Austrian archives as a source for the fortifications of the southern lands of the Republic of Poland in the time of partitions

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (1772–1812), Austrian military and civilian institutions produced a large amount of archives devoted to defensive structures seized in the territories of the 1st and 3rd Polish Partitions (1772, 1795). They are kept in the collections in Kriegsarchiv in Vienna, the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv and in the National Archives in Krakow. The most valuable of them are cartographic materials. Among them, the so-called Mieg’s map (Galizien und Lodomerien – First Miliary Survey 1779–1783), which includes all the most important defensive structures from the times of the First Polish Republic. Another valuable group is the small set of plans for the most important defense facilities of Galicia, built in Poland, stored in Kriegsarchiv. These files are supplemented by the Alte Feldakten complex, containing plans of selected fortified structures and individual descriptions, as well as descriptive materials of individual fortified towns and castles. A certain value is also presented by the First Land Cadastre of Galicia 1785–1789 located in Lviv, in which some of the fortifications erected before 1772 are briefly described.