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GALICIA:
The Austrian Partition (1773-1918)
As kingdoms go, the life of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was short
and sad. It was created in 1773 to accommodate the territories ceded to Austria
by the First Partition of Poland, and was enlarged in 1795 by the addition of the
westerly district of 'New Galicia' acquired at the Third Partition. In 1809, after
the abortive campaign against the Duchy of Warsaw, it was obliged to abandon
part of its recent acquisitions. But in 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, it recov-
ered most of the former New Galicia, except for Cracow, and was compensated
by the award of the easterly districts of Czortkow (Chortkiv) and Tarnopol
(Ternopil'). In 1846, it inherited the remaining effects of the late Republic of
Cracow, thereby consolidating a territorial base which was to remain unaltered
for the rest of its existence. (See Map 4.) The familiar distinction between
Western Galicia, to the west of the River San, and Eastern Galicia to the east,
coincided with a formal administrative division only briefly, in the years
1848-60 and 1861-7; but it continued in colloquial usage throughout the nine-
teenth century. According to the official historical fiction, the new kingdom was
supposed to be a restoration of a long-forgotten medieval realm which had once
been subject to the Hungarian Crown; and it derived its name from the ancient
Ruthenian principalities of Halicz (Galicia) and Wlodzimierz (Lodomeria). In
fact, it possessed little natural coherence. Occupying a long, rambling swathe of
territory to the north of the Carpathian mountains, from the Oder in the west
to the Zbruch in the east, it covered over 20,000 square miles and was the largest
single province of the Austrian Empire. Its absentee proprietors, the Habsburg
Emperors, resided far away in Vienna. Its Governors and Viceroys, from
Johann Count Pergen, appointed in 1773, to Karl Count Huyn, appointed in
1917, were loyal Habsburg servants. Its capital city of Lemberg (Lwow, Lviv)
never aspired beyond the bounds of solid provincial respectability. Its leading
intellectual centre, Cracow, lived in the shadow of a more glorious, shattered
past. Galicia, born from Maria Theresa's guilty pact with Russia and Prussia,
was an unwanted child from the start, and never grew to full maturity. It passed
away in October 1918, and few people mourned its passing.
The Habsburg home within which Galicia developed was unable to provide
a secure or stable environment. In the century which followed the First
Partition, Austria experienced a wide variety of political disasters and constitu-