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Updated: June 6, 2025
"We cannot and will not continue to live under the direct or indirect rule of the violators of Belgium, France and Serbia, the would-be murderers of Russia and Rumania, the murderers of tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers of our blood, and the accomplices in numberless unspeakable crimes committed in this war against humanity by the two degenerate and irresponsible dynasties of Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns.
For a century and a half after the retirement of Charles V in 1556, we hear of two branches of the Habsburg family the Spanish Habsburgs and the Austrian Habsburgs, descended respectively from Philip II and Ferdinand.
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 great war for the Spanish succession, begun in the year 1701, immediately after the death of Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, and ended in 1713 by the Peace of Utrecht, remained equally undecided, but it had ruined the treasury of Louis.
And the long struggle between Bourbons and Habsburgs, culminating in the Thirty Years' War, reduced the Holy Roman Empire to a position, in theory as well as in fact, certainly no higher than that of the national monarchies of France, England, and Spain, or that of the Dutch Republic.
Mary's Church with its three aisles, its glorious organ the largest in all Bohemia, stand out in bold relief amidst the terraced garden and orchards tended with fond care. The belfry is silent, its bells were sacrificed to the cause of the Habsburgs in the Great War; you may see plaster casts of them in the library.
Above all, however, he is of necessity a blind tool in the hands of Germany, and he cannot possibly extricate himself from her firm grip. The Habsburgs have had their chance, but they missed it. By systematic and continuous misgovernment they created a gulf between the Slavs and themselves which nothing on earth can remove. Every Habsburg believes he has a "mission" to fulfil.
The Dutch were also allowed to establish a trade monopoly on the River Scheldt. The elector of Brandenburg was acknowledged king of Prussia, an important step In the fortunes of the Hohenzollern family which at the present time reigns in Germany. The peace of Utrecht marked the cessation of a long conflict between Spanish Habsburgs and French Bourbons.
So far as Berlin is concerned, it will suffice to state that its history is not rich in episode or in marked characters. It long remained the obscure capital of a dynasty which the Guelfs and Habsburgs were pleased to look down upon as parvenu. During the Thirty Years' war, in which Brandenburg played such a pitiable part, Berlin was on the verge of extinction.
In his "Renewed Ordinance of the Land" Ferdinand declared the Bohemian crown to be hereditary in the House of Habsburg, and reserved legislative power to the sovereign. But otherwise the historical rights of Bohemia remained valid, notwithstanding all subsequent arbitrary centralising measures taken by the Habsburgs. Bohemia's rights were repeatedly recognised by each succeeding Habsburg.
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