Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/473

Rh Slovenish village-župa formed in a certain sense an economic whole, in that all dwellers in the župa-district possessed right of pasture; consequently the župa was here an undivided grazing-district throughout which the agricultural rotation proceeded as long as there were no permanent fields, and as long as the cornfields opened by clearing or the burning of a piece of forest and again abandoned after their exhaustion became derelict and once more forest-land. In consequence of this general right of use by the inhabitants the word župa in Servia became personified, and signified also the whole of the inhabitants entitled to the right of pasture — and formally of clearing too — the compastores, conterranei, so to speak. So long as the Avars were lords in the land, and so long as they remained wandering herdsmen, the requirements of their pasturing and their tyranny were decisive; the enslaved Slav peasantry could place their fields only where it suited their masters, and there could be no idea of a peasant right of clearing. In the Balkan peninsula the nomad shepherds wintered with their herds on sunny snowless sea shores, and for this reason in Dalmatia the word župa denotes a sunny land where snow does not fall or where it melts rapidly. Some such districts — standing winter-quarters of the nomads — finally retained the word as their name. Among the Carinthian, Bohemian, and Polish Slavs we find no such župans and no such župas, for here peasant dynasties arose through peasant revolutions and the župans had to give way. But the name itself remained, or was borrowed anew from neighbouring Slavs, and župan in Bohemia signified a high state official, and župa on the one hand is beneficium, and on the other the office connected with it. The members of the highest Bohemian and Polish nobility had the title pan (originally gŭpan). This word has no connexion with župan, but arose from a title kopan attested by a Bulgarian inscription as before mentioned.

The Avars and Bulgars naturally tolerated no other dominus among the directly dominated Slavs, they were themselves the župans, and as župans remained as domini after the break-up of the Avar Empire, and indeed among the Sorbs and Alpine Slavs, and here and there were very numerous, so that they are to be considered as the Avar and Bulgar dominating class Slavised by the lapse of time, and no longer nationally different from the subject people.

From the conglomeration of Slavs planted by the Avars in the Eastern Alps was formed the people of the Slovenes (Carantani). They extended from the Adriatic Sea to the Danube, and from East Tyrol deep into Hungary. As they had the Avar main horde at hand on the Danube and the Theiss, they were most deeply enslaved. After the destruction of the Avar kingdom by Charles the Great their social organisation appears greatly changed. In Lower Styria south of Cilli as late as the fifteenth century they were under an uncommonly numerous hereditary župan class, and even in the smallest hamlet there were one,