Österreich began as an eastern realm in a 996 charter
The Republic of Austria is a landlocked Eastern Alps federation of nine states with Vienna as capital and largest city. Celts lived here around 400 BC before Roman annexation. The native name Österreich continues Old High German Ostarrîchi—eastern realm—first attested in a 996 document.
By the 6th century BC the region was the heartland of the Hallstatt culture, and the salt town of Hallstatt holds Europe's oldest archaeological evidence of the Celts. Rome swallowed the Celtic kingdom of Noricum in 16 BC and kept it as a province until 476. Carnuntum, a legionary camp that grew into the capital of Upper Pannonia, housed about 50,000 people for nearly four centuries. After Rome, Rugii, Odoacer, Ostrogoths, Avars and Slavs passed through before Charlemagne conquered the land in 788 and brought Christianity.
The eastern march went to Leopold I of the Babenberg family in 976, and the Latin form "Austria" appears in the 12th century. When the Babenberg line died out in 1246, Ottokar II of Bohemia seized the duchies, but Rudolph I defeated him at Dürnkrut in 1278, and from then until World War I Austrian history was largely Habsburg history. After Albert V succeeded Emperor Sigismund in 1438, every Holy Roman Emperor but one was a Habsburg. Strategic marriages added Burgundy's Netherlands in 1477 and, through Joanna of Castile in 1496, Spain and its overseas empire.
Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Vienna in 1529; by some Ottoman accounts, early snow ended the attempt. A second siege was broken in 1683 by John III Sobieski's relief army, and the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 handed most of Hungary to Austria. To guard their imperial rank against Napoleon, the Habsburgs proclaimed an Austrian Empire in 1804 and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire two years later. Defeat by Prussia at Königgrätz in 1866 pushed Austria out of German affairs, and the 1867 compromise with Hungary created a dual monarchy whose laws were printed in eight languages.
The empire collapsed with World War I. Engelbert Dollfuss installed an Austrofascist dictatorship in 1934, and Hitler absorbed the country into Nazi Germany a year before World War II began. After ten years of Allied occupation, Austria declared permanent neutrality in 1955 and joined the UN. It entered the European Union in 1995 and adopted the euro in 1999, and about 9.2 million people live on its 83,879 km², with OPEC and the OSCE headquartered in Vienna.
Source: Austria
