The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be defined as a time during which the Austrian House on the whole steadily advanced in the Eastern part of its dominions and steadily fell back in the Western. But in the course of the fourteenth century an acquisition was made which, without making them absolutely continuous, brought them into something more like geographical connexion with one another. ♦Acquisition of Carinthia and Tyrol, 1335.♦ This was the acquisition of the Duchy of Carinthia and County of _Tyrol_, the latter of which lands lay conveniently between the Eastern and Western dominions of the house. ♦Extent of the Austrian territory.♦ These now stretched continuously from the Bohemian frontier to Istria, and they threw out, in the form of Tyrol and the Swabian lands, a scattered, but nearly continuous, territory stretching to the borders of Lorraine and the county of Burgundy. The Austrian possessions now touched the eastern gulf of the Hadriatic and came into the neighbourhood of the Dalmatian Archipelago. ♦Commendation of Trieste, 1382.♦ Somewhat later they reached the main Hadriatic itself, when the city of _Trieste_, hitherto disputed between the commonwealth of Venice and the patriarchs of Aquileia, commended itself to the Austrian Duke Leopold as its lord. This is the same Leopold who four years later fell at Sempach. By this time the Swabian possessions had been increased north of the Rhine, while south of the Rhine the Austrian dominion was steadily giving way. ♦Loss of Thurgau, 1460.♦ The Confederates and their several cantons advanced in every way, by purchase and conquest, till, after the loss of Thurgau, the House of Austria kept nothing south of the Rhine except the towns known as the _Waldstädte_.