Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Italian name under which modern historians are most likely to encounter references to this northern Adriatic port, known as Rijeka since the late 1940s and forming part of croatia since the early 1990s. After the collapse of the habsburg empire , the 1919 st germain treaty provided for Fiume's incorporation into the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (see yugoslavia ). A wave of protest in Italy encouraged the writer and war hero d'annunzio to lead his band of personal followers into a dramatic capture of the port in September 1919. There, in defiance of Rome and Belgrade alike, he ran an authoritarian city-state until January 1921 when giolitti managed to oust him. Through the rapallo treaty of November 1920 the contending states had agreed that Fiume should have the status of a “free city.” However, in 1924 the Yugoslav government yielded to pressure from the new regime of mussolini to recognize officially an Italian annexation already largely achieved through a coup by fascist supporters in 1922. This settlement was reversed at the end of world war ii , when sovereignty was seized by tito's Yugoslavia. ... log in or subscribe to read full text