Austria named its slice of partitioned Poland after an old Hungarian royal title
When the Habsburgs seized land from Poland-Lithuania in 1772, they called it the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The name came from a title Hungarian kings had claimed since the 1200s, and it neatly avoided any mention of Poland, even though much of the territory was historically Polish.
The new crown land was cut in 1772 from the southwest of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the First Partition of Poland. Most of it was historical Galicia, plus a sliver of Lodomeria around Belz and a sizeable southern part of Lesser Poland. It became a crown land of the Austrian Empire in 1804 and, from 1867, sat in the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary with some provincial autonomy, lasting until the monarchy collapsed in 1918.
Both names are Latinised Slavic place names. Galicia derives from Halychyna, the medieval principality centred on the town of Halych. Lodomeria refers to the principality around Volodymyr-Volynskyi, also called Volhynia. King Andrew II of Hungary, who reigned from 1205 to 1235, created the title King of Galicia and Lodomeria during short-lived conquests there, and later Hungarian monarchs kept it among their ceremonial titles. The Habsburgs, as holders of the Hungarian crown, used it to justify their 1772 claim.
The borders moved often in the early decades. In the Third Partition of 1795 Austria took more Polish territory and labelled it West Galicia, stretching the Galician name still further; it was lost again in 1809. Other adjustments followed in years such as 1815 and 1846, but after 1849 the frontier stayed fixed until 1918. During the First World War, Russia briefly governed the area in 1914 and 1915.
After Austria-Hungary broke up, Ukrainian republics claimed the eastern districts, but the Polish-Ukrainian War left the whole region inside the Second Polish Republic. Border changes after the Second World War split it between Poland and Soviet Ukraine. Today the historic heartland lies in western Ukraine, around Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, while its western half forms most of Poland's Lesser Poland and Subcarpathian provinces.
Source: Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
