The first race who felt the new impulse were the Croats. They, more than any of the other peoples who had been annexed to the Kingdom of Hungary, had preserved their separate government and traditions of independence. In 1527 they offered the throne of Croatia to the Hapsburgs, without waiting for any decision by the Magyars; and when Charles VI. was submitting to the Powers of Europe and to the inhabitants of his different dominions the question of the Pragmatic Sanction, Croatia gave her decision quite independently of the Diet at Presburg. But apart from her actual legal rights to independence, there remained a tradition of the old period when the Kingdom of Croatia had been an important Power in Europe, and had extended over Slavonia and Dalmatia. But these claims were not undisputed. The hold which Venice had gained over Dalmatia and Istria had introduced into those provinces an Italian element; and when, in the sixteenth century, the Serbs were called into Hungary in large numbers, Slavonia had developed a variety of the Slavonic tongue which must have weakened the absolute supremacy of the Croats. The sense, however, of a connection between the dialects of the different Slavonic States was a bond of union between those States which might at any time be drawn closer. When, then, Szechenyi began to stir up the Magyars to develop their language and literature, it occurred to a Croatian poet to link together the different dialects of the Southern Slavs into one language. The Croatians had been so far in advance of their neighbours the Serbs that they had abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet, which had been introduced at the time of their first conversion to Christianity, and had adopted the ordinary Latin alphabet. But the Croatian dialect, by itself, would not have been accepted by the other Slavs; and the softer language and higher culture of the old Republic of Ragusa supplied a better basis for the development of the new language. Louis Gaj, the Croatian poet, had studied at the University of Leipzig, which seems to have been the centre of a good deal of Slavonic feeling; and he hoped to link together, not merely the three provinces of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, but several, also, of the south-west provinces of Austria; and, on the other hand, he wished to draw into this bond of sympathy those Slavonic countries which still groaned under the Turkish yoke. It was necessary, however, to find a new name for a language which was a new combination of dialects. To call it the Croatian language would have implied a claim to superiority for Croatia which it was most desirable to avoid; and as none other of the Slavonic provinces could well be treated as the godmother of the new language, Gaj went back to the seventeenth century for a name.