In May 1870 Fiume was annexed to Hungary, but in 1873 the
Croats received as compensation an increase of their guaranteed
revenue to £350,000, an addition of seven to the number of their
representatives at Budapest, and a promise that the military
frontier should be incorporated in the existing civil provinces.
In 1877 a convention with Hungary regulated the control of
public estates in the military frontier, and on the 15th of July
1881 the frontier, including the district of Sichelburg claimed
by Carniola, was handed over to the local administration.
Meanwhile the events of 1875–1878 in the Balkans, culminating in the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, revived the agitation for a “Great Croatia.” A party separate from the regular Opposition, and known as the “Party of the Right,” was formed to oppose the Magyarists. Its activity resulted in the riots of 1883, which were with difficulty quelled; in 1885 its leader, N. Starčević, was condemned to imprisonment for the violence of his speeches against the ban, Count Khuen-Héderváry. In 1888 the moderate Opposition also lost its leader, Bishop Strossmayer, who was censured by the king on account of his famous Panslavist telegram to the Russian Church (see Strossmayer). In 1889 the financial agreement with Hungary was revised and the contribution of Croatia-Slavonia to the expenses shared with Hungary or common to the whole of the Dual Monarchy was raised by 1%. This added burden combined with bad harvests, a fall in the revenue and a deficit in the budget to heighten popular discontent. Count Khuen-Héderváry was responsible for several administrative improvements, but the prosperity of the country declined from year to year. The government was accused of illegal interference with the elections, with the use of the Hungarian arms and language in official documents, and with undue harshness in the censorship of the press. In May 1903 there were outbreaks of rioting in Agram, Sissek and other towns, besides serious agrarian disturbances directed against the Magyarist landowners; in a debate in the Reichsrath (18th May) an Austrian deputy named Bianchini unsuccessfully attempted to induce the imperial government to intervene. At the end of June Count Khuen-Héderváry was made Hungarian prime minister; Count T. Pejačević succeeded him as ban, and restored quiet by promising freedom of assembly and greater liberty of the press. Since 1898 the financial agreement had only been renewed from year to year. But the estimates for 1904 revealed another heavy deficit; and this was only paid by Hungary on condition that the agreement should be renewed until the 31st of December 1913, and the contribution of 56% maintained.
The constitutional crisis of 1905 in Hungary stimulated the nationalist agitation. A congress of Croatian and Dalmatian deputies met at Spalato to advocate Serbo-Croatian unity, and in 1906 the municipality of Agram endeavoured to petition the king in favour of union with Bosnia and Herzegovina. This propaganda was severely discouraged. Baron Rauch, appointed ban in 1908, refused to summon the diet, in which he could not command a single vote, and much excitement was caused in 1909 by the trial of 57 nationalist leaders for high treason. The policy of the nationalists, who now aimed at the political union, under the king-emperor, of all Serbo-Croats in Austria-Hungary—upwards of 4,500,000—was less visionary than the older Illyrism, and less aggressively Panslavist. It no longer sought to include Carinthia, Carniola and Styria in the proposed “Great Croatia.” It was opposed by Austria as tending to create a new and formidable Slavonic nation within the Dual Monarchy, and by Hungary as a menace to Magyar predominance in Transleithania.
Language and Literature.
For the place of the Croatian dialects among Slavonic languages generally, see Slavs. The Croatian dialects, like the Servian, have gradually developed from the Old Slavonic, which survives in medieval liturgies and biblical or apocryphal writings. The course of this development was similar in both cases, except that the Croats, owing to their dependence on Austria-Hungary, were not so deeply influenced as the Serbs by Byzantine culture in the middle ages, and by Russian linguistic forms and Russian ideas in modern times. The Orthodox Serbs, moreover, use a modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet, while the Roman Catholic Croats use Latin characters, except in a few liturgical books which are written in the ancient Glagolitic script. As the literary language of both nations is now practically the same, and is, indeed, commonly known as “Serbo-Croatian,” the reader may be referred to the article Servia: Language and Literature, for an account of its history, of its chief literary monuments up to the 19th century and inclusive of Dalmatian literature, and of the principal differences between the dialects spoken in Servia and Croatia-Slavonia.
The three most important Croatian dialects are known as the Čakavci, Čakavština or, in Servian, Chakavski, spoken along the Adriatic littoral; the Štokavci (Štokavština, Shtokavski), spoken in Servia and elsewhere in the north-west of the Balkan Peninsula; and the Kajkavci (Kajkavština, Kaykavski), spoken by the partly Slovene population of the districts of Agram, Warasdin and Kreuz. This classification is based on the form, varying in different localities, of the pronoun ča, što, or kaj, meaning “what.”
The Cakavci literature includes most of the works of the Dalmatian writers of the 15th and 16th centuries—the golden age of Serbo-Croatian literature. Its history is indissolubly interwoven with that of the Štokavci, which ultimately superseded it, and became the literary language of all the Serbo-Croats, as it had long been the language of the best national ballads and legends.
Kajkavci had from about 1550 to 1830 a distinctive literature, consisting of chronicles and histories, poems of a religious or educational character, fables and moral tales. These writings possess more philological interest than literary merit, and are hardly known outside Croatia-Slavonia and the Slovene districts of Austria.
Apart from the Kajkavci dialect, the whole body of Serbo-Croatian literature up to the 19th century may justly be regarded as the common heritage of Serbs and Croats. The linguistic and literary reforms which Dossitey Obradovich and Vuk Stefanovich Karajich carried out in Servia about the close of this period helped to stimulate among the Croats a new interest in their national history, their traditions, folk-songs and folk-tales. One result of this nationalist revival was the unsuccessful attempt made between 1814 and 1830 to raise the Čakavci dialect to the rank of a distinctive literary language for Croatia-Slavonia; but the Illyrist movement of 1840 led to the adoption of the Štokavci, which was already the vernacular of the majority of Serbo-Croats. Ljudevit Gaj (1809–1872), though he failed to create an artificial literary language by the fusion of the principal dialects spoken by Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was by his championship of Illyrism instrumental in securing the triumph of the Štokavci. Gaj was a poet of considerable talent, and one of the founders of Croatian journalism. Among other writers of the first half of the 19th century may be mentioned Ivan Mažuranić (1813–1890), whose first poems were published in the Danica ilirska (“Illyrian Dawnstar”), a journal founded and for a time edited by Gaj. In 1846 Mažuranić published his Smrt Smail Aga Čengića (“Death of Ismail Aga Čengić”), called by Serbo-Croats the “Epos of Hate.” This remarkable poem, written in the metre of the old Servian ballads, gives a vivid description of life in Bosnia under Turkish rule, and of the hereditary border feuds between Christians and Moslems. In later life Mažuranić distinguished himself as a statesman, and became ban of Croatia from 1873 to 1880. Other writers representative of Croatian literature before 1867 were the lyric poet Stanko Vraz (1810–1851) and Dragutin Rakovac (1813–1854), the author of many patriotic songs.
With the foundation of the South Slavonic Academy at Agram, in 1867, the study of science and history received a new impetus. Under the presidency of Franko Rački (1825–1894) the academy, with its journal the Rad jugoskovenske Akademije, became the headquarters of an active group of savants, among whom may be mentioned Vastroslav Jagić (b. 1838), sometime editor of the
