91
jurisdiction and influence of the territorial prince. Habsburg resistance to the immediate status
of the counts of Cilli was reduced in 1423, when, under pressure from Sigismund, Ernst the
Iron formally renounced feudal overlordship of the Cilli, who from that time no longer
appeared in documents of homage by Styrian nobles to the prince. However, Habsburg
opposition to the counts of Cilli being elevated to the rank of imperial princes was far greater.
This elevation, testified in a draft document of proclamation, was already in preparation in
1430. One can only speculate that it originally failed due to Habsburg pressure, particularly
from the prince of the Inner Austrian Länder, Frederick III. Yet in 1436, when Frederick was
on pilgrimage in Palestine, Emperor Sigismund elevated the counts of Cilli to imperial princes
without Frederick’s consent, and made the counties of Cilli and Ortenburg-Sternberg into
princely banner-fiefs of the empire. The counties and other lands and lordships were made a
principality held by the Cilli as an imperial fief. They also received the regalian rights of
minting and mining, and a territorial court in Celje, so that – as the charter states – “all nobles
living and residing in their Länder, countries, and lordships, and others may defend
themselves in this territorial court and obtain justice … according to the law, customs and
traditions of the Land.”
If the granting of regalian rights impinged on the rights of the duke of Austria, it did
not however affect his princely authority, as regalian rights were also held by other magnates
in his Länder. But the elevation of the two counties to banner-fiefs and the founding of a
noble territorial court did signal a major change compared to the prior allegiance to the old
Länder. The new territorial court meant that judicial jurisdiction over the nobles in the Cilli
counties and lordships would no longer be in the hands of the duke of Austria, as prince of the
Inner Austrian Länder, but would be held by the count of Cilli as the new prince. This
effectively meant the appropriation of these territories from the old Länder, whose nobles
were beginning to recognise the Cilli territorial court – where a separate Cilli territorial law
was starting to form – as their own court. It also represented the formation of a new Cilli
Land. The counts of Gorizia had achieved something similar with
their outer and inner
counties: the former separated from Carinthia, the latter from Friuli. Frederick III could not
afford to recognise the 1436 charter, first appealing unsuccessfully to Sigismund for
protection of his princely rights and interests, then launching a feud against the Cillis, which
is described in detail by the Chronicle of Cilli, a very rare example of medieval
historiographic work created in Slovene territory. Only in 1443 did Frederick – now as king –
recognise the Cillis’ title of prince, but in return they had to renounce their principality,
concluding a successorial settlement that made the Habsburgs heirs to their Land, which
92
passed to them only 13 years later following Ulrich’s murder in Belgrade in 1456. The barely
twenty-year development of a separate Cilli Land therefore came to an end, though the former
county of Cilli within Styria enjoyed special status for considerable time.
Istria
In contrast to Styria, which succeeded in maintaining its unity, Istria’s integrity was
completely broken at about the same time. From 1420, when Venice brought the temporal
power of the Aquileian patriarchs to an end, until the fall of the Republic of St. Mark in 1797,
Istria was politically divided into a Venetian-held coast, and a Habsburg interior. The former
Istrian Karst became part of Carniola proper, the County of Pazin was a lordship “adjoined” to
Carniola, and Trieste was a free imperial city under the Habsburgs, while all other Istrian
coastal towns were individually subordinate to central Venetian control. The only unified
Venetian organisation of Istria was for military and policing purposes, under the command of
the head of the Istrian paisenatico (paysinaticum from paese – land or region), who in the
fifteenth century was stationed at Rašpor castle in the Čićarija hills, which close off the path
into the interior of the peninsula from the northeast. Rašpor’s strategic position led to its
description as clavis totius Istrie (“the key to all Istria”). From that time, the term Istria
described the peninsula only in a geographichal sense.
Istria began to fragment soon after the middle of the thirteenth century, when Venice
took control of most of the coastal towns, while the counts of Gorizia developed a separate
Land in the interior. These were both largely gains at the expense of the Aquileian
patriarchate, previously the largest landowner and holder of public jurisdiction in the march of
Istria. The underlying causes of the division are probably extremely old, and reach back to the
time of the Diet of Rižana and the beginning of Frankish dominion over Istria. At the
beginning of the ninth century, two different feudal orders met in the region: on one side the
main organiser and authority in public life was the town (commune), on the other it was the
seigneury. The political division between Venetian and Habsburg Istria roughly followed the
division between these two forms of organising authority.
In 1209, after over a century of jurisdiction as margraves by the Spanheims and
Andechs over Istria, Patriarch Wolfgar reacquired “the march of Istria with all honours, all
adjuncts and full jurisdiction” on the basis of the privilege granted to Aquileia in 1077 by
Emperor Henry IV. In reality, this did not mean a great deal as a large amount of Istria was
exempt from this margravial jurisdiction, because of the immunity of the Istrian bishops. For