Leopold I of Austria
Leopold I of Austria was the count from Franconia to whom the emperor Otto II gave the March on the Danube in 976, after the Duke of Bavaria's rebellion had cost that duchy its eastern frontier, and the eighteen years he held it began the Babenberg dynasty, which ruled Austria for two hundred and seventy years and whose first document, in 996, is the one that calls the country Ostarrichi. Almost nothing personal is known about him. His origins were argued about for centuries because a twelfth-century chronicler made the Babenbergs descend from the Franconian family of that name that had been destroyed in a feud in 906, which flattered them and is now thought a guess; the likeliest modern reading is that he was a kinsman of the Bavarian ducal house of the Luitpoldings, the dukes the Ottonians were displacing. He appears in 976 at the diet of Regensburg, where Otto II, having crushed Henry the Quarrelsome, broke up Bavaria and gave its eastern march to a loyal count. The march was then a strip of the Danube valley between the Enns and the Wienerwald, won back from the Hungarians since Lechfeld, and its capital was the hill-fort at Melk. Leopold pushed the frontier east to the Wienerwald, within sight of Vienna, and the settlement of the country by Bavarian peasants and monasteries went on behind him. He fought for the emperor against Henry the Quarrelsome again in 984, when the duke tried to seize the regency for the child Otto III, and held Melk and Regensburg for the Ottonians. In 985 he added the county of the Danube valley below the Enns and in 991 pushed the boundary to the Fischa, which Hungarian raids had made the old limit. He died in 994 at Wurzburg, of a wound from an arrow meant for another man at a wedding, and was buried at Wurzburg, and his son Henry I succeeded to the march. It was in Henry's time, in 996, that a charter of Otto III described land in the region commonly called Ostarrichi, the first written form of the name of Austria, whose millennium the republic celebrated in 1996 with Leopold's grant as its founding date.
- Lived: 940 CE – 994 CE
- Nationality: Bavarian
- Roles: margrave, ruler, founder
