The reconstruction of social and political elites is one of the most demanding tasks a historian will face. It requires the collection of a mass of data—such as dates of birth and death, place of origin, parentage, marriage and issue, wealth, career, social networks, intellectual life—and its analysis. Even then the findings are predetermined because they follow from the criteria applied; rather than absolute certainty, these findings commonly yield no more than probabilities. Only rarely will the sources obviate these difficulties by identifying the actors for us, as if ready-made. Happily those of the Tirol from 1567 do precisely that.

On 6 January 1584, the provost of Zwettl in the archduchy of Austria below the Enns recounted events two days earlier that had greatly alarmed him. Present in the town of Zwettl on administrative business, Ulrich Hackel had been very surprised to see the town church unlocked and packed with peasants and townspeople. An additional 600 peasants, according to his reckoning, were gathered outside the church. All were dressed in their best and all were celebrating Christmas. Yet, as far as Hackel had been concerned, Christmas had already been celebrated ten days earlier. He halted worship in the church, telling the congregation that Christmas was now past and had been duly marked. He then sought out the local magistrate to ensure that the church would be kept locked and that trade would be resumed in the town. His actions had, however, aroused very great opposition. An angry crowd surrounded Hackel, accusing him of being a papist and a rogue and demanding to know why he was depriving them of Christmas. He believed that had he uttered one more word in favor of the earlier celebration of Christmas, he would have been killed on the spot. Hackel had escaped their fury only by being escorted by the town magistrate out of the local parish house in which he had taken refuge and beyond the walls of the town.

This article considers responses to Habsburg persecution of Protestants in Hungary during the 1670s. Focusing on the Reformed church, it will first assess how long-established contacts with Reformed co-religionists in northwestern Europe came to provide support for Hungarians in the face of violent state repression. This will concentrate in particular on the trial and imprisonment of Protestant clergy after 1674 and on the liberation of one group of ministers in 1676, thanks to Dutch intervention. It will then consider the diverse ways in which Habsburg persecution of Hungarian Protestants was represented in the Dutch Republic, England, France, and in Hungary, and what this reveals about the international Reformed community toward the end of the confessional age. It will then assess the role of persistent but shifting memories of this era of martyrs and liberators in the later development of Hungarian Reformed identity.

Of all the great questions of Habsburg history, perhaps the greatest is this: What would have been the consequence if Charles V had decided to prioritize differently his dealings with France, the Ottoman Empire, and Christian reformers? It is certain that the House of Habsburg would have proceeded along a different path, but such a truism hardly advances a better understanding of events in the empire, or in Europe more widely, in the sixteenth century. Charles V, as pater ecclesiae and as head of a monarchia universalis, stands astride the traditional and the modern. To him is attributed the last opportunity for Habsburg universal empire, with the long hand of the casa de Austria imprinting Habsburg ambitions on the world.

If proverbial wisdom predicts longevity to the falsely proclaimed dead, then the paradigm of absolutism and its confessional variant must surely be considered a prime example. Having drawn intense fire from scholars of Western Europe over the past two decades, the concept of absolutism has recently been given a fresh lease of life by research, exploring and, to some extent, vindicating its applicability in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Central Europe. Given the evolutionary nature of the making of the early modern Austrian-Habsburg monarchy, the complexity of its constitutional, religious, and ethnic makeup, and the waywardness of some of its governing personnel, it seems doubtful if future research will ever be able to satisfactorily clarify the relationship between the political aspirations of individual Austrian rulers, among whom Ferdinand II arguably made the most serious bid for absolute rule, and the practice of negotiated power that characterized the normal state of relations between the Crown and the monarchy's estates.

Thereis something in a historian that loves wreckage. I am confident that scientists will one day identify a gene on our chromosomes that predisposes us to destruction. As a young graduate student, I listened in rapt attention as Lawrence Stone mesmerized our seminar describing the one opportunity he had in wartime to “sack a house.” Most of us, however, sublimate these illicit desires, and the urge to destroy only becomes evident in our scholarship. Following Gibbon and Huizinga, we relish the study of decay and decline. Humor aside, R. J. W. Evans was well aware of this instinct as he began The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy with a simple but profound observation, “Many historians, in a dozen languages, have sought to explain why the Habsburg Monarchy declined and fell; none has ever seriously investigated the causes of its rise.”

Thirty years ago, R. J. W. Evans, in the preface to his influential work, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, outlined what he saw as needed in the study of this complex subject. The three themes to which he pointed and then addressed in the 450 packed pages that followed were: “a consistent account of the Central European Counter Reformation,” “a balanced view of the Monarchy as a whole,” and “an understanding of intellectual evolution from the Renaissance to the Baroque.” Over the last three decades, numerous historians have taken Evans's lead and contributed to a deeper and more variegated image of the histories of the lands of the Central European Habsburgs. Pieces by five of these historians comprise the forum under discussion here.

In his 1883 playDie Türken vor Wien, Richard von Kralik, the Catholic writer and later doyen of Christian Socialism, recounts the story of the 1683 siege of Vienna. Habsburg military heroes, ordinary Viennese Bürger, and the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa appear on stage in Kralik's retelling of what had become a foundational moment in Austrian historiography. The defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 has been hailed as Austria's finest hour, the Habsburgs' greatest service to Europe, and as the moment when Austria defended all of Western civilization from, among other things, the East, Asian barbarism, and Muslim infidels. Kralik may be the playwright here; but in a preface to the play, he introduces the two figures who are the true sources for his tale of 1683: Lady History and Lady Legend. They work together, each playing her part. Lady History and Lady Legend, he explains, sing in beautiful duet, “both accurate and truthful, neither lying nor inventing.” Kralik's juxtaposition of history and legend was astute. Any historian looking back to the events of 1683 and the stories that have since accumulated about Austria's “saving the occident” encounters a multi-century work in progress, a story under revision, a tale in which “legends” about coffee (said to be introduced to Europe by Turks fleeing Vienna) and croissants (a bun shaped, suspiciously, like a crescent) persist alongside themes more properly in the domain of “history”: class tensions, national conflict, and church-state relations.

On 4 October 1948, József Cardinal Mindszenty preached a sermon for the rosary feast in front of 35,000 Catholic faithful. He began by reminding his congregation of the origins of the feast day that they were celebrating: the victory of Europe's Christian states over the Ottoman Turkish fleet at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. This great victory in the struggle of universal Christendom against the infidel enemy recalled to Mindszenty a second, more particularly Hungarian parallel: the victory of Habsburg forces over the Ottoman Turkish enemy at the battle of Temesvár in 1716. “Hungarian history recalls too such a rosary victory—the Hungarian Christians won it over the Turks in 1716 at Temesvár.” Both military victories represented moments when Europeans had repelled a force seen at the time, and ever after, as hostile to Christian civilization.

Beginningwith the conquests of theBalkans and Hungary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and drawing to an end only with the Habsburg takeover of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, the Ottoman interlude in the Croat lands has long been a cause of great anxiety, great sorrow, great resentment, and great pride. For many writers and interpreters of Croat history, the response to the Turkish threat has figured as a source of profound meaning—indeed, even as a source of identity—and they have clearly intended that their audiences see things in this way as well. Even today the encounter with the Turks may still carry that great weight. In one recent study of the long Croat-Turk relationship, for instance, Ottoman-era specialist Ive Mažuran unequivocally calls the time of invasion and occupation “the most tragic period in Croatian history.” This, then, is still a past that signifies.

Threevery fine papers deal with the Ottoman menace as metaphor in what we now designate as the post-Habsburg period, that discreet time span between the closing decades of the nineteenth century and World War II, with some forays into the contemporary period. In all three papers, the Ottoman (or the Turk, as was the current usage) served as a foil for contemporary grievances. It is not really the “Ottoman menace” they are dealing with, but, accordingly, the communist, socialist, working-class, Jewish, Serbian, or other “menaces” that are additionally demonized by introducing the analogy to a well-known and popular symbol. In the apt observation of the Austrian playwright J. P. Ostland, quoted by Maureen Healy, this was the present packaged as the past. It needs to be stressed that even the phrase “Ottoman menace” is a neologism form the post-World War II period, when scholarly works insisted correctly on a distinction between “Ottoman” as an imperial designator and “Turk” as an ethnic and later a national one. Although this distinction is justified for analytical purposes, it introduces a tinge of anachronism that belies one of the primary goals of history writing.

JohannPezzl's account ofVienna in the 1780s was conceived from the perspective of an enlightened supporter of Joseph II. Pezzl divided this account into numerous small sections, including one on “The Twelfth of September,” the date of the defeat of the Turks outside Vienna in 1683. As Maureen Healy notes, the new austerity of Joseph II, who did not favor excessively ceremonial occasions, moderated the annual celebration of that date. However, for a whole century, the religious commemoration of the date 12 September (which was also the festival of the Holy Name of Mary) preserved the historical memory of the liberation of Vienna in a manner that is more often associated with modern (rather than early modern) commemorations.

Theidea behind this article came from a riddle. A 1907 guidebook to the Austro-Hungarian pilgrimage site of Mariazell carried the following enigmatic line: “The traveler who, while visiting Mariazell, wishes to combine the pleasant and the useful—for whom the pilgrimage should be at the same time an excursion into the mountains—will find a series of pretty promenades that lead him only a short way out of town and require absolutely no exertion.” The author most likely thought the meaning of this somewhat banal passage was completely clear. But the historian must wonder what exactly was “pleasant” and what was “useful” for the traveler to Mariazell. Was it pleasant to contemplate the majesty of God and the clemency of the Virgin Mary and useful to exercise one's body in the fresh, mountain air—even without exertion? Or was it useful to demonstrate one's piety and devotion via pilgrimage and dutiful time spent in mass, but pleasant to stroll through the temple of nature, admiring local flora and fauna along the way? Both of these interpretations are as truthful as they are possible, and their coexistence exemplifies a quintessential duality of religious tourism in the nineteenth century. Mariazell was both a “place of mercy” (Gnadenort), and an “alpine pearl”; its attraction stemmed from a hybrid of sanctity and sanctuary that was exploited by the citizens and residents of Mariazell whose livelihood depended on attracting a constant flow of outsiders.

Onthe morning of 7July1839, three trains operated by the Habsburg monarchy's first steam railroad company, the Kaiser Ferdinands-Nordbahn, arrived at Brno/Brünn, the largest city in Moravia. As one local newspaper correspondent wrote, throngs of onlookers first “caught sight of the smoking locomotive with its line of carriages in quick flight.” In little time the first of three trains from Vienna pulled into the station. “With speed like the wind,” it had covered the roughly 130 kilometers from the imperial capital to Brno in just four and a half hours. The other two trains arrived shortly thereafter. Some of the train's passengers wandered through the city. Prominent state and local officials hosted several notable visitors, including the railroad company's main financial backer, Salomon Mayer von Rothschild, and his leading engineers.

Whilecontextualization is basic to all historical analysis, modern Austrian intellectual history exhibits a particular preference for strong contextual accounts of cultural development. Since the 1970s, the literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a birthplace of modernism—associated with scholars such as Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, William Johnston, William McGrath, and above all Carl Schorske—has endorsed the view, famously expressed by the poet Friedrich Hebbel, that Austria was the “little world where the big world holds its tryouts.” Vienna's cultural efflorescence, it is argued, was exemplary not only for its magnitude and innovation, but also for the close affiliations of its participants. “No one who has studied the high culture of Vienna in the period of liberal ascendancy,” Carl Schorske remarked programmatically, “can fail to be impressed by the sturdy integration of its components.”

Two of the most iconic photos of the 1956 Hungarian revolution involve a colossal statue of Stalin, erected in 1951 and toppled on the first day of the anti-Soviet uprising. One of these pictures shows Stalin's decapitated head, abandoned in the street as curious pedestrians amble by. The other shows a tall stone pedestal with nothing on it but a lonely pair of bronze boots. Situated near Heroes' Square, Hungary's national pantheon, the Stalin statue had served as a symbol of Hungary's subjugation to the Soviet Union; and its ceremonious and deliberate destruction provided a poignant symbol for the fall of Stalinism.

Much has been written concerning the impact of World War I on the development of eugenic thinking, especially in Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries. This has led historians to examine not only specific eugenic movements, but also the international nexus of institutional collaboration, personal affinities, and transfer of ideas. If before 1914, eugenicists from various countries were united in their quest to improve society by biological means—a form of internationalism culminating in the First International Congress on Eugenics organized in 1912 in London—during World War I, many of them engaged in national politics, devising eugenic methodologies to serve the ideological imperatives of their own countries rather than the proclaimed universalism of the prewar years.

YaroslavHrytsak is the director of the Institute for Historical Research at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv and visiting associate professor at the Central European University in Budapest. One of Ukraine's most prominent liberal intellectuals, Hrytsak writes historical essays that often enliven the pages of Krytyka, Ukraine's equivalent of The New York Review of Books. The monograph under review is entitled, in translation, “A Prophet in His Own Fatherland: Franko and His Society (1856–1886).” This is not Hrytsak's first book about the poet and polymath Ivan Franko, but it is certainly his best, betraying many years of reading and reflecting, thinking, and rethinking. In 2007 Hrytsak's new biography of Franko won the “Best Ukrainian Book” prize in the nonfiction category in the competition sponsored by the weekly Korespondent. Very readable, this new biography is full of fresh perspectives. Hrytsak states in his introduction that “in the general hierarchy of scholarly values I place the discovery of new methods of conceptualization of already known facts above the collection of new facts” (20). For his new biography on Franko, Hrytsak chose an interesting illustration for every chapter and then interpreted the illustration in the text. This device is but a characteristic creative moment of Hrytsak's style.

Scandinavian historians have traditionally taken a strong interest in the German-speaking world, including Austria. The peripheral status of their own languages often keeps their works hidden from a wider international readership, however. Even if the findings appear in English, their publication in domestic journals and publishing houses limits their reception. This lack of visibility is deplorable, because Scandinavian researchers can add interesting angles to the interpretation of Austrian history.