Location and Extent.—The Austrian dominions form geographically a compact territory with a circumference of about five thousand three hundred and fifty miles. The total area is greater than that of any other European state save Russia, and is nearly twice the area of Great Britain. The body of the empire lies in the interior of Europe, though it has about one thousand miles of sea-coast on the Adriatic. Austria borders on Italy, Switzerland, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Russia, Roumania, Servia and Montenegro. With the sanction of the Berlin Congress of 1878, the small territory of Spizza, on the Montenegrin frontier and formerly Turkish, was incorporated with Dalmatia. The Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, thenceforward occupied and administered by Austria, were annexed by proclamation in 1908, and are now a part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
Surface Features.—Austria-Hungary has been termed the “Empire of the Danube,” since it lies for the most part within the basin of that river, and embraces the whole of its upper plain, which lies at an elevation of about three hundred feet above the sea. But it is also, next to Switzerland, by far the most mountainous land in Europe, no less than four-fifths of its area being more than six thousand feet above the sea-level.
On the west, Austria embraces nearly half of the great mass of the Alps between the plateau of Bavaria and the plain of Lombardy, the mountain and valley scenery of Tyrol and Salzburg resembling that of Switzerland on a lesser scale. The highest point of all here is the Ortler Spitze. An eastern spur of these heights, the Bakony Wäld, runs into Hungary, compelling the Danube to form a sharp east-to-south bend or knee in its course. In the northwest the Bohmer Wäld, the Erz, and Riesen Gebirge, the Sudetic Mountains, and the Moravian heights, enclose the high basin of the Upper Elbe in Bohemia. Farther east the wooded Carpathians, with the high outlying granite mass of the Tatra rise round the north of the Hungarian plain. These are continued by the Transylvanian Alps, which form the southeastern frontier, next Roumania, and which, with their northern branch, the Biharia Mountains, enclose the highland of Transylvania or Siebenbürgen on the east of the Hungarian plain.
Rivers and Lakes.—The Danube, entering Austria from Bavaria as a considerable river, and flowing southeastward over the plain of Hungary, grows to more than half a mile in width before it leaves the Hungarian border to descend by the gorge of the Iron Gates into its lower plains. It is the great highway of the kingdom, and the great outlet to the Black Sea on the east. (See further under [Danube].)
The Save, the southern boundary river of Hungary, and the Drave join the Danube in the south from the Eastern Alps, up to the base of which both are navigable.
The Theiss, winding south through the plain of Hungary from its source in the Carpathians, is its great northern tributary, also navigable, and so full of fish as to be popularly described as “two-thirds water and one-third fish.”
The March, from the Sudetic Mountains, corresponds to the Leitha from the south, forming part of the boundary between Austria and Hungary. The high basin of Bohemia, as before said, forms the upper basin of the Elbe, which escapes thence into Saxony.
The head stream of the Oder passes through Austrian Silesia; and the Vistula, draining like these to the Baltic, has its head streams in the northern slopes of the Carpathians in Galicia, the eastern portion of which province, however, drains to the Black Sea by the Dniester.
Lakes.—The two large lake basins of the country, which seem to be remnants of much more extensive inland waters, lie in Hungary between the Danube and the Drave. The larger, the Platten See or Balaton Lake, fifty miles long, shallow and stagnant, overflows into the surrounding marshes only in spring. The Lake of Constance, on the northern margin of the Alps, and Lake Garda, on the southern, touch upon Austrian territory.