Carpathian German

The Carpathian Germans are the German-speaking island communities that grew up in the mountain counties of Upper Hungary, in present-day Slovakia. Hungarian kings invited German colonists from the mid-twelfth century, settlement quickening after the Mongol invasion of 1241–1242 depopulated the borderlands. In the eastern Zips, Saxons founded fortified towns under their Zipser Willkür town law, while German miners opened mines farther west.

They became the urban patriciate among a Slovak and Hungarian peasant majority. In 1412 Sigismund pledged sixteen Zips towns to Poland under the Treaty of Lubowla as security for a loan; the loan was never repaid, so the towns stayed under Polish rule until the First Partition of 1772.

Most towns turned Lutheran in the Reformation, though Counter-Reformation campaigns and the Ottoman wars after Mohács in 1526 tested their autonomy; from the eighteenth century many Zipser miners moved to fresh Habsburg mining lands in Bukovina.