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Updated: June 6, 2025
Disregarding the dim feelings of the peasantry, Austrian Poland would probably be the most willing to retain a connection with its old rulers. The Habsburgs have least estranged the Poles. The Cracow district is the only section of Poland which has been at all reconciled to foreign control; it is the most autonomous and contented of the fragments.
His successor Joseph I had no children, so that the Archduke Charles became the heir-apparent to all the possessions of the Austrian Habsburgs. Louis XIV therefore seized the opportunity to make secret overtures of peace to some of the more influential Dutch statesmen through the Marquis D'Allègne, at that time a prisoner in the hands of the Dutch.
The well-drilled Austrian army had remained faithful to their war-lord. The hangman was given plenty of work and the Habsburgs, after the nature of that strangely cat-like family, once more landed upon their feet and rapidly strengthened their position as the masters of eastern and western Europe.
To adopt and pursue a policy which would suit all these lands and peoples would hardly be possible for any mortal: it certainly surpassed the wit of the Habsburgs. They had made an attempt in the seventeenth century to develop a vigorous German policy, to unify the empire and to strengthen their hold upon it, but they had failed dismally.
Napoleon's Illyria, created in 1809, joined for the first time Slovenes and Croats in one political unit, and the excellent administration and the schools left an undying memory of what might be if the Habsburgs cared.
Counts Aehrenthal and Berchtold destined Bulgaria and Roumania to coalesce and form the nucleus of a permanent Balkan confederation to be patronized and protected by the Habsburgs. But circumstance thwarted the design.
But soon the Habsburgs began to violate the liberties of Bohemia which they were bound by oath to observe, and this led finally to the fateful Czech revolution of 1618. At the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 the Czechs suffered a defeat and were cruelly punished for their rebellion. All their nobility were either executed or sent into exile, and their property confiscated.
A month before his pitiful death , Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, summoned all his strength and dictated a will that awarded his whole inheritance to Philip of Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV, with the resolute proviso that under no circumstances should the Spanish possessions be dismembered. When the news reached Versailles, the Grand Monarch hesitated.
In the summer of 1603 it had been firmly but mysteriously arranged between the monarchs of France and Great Britain that the House of Austria should be crushed, its territories parcelled out at the discretion of those two potentates, the imperial crown taken from the Habsburgs, the Spaniards driven out of the Netherlands, an alliance offensive and defensive made with the Dutch republic, while the East and West Indies were, to be wrested by main force of the allies, from Spain, whose subjects were thenceforth to be for ever excluded from those lucrative regions.
He offered the defeated Habsburgs very decent terms of peace, provided they would resign their chairmanship of the Confederation. He was less merciful to many of the smaller German states who had taken the side of the Austrians, and annexed them to Prussia.
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