Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/476

448 As has been already mentioned, in many districts of Carniola and Styria there was no župan class at all and no permanent župans, but one of the peasants was made village-magistrate — equally called župan — from time to time and enjoyed in return a certain remission of dues. But this has nothing to do with the hereditary župan of Tüffer and Lichtenwald, where there were settled župans paying large taxes, even four in one and the same village belonging to one and the same landlord.

It will have been seen that a change took place in the signification of the word župan, and at the same time a change in the position of the peasant population in general, a change different according to place and time, and further developed and differentiated by the unequal pressure of their lords, by continual colonisation under new conditions, and by the decay and resettlement of entire villages. The unpretending peasant who was entrusted for a time with the office of village-magistrate had as little in common with the old Slovene župan as the Frankish horseboy (marescallus) with a great French or German marshal.

While thus the former Avaro-Bulgar herdsman nobility, even if divested of overlordship and turned into a peasantry, maintained itself under the German domination in the sixteenth century in a position distinct from the remaining peasantry and in certain districts of Lower Styria as a numerous hereditary class, it disappeared in the neighbouring province of Carinthia long before the German occupation through revolts of the enslaved peasantry. As we have already seen, these latter had heavy burdens to bear in providing their tormentors with supplies of food and fodder, and giving themselves up to be massacred as befulci in countless wars, while the Avar harnessed their wives and daughters like beasts to his wagon, violated them systematically, destroying their family life and indeed reducing their whole existence to the level of brutes. Thus, destitute of all social ties the peasantry revolted; though many risings were stifled in blood before one was successful. And now after ages of servitude a part of the great Slav world was cheered by the sun of a golden freedom, not this time to fade into anarchy. From the midst of the victorious peasantry a prince was chosen to be a just judge and to guarantee the husbandry of the people, and especially the cattle-breeding till then forbidden to them. And that things should ever remain so, a wonderfully ingenious ritual was devised for the installation of each new prince — always a peasant. And as there was as yet no fixed hereditary succession, and a certain time always elapsed before a new prince was installed, the interregnum was provided for by recognition of the eldest member of a certain peasant family as eo ipso vicegerent. So tenaciously did the people cling to this ritual that even the splendid German dukes of Carinthia had to humble themselves to assume the