Europe provided Maria Theresa with numerous examples of absolute and strongly centralised monarchies. Maria Theresa and Joseph II. could therefore easily take what measures they liked to ensure their absolutism and centralisation. These measures resulted in depriving Bohemia of her independence, a deprivation which was accepted in silence and without any protest amidst general indifference.
Maria Theresa only completed the work begun by the first Habsburg: she only hastened by her enlightened absolutism the slow march of the Czech constitution towards its ruin. She believed she had found in centralisation the only possible salvation for her monarchy against the attacks of Frederick II. Seeing the Prussian State, even at this period a centralised and bureaucratic machine, the working of which depended on the sole will of the monarch, and in whose hands the entire military, economic and financial organisation was concentrated, she attributed Frederick's military successes to this system of government. She therefore determined to follow his example, and to make her empire, or rather her three states, a single, centralised, uniform, and homogeneous State.
By her decisive act in 1749, followed later by a series of other measures, Maria Theresa completed the task undertaken by her House. She destroyed the last remaining institutions of the autonomous,
