I

When the Jugo-Slavs first occupied the western half of the Balkan
peninsula, they were one in speech, in social customs and ancestry, and
were divided only into tribes. The Slovenes, who settled in the northern
end of the west Balkan block, were not separated from their Croat and Serb
kinsmen by the forces of geography, but rather by the course of political
evolution. On the other hand, the Croats became separated from the Serbs by
forces largely geographical, though partially economic and political, in
nature.

The Slovenes gave way before the pressure of the Germans who swept through
the Alps and down the Danube and forced the Slovene vojvodes to acknowledge
their suzerainty and accept their religion. The Germans would doubtless
have succeeded in obliterating them had not the Magyar invasion weakened
their offensive. The Slovenes, however, were left a wrecked nationality
whose fate became blended with that of the Habsburg possessions and
who against the forces of geography--which firmly bound them to the
Croats--were politically riveted to the Habsburg north. This division was
therefore the result of forces created by man and changeable by him. The
Croats settled in the northwestern half of the territory south of
the Slovenes; the Serbs roughly in the southeastern part of it. Here
geographical influences--the direction of the rivers and the Dinaric
ridges--combined with divergent political and economic possibilities,
produced a dualism. The Croats on the Save and its tributaries naturally
expanded westward and aspired to closer connection with the sea where their
struggle with the remnants of Roman civilization and a superior culture
absorbed their energies. They developed out of their tribal state
more quickly, while the Serbs, further inland and amid more difficult