Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 6, 2025
The already shadowy imperial power became a mere phantom, nor was a change destined to come until, centuries later, the Prussian Hohenzollerns should replace the Austrian Habsburgs. Meanwhile the weakness of Germany enabled France to extend her northern boundaries toward the Rhine. Far more serious than her political losses were the economic results to Germany.
An alliance of Venice, Poland, the pope, and Austria waged long and arduous warfare with the Ottomans, and the resulting treaty of Karlowitz, signed at the very close of the seventeenth century, gave the greater part of Hungary, including Transylvania, to the Austrian Habsburgs, extended the southern boundary of Poland to the Dniester River, and surrendered important trading centers on the Dalmatian and Greek coasts to the Venetians.
The world has been made familiar with the Court scandals of the Habsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Georges, and has heard little of the Hohenzollern Dynasty.
Richelieu understood that his two policies went hand in glove to make the Bourbons predominant in Europe was but a corollary to making the royal power supreme in France. The chief warfare of the seventeenth century centers, therefore, in the long, terrible conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. Let us endeavor to obtain a clear idea of the interests involved.
To force into discordant union, tribes which, for seven centuries, had developed themselves into hostile nations, separated by geography and history, customs and laws, to combine many millions under one sceptre, not because of natural identity, but for the sake of composing one splendid family property, to establish unity by annihilating local institutions, to supersede popular and liberal charters by the edicts of a central despotism, to do battle with the whole spirit of an age, to regard the souls as well as the bodies of vast multitudes as the personal property of one individual, to strive for the perpetuation in a single house of many crowns, which accident had blended, and to imagine the consecration of the whole system by placing the pope's triple diadem forever upon the imperial head of the Habsburgs; all this was not the effort of a great, constructive genius, but the selfish scheme of an autocrat.
It is a political conspiracy of the Germans and Magyars against our own as well as the other Slav and Latin nations of the monarchy. "The world knows the justice of our claims, which the Habsburgs themselves dare not deny. Francis Joseph in the most solemn manner repeatedly recognised the sovereign rights of our nation.
The ties of allegiance and conventional authority being, severed, it had become idle for the King to affect superiority of lineage to the man whose family had occupied illustrious stations when the Habsburgs were obscure squires in Switzerland, and had ruled as sovereign in the Netherlands before that overshadowing house had ever been named.
The Habsburg Empire is built upon centuries-old traditions of reaction and violence. Its present power is chiefly based on the alliance which Bohemia and Hungary concluded with Austria against the Turkish peril in 1526. The Czechs freely elected the Habsburgs to the throne of Bohemia which remained a fully independent state, its alliance with Austria and Hungary being purely dynastic.
The Holy Roman Empire had at last come to the inglorious end which it had long deserved. And its last emperor had to content himself with his newly appropriated title of Francis I, Hereditary Emperor of Austria. The dignity and might of the proud Habsburgs had declined before a mere upstart of the people as never before a royal Bourbon.
The death of the latter in 1516 transferred the whole Spanish inheritance to Charles, and three years later, by the death of the former, he came into possession of the hereditary dominions of the Habsburgs. Thus under a youth of nineteen years were grouped wider lands and greater populations than any Christian sovereign had ever ruled.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking