The Two-Headed Eagle

Abbreviations

The Austro-Hungarian Empire set up by the Compromise of 1867 was a union of two near-independent states in the person of their monarch, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Thus, for the fifty-one years of its existence, almost every institution and many of the personnel of this composite state had their titles prefixed with initials indicating their status.

Shared Austro-Hungarian institutions were Imperial and Royal: “kaiserlich und koniglich” or “k.u.k.” for short. Those belonging to the Austrian part of the Monarchy (that is to say, everything that was not the Kingdom of Hungary) were designated Imperial-Royal—“kaiserlich- koniglich” or simply “k.k.”—in respect of the monarch’s status as Em­peror of Austria and King of Bohemia; while purely Hungarian insti­tutions were Royal Hungarian: “koniglich ungarisch” (“k.u.”) or “kiraly magyar” (“k.m.”).

THE ISONZO FRONT, JULY 1916