If the interests of Croats and Magyars at the beginning of the twentieth century can be characterized as mutually opposed, there had been several major signposts along the way to this state of total alienation. These included the Hungarian language and nationality law (passed by the Pozsony Diet in January 1790), and the Croat-Magyar war (initiated by Ban Josip JelaCic in September 1848), and the Nagodba (Agreement) of 1868. The abyss between the two banks of the Drava cannot be appreciated unless it is understood that the whole range of Croat reactions to these painful events had nothing in common with most Magyar views. In the linguistic controversy, though the Croat Magyarophiles undermined the sovereign use of Croatian language in Croatia-Slavonia, not even the most ardent among them contemplated the destruction of Croatian.] As for the war of 1848, its glow was diminished only in the course of Bach's absolutism. 2 And finally, though the Magyarophile Croat minimalists defended the Nagodba as a fair expression of Croat statehood, they did not anticipate having to defend the Nagodba so soon against the same Magyar politicians who had dictated its terms. The recently published excerpts of Isidor Krsnjavi's diary reveal a delicious irony: after Tisza's resignation in March 1890 Khuen-Hedervary himself had to resist Szilagyi's totally one-sided interpretations of the Nagodba. "In Hungary," Krsnjavi wrote, Khuen "was in ill-repute for being a man in the service of the court, for being a second Jelacic."3 For many reasons, Croat-Magyar reconciliation could not be effected within the Dual Monarchy. Some of these reasons were "external": the antiquated and anti-democratic structure of the Monarchy as a whole, the divisive and self-serving activities of two Habsburg factions (Franz Joseph's dualists and Franz Ferdinand's Great Austrians), the interests of neighbors (Germany, Russia, Italy, Serbia, the Ottoman Empire) and expectations of special advantage from any of the same. Other reasons were decidedly "internal"not the least of which were the differences between Croat and Magyar national ideologies and the particular relationships between, on the one hand, the Magyars and the "nationalities," and on the other, the Croats and the Serbs. But in addition to these two broad and to some extent controversial areas of divisiveness, two specific points of division were at work. One of these was the extent to which the Croat and Magyar intellectual elites had become mutually alien -so much so that, in a complete reversal of traditional patterns, their interaction came to an end almost entirely. The second was the policy of "new course" initiated by Frano Supilo in response to the crisis of dualism, which could only be a tactic for so long as Magyar statesmen supported any variant of dualism. In different ways, these points of conflict made union under the Dual Monarchy impossible. The acrimonies that the age of nationalism kindled on both sides of the Drava need not dim the unique role that the people "of southern origin" played in Magyar history. That history is inconceivable with Janos Vitez (Ivan Vitez of Sredna), Janus Pannonius (Ivan CesmiCki), Tamas Bak6cz (Toma Bakac), Peter Beriszl6 (Petar Berislavic), Istvan Brodarics (Stjepan Brodaric), Gyorgy Martinuzzi (Juraj Utisinovic), Antal and Faustus Verancsics (Antun and Faust Vrancic), and the two Mikl6s Zrfnyis (Nikola Zrinski of Szigetvar and his great-grandson Nikola Zrinski, the author of the Szigetvar epopee, the first epic poem in Hungarian). The Croat presence in Magyar affairs was immense, especially from