From 1527 until 1606, there was nearly constant fighting on the long frontier in Hungary and Croatia that divided the Ottoman Empire from the Habsburg monarchy. The conflict began when Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver invaded Hungary in 1526 and defeated King Louis II Jagellio, who died trying to escape. Thereafter, Hungary was claimed by Suleiman, by Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and by the vojvod of Transylvania, Janós Szapolyai. Apart from the “Long” Turkish War of 1593–1606, major invasions from either side were infrequent. The Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire also agreed to several multiyear treaties of peace, starting in 1547. When a treaty had elapsed, both powers usually accepted truces in the interim. Yet the 1547 Treaty of Edirne reflected the priorities of distant capitals. Emperor Charles V had to have calm in Hungary in order to pursue his plans against the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in Germany; Suleiman needed quiet in the west, so as to march east against Shi'ite Iran, the Ottoman Empire's main enemy. But neither Charles nor Suleiman required more than a semblance of peace in Hungary. Hence, Ferdinand, like his new adversary, the paşa or governor-general of Buda, had to deal with border garrisons eager for booty and angry subjects demanding retaliation. The counterpart of imperial peace was Kleinkrieg in Hungary and Croatia.

Historians usually portray the Congress of Vienna in a European frame—and rightly so. The actors and the diplomatic flashpoints spanned the European continent, and the negotiations began before and continued after the Congress. The rulers and statesmen had already started parleying and planning the reconstruction of Europe as they followed behind the armies in the campaigns of 1813–1814, a process that continued while making peace with France in Paris in the spring of 1814, and amid the mixed celebrations and conversations during their visit to London that summer. Even the Congress, successful as it generally was, did not clear all the outstanding issues, which instead carried over into the discussions surrounding the Second Peace of Paris after Napoleon's renewed defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and into the ambassadors' conferences in Paris and London in succeeding years. Yet, there were good reasons why Vienna was selected as the venue for the main round of celebrations and negotiations in autumn 1814, and the location did help shape both the Congress and its diplomatic outcomes. Less often treated as a subject in its own right, however, is the question of what the Vienna Congress meant for and revealed about the history of the Habsburg monarchy, in European context to be sure, but with the focus on Austrian politics and society rather than on their contribution to the European narrative.

In the spring 1893, the following statement appeared in a theater review in one of the Parisian dailies: “Mais, dans ce diable de pays de Galicie, on n'est jamais tranquille et il faut toujours craindre pour le lendemain [But, in this hell of a land Galicia, it's never quiet, and one must always fear for tomorrow].” These words were written in response to the first, and perhaps the only, opera produced in Western Europe about the Austrian province of Galicia. The work's plot centered on a love triangle between a count, a gypsy girl, and a peasant, and was set against the historical backdrop of the Galician peasant uprising of 1846. The opera in question, Kassya, was the swan song of French composer Léo Delibes, written after a trip he took to Hungary and Austrian Galicia. The critic who penned the above words, Georges Street, certainly knew something about intrigue and conspiracy within the Austrian Empire. He was the grandson of Metternich's master spy, Georg Klindworth, and the son of Agnes Street-Klindworth, who gathered intelligence for her father about refugees of the 1848 upheavals living in Weimar. Delibes's opera and Street's biography interconnect only circumstantially—the former composed the music to Kassya; the latter attended a performance and wrote a review—yet this coincidence suggests an interesting avenue for investigation regarding French contacts with East Central Europe.

The question of how to categorize and study science in multicultural empires has in recent years increasingly occupied historians of science and of empires. Issues of intercultural mediation, brokerage, or cultural translation have been particularly influential in the study of science in colonial empires. However, the question for continental empires was about science as a reaction to pluricultural reality. Ernest Gellner, Deborah Coen, and Johannes Feichtinger, among others, have taken a similar approach to the Habsburg monarchy, which notwithstanding its legal status as a monarchy shared several characteristics of an empire. These reactions to empire also included nationalisms, which, as recent publications have shown, largely defined the shape of the late-nineteenth-century scientific landscape in Central Europe. In this article, I want to look at the imperial scientific landscape from yet another perspective, concentrating on itinerant scholars and the circulation of knowledge in the Habsburg Empire. In my view, this constitutes an imperial culture of its own that has not yet been thoroughly analyzed.

During the nineteenth century, most European countries transformed into integrated nation-states, based on the principle of nationalism. Probably the only major European exception to this rule was the Habsburg Empire. Created in 1804 to replace an early modern composite state, the Austrian Empire had to cope with the long historical traditions of its numerous and highly diverse Crownlands. This diversity prevented an effective integration of the Empire, leading, on the one hand, to the introduction of home rule in Hungary and a restricted form in Galicia and in Croatia-Slavonia and, on the other hand, to the maintenance of a large space of action for the other Crownlands.

Not very often does a work of art, which provoked very mixed reactions at the time of its completion, continue to stir the political and cultural waters nearly one hundred years later. The Slav Epic, a series of twenty large canvases created by Alfons Mucha (1860–1939) between 1909 and 1926 on the topic of Slavic history and myth, is such a work, and it has provoked critical comments from Czech art historians, politicians, and journalists. The most recent disputes, which have arisen in the last couple of years, concern the city council of Prague, which has expressed a wish to house the work somewhere in Prague in fulfillment of the artist's wishes, and the town of Moravský Krumlov in Mucha's home region, where the Epic was exhibited for forty years and lays claims to it as well. The debate about its physical location has also been joined by a number of public figures, including Mucha's grandson and the secretary to the then Czech president Václav Klaus, who called the Epic “the kitsch of the millennium” and “sheer Pan-Slavic propaganda.” Such negative comments only highlight the fact that the Slav Epic continues to generate controversy and has not yet found its place in the Czech, let alone European, context.

In 1909, at age forty-six, Franz Ferdinand made a decision about his death that would shape the memory of his life: he would be buried beside his morganatic wife, Sophie Chotek, at his palace in Artstetten (Lower Austria). That may not seem like much from the perspective of our own era. But in the context of the 600-year-old tradition-bound Habsburg dynasty, and in view of the archduke's exalted place in it as nephew of the near octogenarian emperor and next in line for the imperial throne, it was pure rebellion. For what the successor had also determined was where he would not be interred—with his esteemed ancestors in Vienna's Kaisergruft (Kaiser Crypt), which was strictly off-limits to lesser nobility like the Duchess of Hohenberg.

The significance of the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 is unquestionable in the context of Central European history. Small countries were formed, replacing a multinational empire. These new countries, however, had to deal with the aftermath of the downfall of the monarchy in the political, economic, and social spheres for a long time thereafter. Because so much is known about the collapse of the Danubian Monarchy today, one may wonder what else could possibly be said about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Countless authors at home and abroad, some of them distinguished and others unreliable, as well as eyewitnesses and professional historians, have all devoted time and energy to this subject throughout the nearly one hundred years that have passed since the old monarchy fell apart.

The Habsburg monarchy has often been held up as a model of European multiethnic coexistence. Such nostalgia is lent a certain credibility by the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the monarchy's collapse, a Habsburg aristocrat, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, created the Pan-European Union, the most successful pre-1945 movement for European integration. Founded in 1923, the Union still exists today and its honorary president until his death in 2011 was Otto von Habsburg. This seems quite an illustrious pedigree, but the Pan-European Union actually had rather humble origins. The circles in which Coudenhove moved early in his career and those who inspired and supported his movement at its inception hailed from Viennese pacifist and progressive social reform movements. The significance of this formative environment has not been sufficiently explored. What, if anything, was Coudenhove's debt to his Viennese colleagues and predecessors?

The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the fall of 1918 inaugurated a period of rapid change in East Central Europe. Independent Hungary, which emerged as one of the “successor states” to the Dual Monarchy, experienced two revolutions in ten months. However, neither the democratic regime, born in the October Revolution of 1918, nor the more radical Council Republic, founded in March 1919, was able to solve the country's pressing economic and social problems and defend its sovereignty. The collapse of the Council Republic and the occupation of Budapest and the eastern half of the country by the Romanian Army in early August 1919 provoked a right-wing reaction. The next seven months experienced a rapid rise in paramilitary and mob violence. The militias targeted the supporters of the Left, poor workers, and peasants, as well as apolitical and middle-class Jews. Political violence in the second half of 1919 and the early 1920s took the lives of between fifteen hundred and five thousand people in Hungary. The rise of paramilitary and mob violence was part of a larger European phenomenon. From Germany to Turkey, and from Hungary to Poland and the Baltic states, paramilitary groups played a major role in establishing borders and shaping the postwar social and political order domestically.