In the 3rd century, Dalmatia was a central region of the Roman Empire. Even an Emperor born on that coast – Diocletian – had promoted the town of Split to a pseudo-capital, building a titanic palace there. But less than a century later the lands of the eastern Adriatic found themselves becoming a front line. The Goths, first, and the waves of barbarians who followed them depopulated the rich regions of the right bank of the Danube. The border of Italy was marked by the area of ​​Aquileia, and the cities of Istria and Dalmatia became islands of Latinity in a seething sea of ​​barbarian anarchy.

The coastal cities began to gather the refugees who were swarming from the Balkan hinterland towards the West. The Germanic peoples were soon followed by those of the steppes, with their languages ​​incomprehensible to the Romans, and finally those of the eastern marshes, the Slavs. In the 6th century they began to flow from the region now in Poland of the Croatia some tribes who settled between the Liburnian coast and the Drava. A region that had by now become a sort of no-man's-land caught between the Carolingian Empire to the northwest, the Eastern Roman Empire to the southeast and the steppe hordes from the east. And on the coast, the cities that resisted maintaining the memory of Rome.

We welcome refugees

Let's now jump forward seven hundred years. In the 16th century, Venice was a stable master of the Adriatic coast (with the exception of three Italian municipalities: Ragusa, the fifth maritime republic, Trieste and Fiume, which sought protection from foreign kingdoms to maintain their independence from the imperialism of the Serenissima). From the southeast, a new gigantic danger loomed for Europe: the Ottoman Turks, who destroyed the remains of the Byzantine Empire in the mid-15th century and were now spreading across the Balkans.

The first waves of refugees begin to flow into the fortress cities of Dalmatia with the arrival of the Ottoman armies in Albania: they are the Venetianized Albanians who evacuate the coastal cities, while Giorgio Castriota's furious war of independence continues. Nuclei of these populations still survive in Southern Italy, while those closest to Venice have emigrated to Dalmatia. Until the last century, a peripheral neighborhood of Zadar - Borgo Erizzo - was still inhabited by a bilingual majority, who spoke Venetian/Italian alongside Albanian.

Venice opened its doors to this flow of immigration: there were not only religious and idealistic reasons, but also pragmatic ones. Istria and Dalmatia were border lands, and for this reason they were devastated by wars with the Turks and the Habsburgs, by the raids of pirates and unemployed mercenaries (Croatia was one of the reserves of mercenaries in Europe together with Switzerland) and, as a consequence of these indiscriminate movements of armies, by plagues. Repopulating them with the robust Christian peasants of the Balkans seemed like a good idea.

Tongue or blood?

Slavs, Vlachs, Albanians, Greeks, and even Armenians flocked in. Those who had economic means settled in the cities and became Italianized, attracted by the highly refined Venetian culture. The humble classes were distributed in the countryside of the hinterland as colonists. Here illiteracy reigned supreme and the Italian or Venetian language penetrated little, just enough for trade with the coast. In the cities, a strong adhesion was established cultural-linguistics of Latin type to the "nationality" (quotation marks are obligatory, since we are talking about the centuries preceding the contemporary age), in the countryside instead the reference to the blood, typical of the populations of Central-Eastern Europe, remained prevalent.

The integration of the peasant masses into the Italo-Venetian culture was slow. Too slow. In the meantime, the Morlach-Vlach minorities (in general, “Romanian”) tended to disappear, assimilated by the Slavs. The polarization between the cities – Latin, Venetian, Italian – and the countryside, Slavic, was becoming concrete. The penetration of the Italo-Venetian culture was constant – just think of how many Italo-Slavic dialects (the “schiavetto”) were born in the hinge areas between the Italianized cities and the Slavicized countryside. Or the presence of Latin words in the Chavacian language, one of the three dialects of Croatian.

Time's up, nationalism is coming

Then the French Revolution broke out, and with it the end of Venice and the birth of national awareness. First of the Italians, then, by reflection, of the Slavs. In the 1840s the concept (and the word itself) of “Slovenia” was born. The previous decade had seen the first Croatian nationalist newspapers printed often in imitation of the Italian ones. The struggles for Italy’s independence from Austria became an example for those peoples too. However, they were cleverly reabsorbed into the orbit of loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty. With a shrewd master’s move, the Slavs of the hinterland were converted from aspiring independence fighters to irreducible opponents of the Italian Risorgimento. Rather than aspire to detachment from Vienna, they would have preferred to conquer the last islands of Latinity left to those hot-headed revolutionary Italians, thus completing the mechanism set in motion twelve hundred years earlier by the arrival of the first tribes from Croatia. And in Vienna they were rubbing their hands.

The rest – with all due respect to deniers and ignorant people who still today try to mystify reality – is history. The coexistence between Slavs and Italians was irremediably compromised by nationalism. Italy – in its brief parenthesis on those lands in the first post-war period – tried to assimilate the Slavic populations descended from the first immigrants of the dark ages and the new waves of immigration at the dawn of the modern age, but in vain: it was an idea out of time. With the defeat of our country, the Slavs seized the opportunity to close the game with the Latins of the coast: submission or emigration. The Italians chose the latter. And with the Italians also many, many Slavs and the remains of the Balkan communities (such as the aforementioned Albanians of Borgo Erizzo) who had adhered to the Latin, Venetian, Italian culture.

Istria is a severe teacher

A very hard lesson taught by history to those who think that migratory phenomena can be easily governed. Within the populations that immigrated from the Balkan hinterland to the coast, the relationship between those who embraced the Latin-Venetian-Italian culture and those who instead maintained their blood ties with the original lineage (or were assimilated) was extremely limited in favor of the latter. Between the two ideas of "identity belonging", that of blood proved stronger (also because, starting from the nineteenth century, it was accompanied by a powerful cultural campaign that provided it with the support of literacy: ius sanguinis + ius culturae, one might say) and ended up prevailing. To "make Italians" it was no longer enough to send teachers to teach the declension of the verb "to be" in rural Slavic schools, lulled into the idea that the greater cultural refinement of the Peninsula would inevitably attract those people towards Italianization.

by Emmanuele Mastrangelo – 10/02/2021
Source: History On The Net