct vicinity of Trieste, right up to the city
walls. The Slavic-populated rural surroundings of Koper developed their own structure,
headed by the captain of the Slavs (capitaneus Sclavorum), first mentioned in 1349, who was
usually appointed from the ranks of the Koper or Venetian patricians, and who commanded a
peasant army of soldiers known as
černida (black army) by the end of the Middle Ages.
In the interior, a town or market town was a place with the right to hold at least a
weekly market, and whose inhabitants had the right to perform craft and mercantile activities
as free men. Towns were generally larger and more compact settlements than market towns,
and held the additional right to have town walls and the ‘town’ designation. This distinction
only gradually developed: until the thirteenth century, the same place may equally be referred
to as a town (civitas, urbs) or market town (forum, mercatum). Most towns were founded
during the thirteenth century, although the origins of a number of continental towns do go
back to the Early Middle Ages. At the end of the ninth century, Ptuj is already referred to as a
civitas – in an otherwise forged tenth century document of Arnulf, based on an authentic
original – with a toll and stone bridge, which is known to have been in continuous use from
late Antiquity to the end of the thirteenth century, when the course of the Drava changed and a
new bridge had to be built. Ptuj, which already had two churches in the ninth century,
experienced a reawakening at that time as a trading post at the Drava crossing, on the route
linking Italy and the northern Adriatic with Pannonia. The settlement of Magyars on the
nearby plains had blocked Ptuj’s development for a long time, turning it into an isolated
border post. However, in the Late Middle Ages, it re-established itself as one of the most
important stations for transit trade along the lengthy route between Hungary and northern
Italy, when up to 20,000 head of cattle per year were led through Slovene territory to Venice.
Ptuj also has a special status in the history of medieval Slovene towns, since it is probably the
only continental town that had been continually settled since Late Antiquity. In contrast with
other towns in the interior, which generally had their municipal law in the form of a charter of
privileges, Ptuj’s municipal law was written in the form of a lengthy statute (1376), similar to
those of Mediterranean towns. Its provisions also applied as customary law (even before