Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon": Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1

The Story — 900 to 1100 words, six to eight paragraphs

The sequence begins in the Austrian lands under the Babenbergs, where power grows through war, marriage, and shifting loyalty to the Empire. The margraves and dukes push eastward against Hungary and other neighbours, while usually remaining aligned with the emperors. That pattern breaks when Leopold II deserts Henry IV during the investiture struggle and loses Austria, only to recover it after the emperor’s own position weakens. A similar crisis comes much later under Duke Frederick II, “the Quarrelsome,” whose exactions and defiance bring him into conflict with Frederick II, emperor. The emperor ignores the privilege of 1156, summons the duke, and after repeated refusals places him under the ban, declares Austria and Styria vacant, and invades with allies. He briefly rearranges Austrian government and even makes Vienna an imperial city, but once he leaves, the duke returns to power and the emperor’s changes are ignored. Frederick II of Austria is eventually killed in battle against the Hungarians in 1246, ending the Babenberg line and opening a succession struggle.

From there the narrative leaps into the long nineteenth-century transformation of the Habsburg lands, where old estates, imperial authority, and national movements collide. In Galicia, Count Stadion tries to blunt revolt by giving the Ruthenian peasants relief from feudal burdens and by forwarding a petition for official recognition of their language alongside Polish. In Prague, however, the conflict between Czechs and Germans, radicals and conservatives, erupts into a Czech rising on 12 June; Windischgraetz suppresses it on the 16th. That suppression becomes a turning point far beyond Bohemia. The defeat of the Prague uprising signals not merely the army’s first success but the outbreak of a broader race war, in which constitutional liberty is displaced by national hostility. The Frankfort parliament celebrates Windischgraetz, while German revolutionaries in Vienna applaud Radetzky’s victories in Italy as victories for Germanism. The result is to push the Slav nationalities toward the imperial government, because the radicals at Vienna and Budapest appear to them as enemies.

The same revolutionary year then turns on peasant emancipation. The Bohemian diet never meets, writs go out for elections to the Austrian Reichsrath, and the Slav deputies eventually form a majority. That fact matters, but the decisive measure is the abolition of feudal services, carried after prolonged debate on 31 August and receiving imperial consent on 7 September. This is presented as the revolution’s sole permanent outcome. It frees the peasants, gives them what they wanted most, and draws their enormous social weight to the side of the government against the revolutionary parties. The political outcome is therefore paradoxical: a revolution that had begun with liberal hopes leaves behind an enlarged imperial coalition and a deeper reliance on national divisions.

The account of the Dual Monarchy continues into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where economic settlement, constitutional tension, and foreign danger are intertwined. The long dispute between Hungary and Austria over the economic relationship is eventually settled for ten years after negotiations lasting more than twelve. Yet the settlement remains incomplete, because the future of the joint State Bank is left undecided. The customs and commercial treaties with Germany, Italy, and other countries, as well as the Austro-Hungarian treaty, are set to lapse at the end of 1917. That deadline hangs over the monarchy as a test: in ten years it may grow together or grow apart, and the treaties themselves may strengthen it or expose its weakness. The internal crisis is matched by external threats. Unrest in Macedonia reopens the Eastern Question, while Italian irredentism under the Zanardelli cabinet strains relations so sharply in 1902-1903 that war seems possible. Austria fortifies the southern Tirol, the key passes into Italy, and strategic points on the Istrian and Dalmatian coasts, while also building railways through the Tauern, Karawanken, and Wochein ranges to move troops more quickly. The danger eases only when the Zanardelli government falls and relations slowly become more cordial.

The Italian material widens into a small but vivid regional notice on Monte Vergine, where a sanctuary of the Virgin stands on the summit, founded in 1119 and famous for a miraculous picture attributed to St Luke. The church is baroque, though it holds works from earlier periods, and its archives have been moved to Naples. This is a brief pause before the book turns to individuals whose lives carry bigger intellectual weight. Avempace appears as one of the earliest and most distinguished Arab philosophers of Spain: probably born near Saragossa, trained in the exact sciences, and also active as musician and poet. He is presented as a sceptic, even an unbeliever in orthodox terms, yet he becomes vizier at Murcia, later moves through Valencia and Saragossa, then Seville and Xativa, and ends at Fez, where he is poisoned in 1138. His life reveals the precarious relation between philosophy, politics, and religious survival in the Islamic West.

Avicenna’s life is broader and more settled in intellectual ambition, though not in fortune. He becomes physician to an amir after curing a dangerous illness in 997, and his reward is access to the Samanid royal library, a crucial source of learning. When the library burns, enemies accuse him of burning it to conceal his sources. After his father dies and the Samanid dynasty ends, he wanders westward, refusing or bypassing offers from rulers, moving through Khiva, Nishapur, Merv, and Khorasan. At Jorjan, near the Caspian, he finds a patron who gives him a house, and there he lectures on logic and astronomy while beginning the Canon of Medicine. The story casts him as a scholar shaped by patronage, travel, illness, and the survival of manuscripts rather than by any single court.

The sequence then returns to the natural world with the aye-aye, a strange Malagasy lemur discovered by Pierre Sonnerat in 1780 and long known from only one specimen. It is nocturnal, lives in bamboo forests, feeds on sugar-cane juice and caterpillars, and uses its unusually slender middle finger to extract prey from wood. Its account shows the book’s habit of describing the odd and exact at once. The same is true of the technical entry on azimuth, which reduces a celestial or horizontal line to its angular distance from north or south, and of Azo, the Bolognese jurist whose glosses on Roman law become so authoritative that it is said, “Chi non ha Azzo, non vada a palazzo.” Azo’s significance lies less in his biography than in his role as a legal teacher whose methodical exposition shapes practice in the courts and the classroom alike.

The final movement passes through Babadag and Charles Babbage to Babylon and Bacon, before ending on the material bacon of the pig. Babadag is a market town founded by Bayezid I., sometimes a Turkish winter headquarters and later bombarded by the Russians. Babbage emerges as the restless mathematician and mechanician who attacks computational error, pursues a calculating engine, travels Europe to study machinery, and helps reshape mathematical teaching at Cambridge, even though his great machine is never completed. Babylon then opens into irrigation, cities, agriculture, and the decipherment of proper names, explaining how a dense population and elaborate canal system make the plain fertile and how the cuneiform script mixes ideographic and phonetic writing. Finally the article on Bacon, Francis Bacon, moves through his hopes under James I., his literary interventions, his parliamentary service, and his development of the inductive method with its tables of presence, absence, and degrees, before the volume closes with the ordinary meaning of “bacon” as cured pig flesh. The ending is characteristic of the whole volume: it ranges from empire to etymology, then lands on the everyday word that names breakfast food.

The People — 350 to 450 words

• Leopold II of Austria wants to preserve the Babenberg hold on Austria while navigating imperial politics. He loses the mark when he abandons Henry IV during the investiture struggle, but he regains it when the emperor cannot sustain the transfer. His arc shows both the fragility and the resilience of dynastic power.

• Duke Frederick II, “the Quarrelsome,” wants to keep his duchies free from imperial interference, but his own violence and exactions undermine him. He defies summonses, is placed under the ban, and briefly loses Austria and Styria. He returns, but only temporarily, and ends killed in battle, with his house extinguished.

• Count Stadion wants to contain rebellion in Galicia without relying only on force. He wins Ruthenian peasants by abolishing feudal dues and recognizing their language, showing a political instinct for division and accommodation rather than sheer repression.

• Prince Windischgraetz wants to crush the Prague rising and restore order. He succeeds militarily, but his victory becomes symbolic of something much larger: the triumph of armed power and ethnic antagonism over constitutional hopes. His name is attached to a turning point, not a compromise.

• Avempace wants intellectual life inside a world that does not make room for it. He is a philosopher, musician, and poet, yet he also serves as vizier and repeatedly moves from city to city under pressure. He ends poisoned at Fez, his work surviving more clearly than his life.

• Avicenna wants knowledge, patronage, and the freedom to write. He gets access to libraries, lectures to students, and composes major works while wandering from court to court. His story turns him into the model of the scholar whose authority comes from both experience and system.

In Its Own Voice — 200 to 300 words

The volume’s legal and scholarly authority often appears in compressed, memorable phrases. On Azo, the note says:

“Chi non ha Azzo, non vada a palazzo.”

That line captures the weight his glosses carry in practice, making him a standard for legal argument in Bologna and beyond.

The Bacon article also states its method with unusual clarity:

“The list of these is called the table of Essence and Presence.”

This sentence sits inside the account of induction and shows Bacon trying to turn inquiry into a sequence of disciplined comparisons.

Another passage returns to the same method and its limits:

“the process of exclusion or rejection.”

In context, the phrase defines what Bacon thinks is most original in his logic, even as the article notes that the method remains difficult to carry out fully.

What It's Really About — 350 to 450 words

What unites these entries is not a single plot but a common interest in systems under strain: dynasties, empires, legal traditions, scientific methods, and intellectual disciplines. The Austrian history shows how authority survives by compromise, force, or the exploitation of divisions, yet never rests securely. The 1848 material is especially revealing because it does not treat revolution as a clean break. Instead, it shows the government moving through crisis by conceding peasant emancipation, encouraging national rivalries, and then absorbing the social forces that might otherwise have destroyed it. Liberty, nationality, and class are not separated; they become tools in each other’s undoing.

The scholarly biographies of Avempace, Avicenna, Babbage, and Bacon each stress a different version of the same problem: how thought becomes durable. Avempace and Avicenna live at courts where philosophy depends on patronage, travel, and survival under pressure. Babbage confronts a different obstacle, namely the limits of machinery, government support, and practical execution. Bacon again offers a system that aims to make thought more exact, but the article emphasizes that his induction needs tables, exclusions, and “adminicula” because a pure method is not enough. The volume is fascinated by the gap between a theory and the conditions required to make it work.

Even the shorter notices carry this tension. The aye-aye is described by distinctive anatomy and uncertain classification; azimuth turns a practical observation of direction into a precise mathematical term; Babylon is presented as a civilization organized by canals and writing systems; Babylonian proper names become a problem of transcription and reading. The book repeatedly shows knowledge as a matter of ordering what is difficult to classify, whether the object is a lemur, a canal network, a legal maxim, or a political crisis.

Why Read It Today — 250 to 350 words

It suits readers who enjoy seeing knowledge built in layers: not just facts, but facts in relation to institutions, language, and method. The pleasure comes from movement. One entry can carry you from a Croatian or Hungarian conflict to a theory of induction, then to a lemur’s finger and a jurist’s proverb. That speed is part of the experience, and it rewards anyone who likes to see how a major reference work organizes a world.

At the same time, it is demanding in ways that matter today. The prose assumes a great deal of historical background and often compresses long struggles into a few dense paragraphs. National terms and imperial categories reflect the period’s political assumptions, especially in the Austrian sections, where “race war,” “Germanism,” and “Slav nationalities” are framed in the language of the time. The language of empire is not neutral, and the book’s confidence can feel remote from modern historical caution.

Still, the writing remains vivid. The summary of peasant emancipation, the account of Windischgraetz in Prague, the biography of Avicenna, and the explanation of Bacon’s tables of induction all give a clear sense of minds working under pressure. What stays with the reader is not only information but scale: whole political orders, methods of reasoning, and bodies of knowledge rising and falling together.