bridge of Charles IV. Ferdinand, acting on Jesuit advice, made use of the occasion to persecute the Protestants, and especially the Bohemian Union of Brethren; about 30,000 families had to leave the country, amongst them Comenius! Not only were the Bohemian countries depopulated, but the Habsburgs carried through one of the greatest economic revolutions in history. Four-fifths of the soil were taken from the legitimate owners to fill the treasury of the greedy Emperor and his tools, drawn from the dregs of every aristocracy in Europe. The country was brought back to Catholicism by fire and sword—her best men were exiled, her literature burned, her lands plundered.
In 1627, Ferdinand II, curtailed the legislative and administrative rights of the aristocracy—at that time the only representatives of the nation—but he did not dare to deprive Bohemia of her independence. In the same year he issued a new charter confirming the privileges of Bohemia, and expressedly rejecting the theory, preached by his advisers and upheld in modern times by Austrian and German historians, that the Bohemian nation had forfeited its rights to independence. Ferdinand himself and his successors were only too glad to remain kings of Bohemia.
The power of the Habsburgs was strengthened by their success in reimposing Catholicism. The Reformation, while destroying the medieval theocracy, strengthened the State, and, in Catholic countries, the State gained by its alliance with the Counter-Reformation.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Habsburgs continued the unification and centralisation of Austria proper, Bohemia and Hungary, and this aim seemed to have been attained under Maria Theresa and Joseph II. But the latter’s radical and Germanising methods provoked opposition alike in Bohemia, Hungary and all the non-German provinces, and since his days history tells of the revival of the Austrian nations.
4. The opposition of the Bohemian aristocracy to Joseph II. was only the political side of a national revival. The whole of Europe awakened in the eighteenth century; it was the period of humanitarianism in philosophy and literature, the age of reason and freethought, the age of Rousseau, Kant and Paine. Absolutism could not oppose such a movement indefinitely, and even the absolutist monarchs of Austria,
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