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from some form of burgher activity i.e. trading or crafts. The nobility did not have burgher
status, even if they lived in a town. The same applied to the clergy, various officials, servants,
Jews, beggars and also subject peasants (bondsmen) who had bonded lands within the town’s
area of jurisdiction. The saying “city air makes you free” generally applied only to the extent
that a bondsman who lived for a year and a day in a certain town without a lord demanding
his return became free, though without gaining the full rights of a burgher. Entry to
membership of the leading town bodies was open only to the patrician class in the coastal
towns. In the continental towns, which did not have a patrician class, differentiation between
burghers was based on wealth. This effectively restricted access to a town’s main bodies of
governance to the wealthier burghers, who generally came from the ranks of merchants rather
than craftsmen.
The foundations of autonomy for towns were largely laid down in the fourteenth
century, and remained more or less unchanged until the eighteenth. The autonomous bodies in
the continental towns developed from two sources: from the town magistrate, as
representative of the town lord, and from the commune or community (assembly) of all
burghers. In Slovene towns, certain rights were acquired very early (well before 1370 in
Ljubljana), particularly in comparison to towns in modern-day Austria. These included the
right of the burghers to elect the town magistrate, though the town lord of course reserved the
right to approve or reject the choice; these rights enhanced both the town lord’s authority and
town autonomy (which also led to the late appearance of a town mayor). Another source of
autonomy was the community of all burghers, known as the commune (komun) under
influence from the coastal settlements, where the communitas civitatis was first mentioned in
Trieste in 1139. The commune, presided over by the town magistrate, decided on
administrative matters and legal cases. This decision-making process was quickly passed to a
more select group – in larger towns to twelve cvelbarji (a direct borrowing from the German
Zwölfer), from whose ranks an elected town council developed, though this generally only
comprised wealthier burghers. This led to social discord and even clashes between the town
council and the wider burgher classes. In 1472 in Ljubljana, a 24-member council was
appointed to redress this issue, conceived as a form of supervisory body of the town commune
over the town council. However, the latter remained the only real decision-making body in the
town and represented it together with the town magistrate. In 1504 Ljubljana became the only
Carniolan town to follow the example of Styrian towns and appoint a mayor (again the
Slovenes used the term župan for this office), though it was primarily for reasons of prestige
rather than need.
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The linguistic and ethnic identity of the inhabitants of medieval towns in Slovene
territory was heterogeneous; bilingualism and trilingualism was quite normal at this meeting
point of the Slavic, Romance and Germanic worlds. Town inhabitants were largely the
product of a twofold migration – from village to town and from town to town. The former
brought new, generally lower, classes of the town population from the agrarian surroundings,
the latter saw craftsmen and merchants moving from town to town. The medieval town was
indeed a melting pot of different ethnic elements. This applied particularly to towns in the
interior, where the town populations were formed ex novo, while the core population of older
coastal towns was formed by descendants of the pre-Slavic ‘Roman’ population. This renders
rather surprising the mid-fifteenth century report of Enea Silvio Piccolomini asserting that
Istrians were by then Slavs, although the inhabitants of the coastal towns used Italian speech,
but knew both languages. According to Valvasor, the everyday languages of seventeenth-
century Ljubljana were the Carniolan tongue (i.e. Slovene) and German, while nobles and
merchants also spoke Italian, though everything was written in German. Even in Slovenj
Gradec, Valvasor noted that most of the population knew Slovene and German.
The old assertions that the burghers of the coastal towns of modern-day Slovenia were
‘Romans’ or Italians, while the towns of the interior were inhabited by Germans, are certainly
exaggerated and over-simplified. They undoubtedly arose because Italian (Latin) and German
were the almost exclusive languages of official written business, which creates an erroneous
impression that all of life took place in the two languages at this time. A good example of this
is demonstrated by two fifteenth-century Škofja Loka merchants, known in German
documents as Herteisen and Leerensack (literally ‘Hard Iron’ and ‘Empty Sack’). The fact
their surnames were recorded by a ‘Roman’ town clerk in Rijeka as Trdo Železo and Prazna
Vreča – clearly how they had introduced themselves to him – indicates that scribes, who were
accustomed to listening in one language and writing in another, would write Slovene names in
a German form, which gives the impression that the named parties were Germans. It is
undoubtedly the case that the Slovene population predominated in smaller towns in Carniola.
The fact, for example, that the town magistrate in Škofja Loka in 1579 did not know how “to
read, nor write, and much less German” and that the town clerk had to read and translate
letters for him, clearly indicates that the inhabitants of the town generally used Slovene. As
many as 15 town magistrates gave their oaths in Slovene in eight Carniolan towns between
1750 and 1771. Even in the principal and largest Carniolan town – Ljubljana – Slovenes
represented at least 70% of the population according to calculations made during the
Reformation, when the total population was around 6,000 people.