BEFORE AUSTRIA, TO 1000

Austria began its history in the late tenth century as an eastern march of the duchy of Bavaria. It was during this period that an area in the Danube valley came to be known as ‘the eastern land’, in Latin ‘terra orientalis’, or ‘ostarrichi’ in the local German of the time. The first written evidence of this early medieval equivalent of ‘Österreich’ dates from 996. In the eleventh century the march was sometimes referred to as ‘Osterlant’; the Latin version of ‘Austria’ first appears in a document in 1147.

As Austrian historians were at pains after 1945 to prove, the march was never actually called the ‘Ostmark’. Nevertheless, it was as an eastern march of the German kingdom under Bavarian suzerainty, a military district on the Germans' south-east frontier, that Austria started its career.

As the discovery of Ötzi indicates, human activity in the area began thousands of years before any concept of ‘Austria’. The mountainous terrain meant that there were few early settlements. The region was not at the forefront of human civilization, and the Iron Age culture evident at Hallstatt appeared relatively late, around 800 bce. From then until around 400 bce the main group in the region was the ‘Illyrians’, who were largely displaced by Celts, chief among them the tribes of the Norici and Taurisci.