Ostsiedlung

rdf:langString Ostsiedlung

rdf:langString town built in a previously unsettled area. Locators organized the settlement and set up rectangular blocks in an oval area with a central market.

rdf:langString town attached to a preexisting castrum . The castrum was located on the island with the cathedral, the

rdf:langString Poznań , an example of an

rdf:langString Greifswald in medieval Pomerania is an example of an

rdf:langString town with its rectangular street grid was built on the river's bank.

rdf:langString vertical

rdf:langString towns

rdf:langString Examples of

rdf:langString Greifswald im Mittelalter .jpg

rdf:langString Poznan Braun Hohenberg.jpg

rdf:langString Ostsiedlung (German pronunciation: [ˈɔstˌziːdlʊŋ], literally "East-settling") is the term for the High Medieval migration-period when ethnic Germans moved into the territories in the eastern part of the Holy Roman Empire (that Germans had already conquered) and beyond; and the consequences for settlement development and social structures in the areas of immigration. Generally sparsely and only relatively recently populated by Slavic, Baltic and Finnic peoples, the area of colonization, also known as Germania Slavica, encompassed (with relation to modern-day countries) Germany east of the Saale and Elbe rivers, part of the states of Lower Austria and Styria in Austria, the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, and Transylvania in Romania. Since the 1980s, historians have interpreted the Ostsiedlung as a part of a civil and social development, termed the High Middle Age Land Consolidation (German: Hochmittelalterlicher Landesausbau). In a pan-European intensification process from the Carolingian-Anglo-Saxon core countries to the periphery of the continent, societies progressed in culture, religion, law and administration, trade and agriculture. The majority of Ostsiedlung settlers moved individually, in independent efforts, in multiple stages and on different routes - there existed no imperial colonization policy, central planning or movement organization. Many settlers were encouraged and invited by the Slavic princes and regional lords. Smaller groups of migrants first moved to the east during the early Middle Ages. Larger treks of settlers, which included scholars, monks, missionaries, craftsmen and artisans, often invited, in numbers unverifiable, first moved eastwards during the mid-12th century. The military territorial conquests and punitive expeditions of the Ottonian and Salian emperors during the 11th and 12th centuries do not form part of the Ostsiedlung, as these actions didn't result in any noteworthy settlement establishment east of the Elbe and Saale rivers. The Ostsiedlung is considered to have been a purely Medieval event as it ended in the beginning of the 14th century. The legal, cultural, linguistic, religious and economic changes caused by the movement had a profound influence on the history of Eastern Central Europe between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians until the 20th century. In the 20th century, accounts of the Ostsiedlung were heavily exploited by German nationalists (including the Nazi movement) to press the territorial claims of Germany and to demonstrate supposed German superiority over non-Germanic peoples, whose cultural, urban and scientific achievements in that era were undermined, rejected, or presented as German. After World War I (1914-1918), the fact that Germany and Austria lost part of their territories in the East appeared as a counterpoint to Ostsiedlung because some of the Germans in the East became foreign citizens when their homes were no longer part of Germany and Austria. The Germans in the East outside Germany and Austria were not expelled and the regions that Germany and Austria lost in the East were dominated by non-German peoples, so the German loss here was not as severe as after World War II. In and after World War II, Germans were driven out and deported to rump Germany from the East and their language and culture were lost in most areas (including the German-dominated lands which Germany lost after this war) in which German people had settled during the Ostsiedlung; except part of Eastern Austria and especially Eastern Germany.