The Gubernium of Fiume
The territory was to form the new comitatus of Severin that included also all the confiscated possessions of the Frangipane and Zrinski families that surrounded Fiume in the interior. Trieste now became the only harbour of the German hereditary lands. Fiume became fully independent from Trieste in all-commercial, fiscal and administrative matters as the main port of Hungary, which meant excluding the city from the Holy Roman Empire, and here a Gubernium was installed too, while the other ports were annexed to Croatia.
The inclusion of Fiume into Croatia arouse a series of protests from the fiuman notables, promptly supported by the Hungarian estates. In fact already in 1776, when it was decreed to include Fiume to Hungary through Croatia, it was the count József Majláth, acting as Hungarian royal commissar, who took over the town from baron Pasquale Ricci, the representative of the Intendancy from Trieste.
Shortly after that, (with the rescript of the queen dated 23 April 1779) the City is officially directly annexed to Hungary as a corpus separatum) (i.e.: not as a part of Croatia, that was in a personal union with Hungary). Since Fiume had to serve a similar “emporial” function for Hungary as Trieste did for the Habsburg lands, the Hungarian estates (and most probably the Queen) wanted to grant the City a similar degree of institutional autonomy as that enjoyed by Trieste.
According to the rescript from 1779, Fiume was considered to be a corpus separatum - that is a political body with a greater autonomy than a royal free City, or a comitatus, but a territory comparable to the other partes adnexae constituting the Crown of the St. Stephen. Its position was thus comparable to those of the regna, as Trieste was considered to be a crown land of the imperial hereditary lands (Erblande) so Fiume was considered to be a partes adnexa to the crown. After the royal rescript from the 23rd April 1779, the stage for all the political confrontations that will happen in Fiume was set for more than a century and a half. In a sense it can be said that all history that followed was a long footnote on how to interpret this two acts from 1776 and 1779. The act presented a precedent for the Hungarian constitutional praxis, since it was the first time that a part of the Holy Roman Empire (and a hereditary fief of the Habsburgs) was given to the Hungarian-Croatian kingdom. Therefore, since the Croatian and Hungarian estates had widely diverging interests with respect to Fiume, they produced very different interpretations of the rescript.
The Croatians refused to accept the Hungarian reading of the document - they denied that the City could have been excluded from the surrounding territory, that was already framed into a comitatus. Since the Croatian estates never accepted this interpretation, the constitutional position of the City was always somehow imprecise. On the other hand, the change happened when the Croatian diet voted for the suspension of the short-lived Croatian Vice-regency Council in Vienna whose prerogatives were now entirely devolved to the Hungarian Vice-regency Council, now the supreme administrative authority for Croatia as well.
Fiume becomes the administrative centre for two very different - and overlapping - administrative units: The Gubernium of Fiume and the Comitatus of Severin (Severinska Županija), that is an integral part of Croatia. Arguably the simultaneous existence of the two competing offices reflects the still unsettled dispute between the Hungarian and the Croat estates. The predictable outcome of this clash came in 1787, when Joseph II dissolved the County of Severin confirming its transitory nature and introduces a new province (instead of a constituted comitatus of nobles): The “Hungarian Littoral” which now extends from Fiume to Senj. And in Fiume the “Cesareo Regio Governatorato per il Litorale in Fiume” governs the whole new province of the “Hungarian Littoral” (Litorale ungarico), thereby eliminating the Croatian competencies in this stretch of land. For the first time in 1790, unofficially, the representatives of Fiume took part at the gathering of the Hungarian parliament. They claimed the annexation to Hungary, but it was postponed three times by the Habsburg monarchs in 1790, 1802, and 1805. Finally, in 1807, Fiume became legally a part of Hungary. The Fiuman governor had a right to vote in the Chamber of Magnates of the Royal Hungarian Diet (Orszaggyules), while “the deputies of Fiume” (probably two, since their number was still not specified by the law) had the right to vote as members of the Stände und Orden. Fiume become part of the Hungarian Orszag, but de facto the law was never applied.
Read more about this topic: History Of Rijeka