Karantania

The Slavic Duchy of Karantania mainly occupied the territory of today's Austrian Carinthia and Slovenian Carinthia. It emerged from the ashes of the first Slavic union: Samo's Tribal Union.

Samo connected the Western and the Southern Slavic tribes. The union spanned from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea. Its purpose was to defend the Slavs from the Bavarians, the Langobards and the Avars. It collapsed due to the death of Samo (658) and the disconnected link between the Western and the Southern Slavs.

After the demise of Samo's Tribal Union, Karantanians established their duchy under the guidance of knez (lord) Valuk. In 745 Karantania joined the Frankish kingdom as an independent country with its own law (consuetudo Sclavorum) and perserved the inauguration of its knez (lord) in Slovenian language until the year 1414 on the stone of the knez (knežji kamen). To the year 1651 the oath ceremony of the lord took place at the Duke's Chair (Vojvodski stol) and then until the year 1728 in the county house in Klagenfurt (Celovec). The inauguration ritual is described in Jean Bodin's book Six livres de la République and it is known that Thomas Jefferson learnt about it from that book.