In the Banat and elsewhere under Habsburg rule the Serbs were filling
their accustomed part and fighting, now against the Turk and now
against Rakoczi's insurrection, during which, between 1703 and 1711,
they are said to have lost about a hundred thousand men. Prince Eugene
of Savoy, in whose campaigns they took a large share, described them
as "his best scouts, his lightest cavalry, his most trusted
garrisons." And they are rewarded--Joseph I., making use of very
chosen phrases, insists on the merits of the Serbs and confirms their
privileges. And until the Treaty of Pojarevac these privileges are
maintained immune. This treaty came at the conclusion of the 1716-1718
war against the Turks; it put the Banat in the hands of Austria, who
made it a Crown-land, with military government and autonomous
administration. From this time onward the country, which had had an
exclusively Serbian colouring, begins to receive an influx of
strangers. The German governing class introduce Germans from the
Rhine, from Saxony, from Wuertemberg, Bavaria, Upper and Lower Austria
and Tirol. Not only are these colonists settled in some of the most
fertile parts, but Vienna also makes enormous grants of land in the
Banat to lofty military personages and to families of the
aristocracy, and these in their turn assist the immigration of
Germans.
But before the Habsburgs could continue in their efforts to
assimilate, by one process or another, the Southern Slavs in the
Empire, it was necessary to induce them to accept the Pragmatic
Sanction, for Charles VI., the reigning Emperor, had lost his only son
and wished to secure the succession to Maria Theresa. It is
interesting to see that Croatia negotiated independently of Hungary,
that she recognized the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713, whereas the
Magyars did not do so until 1733. Consequently, if the Emperor had
died between these two dates Croatia would have been separated
completely from Hungary. Maria Theresa would have become Queen of
Croatia, but the Magyars would not have been obliged to place
themselves under her. The Croats on this occasion declared that the
crown of Croatia was to pass to that member of the House of Habsburg
who should reign not only in Austria but also in the other hereditary
Austrian lands, for the Croats wanted publicly to show that any
separation from the Slovenes of Carniola, Carinthia and Styria would
be far less endurable for them than separation from Hungary. "It is
neither by force nor yet the spirit of slavery," they said, "that we
have been put under the domination of Hungary; we have submitted
ourselves voluntarily, and not to the royalty but to the king of the
Hungarians."
The Serb and Croat element in the Austrian army was at this time
greater than the sum of all the others, and, owing to the privileges
which their services acquired for them, they came to be regarded with
extreme suspicion by the Magyars. It was under Magyar influence that
Maria Theresa abolished the Croatian council, confided its functions
to the Hungarian Government, and, on the same occasion, in 1779,
proclaimed the town of Rieka (Fiume), with its surroundings, to be
"_separatum sacrae regni Hungariae coronae adnexum corpus_." Rieka, like
Triest, had been a free town under the Habsburgs, the reason being
that they were the chief arteries of trade, so that a greater freedom
was desirable. Like Triest, Rieka does not appear up to this date to
have shown any hankering for Venice, and Maria Theresa's diploma
which renews the freedom is hardly evidence, as some people have
asserted, that the town was throbbing with Italian sympathies.