Imperial Free City of Trieste
Imperial Free City of Trieste | |||||||||||||
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1382–1809 1849–1922 | |||||||||||||
Emperor | |||||||||||||
Legislature | Diet of Trieste | ||||||||||||
Historical era | |||||||||||||
• Occupied by Kingdom of Illyria | 1816–49 | ||||||||||||
4 November 1918 | |||||||||||||
12 November 1920 | |||||||||||||
28 October 1922 | |||||||||||||
Area | |||||||||||||
1910 | 95 km2 (37 sq mi) | ||||||||||||
Population | |||||||||||||
• 1910 | 229,995 | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
Today part of |
The Imperial Free City of Trieste and its Territory (
History
Background
After the
After two centuries of war, Trieste came with the signing of a peace treaty on 30 October 1370 in front of St. Bartholomew's Church in the village of Šiška (apud Sisciam) (now part of Ljubljana) under the Republic of Venice.[1] The Venetians retained the town until 1378, when it became the property of the Patriarchate of Aquileia.[2] Discontent with the patriarch's rule, the main citizens of Trieste in 1382 petitioned Leopold III of Habsburg, Duke of Austria to become part of his domains, in exchange for his defence.[2] This united Charlemagne's southern marches under Habsburg rule,[3] subsequently consolidated as the Austrian Littoral (German: Österreichisches Küstenland).
Trieste in the Holy Roman Empire
Following an unsuccessful Habsburg invasion of Venice in the prelude to the War of the League of Cambrai, the Venetians occupied Trieste again in 1508, and under the terms of the peace were allowed to keep the city. The Habsburg Empire recovered Trieste a little over a year later, however, when conflict resumed. With their acquisition by the Habsburgs, Carniola and the Julian March ceased to act as an east-facing outpost of Italy against the unsettled peoples of the Danube basin, becoming a region of contact between the land-based Austrian domains and the maritime republic of Venice, whose foreign policy depended on control of the Adriatic.[3] Austro-Venetian rivalry over the Adriatic weakened each state's efforts to repel the Ottoman Empire's expansion into the Balkans (which caused many Slavs to flee into the Küstenland, sowing the seeds of future Yugoslav union), and paving the way for the success of Napoleon's invasion.[3]
On the Habsburg's annexation, Trieste had a patriciate, a bishop and his chapter, two municipal chapters totalling 200 people, armed forces and institutions of higher education.[4] Italian irredentism was continually popular — writing in 1917, the Italian nationalist Litta Visconti Arese described the city as:
The last of the Italian Comuni still struggling in the twentieth century against the Germanic Empire and the Invasion of the Barbarians.[5]
Trieste became an important port and trade hub. In June 1717,
In 1768, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann was murdered by a robber in Trieste, while on his way from Vienna to Italy.
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars
Trieste was occupied by French troops three times during the Napoleonic Wars, in 1797, 1805 and in 1809. Between 1809 and 1813, it was annexed to the Illyrian Provinces, interrupting its status as a free port and causing a loss of the city's autonomy; the municipal autonomy was not restored after the return of the city to the Austrian Empire in 1813. For the French, the Illyrian Provinces provided a military frontier against the remaining Austrian lands and a military base against the Turks, as well as providing distant endowments for Marshals of the Empire.[3]
When Napoleon defeated the Republic of Venice in 1797, he found that Istria was populated by Italians on the coast and in the main cities, but the interior was populated mainly by Croats and Slovenians; this dual ethnicity in the same peninsula created antagonism between Slavs and Italians for the supremacy of Istria, when nationalism first started to rise after Napoleon's fall. The restoration of Istria to the Austrian Empire was confirmed at the Congress of Vienna, but a nationalistic feud began to develop between the Slavs and the Italians.[7]
Trieste in the Austrian Empire and Austria–Hungary
Following the Napoleonic Wars, Trieste continued to prosper as the free imperial city of Trieste (German: Reichsunmittelbare Stadt Triest), a status that granted economic freedom, but limited its political self-government. The city's role as main Austrian trading port and shipbuilding centre was later emphasised with the foundation of the merchant shipping line Austrian Lloyd in 1836, whose headquarters stood at the corner of the Piazza Grande and Sanità. By 1913, Austrian Lloyd had a fleet of 62 ships comprising a total of 236,000 tons.[clarify][8] With the introduction of the constitutionalism in the Austrian Empire in 1860, the municipal autonomy of the city was restored, with Trieste becoming capital of the Adriatisches Küstenland, the Austrian Littoral region.
In the later part of the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII considered moving his residence to Trieste (or to Salzburg), due to what he considered a hostile anti-Catholic climate in Italy, following the capture of Rome by the newly founded Kingdom of Italy. However, the Austrian monarch Franz Josef I gently rejected this idea.[9]
The modern Austro-Hungarian Navy used Trieste's shipbuilding facilities for construction and as a base. The Austrian acquisition of Lombardy-Veneto (1815–66) meant that Trieste was no longer in a frontier zone,[3] encouraging the construction of the first major trunk railway in the Empire, the Vienna–Trieste Austrian Southern Railway (German: Südbahn), was completed in 1857, a valuable asset for trade and the supply of coal. The importance of Trieste as a trading and shipbuilding city to the Empire is testified by the expenditure made. The construction of Porto Nuovo cost 29 million crowns over 15 years (1868–83) and in the following decade another 10 million crowns were spent extending the port[3] (roughly equivalent to 12 tons of gold). Up until 1914, over 14 million crowns of subsidies were paid to Austrian shipping companies using Trieste.[3] This investment and railway-building resulted in a rapid expansion of Triestine trade, which peaked in 1913 at over 6 million tons of goods, with the port almost entirely reliant on Austro-Hungarian trade, as opposed to transshipment;[3] even after the Italian acquisition of the city, Trieste continued to be a port for central and southeastern Europe, rather than Italian trade,[3] mainly for coffee, sugar and tropical fruits, wines, oils, cotton, iron, wood and machinery.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was a buzzing cosmopolitan city frequented by artists and philosophers such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Sigmund Freud, Dragotin Kette, Ivan Cankar, Scipio Slataper, and Umberto Saba. The city was the major port of the Austrian Riviera, and perhaps the only real enclave of Mitteleuropa south of the Alps. Viennese architecture and coffeehouses still dominate the streets of Trieste to this day.
End of Austrian Trieste
Together with Trento, Trieste was a main focus of the irredentist movement,[10] which aimed for the annexation to Italy of all the lands they claimed were inhabited by an Italian-speaking population. Many local Italians enrolled voluntarily in the Royal Italian Army (a notable example is the writer Scipio Slataper).[11]
After the end of
The union to Italy brought a loss of importance to the city, as it was now a city on the margin of Italy's map, cut off from its economic hinterland.[
The end of Trieste autonomy was a consequence of the
Demographics
The particular Friulian dialect, called Tergestino, spoken until the beginning of the 19th century, was gradually overcome by the Triestine dialect (with a Venetian base, deriving directly from vulgar Latin) and other languages, including German grammar, Slovene and standard Italian languages. While Triestine was spoken by the largest part of the population, German was the language of the Austrian bureaucracy and Slovene was predominant in the surrounding villages. From the last decades of the 19th century, Slovene language speakers grew steadily, reaching 25% of the overall population of the municipality of Trieste in 1911 (30% of the Austro-Hungarian citizens in Trieste).[17]
According to the 1911 census, the proportion of Slovene speakers amounted to 12.6% in the city centre, 47.6% in the suburbs, and 90.5% in the surroundings.
German speakers amounted to 5% of the city's population, with the highest proportions in the city centre. A small number of the population spoke
See also
- Austrian Riviera
- Battles of the Isonzo
- History of Trieste
- London Pact
References
- ^ L'Archeografo triestino (PDF). Classic Reprint Series (in Italian). Vol. 1. Forgotten Books. 1870. p. 298.
- ^ a b Anka Benedetič (1976), "Iz zgodovine Šiške", Javna tribuna (Ljubljana-Šiška) (in Slovenian), vol. 16, no. 130 (Digitalna Knjižnica Slovenije)
- ^ JSTOR 1789641.
- ^ JSTOR 60235914.
- JSTOR 25121657.
- JSTOR 40241050.
- OCLC 38131096.
- ISBN 978-0-7100-7230-6.
- OCLC 4533637.
- ISBN 978-0-7914-4823-6.
- ISBN 978-88-06-16729-5.
- COBISS 11683661. Archived from the originalon 14 October 2012. Retrieved 28 February 2012.
- OCLC 22254249.
- ISBN 978-88-424-9182-8.
- ISBN 9788878000001.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - ^ Carlo Schiffrer (1946). Historic Glance at the Relations between Italians and Slavs in Venezia Giulia. Trieste: Stab. Tip. Nazionale. pp. 25–34.
- ^ a b Pavel Stranj; Vladimir Klemenčič; Ksenija Majovski (1999). Slovensko prebivalstvo Furlanije-Julijske krajine v družbeni in zgodovinski perspektivi [Slovenian population of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the socio-historical perspective] (in Slovenian). Trieste: Slovenski raziskovalni inštitut. pp. 296–302.
- OCLC 1066087.
- Prime Minister Benito Mussolini.
- ^ a b Spezialortsrepertorium der Österreichischen Länder. VII. Österreichisch–Illyrisches Küstenland [Special geographical report of the Austrian Länder VII: Austrian–Illyrian Littoral] (in German). Vienna: Verlag der K.K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei. 1918.