From:The History of Bukovina, PART II: THE AUSTRIAN PERIOD (1775-1918),
by Sophie A. Welisch, PhD
Posted with permission of the author, March 2002
Revised 
From:The History of Bukovina, PART II: THE AUSTRIAN PERIOD (1775-1918),
by Sophie A. Welisch, PhD
Posted with permission of the author, March 2002
Revised 16 March 2017
Western influence in Bukovina began in earnest with Austrian annexation of the territory through the Convention of Constantinople in 1775. Occupied by Austrian troops under Major General Gabriel Spleny during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-74, Austria sought the territory in order to establish a cordon between the Dniester and the Moldova rivers. In addition, Bukovina would serve as a land bridge connecting Austria’s recent acquisitions of Galicia and Transylvania.
When on August 31, 1774 Spleny crossed the Galician-Polish frontier with three cavalry regiments and five infantry battalions, he encountered no opposition. Spleny functioned as military governor of Austrian-Moldavia, later renamed Bukovina, for more than three years, being relieved of his command in April 1778.
Karl Baron von Enzenberg, Spleny’s successor as military governor, carried out Bukovina’s first census in 1778. The results showed a total population of a little more than 100,000, with 1,390 residing in the largest town, Czernowitz. In his reports to the court, Enzenberg commented on the multinational character of Bukovina, noting specifically Moldavians (Romanians), Jews, Gypsies, Armenians, Hungarians, and migrants from Galicia who, although unidentified by nationality, were in fact Ukrainians. Much of the land was in the possession of the Moldavian Basilian monasteries and the nobility with many of the towns leased to the Jews, who held a dominant position in trade, commerce and business.
At the time of its incorporation into Austria Bukovina numbered scarcely six people per square mile. Inhabited mainly by shepherds and peasants, the indigenous population lived without benefit of a single doctor or pharmacist, without an internal security system for defense from bandits, and without a judicial system as a safeguard against the arbitrary whims of the upper classes. Paths rather than roads traversed the countryside, the province counted few bridges, and its largest towns of Suczawa, Sereth and Czernowitz had fallen into a state of urban decay after centuries of Ottoman neglect. Czernowitz, later to become the provincial capital, was a town of some 200 mud huts, lacking even an adequate water supply. Bukovina’s few elementary schools hardly touched the broad basis of illiteracy which extended to the nobility and the clergy.
During the first five years after its annexation by Austria, Bukovina’s population increased rapidly. Enzenberg’s report of 1778 noted that 14,000 Ruthenian (i.e., Ukrainian) migrants from Galicia had found their way to Bukovina, and he asked Vienna how to handle the Polish magnates’ request for their extradition. Composed largely of serfs fleeing Polish and Ottoman feudal oppression, the new settlers including Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and Romanians, came unbidden and at no cost to the Habsburg monarchy. With its policy of religious toleration and a relaxation of feudal obligations, Bukovina served as a magnet for many and varied ethnic groups in eastern Europe. Thus, early in the Austrian period, Bukovina assumed its multinational character, earning it the appellation of “Europe in miniature.”
State-sponsored colonization to newly-acquired underdeveloped lands wrested from Ottoman control had already begun in the reign of Maria Theresa. After the annexation of Austrian rule over Bachka and the Banat of Temesvar, Vienna actively recruited colonists in order to promote economic development and aid in the defense of these frontier hinterlands. Joseph II, Maria Theresa’s son and successor, had extended the government’s colonization efforts to Galicia shortly after acquiring this territory through the first partition of Poland (1772). Competing for colonists with his fellow monarchs, Frederick II of Prussia and Catherine II of Russia, Joseph sent agents throughout the length and breadth of the German states to recruit settlers. To the enlightened despots population represented national wealth, serving as a source of taxation, military manpower and economic activity.
Set in motion by the dissolution of the old political and social order and lured by the prospects of better economic conditions, thousands of Germans indeed left for distant lands, both in the New World and in eastern Europe. Those who settled in Bukovina came from three distinct geographic, cultural and dialectical regions and included: (1) the so-called “Swabians” from the southwestern