Napoleon's Illyria, created in 1809, joined for the first time
Slovenes and Croats in one political unit, and the excellent administration
and the schools left an undying memory of what might be if the Habsburgs
cared. Vodnik, the Slovene poet, sang of Illyria and her creator, but it
was the meteoric Croat, Ljudevit Gaj, in the thirties, who so eloquently
idealized it as he poured heated rhetoric into the camp of the Magyars, who
after the Diet of 1825 began their unfortunate policy of Magyarization.
Illyria, though short-lived, became the germ of the Greater Croatia idea,
which, with Greater Serbia, existed as the two, not necessarily hostile,
solutions of the Jugo-Slav problem down to the Congress of Berlin. It was
as yet a friendly rivalry with the possible formation of two separate
units. The occupation of Bosnia in 1878 led to actual friction between
them. On the other hand, the annexation of the same province in 1908 had
just the opposite effect, for from that time the ultimate ideal was
no longer Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia in any selfish sense, but
Jugo-slavia, because, to use a platitude, Bosnia had scrambled the eggs.
Evidence of the fairly amicable relations between Slovenes, Croats, and
Serbs at the time of Gaj is not lacking. It was Gaj who reformed Croatian
orthography on the basis of the Serbian. Bleiweis and Vraz endeavored to do
the same in Slovene.
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