The Serb and Croat element in the Austrian army was at this time greater than the sum of all the others, and, owing to the privileges which their services acquired for them, they came to be regarded with extreme suspicion by the Magyars. It was under Magyar influence that Maria Theresa abolished the Croatian council, confided its functions to the Hungarian Government, and, on the same occasion, in 1779, proclaimed the town of Rieka (Fiume), with its surroundings, to be "_separatum sacræ regni Hungariæ coronæ adnexum corpus_." Rieka, like Triest, had been a free town under the Habsburgs, the reason being that they were the chief arteries of trade, so that a greater freedom was desirable. Like Triest, Rieka does not appear up to this date to have shown any hankering for Venice, and Maria Theresa's diploma which renews the freedom is hardly evidence, as some people have asserted, that the town was throbbing with Italian sympathies. THE POSITION OF THEIR CHURCH More and more Germans were being brought into the Banat, and to make room for some between Temešvar and Arad the Roumanians, who had settled there, were transferred, in 1765, to the western county of Torontal. About half a century before this the Roumanian Bishop of Transylvania, with most of his clergy, passed from the Orthodox to the Greek Catholic Church; those of his flock who did not follow him attached themselves to the Serbian Church, and after a considerable time were given by Joseph II. in 1786 a Roumanian bishopric, at Sibiu. This bishopric was placed under the administration of the Serbian Patriarch at Karlovci "_in dogmaticis et pure spiritualibus_," which seems to show that the other privileges of the Serbian Church did not extend to the Roumanians. The Serbs had, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, been founding monasteries, and, although about twenty were secularized or affiliated to others by Maria Theresa, yet there remained eleven in the Banat and one, Hodosh, to the north of the Maroš; and as the Roumanians had no monasteries at all they were received as guests in some of these. And so things continued for about a hundred years. SERBS ASSIST THE BULGARIAN RENASCENCE