In which empire was Gregor Mendel born in 1822?

Gregor Mendel was born in the Austrian Empire in 1822.

Mendel was born Johann Mendel on July 20, 1822, in Heinzendorf bei Odrau, a village in the Austrian Empire's Silesian region. The location is now known as Hynčice in the Czech Republic. His family was German-speaking, but language and ethnicity do not change the political state in which he was born.

He later joined the Augustinian order, took the name Gregor, and worked at St. Thomas's Abbey in Brno. In the monastery garden, he conducted the pea-plant experiments that revealed predictable patterns of inheritance. His 1866 paper became foundational to modern genetics, although scientists widely recognized its importance only after his death.

The answer is not the Austrian Empire's later successor, Austria-Hungary, which was established in 1867. The German Empire also did not yet exist in 1822; it was founded in 1871. Those dates explain why “Austrian Empire” is the historically precise choice among the options.