Galicia (Eastern Europe) - Tribal Area

Tribal Area

The region has a turbulent history. In Roman times the region was populated by various tribes of Celto-Germanic admixture, including Celtic-based tribes – like the Galice or "Gaulics" and Bolihinii or "Volhynians" – the Lugians and Cotini of Celtic, Vandals and Goths of Germanic origins (the Przeworsk and Púchov cultures). Beginning with the Wandering of the nations, the great migration coincident with the fall of the Roman Empire, various groups of nomadic people invaded the area:

• 2nd–5th century: Scythians, Sarmatians (including Alans, Serbs, Croats, and others, who later became slavicized)
• 4th–5th century: Huns
• 5th century: Avars
• 6th–8th century: Slavs
• 6th–9th century: Bulgars (later Slavicized), Pechenegs, Cumans, Hungarians
• 10th–13th century: Karaites
• 13th–18th century: Tatars and other Turco-Mongol peoples from Central Asia

Overall, Slavs (both West and East Slavs, including Lendians as well as Rusyns) came to dominate the Celtic-German population.

In 891-892 the territories of White Croats and Red Croats became under the control of the Great Moravia, a Slavic state. With the invasion of the Magyars into the heart of the Great Moravian Empire around 899, Slavic tribes of Vistulans, White Croats, Red 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 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, a Rurikid Principality of Halych (Halicz, Halics, Galich, Galic) formed there, merged in the end of the century with the neighboring Volhynia into the Principality of Halych Volhynia that existed for a century and a 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.