Možda u tvojim snovima. Ceo život su živeli okruženi superiornijim narodima od sebe zato su i napredniji od Srba.
The Middle Ages
In the 10th century, after the partitioning of the Frankish empire, the lands in which Slovene speakers lived were assigned to the German kingdom. As part of the defense of that kingdom against Magyar invaders, they were divided among the marks, or border marches, of Carinthia, Carniola, and Styria. German lay and clerical lords arrived, along with dependent peasants, and enserfed the Slovenes, whom they called Wends or Winds. Over the next three centuries, the marches came under the
tenuous authority of several territorial dynasts. In the 13th century they fell to
Otakar II of Bohemia, who, like Samo, tried to establish a Slavic empire. Following the defeat of Otakar in 1278, Styria was acquired by the
Habsburg family. Carinthia and Carniola fell into Habsburg hands in 1335,
Istria in 1374, and the city of
Trieste in 1382. Habsburg rule was based on a
bureaucracy that shared power with local noble-run estates. One of these was run by the counts of
Celje, who were powerful in the Middle Ages but whose lineage died out in 1456.
Modern Slovenes tend to view the coming of German rule as a national
calamity, as it subjected the Alpine Slavs to steady pressure to Germanize. Nonetheless, it was from this time that they were included in the Western, or
Roman Catholic, church. German episcopal and monastic foundations, along with local diocesan establishments, enriched and fructified the native Slavic
culture with western European civilization. Indeed, the first missionaries to the area, arriving from
Ireland in the 8th century, taught the Alpine Slavs to pray in their own tongue. The Freising Manuscripts, a collection of confessions and sermons dating from about 1000 CE, are the earliest known document in what eventually became the Slovene language.
Early modern times
Along with the rest of the Habsburg empire, Slovene-inhabited lands experienced fully the
Reformation and Counter-Reformation. The area was left firmly Roman Catholic, but in fact Slovene national development was assisted by such Protestant scholars as Primož Trubar and Jurij Dalmatin, who in the 16th century
propagated the gospel in the
vernacular and even printed a Slovene translation of the Bible.
The Slovenes never lived under Ottoman rule, although Turkish invaders were only partially deflected by the Habsburg’s Military Frontier, established in Croatian lands to the south. Turkish raids occasionally penetrated even Carinthia. The failure of the Ottoman siege of
Vienna in 1683 and Habsburg victories in
Hungary ended the Turkish menace. Baroque civilization was free to permeate all of
Austria, including Slovene-inhabited lands.
Economically, the Slovene lands had been incorporated fully into the system of German
feudal tenure.
