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.

In 1918, following four years of Allied economic blockade, both Fiume’s prosperity and its unique status were under threat. The city council hastily proclaimed Fiume an independent city state, but trumpeted its inhabitants’ desire to be annexed to victorious Italy. This demand was agreeable to Italy but disputed by the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Indeed, the Yugoslav case was supported by President Woodrow Wilson on the ground of ‘national self determination’ and the matter was reserved for adjudication by the Allied powers at the Paris Peace Conference, while an inter-Allied occupation force took over the city. The Fiume issue nearly led to the conference foundering when Wilson, confronted with Italian obduracy, appealed to the Italian people over their government’s head, leading to a temporary walkout by the Italian delegation and nationalist uproar in Italy. In September 1919 the Italian poet and ultra nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio led a paramilitary legion of veterans and other proto-Fascists in a takeover of the city, defying the great powers; but at the end of 1920 the Italian army, acting on behalf of the great powers, ejected D’Annunzio in the so-called ‘Christmas of Blood’. By the terms of the Italo-Yugoslav peace settlement, Fiume was recognised as an independent city state under the aegis of the League of Nations. It was only in 1924 that Mussolini’s Fascist regime dared to reverse this situation and annex Fiume outright.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Ian D. Armour is Honorary Fellow of History at the University of Exeter.