Brief introduction to the Black Death’s conquest of Central Europe

At the same time as the armies of the Black Death emerged victorious in the western parts of Europe, all the way from Spain to Norway, another force formed a broad, although sharply zigzagged plague front that moved northwards in Europe’s central regions. This plague front was made up of the massed forces from the original epicentres in Marseille, northern Italy and on the Dalmatian (Croatian) coast. Austria was invaded at about the same time as Switzerland, in August 1348. This heralded the beginning of the conquest of Central Europe, namely Austria, the Kingdom of Hungary, which at the time stretched all the way from the Dalmatian shores across present-day Hungary and Slovakia to Poland’s southern borders, and the Kingdom of Bohemia, corresponding largely to the territory of the present-day Czech Republic.

Austria: the complex territorial, political and historical context

The present-day Austrian state was only in the making at the time its territory was invaded by the Black Death. Politically, it was part of the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, much of a fiction dating back to Charlemagne’s great conquests, his coronation by the pope in 800 CE as emperor and the establishment of the propaganda myth that he had resurrected the Christian Roman Empire of Late Antiquity. More realistically, Charlemagne had united Frankland (the Kingdom of the Franks) and most of the continental lands and countries that developed a Germanic language, and a number of other regions, areas and countries as well, including a large part of present-day northern Italy.

Austria is the latinized form of the Austro-German name Österreich, composed of two words that mean east(ern) (‘Ost’) and Realm (‘reich’), respectively. This was the name of a margravate that Charlemagne established on the eastern border of his empire after he had defeated the mounted Mongol people called the Avars in AD 788. Later, the margravate was expanded to include also the land to the west of the R. Enns, called Upper Austria in contrast to the original area that was now called Lower Austria where also Vienna is situated, and together these two areas were to constitute the Duchy of Austria.