ÂÒÂ×Ðã

By the end of the fifteenth century, the Estate of nobility had accumulated substantial political power in Central Europe, defined for these purposes as the crownlands of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, all then ruled by the Jagiellon dynasty, as well as the Habsburgs' lands of Lower, Upper, Inner and Further Austria. Through the institutions of diets, dietines and counties, the nobilities had encroached upon the reserved rights of the crown, won privileges at the expense of the towns, and reinforced their legal jurisdiction over the peasantry. This module will examine how the Habsburg rulers - kings of Bohemia and Hungary from 1526 - began the slow process of recovering the authority of the crown, which by the seventeenth century had not only obtained a high degree of confessional uniformity within its territories but had also completed the expulsion of the Ottoman Empire from Central Europe. Although this paper concentrates on kingship, confession and noble Estates in the Austrian hereditary provinces and the lands of the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns (including Silesia, Transylvania and Croatia), there will be some comparative study of the trajectory of neighbouring Poland-Lithuania, where the nobility gained in strength at the expense of the monarchy and developed a republican ideology, as well as to the workings of the Holy Roman Empire. Attention will also be paid to peasants and townsmen, to the alchemical and mystical concepts of government dominant in Central Europe at this time, to the artistic expression of monarchical, ecclesiastical and aristocratic aspirations, to the Thirty Years' War and Westphalian Settlement of 1648, the Turkish wars, and to the area of Ottoman rule.