Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
Austria Oesterreich is the ancient Eastmark or frontier province, the outpost of Carlovingian power against the tribes of the east, then of the mediaeval German Empire against Slav and Magyar. Under the House of Habsburg, which first rose to greatness on the ruins of a Greater Bohemia, Austria grew steadily stronger as a distinct unit.
Even while peace negotiations between Prussia and Austria were going on, he conducted an active propaganda and distributed a proclamation all over Bohemia in which he declared himself as "the deadly enemy of the Habsburg dynasty and of Austrian militarism and bureaucracy": "The Hungarians are preparing, the Yugoslavs are ready. Let us come to a common agreement with them and we shall succeed.
With Wenceslaus III murdered by an unknown assassin while on his way to Poland, the male line of the Přemysl dynasty died out. It continued in the indirect line by the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of Wenceslaus II, with Rudolph, a grandson of the Habsburg who dealt the death-blow to Bohemia's native rulers.
Franz Ferdinand possessed an exceptionally fine political flair, and this enabled him to see that Hungarian policy was a vital danger to the existence of the whole Habsburg Empire. His desire to overthrow the predominance of the Magyars and to help the nationalities to obtain their rights was always in his thoughts, and influenced his judgment on all political questions.
After all, Frederick's short reign was only an interlude: the hand of the Habsburg had closed over Bohemia when Ferdinand I ascended its throne in 1526 by virtue of his marriage with Anna, and also, as I have said, by the free use of Austrian gold; and the victory won by Charles V at Mühlberg in 1547 had almost crushed the cause of Protestantism out of existence.
King William and the Habsburg emperor with other European princes formed a Grand Alliance to prevent Louis' grandson Philip from inheriting the Spanish crowns.
"The Czech nation made an alliance with Hungary and the Austrian Germans by a free election of a Habsburg to the throne of the kingdom of Bohemia in 1526; but the dynasty created through a systematic centralisation and germanisation a unitary absolutist state, thus violating their treaty guaranteeing the independence of the Bohemian State within and without.
The yearly revenues of the whole monarchy of the Imperial house of Habsburg can scarcely be stated at a higher figure than L350,000. Thus the political game for it was a game was by no means a desperate one for the Netherlands, nor the resources of the various players so unequally distributed as at first sight it might appear.
The result of applying the principle of nationality to the Southern Slavs and Roumanians would thus be to create two powerful national States at the expense of the Habsburg Monarchy; and here it is well to repeat that such drastic territorial changes are only possible if the military power of Austria suffers an almost complete eclipse.
Charles VI, like so many of his Habsburg ancestors, was also emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and was thereby accounted the foremost of German princes. But neither Bohemia nor Hungary was predominantly German in language or feeling, and Hungary was not even a part of the Holy Roman Empire. What additions were made to the Habsburg dominions by Charles VI were all of non-German peoples.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking