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significantly different: the succession conflict for the Cilli possessions had
concluded with
total victory for Frederick III. Carniola had never been so firmly in Habsburg hands. The
unity of the Carniolan Land was finally ensured, and the following year Ljubljana also gained
a diocese. By the end of the fifteenth century, with the acquisition of the Wallsee seigneuries
in Kvarner and on the Karst in 1466/70 (which connected the County of Pazin in Istria with
the other Habsburg possessions), and the inheritance of Gorizia in 1500 (when the line of
Gorizian counts died out), the Habsburgs’ major political successes in Slovene territory had
all been achieved.
Gorizia
The
Land of Gorizia developed from the possessions and territorial court districts of
the counts of Gorizia located on the Karst and in the middle of the Soča (Isonzo) basin. The
latter was originally part of Friuli, and Gorizia, which at least formally in the fourteenth
century remained an Aquileian fief, was explicitly described at the end of the eleventh century
as “lying in the kingdom of Italy, in the county of Friuli.” The counts of Gorizia were
originally from Bavaria and arrived at the estates along the mid-
course of the Soča via Lienz,
where they held their older possessions, acquiring Gorizia in the third decade of the twelfth
century from their Spanheim relations. From 1125, the counts of Gorizia were also hereditary
advocates of the church of Aquileia. Advocacy and the related exercise of blood justice
represented an important source of income, and above all an opportunity to begin securing
judicial rights they had not acquired as territorial lords. Advocacy in effect became one of the
most important bases for the counts of Gorizia to develop princely authority on their
seigneurial territory. The ties connecting the Gorizian seigneuries
along the Soča to Friuli
were continually weakened during the many confrontations between the Gorizian counts and
the Aquileian patriarchs. A whole range of circumstances and events came into play, such as
the considerable power of the extensive Gorizian dominion, which stretched from east Tyrol
to Istria. Linked to this was the very large group of Gorizian ministerials, who acted both as
intermediates and as a means of exercising Gorizian rule, as well as their regalian rights, such
as the right to mint coins, the right to escort and convey (conductus), and customs rights, their
status as hereditary advocates for Aquileia and the (Aquileian) captain-general of Friuli
(which the Gorizian counts acquired for a considerable time at the end of the thirteenth
century), and the elevation of the Albertiner line of counts of Gorizia to the rank of imperial
princes in 1365, during the reign of Emperor Charles IV of Luxemburg. The Tyrol-based
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Meinhardiner line had reached this rank in 1286, when it acquired the ducal title of Carinthia.
As the Gorizians began to assert princely authority over their territories, the Land of Gorizia
“broke away” from Friuli, which under its princes, the patriarchs of Aquileia, had also
developed into a Land (patria) with a diet referred to as a (Friulian) parliament, and formal
territorial law, which was codified in 1366. The Friulian territorial law, Constitutiones Patriae
Forojulii, was also used in the county of Gorizia, and it is suggested that a German translation
of these Constitutiones existed in Gorizia in the fourteenth century in which the patriarch’s
name was replaced by that of the count. In this way, Friulian territorial law was applied as
Gorizian territorial law. Gorizian and Friulian territorial law was therefore essentially
identical, a fact supported by a document from 1340 that promises legal protection “according
to the territorial law in Gorizia and in Friuli.” As the thirteenth century ended and the
fourteenth began, the development of Gorizian seigneuries into a Land was accompanied by
the rise of what were originally typical manorial offices to territorial level; above all, the
office of captain developed into that of a governor and representative of the prince (the count
of Gorizia) who “had full jurisdiction in all matters,” according to the formulation of a
document from 1325. The Gorizian estates along the Soča and Karst had therefore already
been formed into a Land in the fourteenth century; this is also indicated by the existence of
Gorizian territorial nobility at the end of the century. This Land of the Gorizian counts would,
together with territory acquired by Maximilian I at the beginning of the sixteenth century at
the expense of the Venetian Republic (the upper and lower Soča basin), develop into the Land
of Gorizia and Gradisca that remained in existence until 1918.
Yet the extensive dominion of the counts of Gorizia, which stretched from present-day
East Tyrol and upper Carinthia to inner Istria, never developed into a single, unitary Land.
The reason for this lies in the scattered nature of their possessions, which also meant that no
single name ever arose to describe all the Gorizian lands. The sum of all the Gorizian allods,
fiefs, rights and judicial districts therefore remained a dominium within which individual
Gorizian Länder grew up. From the fourteenth century onward, the Gorizian estates in upper
Carinthia and East Tyrol around Lienz, where the counts’ other residential castle of Bruck was
located, formed a Land known as the ‘Outer County of Gorizia,’ and had its own court, nobles
and diet. The Gorizian Land that developed along the mid-
Soča was also known as the ‘Inner
County of Gorizia.’ In 1456, Count John of Gorizia issued a territorial law in Lienz that was
to apply “here without and there within the county of Gorizia” – an attempt to tie the inner
and outer counties into one Land. Yet this attempt was not to come to fruition, particularly
after the defeat, in 1460, of the counts of Gorizia in the Cilli succession conflict, leading to