In consolidating his hold over the Austrian, Hungarian, and Bohemian territories which he acquired between 1521 and 1526, Ferdinand I (1521–1564) enjoyed one especially notable success: the suppression in 1547 of a Bohemian uprising during Emperor Charles V's (1519–1556) campaign against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany. Relying on the promise of the Schmalkaldian leader Elector John Frederick of Saxony to protect them, the Bohemian estates formed a league in 1547 which challenged, among other things, Ferdinand's rights to summon the diet, to have his son crowned during his lifetime, and to oversee the administration of his treasury.

The article analyzes reactions to the outbreak of World War I in the Habsburg Crownland of Salzburg. Based on a detailed examination of local sources, such as diaries, memoirs, church and gendarmerie chronicles, regional newspapers, and administrative records, the study sheds light on the complexity of responses and emotions elicited during the summer of 1914. Engaging with recent historiography on the question of “war enthusiasm” and the “August experience,” the ensuing analysis allows for profound insights into how the local population reacted to the news of the Sarajevo assassinations, Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia, and the subsequent declaration of war, mobilization, and the first weeks of the conflict. The article highlights the role of the press, governmental policies, and repression as key factors in creating an agitated atmosphere to which people responded in different ways, depending on age, class, gender, and the urban–rural divide. At times, frenzied patriotic mobilization occurred alongside not only a widespread acceptance of the obligation to do one's duty, but also—and equally—great uncertainty and anxiety. This highlights the complexities of public reactions in the summer of 1914, thereby challenging from a regional historical perspective the notion of an “enthusiastic” welcoming of the war.

By abolishing feudalism, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 helped to create the economic preconditions and the legal-political framework necessary for capitalistic development. This made it possible for Hungary to adapt her economy to the market possibilities offered by the Industrial Revolution in western and central Europe and to share in the agrarian boom of the period between 1850 and 1873. The previously existing division of labor between western and eastern Europe and between the western and eastern parts of the Habsburg monarchy continued on a scale larger than before, with the significant difference, however, that this practice now speeded up rather than retarded the development of preconditions for capitalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century the preconditions for capitalism had come into existence in the Cisleithanian provinces at considerable expense to the Hungarian economy.

This article deals with an early modern court historian's judgments concerning the political competence and incompetence of his contemporaries. Although the phrase “political competence” may seem anachronistic when referring to the second half of the seventeenth century, hardly any historian today would deny that, at least since the late medieval period, European intellectuals belonging to political elites had developed their own understanding of what constitutes effective statesmanship. That understanding was not always normative, or based on exempla of the classical past—it could be practical and expressed through evaluations of current events. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the future Habsburg court historian Galeazzo Gualdo Priorato wrote about Oliver Cromwell: “And let it be noted from his extraordinary example, that not the nobility of birth, nor riches . . . qualify one for high office, as it usually solely happens, but that it is the opportunity that . . . wakes up the spirits, and sharpens the minds.” This article will deal with Priorato's judgments of political competence (and incompetence) in the works that he wrote while in the service of the Austrian Habsburgs.

Amid the preparations for the abortive Russo-Ottoman peace talks at Fokschan in April 1772, Anton Wenzel Kaunitz instructed the Austrian Internuntius in Istanbul, Franz Maria Thugut, to elect a colleague to accompany him to the congress. Kaunitz, eager to maintain Austria's unique relationship with both belligerent parties, suggested two young orientalists, Bernhard von Jenisch and the Hungarian noble Karl Reviczky as suitable companions. In character with many thirty-somethings in the Habsburg bureaucracy in the 1770s, Thugut, Jenisch, and Reviczky were fluent in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish and possessed an exceptional knowledge of Ottoman affairs. As members of the Austrian embassy to the Ottoman Porte, they had each spent long sojourns in Istanbul. The recruitment and education of such men had been one of Kaunitz's priorities since the 1750s. Thugut knew both candidates well, especially Jenisch, an old chum since their student days at the Oriental Academy in Vienna. Despite Reviczky's recent successes as a translator of an Ottoman treatise on government and some ghazals by the Persian poet Hafez, Thugut did not share Kaunitz's esteem for the young noble, explaining that Reviczky “is as ingenious as he is faint-hearted; he turns pale at the mere mention of plague and would take objection to travel over the channel with sharp winds.”

LikeRobert A. Kann, I too am a historian by profession. Despite the close links between their subject and disciplines such as sociology land political science, historians on the whole avoid attempting to analyze contemporary politics. This lecture will therefore concentrate on the first twenty-five years of the Second Republic. Yet I am well aware that in the Kreisky era (notably as a result of the reforms introduced by Hertha Firnberg and Christian Broda) Austria's progress toward Western Europe took on a new character, and the country underwent what was, for the time being at least, its final major modernization. But it was an analysis of the wholly different steps taken toward the West between 1945 and 1970 that laid the foundation on which the single-party Social Democratic (SPÖ) government of the 1970s was able to build. It therefore seems legitimate to focus upon that first half of the history of the Second Republic, and to see the turning point marked by the student movement of 1968 and the election results of 1970 as a natural cutoff point for this discussion. Broadly speaking, the main concerns of the new state in its first two and a half decades were to provide a framework of order for the very disparate elements that it had inherited and to deal with the immense problems now confronting it. NaCenter for Austrian Studiestional Socialism, by its policies and the effects of all-out war, had left behind a country in ruins in every sense—not only materially through the destruction of housing, infrastructure, and industrial plant, but also intellectually and culturally. Most of the leading figures in Austria's cultural and intellectual life had been driven into exile or murdered.

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.

Emperor Maximilian I spared no expense or eff ort to ensure that he would be remembered the way that he wanted to be remembered. Th roughout his reign he concentrated on his image, crafting it to suit his political and dynastic goals. He justifi ed his efforts by claiming that, “Whoever prepares no memorial for himself during his lifetime has none after his death, and that same person will be forgotten along with the sound of the bell that tolls his passing. And so the money I spend on my memorial is not lost; rather, to spare expense on my memorial is to suppress my future reputation. For what I do not produce toward my own memorial during my lifetime will not be celebrated after my death by you or anybody else.” A key aspect of the emperor's memorial was his patronage of and skill in astrology. The image of Maximilian as patron and student of astrology was one of his own making. In his autobiographical writings, Maximilian emphasized his efforts to learn and practice astrology. His personal secretary and adviser, Joseph Grünpeck, who worked on early draft s of the emperor's autobiography and wrote a biography of Maximilian, consistently portrayed the emperor as an avid and gift ed student of astrology. In the biography, which he dedicated to Emperor Charles V, Grünpeck recounted Maximilian's enjoyment in reading astrological and astronomical literature, especially Ptolemy. Not long after Maximilian died, Johannes Schöner praised the emperor for his efforts in astrology and numbered him among the most important patrons of astrology. Toward the end of the sixteenThcentury, Henry Ranzovius, in his history of great patrons of astrology, singled out Maximilian and labeled him a lover of the art.