第10页 The Eastern March, to 1349

Austria began its history in the later 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 966. In the eleventh century the march was sometimes referred to as ‘Osterlant’; the Latin version of ‘Austria’ first appears in a document in 1147.