83
Spanheims, who personally held territorial supremacy (princely rights) over their own
seigneuries. The former referred to themselves as “lords of the land” (domini terrae), and in
1237 acknowledged certain freedoms to their ministerials, including the right to inherit fiefs
and allods, and patrimonial jurisdiction over their bondsmen, while territorial jurisdiction
belonged to the Haimburgs. The bishop of Gurk referred, in 1229, to Bernhard of Spanheim
as “prince of the Land” (princeps terre), when granting him the seigneury of Ljubek over
Litija, which had previously belonged to Henry of Andechs. The Spanheims had already
expanded their Carniolan seigneury, within which they administered blood justice, to make
some of the major Carniolan nobile families, such as the Auerspergs (Turjak), Nassenfuss
(Mokronog) and Scharffenbergs (Svibno), their ministerials.
The death of Duke Frederick in 1246 ushered in the fall of the house of Babenberg,
which had ruled Austria for 270 years, and unleashed a succession conflict with the duchies of
Austria and Styria at its centre and Carniola on the periphery. Although in 1230 Emperor
Frederick II himself had again confirmed that Patriarch Berthold of Aquileia held Istria and
Carniola in fief from the empire, changing political circumstances meant that Carniola
returned to the crown along with Austria and Styria. The emperor placed authority in the
hands of an imperial governor with the title of captain (Hauptmann): Count Meinhard III of
Gorizia (until 1250). This brought the two main competitors for princely authority over
Carniola – Patriarch Berthold and Ulrich of Spanheim – closer together. In 1248, Ulrich
married Agnes, the patriarch’s niece and widow of Frederick II of Babenberg. The marriage
brought Ulrich the Andechs-Weichselburg possessions, which significantly increased his
dominions in Carniola, made up of personal allods such as Ljubljana and Kostanjevica, and
ecclesiastical fiefs. Ulrich began to style himself “lord of Carniola”, dominus Carniolae.
When Ulrich’s father Bernhard died in 1256, making him also duke of Carinthia, the outlines
of an immense Spanheim dynastic territory, stretching from the Gurk river in Carinthia to the
Krka river in lower Carniola, could already be seen.
Meanwhile, a new power was rising in the north. Ottokar
II Přemysl, king of Bohemia
from 1253, acquired a seigneury in the duchy of Austria in 1251/52 and another in Styria in
1261, meaning that his authority now reached as far south as the watershed between the
Dravinja and Savinja, and, with the Laško seigneury, even as far as the Sava. In December
1268, Ottokar reached a pact of succession with Ulrich of Spanheim that promised the
Bohemian king all of Ulrich’s “Länder and allods, and fiefs and other goods.” On Ulrich’s
death in the winter of 1269/70, this enabled Ottokar to enter Carniola from Styria, take
Ljubljana, and move via Kranj into Carinthia, which he occupied. He took the Freising,
84
Brixen and Salzburg ecclesiastical fiefs once held by Ulrich, and also occupied some
Aquileian estates in Carniola, including Slovenj Gradec, Mirna in lower carniola and
Postojna. In 1272, he was also elected captain-general of Friuli, effectively giving him full
control of Friuli as well. It seemed that Ottokar, whose lordship stretched from the Sudety
Mountains to the Adriatic, had solved the question of princely authority over Carniola that
had exercised the Carniolan dynasties for three quarters of a century. Yet Ottokar’s primacy
within the empire set off a reaction that led in 1273 to the election of Rudolf of Habsburg as
king. The conflict between the two rivals came to an end in 1278 near Dürnkrut on the
Marchfeld between Vienna and Bratislava with the last great chivalric battle in the Danube
basin. Numerous knights from Slovene territory took part on Rudolf’s side. Ottokar lost his
life in the battle, but not on the battlefield: he was killed after having been captured – a
dishonourable act in chivalrous terms – by relatives of the Styrian noble, Siegfried of
Mahrenberg, above Radlje ob Dravi. Ottokar had accused this renowned noble of lèse majesté
in 1272 in Prague and had him executed without trial. Siegfried’s unusually cruel death turned
the sympathies of Styrian and other nobles against the Bohemian king, who was gradually
making numerous irreconcilable enemies within his own lands, which only hastened his own
demise. In the mid-seventeenth century, Siegfried was still venerated as a local saint in the
Dominican convent that had been established in Radlje ob Dravi in 1251.
In 1282, Rudolf of Habsburg enfeoffed the imperial fiefs that were now available – the
duchies of Austria and Styria, and Carniola – to his sons Albrecht and Rudolf, despite the fact
that Aquileia had clearly not renounced its formal claim on Carniola, as patriarchs still made
use of the title marchio Carnioliae on occasion in the fourteenth century. In this way, the
foundations of Habsburg territorial supremacy over the Danube basin and eastern Alps were
laid. Yet before this, in autumn 1279, Rudolf had already pledged Carniola to his ally Count
Meinhard of Gorizia-Tyrol, and in 1286 he also granted him the Duchy of Carinthia as a fief.
For some time in the eastern Alps, until the Meinhardiner line of Gorizia counts died out in
1335, a Gorizian-Habsburg equilibrium was established in which the Meinhardiner lordship
over Carniola was always provisory, and could always be bought by provision of an adequate
sum. In 1311, Meinhard’s son, Henry, was forced to cede the Savinja basin, “with all that
appertains to it on both sides of the Sava,” to the Habsburg Frederick the Fair, having lost out
in the struggle for the Bohemian crown that the former allies had engaged in after the
Přemyslid line died out in 1306. The Styrian border advanced at Carniola’s expense to the
Sava, and perhaps
even beyond it at Radeče and Svibno, finally marking the end of the former
Great Carniola established in the mid-eleventh century, which had stretched from the Karst