The profound involvement of the Habsburg monarchy in various revolutionary manifestations in the Balkans since the subjugation of that peninsula by the Ottoman Turks has generally not been deemed worthy of investigation by historians. Only a handful of specialized articles and a few pages in the scant existing studies on Habsburg foreign policy have been devoted to the study of Austrian relations with actual or potential revolutionary elements. There has been a general neglect of Balkan studies by Austrian scholars and of Austrian studies by Balkan scholars.

On April 23, 1526, Suleiman, the Turkish sultan, left Constantinople at the head of an army numbering around 120,000 men. He marched in a northwesterly direction, his apparent purpose being the conquest of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Magyars and their subjects had once been a formidable barrier to the westward expansion of the Ottomans, but they were now badly weakened by the ineptness of their youthful king Louis and the rapacity and shortsightedness of their nobility.

It has been said that Magyar nationalism was the chief disintegrating force in the Habsburg empire. This statement2 obviously refers to the period when integral nationalism was one of the major centrifugal force3 tearing the Dual Monarchy apart. As Hans Kohn has suggested, “Only nineteenth century nationalism stressed the Magyar character of the multiracial kingdom,” since previously the Holy Crown of St. Stephen rather than the Magyar nationality was the symbol of the Hungarian nation.4 Indeed, that often quoted admonition of the founder of the Hungarian state, “unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecille et fragile et,”5 can be interpreted in such a way as to place the emphasis on the a priori multinational character of the medieval Hungarian state and feudal nation. It is ironical that a recent school of Hungarian political writers has endeavored to use even the “idea of St.

There is general agreement among historians that Otto von Bismarck never really approved of the principles of parliamentary government advocated by the nineteenth century progeny of the French Enlightenment, even though he could tolerate particular parliamentary institutions when he considered it practical to do so.1 Thus, while he looked upon political theorizing about natural laws of society and the natural rights of man—the philosophical bases of modern parliamentarianism—as futile efforts to oversimplify the complex nature of social and political organization and regarded revolutionary attempts to implement such rationalizations as sinful and arrogant intermeddling in the divinelyordained, hierarchical social order, he, nonetheless, rejected the rigidly legitimist anti-liberal concepts espoused by the post-1848 Metternichian reactionaries. While the latter called for a total repression of all revolutionary movements, Bismarck, perceiving the futility of sheer negativism, sought to capture revolutionary forces and enlist them in the service of the traditional ruling circle wherever it was possible to do so.

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.

Among the many difficult problems which Minister-president Kasimir Felix Badeni's government (1895–97) bequeathed to all the regimes which followed it the most serious arose from the fact that, as a consequence of the confusion caused by his policies, the tradition that the imperial-royal government in Austria had to collaborate with parliament broke down. The filibustering tactics practiced in the representative bodies of the Austrian half of the empire during the brief period of the Badeni ministry, though they were certainly not unprecedented, nevertheless, assumed a proportion and form hitherto unknown. The obstructionists succeeded in destroying the most fundamental principle of parliamentarianism—the idea that the will of the majority must prevail in the legislative body—and in overthrowing the only constitutional system which had existed in Austria since the laws dealing with ministerial responsibility and imperial representation were passed in 1867. Any government selected by the sovereign without formal consideration of the political opinions of the members of parliament in the long run could operate effectively only if a majority of the members of that body at least tolerated it—provided, of course, that the state was not to surrender to a barely concealed absolutism. Apart from the political tensions which a resort to absolutism would have engendered in Austria and the fact that it would have endangered the rather tenuous relations which Austria had with Hungary, paragraphs 10 and 14 of the law on imperial representation were so worded as to create an effective legal barrier against such a hazardous step in the direction of absolutism.1

At first I was unable to obtain any information at all and then only extremely vague and uncertain indications which left the door wide open for every possible conjecture about where the repository of the records of the main process of the Sarajevo assassins is located. Some maintain that the trial records were sent away soon after the verdict was rendered on October 28, 1914, and that they were later torn apart and hopelessly mixed up—even more so than the records of the Maid of Orleans, whose trial, as is well known, took place over five centuries ago. Others believe that this is no misfortune, since an authentic translation of the records of the main trial from Serbo-Croatian into German was published in 1918 by the Berlin Archiv fur Strafrecht und Strafprozess in a treatise entitled Der Prozess gegen die Attentäter von Sarajevo. Nach amtlichen Stenogrammen des Gerichtsverfahrens aktenmässig dargestellt von Prof. Pharos.1

The interpretation of unpublished political documents in the light of known historical events resembles Penelope's efforts to convince her many suitors of the necessity of her avowed goal, namely to fabricate a new garment out of old material. The Austro-Hungarian diplomatic reports from Washington written in the first two decades of the twentieth century will not necessarily provoke a re-evaluation of the events leading to World War I. However, as in Penelope's case, their craftsmanship will arouse interest; they may well serve as a new source of study, and they certainly shed new light on old material.

American scholarship on Austria-Hungary, at least so far as it concerns published books, got under way only at the end of the First World War. A fair number of books were written during the previous century, but few made any pretension to serious scholarship and fewer still had any permanent value. The prewar literature consisted of a few history texts;2 some polemical works on the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49, most of which were ardently pro-Kossuth;3 descriptive and travel accounts designed to acquaint Americans with the native homes of the newer wave of immigrants (books which were usually well-intentioned but were also sentimental and superficial);4 and tracts on Austria-Hungary and the World War, which were at best one-sided and at worst sheer propaganda.5

Strictly speaking, everything which deals with the history of the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia) and of Slovakia between 1526 and 1918 should be treated as an integral part of the history of the Habsburg monarchy. Especially in Bohemia, but also in Slovakia (at that time referred to as “Upper Hungary”), many historical processes and events took place during this period which were of considerable significance for the fate of the multinational empire.