Imperial Princely Rivalry: Counts of Celje

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

570 - 1341

After Avars and Slavs overran Poetovio in 570, the settlement layer shifts: the Slavic principality of Carantania — the earliest Slavic political entity in the Eastern Alps — included the Styrian lands within its territory. Frankish-Bavarian overlordship from the mid-8th century brought Christianization and the administrative structure of marches (border territories). By the 10th century, the March of Styria was carved from the Carolingian defense system against Magyar incursions. The deepest institutional mark of this era is the Žiče Charterhouse (founded 1155–1165 by Margrave Ottokar III), the first Carthusian monastery outside France and Italy, whose manuscript workshop produced the only surviving group of medieval Slovenian manuscripts. Ptuj passed under the Archbishopric of Salzburg from 874, and the urban centers that would become Maribor, Celje, and Ptuj began crystallizing around castles, monasteries, and trade routes on the Drava and Savinja rivers.

1456 - 1782

After absorbing the Celje lands in 1456, the Habsburgs ruled Lower Styria as a duchy for over five centuries — a period that shaped the bilingual, biconfessional character of the region's cities. Maribor, Ptuj, and Celje were predominantly German-speaking urban islands in a Slovene-speaking rural sea, with German guilds, parish records, and urban carnival (Fasching) traditions that are now almost entirely erased from the accessible record. The Counter-Reformation left the deepest festival-relevant trace: painted beehive panels (panjske končnice) from the Štajerska delavnica workshop at Gornji Grad encode Biblical scenes, anti-Protestant propaganda, saints' legends, and folk narratives in a single medium — showing how Tridentine orthodoxy and resilient folk imagination coexisted. The Gornji Grad Cathedral (1752–1761), the largest Baroque building in Slovenia, was commissioned by Bishop Ernest Attems as a monumental assertion of the Counter-Reformation. The viticultural calendar — klopotec erected on St. Jakob's Day (July 25), wine baptized on St. Martin's Day (November 11) — fused Catholic feast dates with agricultural rhythm, creating a ritual year that still governs the festival calendar today. Joseph II dissolved the Žiče Charterhouse in 1782, closing the monastic chapter of the region.

1 - 476

The Roman imperial frontier reaches deep into what is now Štajerska through Poetovio (Ptuj), a legionary base and colony that once housed 40,000 inhabitants. In 69 CE, Vespasian was proclaimed emperor here — the only place in present-day Slovenia where a Roman emperor was acclaimed. Soldiers from the eastern provinces brought Mithraism, leaving five Mithraic shrines whose ruins still surface beneath modern buildings. Roman stonework — the monolithic Orpheus Monument, spolia in church walls, the grid of old streets — proves material and toponymic continuity, though the leap from Mithraic shrines to later carnival rituals is speculative and unsupported by evidence. The thermal springs at Rimske Toplice, known to Roman bathers, anchor a spa tradition that survives into the present. When the Huns plundered Poetovio around 450, the Roman layer ended — but the place-name 'Ptuj' fossilized the Latin 'Poetovio' forever.

1782 - 1918

From the Josephine reforms through the 19th century, Lower Styria industrialized within the Habsburg economy. Franz Geyer founded the Laško brewery in 1825; Simon Kukec revived it in 1889 with the 'thermal beer' (toplo pivo) innovation, fusing brewing with the geothermal spa heritage of nearby Rimske Toplice. Coal mining began in Hrastnik in 1804, stimulated by the Südbahn railway in 1849. Rimske Toplice, developed as a modern spa in 1840, hosted British Princess Victoria in 1879. These industries — brewery, mining, spa, railway — created a new layer of worker and civic culture that would later become the basis for socialist-era festivals. Simultaneously, the Slovene national awakening created tensions in the German-majority cities: the 1910 census recorded ~18% German speakers across Lower Styria, but in the cities themselves Germans were majorities (Maribor ~80%, Ptuj ~86%, Celje ~67% in 1900). The competing national narratives — Slovene liberation vs. German dispossession — would shape the festival landscape through the cataclysm that followed.