block of lands based around Austria and Hungary, including
the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the north, and
Slovenia, Croatia, and large parts of Italy and Serbia to the
south. To the east it also incorporated much of what is
today Romania and Poland.
Merchants in the Habsburg domains were much less
important than in England, and serfdom prevailed in the
lands in Eastern Europe. As we saw in chapter 4, Hungary
and Poland were at the heart of the Second Serfdom of
Eastern Europe. The Habsburgs, unlike the Stuarts, were
successful in sustaining strongly absolutist rule. Francis I,
who ruled as the last emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
between 1792 and 1806, and then emperor of Austria-
Hungary until his death in 1835, was a consummate
absolutist. He did not recognize any limitations on his
power and, above all, he wished to preserve the political
status quo. His basic strategy was opposing change, any
sort of change. In 1821 he made this clear in a speech,
characteristic of Habsburg rulers, he gave to the teachers
at a school in Laibach, asserting, “I do not need savants,
but good, honest citizens. Your task is to bring young men
up to be this. He who serves me must teach what I order
him. If anyone can’t do this, or comes with new ideas, he
can go, or I will remove him.”
The empress Maria Theresa, who reigned between 1740
and 1780, frequently responded to suggestions about how
to improve or change institutions by remarking. “Leave
everything as it is.” Nevertheless, she and her son Joseph
II, who was emperor between 1780 and 1790, were
responsible for an attempt to construct a more powerful
central state and more effective administrative system. Yet
they did this in the context of a political system with no real
constraints on their actions and with few elements of
pluralism. There was no national parliament that would
exert even a modicum of control on the monarch, only a
system of regional estates and diets, which historically had
some powers with respect to taxation and military
recruitment. There were even fewer controls on what the
Austro-Hungarian Habsburgs could do than there were on
Spanish monarchs, and political power was narrowly
concentrated.
As Habsburg absolutism strengthened in the eighteenth