History of Galicia (Eastern Europe)

With the arrival of the Hungarians into the heart of the Central European Plain around 899, Slavic tribes of Vistulans, White Croats, and Lendians found themselves under Hungarian rule. In 955 those areas north of the Carpathian Mountains constituted an autonomous part of the Duchy of Bohemia and remained so until around 972, when the first Polish (western Polans) territorial claims began to emerge. This area was mentioned in 981 (by Nestor), when Vladimir the Great of Kievan Rus' claimed the area on his westward way. In the 11th century the area belonged to Poland (1018–1031 and 1069–1080), then reverted to Kievan Rus'. However, at the end of the 12th century the Hungarian claims to the principality turned up. Finally Casimir III of Poland annexed it in 1340–1349. Low Germans from Prussia and Middle Germany settled parts of northern and western Galicia from the 13th to 18th centuries, although the vast majority of the historic province remained independent from German and Austrian rule.

The territory was settled by the East Slavs in the Early Middle Ages and, in the 12th century, the Rurikid principality of Galicia was formed, and was merged at the end of the century with the neighboring principality of Volhynia into the Principality of Galicia–Volhynia that existed for the next century and half. By 1352, when the principality was partitioned between the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, most of Galicia belonged to the Polish Crown, where it still remained after the 1569 union between Poland and Lithuania. Upon the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772 the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, or simply Galicia, became the largest, most populous, and northernmost province of the Austrian Empire, where it remained until the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I in 1918.