xture of Tuscan and Venetian dialects) was also spoken due to the Italian minorities. The autonomy of the city was reduced: the highest authority was a prince-captain, always of Venetian birth.
Despite this, Split eventually developed into a significant port-city, with important trade routes to the Ottoman-held interior through the nearby Klis pass. Culture flourished as well, Split being the hometown of Marko Maruli?, a classic Croatian author. Marko Maruli?'s most acclaimed work, Judita (1501), was an epic poem about Judith and Holfernes and written in Split, it was printed in Venice in 1521. It is widely held to be the first modern work of Croatian literature. Still, it should be noted the advances and achievements were reserved mostly for the aristocracy: the illiteracy rate was extremely high, mostly because Venetian rule showed little interest in educational and medical facilities. Split was ruled by the Venetian Republic up to its downfall in 1797. After a brief period of Napoleonic rule (1806�1813) when was even part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, the city was allocated to the Empire of Austria by the Congress of Vienna. Large investments were undertaken in the city during that period, new streets were built and parts of the ancient fortifications were removed.
During the period of the Austrian Empire Split's region, the Kingdom of Dalmatia, was a separate administrative unit. After the revolutions of 1848 as a result of the romantic nationalism, two factions appeared. One was the pro-Croatian Unionist faction (later called the "Puntari", "Pointers"), led by the People's Party and, to a lesser extent, the Party of Rights, both of which advocated the union of Dalmatia with Croatia-Slavonia which was under Hungarian administration. This faction was strongest in Split, and used it as its headquarters. The other faction was the pro-Italian Autonomist faction (also known as the "Irredentist" faction), whose political goals
