Austro-Hungarian Empire in the context of "Austrian Parliament Building"

Freiherr (German: [ˈfʁaɪˌhɛɐ̯]; male, abbreviated as Frhr.), Freifrau ([ˈfʁaɪˌfʁaʊ]; his wife, abbreviated as Frfr., lit. 'free lord' or 'free lady') and Freiin ([ˈfʁaɪ.ɪn], his unmarried daughters and maiden aunts) are designations used as titles of nobility in the German-speaking areas of the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in its various successor states, including Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, etc. Traditionally, it denotes the titled rank within the nobility above Ritter (knight) and Edler (nobility without a specific title) and below Graf (count or earl). The title superseded the earlier medieval form, Edelherr.

It corresponds approximately to the English baron in rank. The Duden orthography of the German language references the French nobility title of Baron, deriving from the Latin-Germanic combination liber baro (which also means "free lord"), as corresponding to the German "Freiherr"; and that Baron is a corresponding salutation for a Freiherr.

Austrians (German: Österreicher) are the citizens and nationals of Austria. The English term Austrians was applied to the population of Habsburg Austria from the 17th or 18th century. Subsequently, during the 19th century, it referred to the citizens of the Empire of Austria (1804–1867), and from 1867 until 1918 to the citizens of Cisleithania. In the closest sense, the term Austria originally referred to the historical March of Austria, corresponding roughly to the Vienna Basin in what is today Lower Austria.

Historically, Austrians were regarded as Germans and viewed themselves as such. The Austrian lands (including Bohemia) were part of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation until the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 which resulted in Prussia expelling the Austrian Empire from the Confederation. Thus, when Germany was founded as a nation-state in 1871, Austria was not a part of it. In 1867, Austria was reformed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 at the end of World War I, Austria was reduced to a rump state and adopted and briefly used the name the Republic of German-Austria (German: Republik Deutschösterreich) in an attempt for union with Germany, but was forbidden due to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919). The First Austrian Republic was founded in 1919. Nazi Germany annexed Austria with the Anschluss in 1938.

The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) (Arabic: مجاعة جبل لبنان, romanized: Majā'at Jabal Lubnān; Ottoman Turkish: Cebel-i Lübnan Kıtlığı جَبَلِ لُبْنَان قِیتْلِیࢰِی), also known as Kafno (Classical Syriac: ܟܦܢܐ, romanized: Kafno, lit. 'Starvation'), was a period of mass starvation on Mount Lebanon during World War I that resulted in the deaths of about 200,000 people, most of whom were Maronite Christians.

There were many reasons for the famine in Mount Lebanon. Natural as well as man-made factors both played a role. Allied forces (Great Britain and France) blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean, as they had done with the German Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe, in order to strangle the economy and weaken the Ottoman war effort. The situation was exacerbated by Jamal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army of the Ottoman Empire, who deliberately barred crops from neighbouring Syria from entering Mount Lebanon, in response to the Allied blockade. Additionally, a swarm of locusts devoured the remaining crops, creating a famine that led to the deaths of half of the population of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a semi-autonomous subdivision of the Ottoman Empire and the precursor of modern-day Lebanon. Ottoman Mount Lebanon had the highest per capita fatality rate of any 'bounded' territory during the First World War.

Western Ukraine or West Ukraine (Ukrainian: Західна Україна, romanized: Zakhidna Ukraina, IPA: [ˈzɑxidnɐ ʊkrɐˈjinɐ]) refers to the western territories of Ukraine. There is no universally accepted definition of the territory's boundaries, but the contemporary Ukrainian administrative regions (oblasts) of Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Ternopil and Zakarpattia (which were part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) are typically included. In addition, Volyn and Rivne oblasts (parts of the territory annexed from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during its Third Partition) are also usually included. In modern sources, Khmelnytskyi Oblast is often included because of its geographical, linguistic and cultural association with Western Ukraine, although this cannot be confirmed from a historical and political point of view. It includes several historical regions such as Carpathian Ruthenia, Halychyna including Pokuttia (the eastern portion of Eastern Galicia), most of Volhynia, northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region, and Podolia. Western Ukraine is sometimes considered to include areas of eastern Volhynia, Podolia, and the small northern portion of Bessarabia.

The area of Western Ukraine was ruled by various polities, including the Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia, which became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, but also the Principality of Moldavia; it would then variously come under rule of the Austrian Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Second Polish Republic, the Kingdom of Romania, and finally the Soviet Union (via the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) in 1939 and 1940 following the invasion of Poland and the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, with the borders finalized after the end of World War II. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it became part of the independent Ukrainian state.

The history of Austria covers the history of Austria and its predecessor states. In the late Iron Age Austria was occupied by people of the Hallstatt Celtic culture (c. 800 BC), they first organized as a Celtic kingdom referred to by the Romans as Noricum, dating from c. 800 to 400 BC. At the end of the 1st century BC, the lands south of the Danube became part of the Roman Empire. In the Migration Period, the 6th century, the Bavarii, a Germanic people, occupied these lands until it fell to the Frankish Empire established by the Germanic Franks in the 9th century. In the year 976 AD, the first state of Austria formed. The name Ostarrîchi (Austria) has been in use since 996 AD when it was a margravate of the Duchy of Bavaria and from 1156 an independent duchy (later archduchy) of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806).

Austria was dominated by the House of Habsburg and House of Habsburg-Lorraine from 1273 to 1918. In 1806, when Emperor Francis II of Austria dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, Austria became the Austrian Empire, and was also part of the German Confederation until the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. In 1867, Austria formed a dual monarchy with Hungary: the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When this empire collapsed after the end of World War I in 1918, Austria was reduced to the main, mostly German-speaking areas of the empire (its current frontiers), and adopted the name, the Republic of German-Austria. However, union with Germany and the chosen country name were forbidden by the Allies at the Treaty of Versailles. This led to the creation of the First Austrian Republic (1919–1933).

The Triple Entente (from French entente [ɑ̃tɑ̃t] meaning "friendship, understanding, agreement") describes the informal mutual arrangement and understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was built upon the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between France and Britain, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. It formed a powerful counterweight to the Triple Alliance of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Italy. The Triple Entente, unlike the Triple Alliance or the Franco-Russian Alliance itself, was not an alliance of mutual defence.

The Franco-Japanese Treaty of 1907 was a key part of building a coalition as France took the lead in creating alliances with Japan, Russia, and (informally) with Britain. Japan wanted to raise a loan in Paris, so France made the loan contingent on a Russo-Japanese agreement and a Japanese guarantee for France's strategically vulnerable possessions in Indochina. Britain encouraged the Russo-Japanese rapprochement. Thus was built the Triple Entente coalition that fought World War I.

The First Czechoslovak Republic emerged from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in October 1918. The new state consisted mostly of territories inhabited by Czechs and Slovaks, but also included areas containing majority populations of other nationalities, particularly Germans (22.95 %), who accounted for more citizens than the state's second state nation of the Slovaks, Hungarians (5.47 %) and Ruthenians (3.39 %). The new state comprised the total of Bohemia whose borders did not coincide with the language border between German and Czech. Despite initially developing effective representative institutions alongside a successful economy, the deteriorating international economic situation in the 1930s gave rise to growing ethnic tensions. The dispute between the Czech and German populations, fanned by the rise of Nazism in neighbouring Germany, resulted in the loss of territory under the terms of the Munich Agreement and subsequent events in the autumn of 1938, bringing about the end of the First Republic.

The Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence or the Washington Declaration (Czech: Washingtonská deklarace; Slovak: Washingtonská deklarácia; German: Washingtoner Erklärung; Hungarian: Washingtoni Nyilatkozat) was drafted in Washington, D.C., and published by Czechoslovakia's Paris-based Provisional Government on 18 October 1918. The creation of the document, officially the Declaration of Independence of the Czechoslovak Nation by its Provisional Government (Czech: Prohlášení nezávislosti československého národa zatímní vládou československou), was prompted by the imminent collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which the Czech and Slovak lands had been part for almost 400 years, following World War I.