The idea of reform still supplies the guiding principle for most accounts of late medieval religion in Bohemia. Like a brightly colored thread, reform marks a trail leading forward from Jan Hus (d. 1415) to the leaders of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as well as backward to a series of precursors in the fourteenth century. This essay takes a different path through the religious culture of fourteenth-century Bohemia and of Prague, in particular. Rather than following the traditional historiography in identifying a handful of fourteenth-century Prague preachers as revolutionary forerunners of Jan Hus, this essay situates these and other figures within a more complicated and multivalent local religious culture, a culture that was carefully molded by Central Europe's most powerful authority. No one shaped Prague's local religion more dramatically than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (r. 1346–1378), as three examples offered here will illustrate. Like an architect, Charles IV designed much of Prague's vibrant local religion. Nevertheless, neither he nor anyone else completely controlled it.

Forty years ago R. J. W. Evans, in his now classic study of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, observed that, in the absence of a coherent early modern central government, the Habsburg enterprise rested crucially upon the baroque court and Habsburg patronage of the arts. Evans especially noted that “two great synthetic achievements, alike commissioned by court, magnates, and Church, alike immortally associated with the age of baroque in the Habsburg lands: the dramatic extravagance of opera; and its physical counterpart, the monumental architecture of the years around 1700.” Evans argued further that baroque art, including opera, contributed to the ideological legitimacy of the court, and therefore the state. This became particularly important during the reign of Emperor Leopold I, who was himself a composer of some distinction and who sponsored one of the supremely monumental operatic productions of the seventeenth century, Antonio Cesti's Il pomo d'oro, on Paris and the prize of the golden apple, staged with twenty-four sets over the course of two days, in honor of the birthday of Leopold's teenage empress, the Spanish Infanta Margarita, in 1668. As a child, she had appeared as the artistic focus of the Spanish court in the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.

Few memoirs are as rich in detail as those of Field Marshal Count Francis Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff from 1906 to 1911 and from 1912 until 1917. The numerous documents cited in the text and appended to each of the volumes make Conrad's memoirs an invaluable source for historians interested in Austro-Hungarian diplomatic, political, and military developments prior to and during the early months of the first World War.

The idea that the South Slavs constituted a single ethnic whole has long received considerable support in Croat intellectual circles. Ljudevit Gaj's Illyrian movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which represented the initial stage of the Croat national awakening, recognized this idea and attempted to construct a common culture for all South Slavs under the neutral Illyrian name. Given the increased pressure of Magyarization in the first half of the nineteenth century, the linguistic and regional particularisms of the Croats resulting from the breakup of Croat lands in the medieval and early modern periods, and the presence of a considerable Serb minority in the Croat lands, the Illyrian idea became a necessity. It enabled the “awakeners” to overcome the particularisms that complicated the creation of a national consciousness among the Croats and deeply implanted in this consciousness the commonality of the South Slavs. Illyrianism eventually became a political force that found expression in the revolutions of 1848–49, but it was largely rejected by the Slovene intelligentsia and the Serbs of the Serbian principality and the Vojvodina. It remained a force and retained its significance only in the Croat lands.

Situated in the very heart of Europe, German-Austria, pitiful remainder of the once glorious and powerful Habsburg empire, was in the immediate postwar period subject to influences from both the East and the West: from distant Russia, swept by revolution and civil war and anxious to spread the gospel of Bolshevism beyond her uncertain borders, and from the victorious democratic and capitalist West, especially France and Great Britain. The Entente seemed determined to protect Austria and Central Europe from the two chief dangers which loomed on the horizon: the thrust into neighboring Austria of the newly established Soviet Hungarian Republic—the second Soviet regime in the world—and Anschluss with the new German Republic—a union which would strengthen and aggrandize the Reich at a time when weakening the German colossus and preventing its resurgence seemed to the Western Powers to be imperative.

In discussing the Austrian State Treaty it is necessary to start with an explanation of terminology. Why “State Treaty?” Generally speaking, any treaty concluded between independent states or nations is a “Staatsvertrag,” as the German term goes. Then why is the Austrian treaty of 1955 known as the “State Treaty?” The origins of the term are to be found in Austrian legal terminology after World War I. In 1919 the Austrian government championed the legal thesis, developed by the distinguished legal theorist Hans Kelsen, that the Austrian Republic had not been in a state of war with the Allied and Associated Powers since it had not been in existence while the war was being fought; consequently, the Austrian Republic refused to be the legal successor of the defunct Austro-Hungarian empire.

After the Habsburg empire rose to the position of a great power and successfully defended itself against the expansionist drives of Ottoman imperialism, both the population and the territory of the southeastern part of the monarchy began to increase. As a consequence of this expansion, an increasing number of Orthodox peoples were incorporated into the multinational empire on various legal bases. The Orthodox population of the empire certainly did not constitute anything resembling an undivided unit, whether in regard to the language which the people spoke or the length of time they lived in the area or belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. A real community of interests existed only insofar as folklore, tradition, and their common legal struggle for religious freedom were concerned. This was especially true of the Serbs and the Rumanians. During the course of their struggle to attain religious freedom a hierarchical social structure, dominated by the Serbian higher clergy, came into being which remained in existence for a long period of time.

The question of whether the Poles were an integrating or a disintegrating factor within the Habsburg monarchy has yet to be fully studied by Polish historians. Up to now they have concerned themselves mainly with the part played by the Austrian empire in the history of the Polish nation after the eighteenth century partitions and have overlooked the role of the Poles in the Austrian empire. They have concentrated their attention on the fate of the territories of the historic Polish state which fell under Habsburg rule and have studied the social, cultural, and political transformations which affected Galicia during the century and a half of Austrian domination. Polish historians have even studied the contributions made by former Habsburg subjects to the reconstruction of the Polish state after the dissolution of the monarchy, but they have rarely discussed the part which the Poles took in the political life of the multinational empire.

The Pragmatic Sanction (pactum mutuae cessionis et successionis), formulated in 1703 and first made public in 1713, has been regarded as the legal basis for the unity of the disparate lands under Habsburg rule until the mid-nineteenth century. Although the Pragmatic Sanction did not prevent foreign powers from trying to seize Austrian territory, it did provide legal justification for the existence of the monarchy as an indivisible whole for well over one hundred years.