Ostarrichi Document

Ostarrîchi Document

Henry the Strong (d. 1018) was the second Margrave of Austria, a territory established as a buffer zone between the lands of the Germans, Hungarians, and Poles in 976 in the as part of the gradual German reconquest and resettlement of the region. During Henry’s reign, Emperor Otto III (980–1002) sought to support these efforts by donating some lands and their corresponding incomes to Gottschalk von Hagenau, Bishop of Freising. This event is recorded on a thousand-year-old piece of parchment commonly known as the Ostarrîchi Document. However, its true historical significance is that it contains the oldest written mention of the word Ostarrîchi. A circumflex (^) was added to the word by linguists in the 19th century to make its spelling more phonetically correct, but it does not appear in the original document.

The History of Austria up to 996

Settled by humans since the Stone Age, the area of modern Austria was as early as 800 BC by a Celtic people called the Norici who were allies of the Romans. They were famous for producing Noric steel and were a major provider of weaponry to their allies before finally being incorporated into the Roman Empire in 16 BC. During the migration period, the region was temporarily settled by Goths during the 4th and 5th centuries before they moved on. The Bavarii and Slavs permanently established themselves there in the course of the 6th and 7th centuries as vassals of the Franks and mixed with the local Romano-Celtic population. Bavarians continued to spread down the Danube and up into the Alps in the following centuries, which is why they and Austrians continue to speak a similar dialect today.
Charlemagne led the Franks and Bavarians against the neighboring Avars and drove them from the area between 791 and 803 to create a series of marches between the Danube and Adriatic to protect the southeastern corner of his empire. The arrival of the Magyars in 862 initiated a century of raids and warfare that saw much of the region overrun forcing the Germans to withdraw. After the victory of Otto the Great at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, the Magyars were driven back and the Eastern March was reestablished in 972. It was ruled beginning in 976 by Count Leopold I of Babenberg (ca. 940–994), whose family ruled Austria until they were succeeded by the famous House of Hapsburg in 1246.

Defining Ostarrîchi

Although this is the oldest written record of the work Ostarrîchi, it does not necessarily imply that Austria only came into existence a millennium ago, nor does it mean that the term Ostarrîchi was adopted overnight or originally corresponded with the historic boundaries of the country. On the contrary, it is more likely that it simply records for the first time in writing what had probably long since been a perfectly normal way of referring to the region south of the Danube. It is possible that the meaning of the term changed and evolved from referring to a specific area to becoming the word for Austria as a whole, or it could have served as shorthand for both a specific place and the region in which it is located, much as “Los Angeles” is used to refer to both the city itself and to that region of Southern California more generally.
The document only identifies it as a relatively small area, “the country called Ostarrichi” consisting of “thirty royal estates in its immediate vicinity, with cultivated and uncultivated land, meadows, pastures, forests, buildings, springs and watercourses, hunting grounds, bee meadows, fishing waters, mills, movable and immovable property, paths and impassable land, exits and entrances, yields achieved and yet to be achieved, and everything that belongs to these estates according to law and justice”. It is one of only four non-Latin words appearing in the document and the other three are Old Bavarian, and so Ostarrichi may have a similar origin as a translation of the Latin marcha orientalis or “eastern march”.