Fiume: Europe's Smallest Successor State

Before the Habsburg monarchy’s collapse, the port city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) was a corpus separatum, or semi-autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Hungary. It had its own council under a governor appointed by Budapest, rather than being subordinate to Hungary’s sub-Kingdom of Croatia. Fiume owed its separate status to Hungarians’ post 1867 determination to control their own trade conduit to the outside world, beyond the reach of Habsburg ‘Austria’. In the half-century before the First World War the city duly boomed, its population soaring from 17,000 to 55,000, as it became Hungary’s principal export-import entrepôt as well as the embarkation point for emigrants to the Americas and beyond. The city’s core remained largely Italian-speaking, while the suburbs that sprang up in the Croatian hinterland spoke Serbo-Croat. As of 1918, however, even excluding this hinterland, over half the population in the city’s eight square mile territory spoke a language other than Italian.