Austro-Hungarian Empire

The Austro-Hungarian Empire (German: Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie, Hungarian: Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia) and its predecessors (the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Austrian Empire) dominated Central Europe and the northern Balkans from the end of the Middle Ages until its collapse at the end of World War I. At the time of its greatest extent, in the mid-19th century, it spanned about a thousand miles (1600 km) from Pavia in Northern Italy to Ternopil in Western Ukraine.

The empire was ruled by the House of Habsburg, arguably Europe's mightiest dynasty. All countries within the Austro-Hungarian realm are republics today, very few people with memories from the empire are alive, and very few heirs to the Habsburg family are left; still, many palaces and artefacts have survived to this day. And even though the Cold War has severed many ties, feelings of kinship and cooperation still and once more exist between the former parts of the empire.

During the 19th century, the empire was often seen as horrendously "backward" and in an era of rising nationalism it was dubbed "prison of nations". However, the "Austrian" half of the empire in particular granted remarkable linguistic and cultural rights for minorities and in the 21st century, the attempt at peaceful multi-ethnic coexistence – however flawed it was – is often retrospectively seen as something lost in the catastrophic World War I, rather than a "backwardness" to be replaced by ethnically cleansed nation states.

Regions
Empire of Austria (Cisleithania):

1. Bohemia

2. Bukovina

3. Carinthia

4. Carniola (see Slovenia)

5. Dalmatia (including the Bay of Kotor)

6. Galicia (see Małopolskie, Podkarpackie and Western Ukraine)

7. Austrian Littoral (see Istria, Gorizia-Gradisca, and Trieste)

8. Lower Austria

9. Moravia (see North Moravia and Silesia and South Moravia)

10. Salzburg

11. Silesia (see North Moravia and Silesia)

12. Styria (including Eastern Slovenia)

13. Tyrol (including South Tyrol)

14. Upper Austria

15. Vorarlberg

Kingdom of Hungary (Transleithania):

16. Hungary including Slovakia, Burgenland, Transylvania, Crișana, Maramureș, Banat and Vojvodina

17. Croatia-Slavonia


 * Fiume (un-numbered)

Austro-Hungarian Condominium:

18. Bosnia and Herzegovina

Older provinces, lost before the Great War


 * Lombardy-Venetia

Overseas possessions:


 * Tianjin (part)

Understand
The Early Middle Ages saw the rise of monarchies and city-states in Central Europe, which came to be united in the Frankish Empire. The empire was divided in the 10th century, with most of Germanic Europe being split in a complex patchwork of city-states. From AD 962, many of them were united in a loose confederation known as the Holy Roman Empire, with the claim to succeed the ancient Roman Empire. The German word for Emperor, Kaiser, as well as the Russian equivalent czar, derives from the name "Caesar", that was pronounced rather similarly to the modern German word "Kaiser" in classical Latin. Over the centuries, the Holy Roman Empire lost power to local rulers, and the Emperor became an electoral position of mostly sentimental value.

Meanwhile, the East Roman Empire survived as the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople. As the city was lost to the Ottoman Empire who changed the capital's name to Istanbul, both the Ottomans themselves and the Russian Empire claimed succession from Rome. The Ottomans and Russia came to be Austria's main rivals, though occasionally their allies.

The house of Habsburg, whose ancestral seat is in the Swiss canton of Aargau, ascended the throne of Austria in 1282. From 1438 to 1806 the dynasty almost continually held the titles of German king and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. From 1516 to 1700, the Habsburgs also controlled the vast Spanish Empire. Ferdinand I of Austria was elected King of Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic) in 1526 and annexed Hungary in the same year, thereby also acquiring Croatia and Slovakia.

While the Protestant Reformation swept northern Europe, Austria remained Catholic. In the early 17th century, Protestant states revolted against the Holy Roman Empire. The conflict evolved to the Thirty Years' War, in which the Holy Roman Emperor lost all significant power outside Austria and Bohemia. The multiethnic Habsburg Monarchy, lying partly within and partly outside the Empire, became a great power in its own right, and a destination on the Grand Tour. Vienna became a centre for European classical music and other arts, boasting composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.

Following the 1789 French Revolution, the Kingdom of France became Austria's main rival in the French Revolutionary Wars, and later the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon Bonaparte became Emperor of the French in May 1804 to usurp the Imperial glory. He planned to conquer more of Europe, and thereby chances to be elected as Holy Roman Emperor. Francis II styled himself Emperor of Austria two months later, to secure his title. In 1805, Napoleon defeated Austria, and forced them to cede much territory. Francis formally dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, to avoid losing the crown to Napoleon. Austria was weakened, and defeated by Napoleon again in 1812. As much of Napoleon's army perished in a campaign against the Russian Empire, Austria joined a coalition that eventually defeated the Napoleonic Empire, and the 1815 Congress of Vienna restored the Austrian Empire as one of Europe's great powers.

Prussia led an alliance that defeated Austria in the 1866 Austro-Prussian war, and became the core state of the German Empire in 1871, with an emperor of their own. Austria-Hungary was no longer the dominant power in Central Europe. However, the 1870s Gründerzeit ("founders' period") brought a great economic boom as well as a long-lasting construction boom and the emergence of a highly ornamental, eclectic-historicist architectural style that is considered typical for the Habsburg lands. The most representative examples of this period are along the Vienna Ring Road, but buildings of a similar style can be found all over the former Empire.

In contrast to most other European empires, Austria-Hungary had no persistent colonies overseas. In 1778, the Empire founded settlements on the Nicobar Islands, and on Maputo Bay in Mozambique. Both were abandoned within a few years. After suppressing the Qing Dynasty-backed Boxer Rebellion as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1901, Austria-Hungary had a concession zone in Tianjin from 1901 to 1917.

In the 19th century, particularly in the long reign of emperor Franz Joseph (1848-1916), nationalism swept Europe, and many ethnic groups requested independence, or at least more autonomy. The Kingdom of Hungary earned more recognition in the Compromise of 1867, styling the empire as Austria-Hungary. While other European countries were formed or reformed according to nationalist and democratic ideas, the empire was still based on divine right, feudalism, and royal marriages. After 1867, many institutions of the Empire were styled "imperial and royal", referring to the two crowns of Austria and Hungary, kaiserlich und königlich in German. This was usually abbreviated to "k. u. k." in Austria and "k. k." in Hungary (the butt of many jokes in military and diplomatic circles) and led to the country's nicknames "k. u. k Monarchie" or "Kakanien".

Discontent among the Slavic peoples was supported by the Russian Empire, and led up to the 1914 assassination of Franz Joseph's heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand (married to a Czech countess, he supported Slavic rights within the empire, if only to knock down the Magyars a peg) in Sarajevo, which became the igniting spark of World War I; at its time known as "The Great War". The war and the subsequent political revolts led to the fall of Austria-Hungary, as well as the Russian, German and Ottoman empires.

The empire was a forerunner in science and technology. Vienna and Prague were connected by a telegraph line as early as 1847. The Telefon Hírmondó was a broadcast service in Budapest founded in 1893, the first and most successful of its kind. Budapest arguably has the world's second oldest underground railway. The Orient Express was a legendary rail line, with much of its length through Austria-Hungary.

Other than Austria and Hungary, the empire's territory is today divided between Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland.

Get around
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was tied together by railroads and many of them survived the Cold War and the general neglect of railway infrastructure in the twentieth century or have been restored in recent times. In addition to that, there was an effort even through the years of European division to ensure a state of good repair for some roads linking Germany and other destination countries for work migrants with their former homelands to the South and East. As the Iron Curtain opened, traffic flows changed once more and the Austrian Railway, ÖBB, is slowly but surely acquiring an amount of international connections out of proportion with the size of the country, largely focused in the "k.u.k. lands" (kaiserlich und königlich, i.e. the former Austria-Hungary), Germany and Switzerland.

Talk
German used to be the lingua franca of the empire and Central Europe in general. This ended after World War II, as millions of German-speakers were expelled from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and several other nations, to present-day Germany and Austria. Still, the empire was multi-ethnic, with recognition of local languages—its krone banknotes bore text in no less than eight languages in addition to German and Hungarian. During the 19th century the Hungarian half of the Empire had an even more aggressive language policy marginalizing linguistic minorities and strongly Magyarizing many places, the effects of which can be seen to this day.

In addition, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was, for a time, a major patron of operas in Italian as well as German, and many of the upper class German-speaking subjects of the empire also understood some Italian and French. German still plays some role as a second or third language in the area, but oftentimes it has been relegated to a secondary position behind English or Russian, not least because the German-language states want to avoid the appearance of cultural imperialism.

Itineraries

 * Orient Express, a legendary rail line between Paris and Istanbul, with much of its distance within Austria-Hungary
 * The Danube flows through many of the most important cities of the former Empire
 * EuroVelo cycling routes EV4 (Prague–Brno–Kraków–Lviv), EV6 (Danube Cycleway: Vienna–Bratislava–Budapest–Belgrade), EV7 (Prague–Linz–Salzburg–Bolzano), EV9 (Wrocław–Brno–Vienna–Ljubljana–Trieste), EV11 (Kraków–Košice–Szeged), EV13 (Iron Curtain Trail)
 * The Ćiro Trail is a 157-km rail trail for cycling in what was the southern reaches of the empire between Mostar and Dubrovnik. It follows the tracks of a dismantled Austro-Hungarian narrow gauge railway, and crosses several 19th-century tunnels and bridges.