page_title: Ostsiedlung
section_title: Marches and regions affected
hierarchical_section_title: Ostsiedlung / Marches and regions affected
caption_attribution_description: English: German map of the German &amp; others populations &amp; settlements in the early Middle-Age.
context_page_description: Ostsiedlung is the term for the process of eastward migration and chartering of settlement structures by ethnic Germans of the Holy Roman Empire into less-populated territories, however, already inhabited by Slavs and Balts east of the Saale and Elbe rivers, primarily the southern and western regions of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. The area of colonization stretched from Estonia at the Baltic coast in the north, via the territories that conform to modern Poland and Silesia, further into Bohemia and Slovenia, Hungary and extended south-east into Transylvania. The Ostsiedlung took place along the roughly 1,000 km long eastern territorial border of the Empire and the State of the Teutonic Order. The old term Deutsche Ostkolonisation, which was often used in the past, has been discontinued since the middle of the 20th century due to its linguistic proximity to modern colonialism.
  Central and Eastern European societies underwent various changes in culture, religion, law and administration, agriculture, demography during the period of German eastward expansion.
caption: German eastward expansion 895—1400, Historischer Schul-Atlas, 1893
exif: {"Image Make": "EPSON", "Image Model": "WF-2630 Series", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "360", "Image YResolution": "360", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2019:01:06 11:22:19", "Image ExifOffset": "212", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "382", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5554", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2019:01:03 20:55:00", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3375", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1908"}