For more than twelve centuries Austria’s geographical position has made her the protectress of Europe from successive onslaughts of barbarian hordes pressing from the east. The German-speaking nucleus of the present Dual Monarchy was founded, at the end of the eighth century, by Charles the Great as a bulwark against the Avars. A little later the rôle of stemming the tide of Hungarian attacks also devolved upon it. Fighting incessantly and on the whole successfully against eastern invaders, the Austrians gradually extended their territory towards the Orient. The valley of the Danube provided them with settling-land and passage-way. War and marriages brought their share of added territory to the Hapsburg reigning family. By 1526 Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia and Hungary had been added to the Empire. Transylvania was conquered in the seventeenth century, Galicia and Bukovina in the eighteenth. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Austria was the leader among German-speaking states. Prussian shot and shell ousted her from this position at the battle of Sadowa in 1866. But the task undertaken over a thousand years ago is still being performed. Austrians today are engaged in another effort to check the westward Slavic flow.

The country is ill-prepared to meet its hereditary foe. The sovereign existence of Austria-Hungary to this day can be regarded only as an exceedingly marvelous feat of political jugglery. Its weakness lies in the presence of strong contingents of dissimilar races in its population. Struggle between the component masses is as unending as it is passionate. To the lack of linguistic or racial affinity must be added the want of a liberal form of government in the strictly representative or federative sense. Representative government, in the absence of everything else, might have provided the required bond of political cohesion. Of the total population of Austria only 11,000,000, or 24 per cent, are Germans. These Teutons pay allegiance to the Hapsburg emperor along with 9,000,000 Hungarians, 3,000,000 Rumanians and about 1,000,000 Italians. The Slavic race, however, outnumbers every other element in the Empire. Its 21,000,000 members constitute 44 per cent of the subjects of Charles I.

In one sense Austria’s mission of protecting Europe ended as soon as the Ottoman Empire ceased to be a source of danger. To consolidate Danubian nationalities in a single group capable of withstanding the Turkish advance had constituted Austria’s most glorious part in modern history. With the elimination of the Turkish danger, the necessity of political union among the peoples occupying the valley of the Danube was removed. The chief reason for the maintenance of an Austrian state thereby ceases to exist. Events of our own times reveal the natural working out of these international problems. As long as Mohammedanism threatened to absorb Christianity in southeastern Europe, the various peoples of the Austrian Empire stood shoulder to shoulder against a common foe. The sense of security now induces them to turn their thoughts on themselves and effectively hasten the growth of national consciousness based on ideals and aspirations which can be expressed in a common language.

The passing of Austria’s usefulness as a nation has been marked by the country’s growing vassalage to the leading Teutonic power. At Berlin, the center of Imperial Germany, the aim of every leader is to further the easterly expansion of the Empire. Austria, commanding the natural route to the southeast, figures as a precious asset in these imperial estimates. But success to German ambition spells defeat to the dreams of political independence cherished in the minds of the peoples of Austria-Hungary. A conflict of vital importance to each contestant is raging. The struggle is likely to be maintained wherever more than a single language continues to be spoken.

The mastery of the Adriatic, claimed by Italy at present, has been contested in the past twenty-five centuries by every people which succeeded in gaining a foothold on its shores. Illyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Turks each in their day acquired maritime supremacy in the Mediterranean, and naturally aspired to control this waterway. The prize was worth fighting for. It was part of the lane of traffic between the rich valley of the Po, the lands beyond the Alps and eastern countries. In the present century eastern trade generally runs in different channels. A sufficient tonnage, however, finds its way to the great harbors of the Adriatic to excite Italian ambitions. Moreover Italian manufacturers are looking forward to the establishment of crosswise trade relations with the Balkan peninsula. These are economic considerations which impart definite aim to the policy of Italian statesmen.

The most satisfactory picture of Italian desire to annex Dalmatia appears on maps of the Adriatic, which show the contrast between the opposite coasts. On the Italian side, the coastline runs with monotonous uniformity. It is devoid of the headlands, gulfs or islands which impart economic, strategic and scenic value to Dalmatia. Barring short stretches in Puglia the entire Italian coast is shallow and sandy. Its well-known ports hardly deserve the name. Mariners are well aware of the obstacles to navigation along the whole western Adriatic shore. At the head of this sea, especially, the situation for Italian shipping is most unfavorable, owing to the large number of rivers which discharge material collected from practically the entire eastern watershed of the Alps and that of the northern Apennines. From west to east some among the most important of these rivers are the Po, Adige, Piave and Isonzo. This piling of material, added to the process of land emergence going on at the head of the Adriatic, impairs the value of the Gulf of Venice to modern navigation.

The Dalmatian coast, however, with its numerous bays and gulfs setting far into the land and broken by many headlands, is fringed by a garland of outlying islands. These natural features of the region provide the advantages denied to Italy. Almost every mile of shore in Dalmatia contains a commodious harbor for merchantmen or a well-sheltered base for war vessels. Most of the rivers originating in the mountain chains overlooking blue water flow eastward toward the Danube. Very little silt and sediment therefore finds its way to the Dalmatian coast.

Linguistically, the eastern shore of the Adriatic is Serbian or Albanian. But the history of this coastal land is Italian in spite of the showing of census returns as to the decided numerical inferiority of Italians within its limits. Rome had reached Dalmatia and the Near East by way of the Adriatic. A whole chain of imposing ruins extending to the wild Albanian shores bear the unmistakable impress of Roman splendor. In the partition of the Roman Empire in 295 A.D. Dalmatia was assigned to the western and not to the eastern half. The period of its subjection to Venetian rule is one of the most brilliant in its history. All the civilization it received came from the west.

The fact is that the Italian element has always been predominant. After 1866 its influence was viewed with disfavor by the Austrian government. Serbians and Croats were encouraged to settle in the Italian communities of the coast and officials of the Dual Monarchy were instructed to assist the Slavs in every possible manner with a view to counterbalancing Italian primacy in the province. In recent years the task of the Austrian government became doubly difficult, for its representatives could not avoid playing alternately into the hands of Serbians and Italians.

Dalmatia has always greeted Italian thought as the heritage of Rome and Venice. Its history, its most notable monuments and its whole culture are products of either Roman or Venetian influence. The maritime cities in particular still remain strongholds of Italian thought. Almost every one boasts of a native son who has distinguished himself in the cause of Italy.

Zara, which Italian authors delight in qualifying as “italianissima,” is the native city of the Italian patriot Arturo Colantti. The great Dalmatian poet Niccoló Tomasseo, whose monument was erected in Sebenico in 1896, was a son of this city and, although an intensely patriotic Slav, nevertheless thus expressed himself in Italian:

showing thereby the extent of the hold of Italian culture over the land. Again, Spalato is the birthplace of Antonio Bajamonti, one of the greatest exponents of Italy’s claims over Dalmatia.

According to the Austrian census of 1910 the population of the province consisted of 645,666 inhabitants. Of these it is estimated that 60,000 are Italians, who constitute the progressive and educated element of the population. The Slav inhabitants number approximately 480,000, but only about 30,000 among them have a speaking knowledge of Italian. The mass of this Slavic element is uneducated.

The Illyrians were early inhabitants of the eastern Adriatic coast whom the Romans had conquered in order to check piracy in the Adriatic. After being tamed these barbarians formed the substratum of the population of Adriatic cities. Throughout the coast their language was displaced during the Middle Ages by the Venetian of Italian traders. In the Albanian mountains, however, the old Illyrian tongue strongly impregnated with Latin words still survives. Roman influence could not be exerted on this rugged land as strongly as on the coast.

Rome’s ancient domination of the Illyrian coast and Wallachian plains led to highly interesting consequences. A genuine Romance language was once spoken by the mountain population of shepherds which extended across the entire Balkan peninsula from the Dalmatian coast, through the Bosnian and Serbian highlands, into the easternmost ranges of the Carpathians. The similarity observable in Balkan and Carpathian mountain dialects thus finds its source in the original easterly expansion of Rome. The Banat territory, in which the proportion of Rumanian inhabitants is high, is the bridge land which connects the Rumanian form of Latin used on the broad Transylvanian shelf to the Albanian prevailing in the broken-up highlands of Albania. Romance speech therefore found a ready soil in the Balkan uplifts. It may even be detected in the mountainous sections of Thrace, a province which also fell under Roman rule during the transition period from pagan to Christian days.

The arrival of Slavs in the seventh century forced the Romans to take refuge behind city walls, so that although the vast non-urban part of the province became Slavic in population, the cities remained Latin and formed themselves into a number of independent republics. These city states passed under Venetian protection in the ninth and tenth centuries to safeguard themselves against the piratical raids of Slavs who had succumbed to the nefarious influence exerted by the dissected coast with its numerous fiords and deep-water harbors.

The Venetian protectorate soon became converted into direct sovereignty. But the yoke of the Doges lay light on the land, the administration of cities being left entirely in the hands of the citizens. Venetian authority was most strongly felt in Dalmatia after the assumption of the title of Dux Histriae et Dalmatiae by Doge Pietro Orseolo II. All the efforts of Hungarians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and of Turks in the seventeenth, to insinuate themselves into Dalmatian affairs were futile. The imposing barrier of the Dinaric Alps forbade intercourse between Dalmatia and the east. Life and progress flowed into the province from the west over Adriatic waters.

Dalmatia changed hands frequently during the Napoleonic period. Perhaps it is on this account that the Dalmatian, when questioned regarding his nationality, answers by stating that he has two languages. Of these he calls one “lingua del cuore,” and the other “lingua del pane.” His native province was awarded to Austria by the treaty of Campoformio in 1797 and subsequently annexed to Napoleon’s Empire by the treaty of Presburg in 1805. It reverted to Austrian rule in 1814. Successive masters, however, failed to root out Italian in the region. The language was recognized as official until 1860. The formation of a united Italian state marked the beginning of a repressive policy directed against Italians by the Austrian government. The effort of the Hapsburg administration was entirely directed towards the development of the Adriatic Slavs in order to counterbalance Italian influence. A great revival of Croatian and Serbian national feeling resulted from this policy.

The award of the entire eastern Adriatic coast to Italy would not only trespass on lands of alien speech, but would seriously hamper future economic development of Croatians and Serbians by preventing these peoples from attaining the sea. These points are admitted by most Italian irredentists. They therefore limit their claims to the Istrian peninsula and the coast region of Dalmatia comprised between the Velebiti range and the Narenta river. Italy’s position in the Adriatic would be improved by the recognition of the rights of her Slav neighbors. The goodwill of a united and liberated Jugoslavia, which would be bound to Italy by ties of interest and sentiment, would thus be acquired.

The Croatian coastland, in the section which extends along the waterway of the same name from the gulf of Fiume to the mouth of the Zermagna river, is known as the Morlacca. The bay of Buccari is strategically necessary for the protection of Fiume, and Italians would probably make a strong claim for its possession in case the larger seaport came into their possession. The Serbian coastland really begins south of the Narenta river and centers around Ragusa. This is the only city of any importance on the Adriatic coast in which evidences of Serbian culture are discernible.

The old Slavic settlers were probably traders who plied between the coasts of Dalmatia and Abruzzi during the Middle Ages. In the kingdom of Naples Slav colonists are known as early as the eleventh century, during the reign of Emperor Otto I. The bulk of Slavic immigration into Italy dates, however, from the beginning of the fifteenth century when possession of the coast provinces was disputed by the Aragonians and Angevins. Both claimants induced Slavs to colonize the contested regions on condition that they would recognize the authority of those who provided them with land. At a later period the advance of Turkish hordes in the Balkans drove a large number of Slavic families westward.

The Turkish conquest of Greece also forced many Greek families to seek safety on the Italian mainland. As a result, two communities of Greek speech are found on Italian territory at Lecce in the province of Puglia and at Bora in Calabria. The vernacular of both these regions contains a strong proportion of Italian words without, however, losing its affinity with the original mother tongue. The Lecce community consists of 4,973 families scattered in nine communi. The southern group is represented by 2,389 families settled in four communi of the Bora district, in Reggio di Calabria and in Palizzi. Altogether Greek is spoken as a vernacular by 30,700 inhabitants of Italy.

Still another reminder of the Turkish conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is afforded by the presence of an Albanian element living along the eastern coast of Italy. This group consists of between 80,000 and 90,000 Albanians speaking their own language. The purity of Albanian speech and custom has been preserved by them on the alien soil skirting western Adriatic waters.[68]

This total shows a marked decrease from the figure of 96,000 reported in the census of 1901. Emigration accounts mainly for this loss. At the same time, a tendency among Albanians to forsake their vernacular for Italian is discernible as intercourse with the dominant element increases.

All these nuclei of foreign languages cannot impair the unity of Italian nationality because the racial distinctions on which they are based have been largely obliterated. The final supremacy of Italian language is already in sight. From the valleys of Piedmont to the eastern coastlands which face Albania, the alien tongues are giving way before the national vernacular, perhaps just because no pressure or effort to hasten their disappearance is being exerted by the government.

TABLE I

Inhabitants of Italy Speaking Non-Italian Vernaculars[69]

The proportion of inhabitants of Italian (including Ladin) speech in the Adriatic lands claimed by Italy is given as follows according to the Austrian Census of 1910:[71]

TABLE II

Proportion of Inhabitants of Italian (Including Ladin) Speech in the Adriatic Lands Claimed by Italy According to the Austrian Census of 1910: