The Great Moravian territory at the upper/middle Tisza river; Stephen I
Magyar expansion was checked at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. During many centuries the Croats had their bans (viceroys) and their assembly called Sabor. The oldest known Sabor was held in Split in 925 and in 928 (devoted more to religious than to secular questions), and in 1076 when Dmitar Zvonimir was elected the Croatian King by the "unanimous choice of the clergy and the people". In 995, when White Croatian troops led by Sobjeslav were defending their Dukedom from pagan tribes, White Croatia was suddenly attacked by the Czech duke Premysl, destroying their capital Libice and killing most of the Croatian population. There are some conjectures that several noble families in Poland (like Paluk's) are descendants of White Croats, as well as the family of Rozomberk (which seems to be related to the town of Ruzomberok in Slovakia). Sobjeslav was killed in 1004 on a bridge over Vltava river in Prague, when Polish troops tried to occupy the city. The Croats preserved these important state institutions of ban and Sabor also when they decided to enter the Habsburg state (1527--1918). Today the Sabor has the meaning of the Croatian Parliament.
Hungarian settlement in the area became approved by the Pope by the crowning of Stephen I the Saint (Szent István) in 1001 when the leaders accepted Christianity. Stephen I was married in ca. 995 to Giselle of Bavaria, the daughter of Henry II the Wrangler and Gisela of Burgundy. The official entering of Croatia into personal union with Hungary, becoming part of the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, had several important consequences. Stephen's cousin Andrew I was crowned King of Hungary, re-establishing the Árpád dynasty in 1047. Stephen divided Hungary into 40-50 counties and continued the work of his father Géza by applying the decimal organizational system of his ancestors.
The century between the Magyars' arrival from the eastern European plains and the consolidation of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1001 were dominated by pillaging campaigns across Europe, from Dania (Denmark) to the Iberian peninsula (Spain). The Slavic population of the region (and remnants of the Avars in the southwest) was also assimilated by the Magyars, except those living approximately in present-day Slovakia (the ancestors of the Slovak people) and those living in present-day Croatia. The Hungarian king also introduced a variant of the feudal system; large fiefs. During this period, the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller also acquired considerable property and assets in Croatia.
Croatia joined the Kingdom of Hungary in 1102. After freeing themselves from the rule of the Avars in the 7th century, Bohemia's Slavic inhabitants came (in the 9th century) under the rule of the Premyslid dynasty, which continued until 1306. With Bohemia's conversion to Christianity in the 9th century, close relations were forged with the East Frankish kingdom, then part of the so-called Carolingian empire, later the nucleus of the Holy Roman Empire of which Bohemia was an autonomous part from the 10th century. Between 999 and 1019 the land of Moravia was under the rule of Boleslaus I of Poland before becoming part of Bohemia in 1019. It was raised to the status of a margraviate (or mark) in 1182 and has since then shared its history with Bohemia, coming under the rule of the House of Luxembourg between 1349 and 1411 and then under Habsburg rule.
From 1102 the Croats had shared together with Hungarians a newly built state under common Hungarian and Croatian Kings. The Kings were crowned twice: with the Hungarian and the Croatian crown. From that time on, the Croats were dreaming about having their own independent state, and it was revived after almost nine centuries in 1991. During this very long period parts of Croatian soil were dominated by Venetians, Italy (in the first half of the 20th century), the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburgs. Among all the nations reigned by the Habsburgs (Czechs, Poles, Slovenians and others) the Croats are together with Austrians and Hungarians the only ones who have preserved an uninterrupted continuity of their state since the Early Middle Ages. Furthermore, as stated by one of best Croatian historians Vjekoslav Klaic, the Croatian Kingdom was the oldest one in the Habsburg Monarchy, older than Austrian, Hungarian, or Czech Kingdom.
In 1346, Dalmatia was struck by the Black Death. During this period Dalmatia was briefly ruled by Croatian magnates Šubic, the first Bosnian king Stephen Tvrtko, and contested by the Angevins and Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor in the early 15th century, but the end result of this conflict was that the Venetians took control of most of Dalmatia by 1420. The Roma are first mentioned in western Hungary (Burgenland) in 1389. The language Romanes became colonized rather than distinct. By the eighteenth century, the Roms were known as Gypsies by the organizational northern Burgenland when the Roms had settled South Burgenland between the duchies Orelans and Bourbon that were in the middle of the Counter Reformation. Louix VIII France married Anne of Austrasia-Hapsburg. It is little known that there was the Society of Dalmatians in England already in 1590.
Venice was very important place for publishing books of numerous Croatian writers, philosophers and scientists. It is no surprise that in 17th century a Venetian master Bartol Occhi published a catalogue of Croatian books, in which the central Venetian pier (Riva degli Schiavoni) was called Riva od Harvatou, and the catalogue was sold in his workshop in this very street. Precisely in front of the grand hotel Danieli Excelsior in this pier, there is an inscription (hardly legible) showing that this part of Venetian harbour had been reserved for ships from islands of Hvar and Brac: FINE DI STAZIO DEI ABITANTI DELLA BRAZZA E DI LESINA (Lovorka Coralic). During the shameful aggression of Venetians and Crusaders in 1202, the Christian city of Zadar, a dangerous rival of Venice at the time, was robbed and terribly destroyed.
In the partition of the Byzantine empire after the capture of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, Crete was eventually acquired by Venice, which held it for more than four centuries. During Venetian rule, the Greek population of Crete was exposed to Renaissance culture. Geffroy de Villehardouin, a French chronicler who described the siege and destruction of Zadar for the good of Venice during the Crusade, wrote that Zadar in Sclavonia (a synonym of Croatia at that time) is one of the best fortified cities, surrounded with strong walls, and that it is difficult to find a more beautiful, better fortified and richer city.
The Republic of Venice made several attempts to attain control of the Dalmatian islands and city-states, while Byzantium also preserved an influence on them, although one which faded towards the end of the eleventh century, by which time the Kingdom of Hungary also expanded southwards by having Croatia enter into a personal union with the King of Hungary. The 13th- 15th centuries were marked by a rivalry of Venice and Hungary, as the Byzantine influence had fully faded. The once rival Slavic-speaking and Romance-speaking populations of Dalmatia started contributing to a common civilization, and achieved a remarkable development of art, science and literature. The cities would accept foreign sovereignty, mainly of Venice, but strived to preserve local autonomy. The Ottoman invasion further contributed to the inclusion of the Croats and other Slavs in the cities. The Venetians retained the island of Crete until 1669, when the Ottoman Turks took possession of it. Crete is one of the 13 regions into which Greece is divided.
| Venetic is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in ancient times in the Veneto region of Italy, between the Po River delta and the southern fringe of the Alps; and probably also in parts of Slovenia. Venetian, a Romance language presently spoken in the same general region. Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European (predominantly Italic) and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. BC eighth century Cumaean showed strong similarites to the Phoenician alphabet toward influence in the West-Central Mediterranean region. Various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch (Faliscan and members of the Sabellian group, including Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene, and other Indo-European branches such as Venetic and Messapic) originally used the alphabet. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet. The Germanic runic alphabet was most likely derived from one of these alphabets in about the 2nd century.
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