The special feature in the history of the house of Austria from the fifteenth century onwards is its connexion—a connexion more or less broken, but still constantly recurring till in the end it becomes fully permanent—with the kingdom of Bohemia within the Empire and with the kingdom of Hungary beyond its bounds. These possessions have given the Austrian power its special character, that of a power formed by the union under one prince of several wholly distinct nations or parts of nations which have no tie beyond that union. The Austrian princes, originally purely German, equally in their Swabian and in their Austrian possessions, had already, by the extension of their power to the south, obtained some Slavonic and some Italian-speaking subjects. Still, as a power, they were purely German. ♦Various acquisitions of Austria.♦ But in the period which begins in the fifteenth and goes on into the nineteenth century, we shall see them gradually gathering together, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing—gaining and losing by every process, warlike and peaceful, by which territory can be gained or lost—a crowd of kingdoms, duchies, and counties, scattered over all parts of Europe from Flanders to Transsilvania. But it is the acquisition of the two crowns of Bohemia and Hungary which, above all others, gave the House of Austria its special position as a middle power, a power belonging at once to the system of Western and to the system of Eastern Europe. Among the endless shiftings of the states which have been massed together under the rule of the House of Habsburg, that house has more than once been at the same moment the neighbour of the Gaul and the neighbour of the Turk; and it has sometimes found Gaul and Turk arrayed together against it. Add to all this that, though the connexion between the house of Austria and the Empire was a purely personal one, renewed in each generation by a special election, still the fact that so many kings of Hungary and archdukes of Austria were chosen Emperors one after another, caused the house itself, after the Empire was abolished, to look in the eyes of many like a continuation of the power which had come to an end. The peculiar position of the Austrian house could hardly have been obtained by a mere union of Hungary, Austria, and the other states under princes none of whom were raised to Imperial rank. Nor could it have been obtained by a series of mere dukes of Austria, even though they had been chosen Emperors from generation to generation. It was through the accidental union under one sovereign of a crowd of states which had no natural connexion with each other, and through the further accident that the Empire itself seemed to become a possession of the House, that the House of Habsburg, and its representative the House of Lorraine, have won their unique position among European powers.

The first hints, so to speak, of a coming union between the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms and the Austrian duchy began, as we have seen, in the days of Ottokar. A Bohemian king had then held the Austrian duchy, while a Hungarian king had for a moment occupied part of Styria. ♦Relations with Hungary and Bohemia.♦ But the later form which the union was to take was not that of the Bohemian or the Hungarian reigning over Austria, but that of the Austrian reigning over Hungary and Bohemia. The duchy was not to be added to either of the kingdoms; but both kingdoms were in course of time to be added to the duchy. The growth of both Hungary and Bohemia as kingdoms will be spoken of elsewhere. We have now to deal only with their relations to the Austrian House. ♦Rudolf, son of Albert, King of Bohemia, 1306.♦ For a moment, early in the fourteenth century, an Austrian prince, son of the first Austrian King of Germany, was actually acknowledged as King of Bohemia. But this connexion was only momentary. The first beginnings of anything like a more permanent connexion begin a hundred and thirty years later. ♦Albert the Second, King of Hungary and Bohemia, 1438.♦ The second Austrian King of Germany wore both the Hungarian and the Bohemian crowns by virtue of his marriage with the daughter of the Emperor and King Siegmund. The steps towards the union of the various crowns are now beginning. ♦Siegmund, King of Hungary, 1386; King of the Romans, 1414; King of Bohemia, 1419; Emperor, 1433.♦ Siegmund was the third King of Bohemia who had worn the crown of Germany, the second who had worn the crown of the Empire. Under his son-in-law, Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria were for a moment united with the German crown; in the next reign, as we have seen, begins the lasting connexion between Austria and the Empire. But the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms parted again. ♦Wladislaus Postumus, Duke of Austria, 1440-1457; King of Hungary and Bohemia, 1453-1457.♦ One Austrian King, the son of Albert, reigned at least nominally over both kingdoms, as well as over the special Austrian duchy. But the final union did not come for another eighty years. The Turk was now threatening and conquering. At Mohacz Lewis, king of the two kingdoms, fell before the invaders. ♦Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 1519; King of Hungary and Bohemia, 1527; King of the Romans, 1531; Emperor-elect, 1556.
Permanent union of Bohemia.♦ His Bohemian kingdom passed to Ferdinand of Austria, and from that day to this, unless we except the momentary choice of the Winter King, the Palatine Frederick, the Bohemian crown has always stayed in the House of Austria. And for many generations it has been worn by the actual sovereign of the Austrian archduchy.

The acquisition of the crown of Hungary was of greater importance. It at once put the Austrian House into a wholly new position; it gave it its new later character of a middle state between Eastern and Western Europe. The duchy had begun as a mark against the Turanian and heathen invaders of earlier times. Those Turanian and heathen invaders had long before settled down into a Christian kingdom; they had latterly become the foremost champions of Christendom against the Turanian and Mahometan invaders who had seized the throne of the Eastern Cæsars. ♦Mission against the Turk.♦ With the crown of Hungary, the main duty of the Hungarian crown, the defence of Christendom against the Ottoman, passed to the Archdukes and Emperors of the Austrian House. ♦The Austrian kings in Hungary.♦ But for a long time Hungary was a most imperfect and precarious possession of its Austrian Kings. ♦1526-1699.♦ For more than a century and a half after the election of Ferdinand, his rule and that of his successors was disputed and partial. They had from the very beginning to strive against rival kings, while the greater part of the kingdom and of the lands attached to the crown was either held by the Turk himself or by princes who acknowledged the Turk as their superior lord. These strictly Hungarian affairs, as well as the changes on the frontier towards the Turk, will be spoken of elsewhere. ♦Peace of Passarowitz, 1718.♦ It was not till the eighteenth century that the Austrian Kings were in full possession of the whole Hungarian kingdom and all its dependencies.

Meanwhile the Austrian power had been making advances in other quarters. At the end of the fifteenth century the Austrian possessions at the north-east of the Hadriatic were greatly enlarged by the addition of the county of Görz, which carried with it the fallen city of Aquileia. ♦New position towards Italy.♦ A more direct path towards Italian dominion was thus opened. The wars of the League of Cambray made no permanent addition to Austrian dominion in this quarter; but the master of Trieste and Aquileia, whose territory cut off Venice from her Istrian possessions, might already almost pass for an Italian sovereign. ♦Dominions of Charles the Fifth.♦ Under Charles the Fifth the House of Austria became, as we have seen, possessed of a vast Italian dominion. But after him it passed away alike from the Empire and the German branch of the house, to become part of the heritage of the Austrian Kings of Spain. ♦Austrian rule in Italy.♦ It was not, as we have already seen, till the beginning of the eighteenth century that either an Emperor or a reigning archduke again obtained any territory within the acknowledged bounds of Italy. The fluctuations of Austrian rule in Italy, from the acquisition of the Duchy of Milan down to our own day, have been already told in the Italian section. Lombardy and Venetia are now again Italian; but Austria still keeps the north-east corner of the great gulf. She still keeps Görz and Aquileia, Trieste and all Istria, to say nothing of the dangerous way which her frontier still stretches on Italian ground in the land of Trent and Roveredo.

These last named possessions still abide as traces of the Austrian advance in these regions, and its fluctuations there have been among the most important facts of modern history. Another series of Austrian acquisitions in the West of Europe have altogether passed away. The great Burgundian inheritance passed to the House of Austria. ♦Maximilian and Philip.♦ But it was only for a short time, in the persons of Maximilian and Philip, that it was in any way united to the actual Austrian Archduchy. ♦The Austrian Netherlands.♦ After Charles the Fifth the Burgundian possessions passed, like those in Italy, to the Spanish branch of the House, and, just as in Italy, it was not till the eighteenth century that actual Emperors or archdukes again reigned over a part of the Netherlands. ♦Loss of Elsass.♦ Before this time the Alsatian dominion of Austria had passed away to France, and the remnant of her Swabian possessions passed away, as we have seen, in the days of general confusion. The changes of her territory in Germany during that period have been already spoken of. Her acquisitions in Eastern Europe will come more fully elsewhere; but a word must be given to them here. ♦Loss of Silesia, 1740.
Final partition of Poland, 1772.♦ Looking at the House of Austria simply as a power, without reference to the German or non-German character of its dominions, the loss of Silesia may be looked on as counterbalanced by the territory gained from Poland at the first and third partitions. ♦Galicia and Lodomeria.♦ The first partition gave the Austrian House a territory of which the greater part was originally Russian rather than Polish, and in which the old Russian names of Halicz and Vladimir were strangely softened into a Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. ♦Third partition, 1795.
New-Galicia.♦ The third partition added Cracow and a considerable amount of strictly Polish territory. These last passed away, first to the Duchy of Warsaw, and then to the restored Kingdom of Poland. ♦Annexation of Cracow, 1846.♦ But Galicia has been kept, and it has been increased in our day by the seizure of the republic of Cracow. These lands lie to the north of the Hungarian kingdom. Parted from them by the whole extent of that kingdom, and adjoining that kingdom at its south-west corner lie the coast lands of Austria on the Hadriatic. ♦Dalmatia, 1797.♦ By the Peace of Campoformio, Austria took Dalmatia strictly so called, and the other Venetian possessions as far south as Budua. ♦Recovered, 1814.
Ragusa, 1814.♦ These lands, lost in the wars with France, were won again at the Peace, with the addition of Ragusa and its territory.

This account of the gains and losses of a power which has gained and lost in so many quarters is necessary somewhat piecemeal. It may be well then to end this section with a picture of the Austrian power as it stood at several points of the history of the last century and a half, leaving the fluctuating frontier towards the Turk to be dealt with in our survey of the more strictly Eastern lands.

We will begin at a date when we come across a sovereign whose position is often strangely misunderstood, the Empress-Queen Maria Theresa—Queen in her own right of Hungary and Bohemia, Empress by the election of her husband to the Imperial Crown. ♦Her hereditary dominions.♦ The Pragmatic Sanction of her father Charles the Sixth made her heiress of all his hereditary dominions. That is, it made her heiress, within the Empire, of the kingdom of Bohemia with its dependencies of Moravia and Silesia—of the Archduchy of Austria with the duchies, counties, and lordships of Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Tyrol, Görz, and Trieste—of Constanz and a few other outlying Swabian points—as also of Milan, Mantua, and the Austrian Netherlands, lands which it needs some stretch, whether of memory or of legal fiction, to look on as being then in any sense lands of the Empire. Altogether beyond the Empire, it gave her the Kingdom of Hungary with its dependent lands of Croatia, Slavonia, and Transsilvania or Siebenbürgen. These hereditary dominions, lessened by the loss of Silesia, increased by the addition of Galicia, she handed on to their later Kings and Archdukes. Her marriage transferred those hereditary dominions, it indirectly transferring the Empire itself, to a new family, the House of Lorraine. The husband of Maria Theresa, Francis, who had exchanged his duchy of Lorraine for that of Tuscany, was in truth the first Lotharingian Emperor. After him came three Emperors of his house, under the third of whom the succession of Augustus and Charles came to an end.

We may take another view of the Austrian territory at the moment when the French power in Germany was at its height. The Roman Empire and the German kingdom had now come to an end; but their last sovereign still, with whatever meaning, called himself Emperor of his archduchy, though without dropping his proper title of Archduke. ♦New use of the name Austria.♦ From this time the word Austria was used, commonly but inaccurately, to take in all the possessions of the House of Austria. And, as all the possessions of the House of Austria were now geographically continuous, it became more natural to speak of them by a single name than it had been when the dominions of that house in Italy and the Netherlands lay apart from the great mass of Austrian territory. And at this moment, when the Empire had come to an end and when the German Confederation had not yet been formed, there was no distinction between German and non-German lands. The ‘Empire’ of Francis the Second or First, as it stood at the time of Buonaparte’s greatest power, had, as compared with the hereditary dominions of Maria Theresa, gone through these changes. Tyrol and the Swabian lands had passed to other German princes; Salzburg had been won and lost again. In Italy the Venetian possessions had been won and lost, and they, together with the older Italian possessions of Austria, had passed to the French kingdom of Italy. France in her own name had encroached on the Austrian dominions at two ends. She had absorbed the Austrian Netherlands at one corner, the newly won territory of Dalmatia at another. This last territory, with parts of Carinthia and Carniola, and with the Hungarian kingdom of Croatia, received, on passing to France, the name of the Illyrian Provinces. Illyrian they were in the widest and most purely geographical sense of that name. But this use of the Illyrian name was confusing and misleading, as tending to put out of sight that the true representatives of the old Illyrian race dwell to the south, not only of Carinthia and Carniola, but of Dalmatia itself. The loss of the Austrian possessions in this quarter brought back the new Austrian ‘Empire’ to the condition of the original Austrian duchy. It became a wholly inland dominion, without an inch of sea-coast anywhere.

We have already seen how Austria won back her lost Italian and Dalmatian territory, and so much of her lost German territory as was geographically continuous. ♦Ragusa and Cattaro.♦ Released from her inland prison, provided again with a great sea-board on both sides of the Hadriatic, she now refused to Ragusa the restoration of her freedom, and filched from Montenegro her hard-won haven of Cattaro. The recovered lands formed, in the new nomenclature of the Austrian possessions, the kingdoms of Lombardy and Venice, of Illyria, and of Dalmatia. The last was an ancient title of the Hungarian crown. The Kingdom of Illyria was a continuation of the affected nomenclature which had been bestowed on the lands which formed it under their French occupation. We have already traced the driving out of the Austrian power from Lombardy and Venetia, its momentary joint possession in Sleswick, Holstein, and Lauenburg. ♦Cracow, 1846.♦ The only other actual change of frontier has been the annexation of the inland commonwealth of Cracow, to match the annexation of the sea-faring commonwealth of Ragusa. ♦Separation of Hungary, 1848.♦ The movement of 1848 separated Hungary for a moment from the Austrian power. ♦Recovery of Hungary, 1849.♦ Won back, partly by Russian help, partly by the arms of her own Slavonic subjects, the Magyar kingdom remained crushed till Austria was shut out alike from Germany and from Italy. ♦Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, 1867.♦ Then arose the present system, the so called dualism, the theory of which is that the ‘Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’ consists of two states under a common sovereign. By an odd turning about of meanings, Austria, once really the Oesterreich, the Eastern land, of Germany, has become in truth the Western land, the Neustria, of the new arrangement. With the Hungarian kingdom are grouped the principality of Transsilvania and the kingdoms of Slavonia and Croatia. The Austrian state is made up of Austria itself—the archduchy with the addition of Salzburg—the duchy of Styria, the county of Tyrol, the kingdoms of Bohemia, Galicia and Lodomeria, Illyria, and Dalmatia with Ragusa and Cattaro. These last lands are not continuous. Thus two states are formed. ♦Modern Austria.♦ In one the dominant German duchy has Slavonic lands on each side of it, and an Italian fringe on its coast. ♦Modern Hungary.♦ In the other state, the ruling Magyar holds also among the subjects of his crown the Slave, the Rouman, and the outlying Saxon of Siebenbürgen. ♦Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Spizza, 1878.♦ Add to this that the latest arrangements of all have added to the Austrian dominions, under the diplomatic phrase of ‘administration,’ the Slavonic lands of Herzegovina and Bosnia, while the kingdom of Dalmatia is increased by the harbour of Spizza. A power like this, which rests on no national basis, but which has been simply patched together during a space of six hundred years by this and that grant, this and that marriage, this and that treaty, is surely an anachronism on the face of modern Europe. Germany and Italy are nations as well as powers. Austria, changed from the Austria of Germany into the Neustria of Hungary, is simply a name without a meaning.

We have thus gone through the geographical changes of the three Imperial kingdoms, and of the states and powers which were formed by parts of those kingdoms falling away, and in some cases uniting themselves with lands beyond the Empire. They have all to some extent kept a common history down to our own time. We have now to turn to another land which parted off from the Empire in like manner, but which parted off so early as to become a wholly separate and rival land, with an altogether independent history of its own.