een 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.

THE POSITION OF THEIR CHURCH

More and more Germans were being brought into the Banat, and to make
room for some between Teme[vs]var and Arad the Roumanians, who had
settled there, were transferred, in 1765, to the western county of
Torontal. About half a century before this the Roumanian Bishop of
Transylvania, with most of his clergy, passed from the Orthodox to the
Greek Catholic Church; those of his flock who did not follow him
attached themselves to the Serbian Church, and after a considerable
time were given by Joseph II. in 1786 a Roumanian bishopric, at Sibiu.
This bishopric was placed under the administration of the Serbian
Patriarch at Karlovci "_in dogmaticis et pure spiritualibus_," which
seems to show that the other priv