On the silliness of the Illyrian theory and the myth of the "noble savage"

Contrary to one of the usual narratives one will likely encounter when researching the sad recent history of Dalmatia - that the Italian intellectual class during the Risorgimento was composed of anti-Slav chauvinists motivated by hatred for the "native" Slavs - Italian and other European historians and linguists contributed in no small part to the perpetuation and spread of the many myths underpinning Croatian nationalism and Yugoslavism. A passage from one of the polemics of linguist Graziadio Ascoli is illustrative both of the romantic sympathies and factually suspect conception of history held by many Italian and other European intellectuals in the late 19th century:

"...Italians compose by a large margin the majority of the population of Zara, of the modest capital of the province or Kingdom [of Croatia], by which name it was called even by reigning Venice; and it is, in the eyes of the Slavs, as if the capital of France was populated by Englishmen or the capital of Hungary by Romanians. The [Slavic] indigenous people, all told, no longer tolerate these colonizers, whose presence disheartens them: they understand that, were they to assimilate themselves with them, they would disappear, as the Hellenes of Magna Grecia disappeared before the Italics. And the threat is summed up in the shout heard from the Uskoks: Chase them into the sea!"

The irony in these assertions is twofold.

Firstly: the indigenous people of Dalmatia are those known collectively to history as the Illyrians, Indo-Europeans who in antiquity lived not only on the eastern shore of the Adriatic but also settled upon its western shore, in Puglia. Obviously (contrary to the romantic delusions of 19th century Croatian nationalists whose "Illyrian theory" claimed that the entire Slavic people originated in Dalmatia), even if one discounts or attempts to diminish the effect of the later Roman conquest of Illyria and the settlement of Roman veterans in the province - who themselves were forcibly assimilated with the Slavs, had their names changed by Slavic clergymen and later by communist bureaucrats, and were forbidden from using their own language - and the speakers of the dialects of Puglia that what remains of the ancient Illyrians can be found.

A more apt comparison than Sgr. Ascoli's might be to ask how the Greeks felt during the final siege of Constantinople, and how they feel today when they see one of the many History Channel programs sponsored by the Turkish government, claiming the works of their ancestors as "Turkish history;" or, if the reader will pardon the reference, what it was for the children of Elrond to be reduced only to Rivendell, the Last Homely House before the East, and to know that even that last stronghold of their people must soon perish.

Secondly, as is now accepted by all but a few Slovenian and Croatian fringe theorists, the ur-heimat of the Slavs was a marshy, infertile land in what is now Ukraine and western Russia. Neither the South Slavs nor their language are indigenous to the Balkans; they first arrived in the former province of Dalmatia in the 7th century, though Thomas the Archdeacon writing in the 13th century says that at first the Slavs only crossed the Dinaric Alps to raid and pillage and then returned to their own villages, and it was some time before they permanently settled in coastal Dalmatia.

Far from being an endangered "indigenous population" in Dalmatia, the South Slavs first arrived as opportunistic scavengers; as looting and destroying towns and cities already devastated by the Huns, Goths and the ill-fated reconquest of Justinian, and the defenses of which were left in a state of ruin by the ruling Goths at the time of the Slavic invasion, can hardly be called conquest. Croatian Wikipedia editors have appended virtually every article dealing with the former Roman towns of Dalmatia with a copied-and-pasted statement to the effect that "Croatians conquered and rebuilt the settlement in the 7th century," in an effort to ennoble the wanton destruction of their forefathers. Unfortunately for them, 17th century Latin Dalmatian historian Lucio Giovanni, one of the first scientifically-minded historians of the modern age (and whom they insist, of course, was a Croat), writes that after being reduced to rubble by the Slav invaders, the former homes of the actual indigenous inhabitants were never rebuilt and left uninhabited.

Then, in the late Middle Ages, as the Ottoman Turks advanced through eastern Europe, Slavic refugees came pouring over the mountains and were allowed by the Venetian oppressor - whose disdain for them was so great as to name a dock (Riva degli Schiavoni) after them in Venice - to resettle in Dalmatia. There is, of course, no Dock of the Venetians in any Croatian city in honour of a republic that not only allowed the current occupiers of Dalmatia to settle there in the first place, but at Lepanto destroyed the fleet of the empire before which the various South Slavic chiefdoms and kingdoms had capitulated centuries earlier.

Finally, Croatians from Slavonia were shipped to Dalmatia by the thousands by the Hapsburg monarchy during the 19th century for the purpose of displacing and diluting the Italian population, whose compatriots across the Adriatic had been rebelling against crown authority for decades and finally freed themselves from Austrian rule between 1860 and 1870. The "Austrian Slavs," as the Croatians, Slovenians, Czechs and Slovaks were then known, were considered loyal to the crown since they had fought for the emperor during the uprisings of 1848. The idea of a Tripartite Monarchy of Austria, Hungary and a "Slavia" comprising all the territories held by the Austrian Empire claimed by the pan-Slavist movement had currency not only among Slavic nationalists but also within the Hapsburg nobility and military establishment. The Italian territories held by the Hapsburg crown were considered to be of critical strategic and economic importance, as they constituted the Empire's only point of access to the Mediterranean. And to the end of ensuring their continued attachment to the crown, these lands were Germanized and Slavicized as was convenient.

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To understand why Italian and western intellectuals in general would sympathize with Slavic nationalists in Dalmatia is not difficult; indeed it is easier than the mental gymnastics required to subscribe to the myth of genocidal, proto-nazifascist Italian irredentists vs. poor, oppressed Slavs who just happened to have the ruling class of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and the rest of Slavic Europe supporting their cause.

In the mid-to-late 1800s, the Slavs of central Europe, who had lived under foreign rule for centuries - and in the case of the Croatians and Slovenians, had never developed a written culture of their own - suddenly became an object of fascination and intense sympathy in the West, particularly after rebellions against the empires and certain atrocities committed by the Turks in Bulgaria were widely publicised in the press. The various romantic-sounding but ultimately completely ahistorical forms of nationalism then fermenting in the Balkans gained enthusiastic supporters in western academic circles.

Reading the numerous travel diaries published by visitors to Dalmatia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the height of Slavophilia in the West, one detects that the sympathetic bourgeois authors of these early travel guides considered the Slav and Morlach villagers of the Dalmatian hinterland to be "noble savages" uncorrupted by civilization, and that their enthusiasm was largely due to the discovery that such "rustic" people were to be found in western Europe.

The so-called "noble savage" (who is obviously a caricature) is exempt from the rules of conduct and morality by which civilized men are bound - he is not capable of committing crimes because in his primitive state he does not know better, and his acts of barbarity, far from being blameworthy, are cause for sympathy, as being a "noble savage" there is no criminal impulse in him. If a noble savage commits atrocities it is only because he has been oppressed and deprived of his rights by corrupt civilized people, and therefore is an object of sympathy in any situation, no matter how criminal his actions would be considered were they carried out by a civilized man.

It should not be seen as a surprise, then, that the 19th century urban bourgeoisie, suffering collectively from the modern maladies of neurosis and alienation and seeking some antidote to the crushing monotony and immorality of the modern society its own class had created, would enthusiastically take up the banner of the pan-Slavist movement, according to the same self-loathing cultural logic out of which emerged communism, that other, more famous invention of disaffected bourgeois pseudointellectuals.

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Though by the early 20th century the "Illyrian theory" was already long-discredited, still one finds that many prominent academics supported its primary implication: that although even after a century of Croatian terrorism - aided and abetted by the Austrian police - the Italian character of the Dalmatian cities was evident to any visitor, and anthropologists considered the colourful costumes and ornaments of the Slavic villagers to be Asiatic in origin, Dalmatia was nonetheless a "Slavic land," and to paraphrase a disturbing passage in Frenchman Charles Yriarte's travel diary, soon destined to be cleansed of the corrupting influence of Italian civilization by the Slavic race which would soon occupy all the land from Siberia to the Adriatic.

One finds that here as well as in the writings of other pan-Slavist sympathizers there is a sort of bizarre inversion of the Monroe Doctrine, and not a few echoes of the alleged virtues of the barbarian exalted by the (also then in vogue) atavistic German völkisch movement. By virtue of the mystical characteristics attributed by these academics to the Slavic nations as a whole (excluding Poland, which, by reason of its historical statehood, its people's orthodox Catholicism and their antipathy for Russia and its autocratic government, was seen as irretrievably lost to civilization), the expansion of the Slavs into territory they had hitherto never occupied was not only their right, indeed such was seen as desirable, even necessary for a western civilization in need of a Jüngerian cleansing by fire.

And as Sgr. Ascoli - who according to the popular narrative, as an Italian irredentist, is supposed to have been a nazifascist Slavophobe - seems to have regarded as inevitable and even desirable, Zara and all of Dalmatia was "cleansed" of its two thousand years of Latin civilization, and its native inhabitants literally "chased into the sea;" the fortunate into exile without their property, illegally confiscated by the communist junta of Tito; and the less fortunate to their graves.

Dalmatia, as their historian Giovanni Lucio defined it - the "Patria of Dalmatians, Romans, Latins" - no longer exists. It has been mutilated beyond recognition, except in the memories of its people.

And yet, condemned to ignoble exile as they have been, the Dalmatians have thrived everywhere they have gone, and they have thrived so because they are the true people of that land; having been "chased into the sea" has not destroyed them, because they are of that fierce Illyrian race that made their home on both its shores; they are the Roman legionaries of a thousand triumphs; it was they who made the final doomed march from Salona at the twilight of an age; they are the heroes of Rhodes, of Famagusta, of Lepanto, and into exile they have carried with them the two thousand years of Latin life which is Dalmatia: and neither the crying "Uskoks" nor any other mortal power can steal it from them.