Croatia

CROATIA. - I. GEOGRAPHY. - A region of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, occupying approximately the same borders as the kingdom of the same name, which had a brief existence during the Second World War.

The kingdom of C., united with the Crown of Hungary, measured, in 1913, 42,534 sq. km. in area with 2,261,954 inhabitants; the one that arose and disappeared during the Second World War, comprising beyond the original core a large part of Dalmatia, Slavonia and the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina, covered ca. 106 thousand sq. km. in area with 7 million inhabitants. The present-day Croatian People's Republic measures 57,400 sq. km. with 3,749,039 inhabitants (1949). Important cities are: Zagreb, Osijek, Varaždin, Karlovac, Brod, Ragusa and Split.

C. is made up of the Dinaric zone to the SW. of the rivers Kupa and Sava and of the Pannonian zone, which consists of two parts: a mountainous one that is an extension of the Alpine zone and a flat one around the rivers Sava, Drava and Danube. The climate of C. has a continental character with hot summers and rigid winters and a violent "bora" on the high plateaus.

C. is distinguished by its partial lack of religious unity. The majority is Catholic (60%), especially in Dalmatia, Slavonia, central and south-western Bosnia; the "Orthodox" constitute ca. 29%, the Muslims 11%. The latter descend from the "Patarenes" who infiltrated the country around 1200, who after the Turkish conquest embraced Islam.

Gastone Imbrighi

II. CIVIL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

The Croats, a very ancient people (in the 6th century B.C. they lived in Iran), who moved to central Europe around Kraków, according to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, were already in the 7th century A.D. (unlike the other Slavs) governed by their own solid form of state. Called by Heraclius, after having defeated the Avars and occupied Pannonia, they then descended to settle along the whole of Dalmatia, where the Roman element had fallen under the subjection of the Avars (first half of the 7th century). Immediately after their arrival in Dalmatia the Croats received Baptism from missionaries called by Rome in the times of John IV (640-42). From then until our own days, those whom in 925 Pope John X would call "specialissimi filii Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae", according to the letter written to the first "king Tomislav", found in their attachment to the Roman See and to the Catholic faith an element of strength and of national self-identification, in the face of the connected expansive assaults of Serbian Orthodoxy and of the Muslim Turks. Bound to Rome, under the papacy of Agatho (678-81) by "covenants signed with their own hand and by firm and inviolable oaths to St. Peter the Apostle", pledging not to invade the lands of others but to live "in peace with all those who wished it" (according to the account of Porphyrogenitus in De administrando Imperio), this bond with the West was accentuated as a consequence of the Frankish expansion toward central Europe, when around 800 the two Croats, the Pannonian and the Dalmatian, recognized Frankish sovereignty. Toward the end of the 9th century a dark period began for Croatia, marked by internal struggles between the Frankophile party, gathered around Duke Domagoj (864-76), and the Byzantine party which with Sedeslaus tried to induce the Croats to the schism of Photius, but without success. Once the latter was overthrown by Branimir, the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire and the very crisis of the papacy over the investiture struggle induced the Croatian dynasty to orient itself ever more toward Byzantium. The Glagolitic liturgy was in use among the Croats already around 900: that is, the Roman rite resting on the Old Slavonic language

CROATIA - Remains of the fortifications (16th century) of the cathedral of Zagreb (13th century, restored in 1880).

and on the Glagolitic script. Six dioceses preserve this privilege. With the general recovery of the Roman Church under Gregory VII, Dalmatian Croatia, after a long period of struggles, Norman interventions from Apulia, and Venetians at Split (February 1076), succeeded in firmly integrating itself among the states that the strong theocratic conception of Gregory VII placed under the direct dependence of the See of Rome. Zvonimir, crowned Rex Chroatiae Dalmatiaeque in 1076, accentuated the orientation of his people toward the West. After the death, in 1089, of Zvonimir (penultimate king of the national Trpimirović dynasty), following internal turmoil, two years later Ladislaus of Hungary took advantage of the situation of anarchy to extend his dominion over Pannonian Croatia, while his successor Coloman, by the pacta conventa of 1102, obtained that of Dalmatia by right of succession, joining at Biograd the Crown of Croatia to that of St. Stephen. From then on there was a double coronation of the Árpád kings, in Hungary and in Croatia.

From this moment the history of Croatia merges with that of Hungary, to which it continued to be a regnum associatum until 1791. Having recognized themselves nationally from the outset in Rome and in Catholicism, the Croats continued for centuries to defend together their national individuality and the Catholic positions in the Balkans, against the assaults and then the connected penetration of the Turks on the political-military side, and of the Serbs on the religious-national one. In 1242 the Croats are seen halting at their own borders the Mongols of Kadan, while the Turkish conquest of Bosnia opened the gates of Croatia, which in a short time fell under the dominion of their raids. In vain Pius II on 22 Oct. 1463 proclaimed a crusade precisely to liberate Bosnia and relieve the Turkish pressure that was spreading as far as Hungary, Carinthia and Friuli. The last queen, Catherine, a blessed of the Franciscan Order, died in Rome in 1478, leaving the kingdom to the Holy See. The Croats remained practically alone, and the necessities of defense brought to the fore the "ban of Croatia", with a captain general (1477) under his command, who, as the only true representative of the people, had his own army as the greatest guarantee of national liberty. The centuries-long struggle of the Croats against the Turks earned them the title of "scutum saldissimum et antemurale Christianitatis" (Leo X, 1519). Overrun and devastated by Turkish raids, what would come to be defined as the "reliquiae reliquiarum olim inclyti regni Chroatiae" became the object of a slow national as well as religious erosion at the hands of "Orthodoxy", which under Ottoman rule had become a tenacious factor in preserving Serbian national individuality. From 1527 the territory, now more restricted, passed by the free decision of the Croatian parliament under the dominion of the Habsburgs, in whose hands it remained until 1918.

The Croats also sought to hold firm to their individuality, above all in relation to Hungary, with which they tended to achieve equality of rights. The movement was accentuated as a consequence of the entry, in part, into the Napoleonic orbit as Illyrian provinces (1809-13), giving rise to stirrings of national rebirth which, under the name of Illyrism, would be renewed with Gaj and would remain alive throughout the 19th century.

If the constitution of 1849 emphasized the complete separation of Croatia from Hungary, it is to Msgr. G. Strossmayer, bishop of Djakovo from 1848, that a perceptible impulse is due, above all religious and cultural, toward the consolidation of Croatian aspirations for a broad autonomy, reconfirmed in 1868. The period up to 1918 is characterized by the struggle for the defense of this autonomy, and, when the First World War broke out, the collapse of the "dual monarchy" led to the separation from it of Slovenia and Croatia, which together with Serbia went to form Yugoslavia (1 Dec. 1918).

The coexistence of the Croats within the new Yugoslav state was anything but easy, given the disputes of stock and religion. Although the Constitution affirmed the principle of the equality of all religions, in fact the government, in the hands, predominantly, of the "Orthodox" Serbian element and always inclined to identify State and national Church, supported the expansion of "Orthodoxy" through obstacles to Catholic schools and the construction of "Orthodoses", favoring mixed marriages or the actual passage to schism. Thus it could happen that in twenty years the percentage of Catholics decreased by 4%, about a tenth of their numerical strength. Because of the pressures of the Serbian schismatic hierarchy, Belgrade did not ratify the Concordat concluded with the Holy See on July 25, 1935. At the same time the struggle against Serbism was also taking place on the political terrain, where the Croats were divided between the more extreme and intransigent current of Pavelić's Ustaše, which wanted separation from Yugoslavia, and the peasant party of Vl. Maček, inclined toward a broad autonomy, which it later achieved with the Maček-Cvetković agreement of Aug. 25, 1939. When the Second World War broke out, on Apr. 10, 1941 the independent State of C. was proclaimed, whose tormented life, marked by violence and massacres in the various belligerent camps, came to an end on May 6, 1945 following the German collapse. With the new Yugoslav Constitution (Nov. 30, 1946), C. became one of the six federal Republics, and in it communist totalitarianism did not spare clergy and faithful, along with all opponents of the regime. The trial against the archbishop of Zagreb, Msgr. J. Stepinac, sentenced to 16 years of forced labor (Oct. 11, 1946), was sensational.

For the ecclesiastical circumscriptions, the liturgy, art and literature: v. IUGOSLAVIA.

Angelo Tamborra.