1763-1920 - Austrian Silesia
In 1740 died Charles VI, Emperor of Germany, the last descendant in the male line of the House of Austria. Charles had in the latter part of his life promulgated the new law of succession known as the Pragmatic Sanction, in virtue of which, his daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa, wife of Francis of Lorraine, succeeded to the dominions of his ancestors, including Silesia. Prussia, along with the other great powers of Europe, had bound herself by treaty to respect this law, but Frederick II, in defiance of his solemn oath, determined to annex Silesia, which had a population of about 1 million inhabitants.
The various acquisitions which the Hohenzollerns had made, while they brought extensive territories under their rule, were so scattered that they needed to be linked up and consolidated, if Prussia was ever to form a strong State. To Frederick the Great the configuration of his kingdom was intolerable. He desired Saxony, West Prussia, and Swedish Pomerania. He gained Silesia, which he seized in 1740, and which Austria finally yielded at the Peace of Hubertusburg in 1763, together with Schwiebus and Glatz, as a result of an eight-year war known as the War of the Austrian Succession.
Austrian Silesia, the part of the duchy that remained to Austria after the Seven Years' War, was a mere fraction of the whole, its area being only 1,980 square miles, or ahout one-eighth of that of Prussian Silesia. It fell into two small portions of territory, separated by a projecting limb of Moravia and surrounded by Prussian Silesia, Moravia, Hungary, and Galicia. Until 1849 it was for administrative purposes reckoned a part of Moravia, but since that year it was a crownland of the Austrian empire (the smallest of all), with the style of duchy. The population in 1885 was 577,593.
The Duchy of Austrian Silesia comprised the two Silesian districts of Troppau and Teschen. The Troppau district is known as Upper or Western Silesia, the Teschen district as Lower or Eastern Silesia, the whole comprising an area of 2026 square miles. The Duchy was bounded on the north by Prussian Silesia, on the south by Slovakia, on the east by Galicia, and in the west by Moravia. In the Teschen district the soil is mostly poor, the climate cold and wet. The chief rivers are the Ostrawitza, the Olsa, and the Vistula, which rises in the Barania Range and flows north to the Prussian Frontier at Schwarzwasser, then eastwards to the Galician border.
The Duchy in 1920 was composed of three distinct areas : the German political district which formed the greater part of Western Silesia, and included the town of Troppau ; the Czecho-Slovak territory in Western Silesia comprising the northern part of the rural districts of Troppau and Friedek ; the Polish territory which included the districts of Bielitz, Teschen, and Freistadt. The total population according to the census of 1910 numbered 741,456, in the proportion of 43.90 percent German, 24.33 percent Czech-Slovak, 31.72 percent Polish, 0.05 percent, others. The average density of population was 380 to the square mile.
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