The Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, Text

by Edward A. Freeman

♦Acquisition of Görz, 1500.♦

Meanwhile the Austrian power had been making advances in other quarters. At the end of the fifteenth century the Austrian possessions at the north-east of the Hadriatic were greatly enlarged by the addition of the county of Görz, which carried with it the fallen city of Aquileia. ♦New position towards Italy.♦ A more direct path towards Italian dominion was thus opened. The wars of the League of Cambray made no permanent addition to Austrian dominion in this quarter; but the master of Trieste and Aquileia, whose territory cut off Venice from her Istrian possessions, might already almost pass for an Italian sovereign. ♦Dominions of Charles the Fifth.♦ Under Charles the Fifth the House of Austria became, as we have seen, possessed of a vast Italian dominion. But after him it passed away alike from the Empire and the German branch of the house, to become part of the heritage of the Austrian Kings of Spain. ♦Austrian rule in Italy.♦ It was not, as we have already seen, till the beginning of the eighteenth century that either an Emperor or a reigning archduke again obtained any territory within the acknowledged bounds of Italy. The fluctuations of Austrian rule in Italy, from the acquisition of the Duchy of Milan down to our own day, have been already told in the Italian section. Lombardy and Venetia are now again Italian; but Austria still keeps the north-east corner of the great gulf. She still keeps Görz and Aquileia, Trieste and all Istria, to say nothing of the dangerous way which her frontier still stretches on Italian ground in the land of Trent and Roveredo.

♦Burgundian possessions.♦

These last named possessions still abide as traces of the Austrian advance in these regions, and its fluctuations there have been among the most important facts of modern history. Another series of Austrian acquisitions in the West of Europe have altogether passed away. The great Burgundian inheritance passed to the House of Austria. ♦Maximilian and Philip.♦ But it was only for a short time, in the persons of Maximilian and Philip, that it was in any way united to the actual Austrian Archduchy. ♦The Austrian Netherlands.♦ After Charles the Fifth the Burgundian possessions passed, like those in Italy, to the Spanish branch of the House, and, just as in Italy, it was not till the eighteenth century that actual Emperors or archdukes again reigned over a part of the Netherlands. ♦Loss of Elsass.♦ Before this time the Alsatian dominion of Austria had passed away to France, and the remnant of her Swabian possessions passed away, as we have seen, in the days of general confusion. The changes of her territory in Germany during that period have been already spoken of. Her acquisitions in Eastern Europe will come more fully elsewhere; but a word must be given to them here. ♦Loss of Silesia, 1740.
Final partition of Poland, 1772.♦ Looking at the House of Austria simply as a power, without reference to the German or non-German character of its dominions, the loss of Silesia may be looked on as counterbalanced by the territory gained from Poland at the first and third partitions. ♦Galicia and Lodomeria.♦ The first partition gave the Austrian House a territory of which the greater part was originally Russian rather than Polish, and in which the old Russian names of Halicz and Vladimir were strangely softened into a Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. ♦Third partition, 1795.
New-Galicia.♦ The third partition added Cracow and a considerable amount of strictly Polish territory. These last passed away, first to the Duchy of Warsaw, and then to the restored Kingdom of Poland. ♦Annexation of Cracow, 1846.♦ But Galicia has been kept, and it has been increased in our day by the seizure of the republic of Cracow. These lands lie to the north of the Hungarian kingdom. Parted from them by the whole extent of that kingdom, and adjoining that kingdom at its south-west corner lie the coast lands of Austria on the Hadriatic. ♦Dalmatia, 1797.♦ By the Peace of Campoformio, Austria took Dalmatia strictly so called, and the other Venetian possessions as far south as Budua. ♦Recovered, 1814.
Ragusa, 1814.♦ These lands, lost in the wars with France, were won again at the Peace, with the addition of Ragusa and its territory.

This account of the gains and losses of a power which has gained and lost in so many quarters is necessary somewhat piecemeal. It may be well then to end this section with a picture of the Austrian power as it stood at several points of the history of the last century and a half, leaving the fluctuating frontier towards the Turk to be dealt with in our survey of the more strictly Eastern lands.

♦Reign of Maria Theresa, 1740-1780.♦

We will begin at a date when we come across a sovereign whose position is often strangely misunderstood, the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa—Queen in her own right of Hungary and Bohemia, Empress by the election of her husband to the Imperial Crown. ♦Her hereditary dominions.♦ The Pragmatic Sanction of her father Charles the Sixth made her heiress of all his hereditary dominions. That is, it made her heiress, within the Empire, of the kingdom of Bohemia with its dependencies of Moravia and Silesia—of the Archduchy of Austria with the duchies, counties, and lordships of Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Tyrol, Görz, and Trieste—of Constanz and a few other outlying Swabian points—as also of Milan, Mantua, and the Austrian Netherlands, lands which it needs some stretch, whether of memory or of legal fiction, to look on as being then in any sense lands of the Empire. Altogether beyond the Empire, it gave her the Kingdom of Hungary with its dependent lands of Croatia, Slavonia, and Transsilvania or Siebenbürgen. These hereditary dominions, lessened by the loss of Silesia, increased by the addition of Galicia, she handed on to their later Kings and Archdukes. Her marriage transferred those hereditary dominions, it indirectly transferring the Empire itself, to a new family, the House of Lorraine. The husband of Maria Theresa, Francis, who had exchanged his duchy of Lorraine for that of Tuscany, was in truth the first Lotharingian Emperor. After him came three Emperors of his house, under the third of whom the succession of Augustus and Charles came to an end.

♦Austrian dominions in 1811.♦

We may take another view of the Austrian territory at the moment when the French power in Germany was at its height. The Roman Empire and the German kingdom had now come to an end; but their last sovereign still, with whatever meaning, called himself Emperor of his archduchy, though without dropping his proper title of Archduke. ♦New use of the name Austria.♦ From this time the word Austria was used, commonly but inaccurately, to take in all the possessions of the House of Austria. And, as all the possessions of the House of Austria were now geographically continuous, it became more natural to speak of them by a single name than it had been when the dominions of that house in Italy and the Netherlands lay apart from the great mass of Austrian territory. And at this moment, when the Empire had come to an end and when the German Confederation had not yet been formed, there was no distinction between German and non-German lands. The ‘Empire’ of Francis the Second or First, as it stood at the time of Buonaparte’s greatest power, had, as compared with the hereditary dominions of Maria Theresa, gone through these changes. Tyrol and the Swabian lands had passed to other German princes; Salzburg had been won and lost again. In Italy the Venetian possessions had been won and lost, and they, together with the older Italian possessions of Austria, had passed to the French kingdom of Italy. France in her own name had encroached on the Austrian dominions at two ends. She had absorbed the Austrian Netherlands at one corner, the newly won territory of Dalmatia at another. This last territory, with parts of Carinthia and Carniola, and with the Hungarian kingdom of Croatia, received, on passing to France, the name of the Illyrian Provinces. Illyrian they were in the widest and most purely geographical sense of that name. But this use of the Illyrian name was confusing and misleading, as tending to put out of sight that the true representatives of the old Illyrian race dwell to the south, not only of Carinthia and Carniola, but of Dalmatia itself. The loss of the Austrian possessions in this quarter brought back the new Austrian ‘Empire’ to the condition of the original Austrian duchy. It became a wholly inland dominion, without an inch of sea-coast anywhere.