The Baltic Crusades; Illyrian Provinces; North-Mid-South Burgenland
The village of Ágfalva was part of the Dág domain. Croatia joined the Kingdom of Hungary in 1102. The joining of the Croatian and Hungarian crowns automatically made Hungary and Venice rivals for domination of Dalmatia. Hungary sought access to the sea, while Venice wished to secure its trade routes to the eastern Mediterranean and to use Dalmatian timber for shipbuilding. In 1195, it was acquired by the Cistercian order.
The Baltic Crusades of the 11th to the early 15th century formed the fulcrum of the transformation of the Baltic region from rural pagan farming peasants paying tribute to whatever lord prevailed over the others to rule them, to the Christianized, market-oriented, urban foundation of modern Baltic society. The institution of knighthood represented the values of medieval Europe, and the incursion of the knightly orders into the Baltic countries during these crusades transmitted those values to the Baltic regions despite the strong resistance of the independent, unchurched peoples living there. The involvement of North Germans and Scandinavians in the crusades left critical political and social imprints and changes that affected the future path of historical events in the Baltic region that was to evolve into the countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The Catharist movement reached western Europe in the 11th century and spread throughout Italy, France, Catalonia, Germany and England, however it was in the lands of the Counts of Toulose. Catharism is a religion based on salvation according to a re-interpretation of the New Testament and a Gnostic interpretation of the Gospel of Saint John. As the balances of power shifted in the 12th century, the Eastern Orthodox Church, based in Constantinople and the seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire, became a focus of the Crusades as well. The success of the Crusades, as measured by conversion to Catholicism, was negligible in the Middle East, but high in the Baltic region, where all but the Lithuanians were converted to Catholicism by the close of the 13th century.
In 1284 the Teutonic Order succeeded in defeating Prussia, which disappeared as a distinct tribe of Switzerland and Alsace located on the eastern boder of France- an area is named for the Saxons, assimilating into the neighboring societies of Poland, Germany and Lithuania. Later German conquerors appropriated the name ‘Prussia’ for themselves. The Crusaders in the 14th century continued the consolidation of their hold on the Baltic lands, strengthening their power in Estonia in 1343 as a result of the peasant rebellion against Danish rule and the subsequent Danish sale of northern Estonia to the Teutonic Order for 10,000 marks.
The Baltic Crusades are a branch of the Catholic crusading movement that comprised five main Crusades that occurred between 1096 and 1221.
The Magyars swept the open country in the north and settled with the kindred nation of the Petchenegs. Their own kings, acting through the agency of various monastic orders, recolonized the whole open space on both sides of the Neusiedlersee with German settlers and Bajuvarians as most of the Austrians. Descendants of the settlers still make up a large population of the Wieselburg district of Burgenland (Austria). This colonization lasted from the eleventh century, beside the Northern Crusades to the thirteenth century and the origins of the Hanseatic League. Swedish and German campaigns against Orthodox Russian principalities are also sometimes considered part of the Northern Crusades. Armed conflict between the Balts and Slavs who dwelt by the Baltic shores and their Saxon and Danish neighbors to the North and south had been common for several centuries prior to the crusade. The first campaigns were launched in parallel with the Second Crusade to the Holy Land in the mid-1100s, and continued irregularly until the 16th century.
In the 13th century, the village became called Agendorf by its German settlers. Until the 19th century, Agendorf was a serf village ["Frondorf"] for Sopron. The mine in Brennberg was opened in 1785, providing employment for many inhabitants. In 1906, the name of the village was changed to Ágfalva. The Leitha appears as the Austro-Hungarian frontier as early as 1043 AD. In the south, the Lafinitz seems to have become the line between Hungary and Styria. In the fifteenth century, some of the border castles and cities were ceded by Hungary to Emperor Frederick IV, his brother Albrecht VI, and the Emperor Maximilian, and some were administered by the lower estates of Austria. The German tribes who succeeded Rome in (Noricum) Austria and Pannonia were probably further borders created and left by the Avars. In the 7th century, the Croat tribe moved from the area north of the Carpathians and east of the river Vistula (what was referred to as the White Croatia) and migrated into the western Dinaric Alps.
- Bulgaria—first Slav state in the 6th century A.D.
- Khazar overlordship over most of the Crimea dates back to the late 600s.
- Kievan Rus—On trade route, Kiev became capital of Russian city-states during 9th century. Kievans were cosmopolitan, but adoption of Eastern Orthodoxy in 980 contributed to Eastern separation, High German consonant shift from Old East Slavic
- The Csángó settled Moldavia between the 13th and 15th centuries and are the only Hungarians living to the east of the Carpathians. Some Csango feel closer to Hungarians, others claim that they are in fact Romanians.
- Peter the Great and Russian Expansion (18th-19th Centuries): After Russian independence from Mongols in 1452, isolationism and feudal institutions.
- Mongol and Turkish Conquests in 13th-17th centuries devastated Central Eurasia, severed Western ties, and caused Russian capital to move to Moscow, which became the “Third Rome” after the fall of Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453. Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Slovenes avoided Ottoman domination; Hungary and Croatia were liberated early.
- The First Austrian Period in Istra (1797-1805); Era of Bourgeois Revolutions
- The Ottoman Empire, 1798-1923
- The Province of Istra in the Illyrian Provinces (1809-1813)
- Emancipation and Industrialization (1853-1900)
- The Russian Revolutions and World War I (1900-1918)
- The Planning Era Begins (1929-1945)
- Russia's land area is 84% larger than the United States: 36% of population, 41% of production, 73% of surface area