Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/1157

YUGOSLAVIA

Scale, 1:5,000,000

Frontier of Yugoslavia Other International Frontiers 1921 International Frontiers 1914 Boundaries between Austria, Hun|ary, Croatia & Bosnia 1914 Railways

autonomous unit under Hungary, has by the Treaty of Rapallo been constituted as an independent State. Italy has acquired almost all the Slovene and Croat districts of Gorizia and Istria.

A census of the new State was taken in the spring of 1921, the total pop. being 12,162,900.

Early Tendencies Toward Unity. The Yugoslav movement was by no means a recent one, as is often assumed. Despite the different traditions of culture due to the rival ecclesiastical influence of Rome and Byzantium, a sense of kinship had sur- vived throughout centuries of separation, and was strengthened by continual migration. The two most notable cases were the formation of the Uskok pirate settlements along the Dalmatian coast in the i6th century, and the settlement of the Serbian patriarch and many thousand Serb refugee families in Slavonia and S. Hungary, at the invitation of the Emperor Leopold I. in 1690. Ivan Gundulic and the brilliant group of poets that gathered round him at Ragusa in the early i7th century, re- flected in their writings the little Slav Republic's intimate con- nexion with its kinsmen of Serbia and Bosnia. The first advo- cate of the Pan-Slav idea in Russia itself was Krizanic, a Croat Catholic priest from Dalmatia, and early writers in favour of Slavonic racial and literary unity were the Slovene schoolmaster Bohoricz (1584) and the Dalmatian Croat Orbini, who wrote in Italian (II regno degli Slavi 1601). The Franciscan friar Kacic, who did so much for the revival of popular poetry in Bosnia and Dalmatia in the mid-i8th century, shows similar traces of Serbophil feeling, and the achievements of Dusan and other Serbian Tsars have bulked almost as largely in the modern literature of the Croats as of the Serbs themselves.

The first active impulse toward political unity was given by Napoleon, when after Wagram he erected the Slovene districts

and most of Croatia and Dalmatia into a separate Illyrian State, incorporated in the French Empire, but having its adminis- trative capital at Laibach. This short-lived experiment, which inspired the muse of Vodnik, the first Slovene poet of real mark, had its aftermath in the Illyrian movement of the forties, which centred in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Its real motive force was supplied by Ljudevit Gaj, who combined to a remark- able degree the qualities of author, philologist and political agitator. His two newspapers, the Illyrian National Gazelle and the Danica Ilirska (Illyrian Daystar) provided a literary focus for the rising generation ; while his reform of Croat ortho- graphy, planned on parallel lines with Vuk Karadzic's epoch- making philological work in Serbia, assured to modern Serbo- Croat literature a definitely unitary development. The fact that linguistically Serb and Croat had thus become interchange- able terms, only to be distinguished by the respective use of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, inevitably reacted upon the politi- cal situation, and served as an incentive to the movement for unity. In somewhat sensational and affected but prophetic words Gaj compared Illyria to a lyre, " a triangle between Skutari, Varna and Villach. Its strained and inharmonious chords are Carinthia, Gorizia, Istria, Croatia, Slavonia, Dal- matia, Ragusa, Bosnia, Montenegro, Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria and Lower Hungary," and " on the great lyre of Europe they must harmonize once more." He saw in the Mag- yars the chief obstacle to the realization of his dream, and openly warned them that they were " an island in the Slav ocean," which one day might easily engulf them. The alienation of Croat and Magyar for centuries close allies in the struggle against the Turk grew rapidly in the ' forties, mainly owing to the aggressive legislation passed by successive Hungarian diets,