ABSTRACT
The ancestors of the Slovenes adopted Christianity toward the end of the first millennium CE, during the time of the Carolingian restoration of the Roman Empire. It was a lengthy and bloody process, but one that integrated this group of Southern Slavic tribes into the sphere of western European civilization. In fact, their area of settlement was under the pastoral care of three powerful church entities, each with its center in foreign territory: the Patriarchate of Aquileia in Friuli, the Bishopric of Salzburg, and the Bishopric of Brixen in South Tirol. Under circumstances contingent on a symbiosis between the Church and the feudal state, there was not much room for the development of Slovene culture, for there was no native nobility and hardly any bourgeoisie whose members were typically Germanized or Italianized during their social ascent. For the peasantry bound by vassalage to the local gentry, a prayer or a sermon in their language sufficed, as attested to by the Freising manuscripts—the first Slovene texts—written at the turn of the ninth century, and by a few rare fragments of preserved medieval writing. It was into this void, in which the Slovene population remained at the margins of European intellectual discourse, that in the first half of the sixteenth century Martin Luther’s church reform entered the picture. 2
