But the liberation of Hungary from the 'Iurks brought no relief to the Hungarians. The ruthless suppression of the Magyar malcontents, in which there was little discrimination between the innocent and the guilty, had so crushed the spirit of the country that Leopold considered the time ripe for realizing a long-cherished ideal of the Habsburgs and changing Hungary from an elective into an hereditary monarchy. For this purpose a diet was assembled at Pressburg in the autumn of 1687. It was a mere rump, for wholesale executions had thinned its numbers and the reconquered countries were not represented in it To this weakened and terrorized assembly the emperor king explained that he had the right to treat Hungary as a conquered country, but that he was prepared to confirm its constitutional liberties under three conditions: the inaugural diploma was to be in the form signed by Ferdinand I, the Crown was to be declared hereditary in the house of Habsburg, and the 31Sl clause of the Golden Bull, authorizing armed resistance to unconstitutional acts of the sovereign, was to be abrogated These conditions the diet had no choice but to accept, and, in October 1687, the elective monarchy of Hungary, which had been in existence for nearly seven hundred years, ceased to exist. The 1mn1ed1ate effect of the peace of Karlowitz was thus only to strengthen despotism in Hungary. Kollonich, who had been created a cardinal in 1685, archbishop of Kalocsa in 1691 and archbishop of Esztergom (Gran) and primate of Hungary in 1695. was now at the head of affairs, and his plan was to germanize Hungarj as speedtly as possible by promoting a wholesale immigration into the recovered provinces, all of which Were in a terrible state of dilapidation 1

The border counties, now formed into a military zone, were planted exclusively with Croatian colonists as being more trustworthy defenders of the Hungarian frontier than the Hungarians themselves. Moreover, a neo-aaquiszta commisszo was constituted to inquire into the title-deeds of the Magyar landowners 1n the old Turkish provinces, and hundreds of estates were transferred, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to naturalized foreigners Transylvania since 1690 had been administered from Vienna, and though the farce of assembling a diet there was the promise of religious liberty, conceded to in 1687, was not kept. No wonder then if was now seething with discontent and only an opportunity to burst forth in open ie-This opportunity came when the emperor, in the War of the Spanish Succession, Withfrom Hungary except some 1600 men. In still kept up, even it on its surrender the whole country awaiting R, , k6czy bellion. involved drew all his troops 1703 the malcontents found a leader in Francis Rakéczy II (q 1'), w ho was elected prince by the Hungarian estates on the oth of July 1704, and during the next six years gave the emperor Joseph I, ho had succeeded Leopold 1n May 1705, considerable anxiety. Rakéczy had often as many as 1o0, oo0 men under him, and his bands penetrated as far as Moravia and even approached within a few miles of Vienna. But they were guerrillas, not regulars, they had no good officers, no serviceable artillery, and xery little money, and all the foreign powers to whom Rakéczy turned lor assistance (excepting France, who fed them occasionally with paltry subsidies) would not commit themselves to a formal alliance with rebels who were defeated in every pitched battle thev fought On the other hand, if the Rakéczians were easily dispersed, they as quickly reassembled, and at one time they held all Praiisylvania and the greater part of Hungary.

Thus the peace of Szatmar assured to the Hungarian nation all that it had won by former compacts with the Habsburgs, but whereas hitherto the Transylvanian principality had been the permanent guardian of all such compacts, and the authority of the reigning house had been counterpoised by the Turk, the effect and validity of the peace of Szatmar depended entirely upon the support it might derive from the nation itself. It was a fortunate thing for Hungary that the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession introduced a new period, in which, at last, the interests of the dynasty and the nation were identical, thus rendering a reconciliation between them desirable. Moreover, the next century and a half was a period of domestic tranquillity, during which Hungary was able to repair the ruin of the long Turkish wars, nurse her material resources, and take the first steps in the direction of social and political charles reform. The first reforms, however, were dynastic HL rather than national. Thus, in 1715, King Charles III 2 persuaded the diet to consent to the establishment of a standing army, which-though the diet reserved the right to fix the number of recruits and vote the necessary subsidies from time to time-was placed under the control of the Austrian council of war. The same centralizing tendency was shown in the administrative and judicial reforms taken in hand by the diet of 1722. A Hungarian court chancery was now established at Vienna, while the government of Hungary proper was committed to a royal s tad holders hip at Pressburg. Both the chancery and the s tad holders hip were independent of the diet and responsible to the king alone, being, in fact, his executive instruments. It was this diet also which accepted the Pragmatic Sanction, first issued in 1713, by which gagmatlc auction. the emperor Charles VI, in default of his leaving 1725; male heirs, settled the succession to his hereditary dominions on his daughter Maria Theresa and her heirs By the laws of 1723, which gave effect to the resolution of the diet in favour of accepting the principle of female succession, the Habsburg king entered into a fresh contract with his Hungarian subjects, a contract which remained the basis of the relations of the crown and nation until 1848. On the one hand it was declared that the kingdom of Hungary was an integral part of the Habsburg dominions and inseparable from these so long as a male or female heir of the kings Charles, Joseph and Leopold should be found to succeed to them On the other hand, Charles swore, on behalf of himself and his heirs, to preserve the Hungarqan constitution intact, with all the rights, privileges, customs, laws, &c, of the kingdom and its dependencies. Moreover, in the event of the failure of a Habsburg heir, the diet reserved the right to revive the “ ancient, approved and accepted custom and prerogative of the estates and orders in the matter of the election and coronation of their king ”

The reign of Charles III is also memorable for two Turkish wars, the first of which, beginning in 1716, and made glorious by the victories of Prince Eugene and Tanos Pallfy, was terminated by