Brief History of Julian Venetia

Written by Diego De Castro

(Extracted from the book "La questione di Trieste, l'azione politica e diplomatica italiana dal 1943 al 1954" by Professor Diego De Castro.)


2. THE GEOGRAPHICAL BORDER

At the time of the peace treaties of 1919 and 1947, Italy maintained that its eastern border was established by the Julian Alps; Wilson himself, in his message to the Italian people in April 1919, had accepted this affirmation. [A. D'ALIA, La Dalmazia, Publishing House Optima, Rome 1928, p. 217.] It would be out of place to discuss that topic in this book, given the existence of a large volume that deals specifically with the problem of our eastern borders and references a rich bibliography. [G. VALUSSI, Il confine nordorientale d'Italia, LINT, Trieste 1972.] According to Yugoslavia, our borders ended at the Isonzo river or, perhaps, even at the Tagliamento. This was bending geography to politics... But as I have said and will repeat several times, the geographical arguments were perfectly useless because the representatives of the great nations bartered the destiny of a small victorious people and that of a large vanquished population, using them as bargaining chips in negotiations that concerned other nations and other interests of every kind. Neither justice nor equity came, not even on the sly, in the Treaty of Peace, as we and the Yugoslavs had hoped, albeit with opposing desires.

[Also J.C. CAMPBELL, Successful Negotiations: Trieste 1954. An Appraisal by the Five Participants, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1976, p. 8, says: "neither Italy nor Yugoslavia had a significant influence on the negotiations which were in the hands of the three Great Powers." As well as a little-known volume, perhaps because it is excellent and objective, already cited earlier, D.I. RUSINOW, op. cit., p. 330, observes that the border set by the Peace Treaty of 1947 "was the result of a compromise between the political aims of an Allied army and the military necessity of another: the Italians had no say." On p. 396, it underlines the fact that no account was taken of the opinion of the people it concerned. On p. 401, it says: "it did not matter; the course of the negotiations had little to do with the merits of the Yugoslav cause or the Italian cause." See also p. 405.]


3. THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF THE AREA AND THE ROMAN ERA

Human settlements have existed in the territory of Julian Venetia since the Palaeolithic era [For the bibliography see the volume VALUSSI, Collana di Bibliografie, cit., p. 93 et seq. The Thracians of Pietro Kandler constitute a reminder of literary type.]; but when the Romans arrived in 178-177 BC, they found a people very fierce (Carni, Histri, Liburnians and Iapydes) and quite numerous, who did not initially resign themselves to Roman governance, unlike the Veneti, who were similar in race and language to the people we are speaking of. Trieste is called a "Carnic village" by the writer Artemidorus, and in 53 BC it was sacked by the Iapydes. The linguistic and cultural Romanization of those populations was achieved as early as the age of Augustus (in 49 BC Trieste was a Roman colony and its citizens had Roman citizenship). This was made possible by the fact that, since 181 BC, the year of its foundation, Aquileia had the function of attracting all the people of the area, first of all with its political, military, commercial, and industrial prestige, and then with its strength of religious center after the advent of Christianity. The influence of Aquileia lasted for almost sixteen centuries and none of the neighboring peoples remained immune to its influence.

The Romans created new settlements or expanded existing native ones. As a result, urban areas arose on all sides, by then heavily populated, such as Tergeste (Trieste), Pietas Julia (Pola), Parentium (Parenzo) and almost every Istrian city today has a name derived from the Romans or from the Latin version of a previous name. Little or nothing is known about the civilization of the early peoples of Julian Venetia, because the Romans completely permeated the local ethnic fabric, thereby causing all traces of earlier cultures to disappear. The same had happened in the rest of Italy: they became subjected to Rome and the process of Romanization of Julian Venetia took place exactly like that of the other Italian regions: slowly and almost imperceptible through successive generations, which were five or six in "Regio X Venetia et Histria".


4. FROM ROMANITY TO ITALIANITY

Nor was the transition from Romanity to Italianity any different in Julian Venetia than the rest of Italy. One can only observe that it took place through a tenacious defense of the values of Latin civilization, led by people most exposed to the attacks of the barbarians, after their immense hordes had seized Pannonia, Noricum, Dalmatia. These territories, during the Roman period, had constituted the bulwark against the pressure of the barbaric and primitive neighboring peoples who had a rapidly growing population. As always happens — and as was the case with the absorption of earlier civilizations by the Romans — the superior culture assimilated the inferior one. Therefore Julian Venetia easily absorbed the few barbarians who invaded the region. It was an easy manner simply because they were so few, since the region constituted only a transit area for all the barbarian invasions; it was a poor country, very different from the rich Po Valley, which was where the invading people were headed. Moreover, at that time, Julian Venetia was completely and compactly Romanized and the descendants of the ancient indigenous peoples (as is clear from their surnames) held very high positions in the civil administration and military of the Empire.

The transition from Romanity to Italianity occurred, therefore, as in all the other Italian regions, gradually and imperceptibly, as has already been said. This was made possible and was facilitated by the fact that the population was very large and was not divided by tribal, linguistic or racial hostility, and had lived in a region which, in the peace and tranquility of the flourishing centuries of the Roman Empire, was able to blend its people, because they were part of Italy and were far away from the limes (the Roman border along the Danube), and instead were surrounded by other vast territories that were firmly Romanized. Regarding the transition from Romanity to Italianity in Julian Venetia [Everyone knows that the name "Julian Venetia" was given to the region by the famous linguist Graziadio Ascoli in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is little known, however, that the name of the Julian Alps dates from Roman times, as does Forum Julii (Cividale) - from which the name "Friuli" derives - as well as Pietas Julia (Pola), etc.], it will be useful — and it is worth repeating — to keep in mind that the transition from Romanity to Italianity was the same process that occurred in the rest of Italy. The only strange occurrence was the fact that Aquileian Roman civilization did not manage to produce a great scholar in the area.

The Italianity of Julian Venetia is not due, therefore, to immigration from the Italian peninsula, but it is autochthonous. It was created spontaneously by the people who lived there before the arrival of the Romans and who were later Romanized. The descendants of Roman colonists were presumably few, given that the fertility of the area had always been very modest and therefore certainly not likely to draw strong immigration.

[It is surprising that a man of culture like Vladimir Velebit (CAMPBELL, Trieste 1954, cit., p. 78) asserts that the boundaries between Italians and Slavs are placed on the Isonzo river ever since the Slavs entered Europe in the 7th century; and asserts that the Italian cities in Istria and Dalmatia were all created by Venice; and further asserts that Trieste, three or four centuries ago, was "a fishing village inhabited by a mixture of Slovenian fishermen and, perhaps, by some Venetian fisherman." Maybe Mr. Vladimir Velebit should reflect on the local surnames, many of which are purely Roman or Latin (Petronio, Apollonio, De Castro, etc.) and are borne by families whose origins are so ancient that they are lost in the mists of time.]

Now, the process of Romanization and its transformation into Italian culture occurred much more tenaciously (for elementary reasons, instinctive, without any ethnic or historical awareness) because there was a long period of peace followed by a period of disastrous events, which begun with the arrival of the Visigoths under Alaric in the beginning of the fifth century. It is easy to defend the undisputed civil superiority of the whole Romanized population of Julian Venetia in the face of barbarians due to their obvious spirit of conservatism, pride, and xenophobia. And such defense is all the more tenacious because, as we know, they resisted much more strongly. Additionally, after the outlying areas of the Empire were conquered by the barbarians, Julian Venetia began to take on the function of being the border area and the land of encounter between different peoples, which it still remains.

Among the barbarians, of which there were many heterogeneous tribes, the only people to settle in the area, but in very small groups, were the Ostrogoths (Theodoric was within the walls of Trieste in 568 AD); nor, due to their small number, did they alter the ethnic physiognomy of the region, which remained united from 539-787 to the Eastern Roman Empire, except for a brief Longobard interlude, under the last king, when Trieste was razed to the ground. It was the Longobards who first broke the regional unity, aggregating the Vipava and Isonzo valleys to the Duchy of Friuli. The fracture was completed ever since (except for the brief reunion in the Napoleonic period), and while Roman civilization was almost destroyed in the part conquered by the Longobards, depopulating the area and thus opened it up to the invading Avars and Slavs, the territories under Byzantine dominion (namely Trieste and Istria) flourished; they were dependent on the Exarchate of Ravenna and defended by the so-called "numerus tergestinus", a border militia created by the Byzantines, who in 611 AD ejected the invading Slavs. In the sixth century, the part conquered by the Longobards was already facing the Avars, who were followed by the Slavs; the Franks were also beginning to show their face. The Longobards ousted the Slavs and drove them back to the Drava Valley. The Romanized people of the valleys mentioned before were already refugees, while in the area of the Lagoon (together with other exiles from different areas) they began to build new lagoon towns, including Venice.

The cultural exchange between Istria and the Exarchate was very intense and Istria itself was never hellenized. An Istrian, Maximianus, was archbishop of Ravenna and many large Istrian families even emigrated towards the lagoons at that time, settling also in the nascent Venice. It was thus the eastern shore, with its Romanized inhabitants, who colonized the West, if I may say so, and not vice versa. This favored the subsequent supplications of the Istrian towns towards Venice, when the Exarchate weakened and defense against attacks by the Longobards and other barbarians became ineffective, especially the attacks by the Slav pirates who, since about 640, began running the sea and plundering the Istrian towns from their hideouts located in Dalmatia.

But, with the passage of time, in the eighth century, after which the Longobards on Italian soil became less barbaric, the Istrian territories under Byzantine rule began to weave good relations with their neighbors. As relations with the Longobards and with the shore of Ravenna grew closer and closer, even more territories of the eastern shore of the Adriatic gravitated towards the Western world, removing any cultural influence from the Byzantine East. This definitive insertion into the life of the West was further accentuated under the rule of the Franks, who also had the merit of including the entire region of Julian Venetia into the political and administrative unity of the Frankish Kingdom of Italy. Except for short and temporary administrative shifts, the area remained part of the Italian political entity and subsequent developments until the fourteenth century. They formed the first large feudal nuclei at Gorizia, Pisino, and Duino.

Also the Patriarchate of Aquileia had a feudal character. The coastal towns of Istria wanted, however, a communal regiment in the same period and in the same way as the comunes in the other parts of Italy. This was the period when Latin — probably bastardized already in Roman times from the original local language — transformed into the vernacular Romanic or Romance, as in the rest of Italy and in many other areas previously dominated by Rome. Indirect evidence of this is the fact that the still-surviving dialects in Rovigno, Valle, Dignano and Veglia, studied by Bartoli, derived from Latin without going through Venetian, unlike the dialects spoken in the other coastal towns, which, however, originally derived from the same Veneto. Even in this respect Julian Venetia remained tied to Italy, in addition to being politically united to her.


5. THE INFILTRATION OF THE GERMANIC ELEMENT

The area had contact with Germanic ethnic groups already at the time of the first invasions of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths; but, given that they were a numerically small group, they left no trace on the ethnic character. However, the real infiltration of the Germanic element into this region of Italy only took a clear shape after the Ottonian period (919-1024), through the new Medieval political-juridical-administrative organization known as feudalism. The emperor is the only one who is not a vassal to anyone; everyone else is part of a chain that he leads and which is divided into countless branches and increasingly smaller rings.

This kind of network, which extends over the ethnic, economic and political reality of the indigenous peoples in any area, was in Julian Venetia composed primarily by rulers of Germanic origin. Although they brought with them militias of their nationality, they could not change the ethnic character of the region for various reasons: first, such ethnic distortion of a territory can only be achieved through the transportation of large families, and this did not happen; second, since this was a caste of rulers who spoke a different language, they had difficulties mingling with the local ethnic element; and third, since they were foreign rulers, they were increasingly seen as an unpopular foreign body in the ethnic demographic of the local population. Moreover, in the last centuries, despite all possible efforts, even after a thousand years had past since the first arrival of the feudal lords across the alps, Austria was unable to Germanize the maritime pearl of the Habsburg crown: Trieste.

[It is sufficient to see the following data, taken from S. SOMOGYI, "Alcuni dati statistici sulle popolazioni della Venezia Tridentina e Giulia secondo la lingua d'uso degli abitanti", in «annali di statistica», serie VIII, vol. II, p. 25. The percentage of the German population in the Austrian administrative district of Trieste, shows, in the years marked, the following changes: 1846: 9.96%; 1857: 7.81%; 1880: 4.27%; 1890: 5.25%; 1900: 5.88%; 1910: 6.21%.]

All towns which held status of being a free commune were always free or semi-free from feudalism, in particular those of the Istrian coast. Elsewhere in the area, as happened everywhere, the emperors appointed both ecclesiastics and laity as their vassals. Among the former, the most important was the patriarch of Aquileia, among the second the Margrave of Istria, preceded by the Counts of Istria until 1209; they were all members of noble German families, and many of the patriarchs of that period were also Germans. The authority of the latter, until 1420, was extended, at least in theory, over the whole of Istria and the Margraves were their lieutenants; and the counts of Gorizia were also "advocates" of the patriarchs.

The Counts of Gorizia were initially descended from various other German families, then from the twelfth to the sixteenth century they belonged only to the Lurngau-Heimföls family. Among the lay lords there was also the lords of Duino — the Walsee family — and an Istrian branch of the lords of Gorizia who, usurping the temporal power of the bishops of Parenzo — just as others were usurping the power of the patriarchs — had created a lordship with their center in Pisino, renamed Mitterburg. The first to become extinct was the Gorizian branch of Pisino in 1374; followed by the Walsee in 1466; and followed by the Lurngau-Heimföls family in 1500. The inheritance of these extinct families, usually through dynastic marriages, all passed to the Habsburgs, who created a feudal domain stretching from Gorizia to Liburnia and inner Istria, which they attached to their previous possessions of Carniola. Of this, the boundaries were extended at the expense of the inherited areas. In 1382 also Trieste was given to the Habsburgs (after a first act of dedication in 1369), so that a perfect territorial continuity of the new, large and single domain was achieved.


6. THE ARRIVAL OF THE SLAVS AND THEIR DIFFUSION

Quite another matter is the problem of the arrival of the Slavs in Julian Venetia. We must clearly distinguish the Slovenes from the Croats, not only with regard to the areas they settled, but also with regard to the way in which they penetrated Julian Venetia. The Slovenes constitute one of the "peoples without history", according to the definition of F. Engels.

[An excellent definition of the term, which is not pejorative, is given by I. RUSINOW, Italy's Austrian Heritage, cit., p. 22: "Slovenians of the Littoral were one of the nations traditionally considered "unhistorical". Effectively this means that up until the second half of the nineteenth century these people were barely conscious of their national heredity and lived in a patriarchal relationship with an elite which culturally (even if not racially) represented a "historical" nation, in this case predominantly Italian."]

They were, in other words, a small people inserted into to a much larger realm, such as the Frankish Kingdom or the Habsburg Empire, and were always dominated by other nations; a meek people, rural, hard-working, belonging, even from the point of view of anthropology, to a different race than the Croats. [The Slovenes, with their blonde-gray hair color, blue-gray eyes, brachyprosopic faces, mesocephalic or brachycephalic skulls, and medium-low stature, belong to a branch of the Baltic race. The Croats, being tall, dark, with dark eyes, brachycephalic, dolichoprosopic and dolichocephalic, represent a branch of the Dinaric race which extends, on the Adriatic coast, from Albania to Ancona, with points towards the interior, which reaches as far as Hungary.]

The latter created a political and military complex and had a history that was certainly not peaceful. Still today there exists an ethnic border corresponding, more or less, to the current Croatia and Slovenia, which, starting from the valley of the Dragogna River (which flows into the gulf of Pirano) meets the Upper Carso just south of Castelnuovo and continues to the crossroads of Ruppa, south of Montenevoso. There are Slovenian foothills in the Pinguentino and in the upper Val d'Arsa, and there were Croatian foothills in the Natisone valley, as is clear from the paleo-Croatian dialect that is spoken.

Even with regard to their character and their status, the Slovenes were peacefully living in Julian Venetia already in the seventh century, in the wake of the extreme warlikeness of the ferocious Avars, penetrating the upper valleys that were left vacated by the Roman population, which had taken refuge in the lagoons. Later, when the Longobards managed to destroy the Avars, the Slavic peoples were freed from a sort of slavery [Some argue that the relationship between the two races was exactly the opposite, and claim that the Slovenes were ruling over the Avars.], they slowly infiltrated from the valleys of Brava and Gail, near the Resia, Torre and Natisone rivers, and from the Sava Valley, and made their way to the Idria, Vipacco, Timavo and Carsia rivers. But their settlements were extended, although isolated, also in middle and lower Friuli and down towards Istria. In the well known Placitum of Risano in 804, the representatives of the autochthonous Romance population complained to Charlemagne and to John, Duke of Istria, about the Slavic penetration and the allocation of land to these intruders.

[Il Cartolare of P. KANDLER, cit., pp 59-60, reports, from the Istrian diplomatic code, the entire meeting in Risano. As for the question of the Slavs, the Romance population says: Insuper sclavos super terras nostras posuit: ipsi arant nostras terrai et nostra; runcoras, segoni nostras pradas, pascunt nostra pascua, et de ipsas nostras terras reddunt pensionem Joanni. Duke John, with a sort of self-criticism, as we would say today, responds to the presence of the missi dominici: De sclavis autem unde dicitis accedamus super ipsas terras, ubi resedunt, et videamus, ubi sine vestra damnietate valeant residere, resideant: ubi vero aliquam damnietatem faciunt sive de agris sive de silvis vel de roncora aut ubicumque, nos eos ejiciamus foras. Si vobis placet, ut eos mittamus in talia deserta loca, ubi sine vestro damno valeant commanere, faciant utilitatem in puhlico sicut et caeteros populos. During the Placitum of Risano, the old municipal statute was restored in Trieste. The numerus tergestinus was also kept alive by the Carolingians and was used to fight against the Croats. CECOVINI, op. cit., p. 24.]

For the Duke it was not a matter of political or racial favoritism, but purely a matter of demographic shifts within the Frankish dominion, which at that time extended far beyond Julian Venetia. And, since the Romance population must have been in very poor demographic conditions at that period, the Duke was certainly happy to find people willing to work in a depopulated region. Obviously, if the demographic situation were in the opposite condition, the Romance group would have expanded into the vast space to the east of Julian Venetia forming part of the Frankish Kingdom, just as many centuries earlier had happened during the Roman Empire, which brought its own civilization far eastward. Slovenian penetration was due, therefore, to demographic-economic factors. And the Slavic element of the countryside was never able, in the following centuries, to regain its lost position, neither in Istria nor anywhere else, with the exception of that part of lower and middle Friuli where there were sporadic settlements of Slavs, but all that remains of them there is some traces in the toponyms.