Di terra e poche ignude isole sparte,
O Patria mia, sarai; ma la rinata
Serbia guerriera mano e mite spirto,
showing thereby the extent of the hold of Italian culture over the land. Again, Spalato is the birthplace of Antonio Bajamonti, one of the greatest exponents of Italy’s claims over Dalmatia.
According to the Austrian census of 1910 the population of the province consisted of 645,666 inhabitants. Of these it is estimated that 60,000 are Italians, who constitute the progressive and educated element of the population. The Slav inhabitants number approximately 480,000, but only about 30,000 among them have a speaking knowledge of Italian. The mass of this Slavic element is uneducated.
The Illyrians were early inhabitants of the eastern Adriatic coast whom the Romans had conquered in order to check piracy in the Adriatic. After being tamed these barbarians formed the substratum of the population of Adriatic cities. Throughout the coast their language was displaced during the Middle Ages by the Venetian of Italian traders. In the Albanian mountains, however, the old Illyrian tongue strongly impregnated with Latin words still survives. Roman influence could not be exerted on this rugged land as strongly as on the coast.
Rome’s ancient domination of the Illyrian coast and Wallachian plains led to highly interesting consequences. A genuine Romance language was once spoken by the mountain population of shepherds which extended across the entire Balkan peninsula from the Dalmatian coast, through the Bosnian and Serbian highlands, into the easternmost ranges of the Carpathians. The similarity observable in Balkan and Carpathian mountain dialects thus finds its source in the original easterly expansion of Rome. The Banat territory, in which the proportion of Rumanian inhabitants is high, is the bridge land which connects the Rumanian form of Latin used on the broad Transylvanian shelf to the Albanian prevailing in the broken-up highlands of Albania. Romance speech therefore found a ready soil in the Balkan uplifts. It may even be detected in the mountainous sections of Thrace, a province which also fell under Roman rule during the transition period from pagan to Christian days.
The arrival of Slavs in the seventh century forced the Romans to take refuge behind city walls, so that although the vast non-urban part of the province became Slavic in population, the cities remained Latin and formed themselves into a number of independent republics. These city states passed under Venetian protection in the ninth and tenth centuries to safeguard themselves against the piratical raids of Slavs who had succumbed to the nefarious influence exerted by the dissected coast with its numerous fiords and deep-water harbors.
The Venetian protectorate soon became converted into direct sovereignty. But the yoke of the Doges lay light on the land, the administration of cities being left entirely in the hands of the citizens. Venetian authority was most strongly felt in Dalmatia after the assumption of the title of Dux Histriae et Dalmatiae by Doge Pietro Orseolo II. All the efforts of Hungarians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and of Turks in the seventeenth, to insinuate themselves into Dalmatian affairs were futile. The imposing barrier of the Dinaric Alps forbade intercourse between Dalmatia and the east. Life and progress flowed into the province from the west over Adriatic waters.
Dalmatia changed hands frequently during the Napoleonic period. Perhaps it is on this account that the Dalmatian, when questioned regarding his nationality, answers by stating that he has two languages. Of these he calls one “lingua del cuore,” and the other “lingua del pane.” His native province was awarded to Austria by the treaty of Campoformio in 1797 and subsequently annexed to Napoleon’s Empire by the treaty of Presburg in 1805. It reverted to Austrian rule in 1814. Successive masters, however, failed to root out Italian in the region. The language was recognized as official until 1860. The formation of a united Italian state marked the beginning of a repressive policy directed against Italians by the Austrian government. The effort of the Hapsburg administration was entirely directed towards the development of the Adriatic Slavs in order to counterbalance Italian influence. A great revival of Croatian and Serbian national feeling resulted from this policy.