It was created by Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa in 1180 when he raised the
March of Styria to a duchy of equal rank with neighbouring
Carinthia and
Bavaria, after the fall of the Bavarian Duke
Henry the Lion earlier that year. Margrave
Ottokar IV thereby became the first duke of Styria and also the last of the ancient
Otakar dynasty. As Ottokar had no issue, he in 1186 signed the
Georgenberg Pact with the mighty
House of Babenberg, rulers of
Austria since 976, after which both duchies should in perpetuity be ruled in personal union. Upon his death in 1192, Styria as stipulated fell to the Babenberg
Leopold V, Duke of Austria. The Austrian Babenbergs became extinct in 1246, when Duke
Frederick II was killed in battle against King
Béla IV of Hungary. Styria, a vacant Imperial fief, became a matter of dispute among the neighbouring estates. It passed quickly through the hands of
Hungarian kings in 1254, until King
Ottokar II of Bohemia conquered it, being victorious at the 1260
Battle of Kressenbrunn. As King Ottokar II had married the last duke's sister
Margaret, he laid claim to both Austria and Styria. This met with strong opposition by the newly-elected King
Rudolph I of Germany, who claimed the duchies as
escheated fiefs. Rudolph finally defeated Ottokar at the 1278
Battle on the Marchfeld, seized Austria and Styria and granted them to his sons
Albert I and
Rudolf II. The
House of Habsburg provided Styria with dukes of their lineage from that point on. The duchy was, however, separated from Austria by the 1379
Treaty of Neuberg, after which Styria, Carinthia, and
Carniola formed the
Inner Austrian territory ruled by the descendants of
Leopold III of the
Leopoldian line, who took their residence at
Graz. In 1456 they could significantly enlarge the Styrian territory by acquisition and re-acquisition of the comital
Celje estates in
Lower Styria. Both duchies were again ruled in personal union, when Leopold's grandson
Frederick V inherited Austria in 1457. In 1496 Frederick's son
Maximilian I signed an order expelling all
Jews from Styria, who were not allowed to return to Graz until 1856. In 1512 the duchy joined the Empire's
Austrian Circle. A second Inner Austrian cadet branch of the Habsburgs ruled over Styria from 1564. Under Archduke
Charles II of Inner Austria, Graz became a centre of the
Counter-Reformation, expedited by the
Jesuits at the
University of Graz established in 1585 and continued under Charles' son Archduke
Ferdinand II, who became sole rule of all Habsburg hereditary lands and
Holy Roman Emperor in 1619. The
Protestant population was expelled, including the astronomer
Johannes Kepler in 1600. Meanwhile, at the time of the
Ottoman invasions in the 16th and 17th centuries after the 1526
Battle of Mohács, the land suffered severely and was depopulated. The Turks made incursions into Styria nearly twenty times; churches, monasteries, cities, and villages were destroyed and plundered, while the population was either killed or carried away into slavery. Styria remained a part of the
Habsburg monarchy and from 1804 belonged to the
Austrian Empire. The development of the duchy was decisively promoted by
Archduke John of Austria, younger brother of Emperor
Francis I, who in 1811 founded the
Joanneum, predecessor of the
Graz University of Technology, and the
University of Leoben in 1840. He also forwarded the construction of the
Semmering railway to
Mürzzuschlag and the
Austrian Southern Railway line from
Vienna to
Trieste completed in 1857, which boosted the Styrian economy. In the course of the
Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 (
Ausgleich), the duchy was assigned as a crown land for the
Cisleithanian part of
Austria-Hungary, while along with the rise of
nationalism the conflict between the
German and
Slovene population intensified. On the collapse of Austria-Hungary in the aftermath of
World War I, the
rump state of
German Austria claimed all Cisleithanian Austria with a significant German-speaking population including large parts of the Styrian duchy, while the Slovene
Lower Styrian part joined the
State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. Conflicts arose especially around the majority German-speaking border-town of
Maribor (Marburg an der Drau), where the census in 1900 recorded 83.5% German-speakers, which after a massacre of German protestors awaiting the American delegation, popularly known as "
Marburg's Bloody Sunday", although it was actually a Monday, ultimately fell to Yugoslavia. The former duchy was partitioned broadly along
ethnic lines, though where mixed, the defeated Austrian side lost the lands to Yugoslavia, such as the majority-German Abstall basin, with only the entirely German-speaking two thirds of its territory (
Upper Styria and parts of ) remaining with
Austria, and the southern third of
Lower Styria with
Maribor passing to the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, eventually becoming part of modern
Slovenia. ==Name==