Ante Trumbić
Ante Trumbic (May 17, 1864 - November 17, 1938), the Croatian nationalist leader, was born in Austro-Hungarian province of Dalmatia and studied law at Zagreb, Vienna and Graz (his doctorate, 1890). He practised as a lawyer, and then, from 1905 as the city mayor of Split. He was in favor of moderate reforms in Austro-Hungarian Slavic provinces. At the same time separatist and pan-Slav movements were troubling politics in Serbia.
After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, Trumbic fled to Italy and was the prime mover of the "Yugoslav Committee" that operated out of London trying to convince the Serbian government of Nikola Pasic that an equal union of Croats, Slovenes and Slavs would serve the interest of the South Slavs, discussions that led to the Corfu Declaration, signed in the summer of 1917. Crown Prince Alexander, acting as regent for the claimant King Peter I of Serbia, endorsed the Yugoslav concept.
At the Versailles conference after World War I, Trumbic had to represent Yugoslav concerns in the face of Italian territorial ambitions in Dalmatia (temporarily settled in 1920, but raised again with Benito Mussolini. Trumbic resigned as Foreign Minister in 1920, as Serbian domination became the policy in the kingdom that was to have represented all the minority interests among South Slavs.
By 1929, when King Alexander I abrogated the constitution to establish a royal dictatorship, Trumbic was in retirement in Zagreb.