Henceforth for over two centuries Austria and Habsburg became the bulwark of Christendom against the Turks; though delayed by wars of religion and by the excesses of religious bigotry, they yet never lost sight of the final goal.  Twice—­at the beginning and at the end of this period, in 1527 and 1683—­the Turks were before the very walls of Vienna, but the second of these occasions represents their final effort.  In the closing years of the seventeenth and the first two decades of the eighteenth centuries the tide finally rolled back against them.  Foremost among the victors stands out the great name of Prince Eugene, comrade-in-arms of our own Marlborough, whose song, “Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter” (Prince Eugene, the noble Knight), has been sung in July and August 1914 on the streets of Vienna, just as “Marlbrook s’en va-t-en guerre” might be sung by our Belgian allies.  The peace of 1718 represents Habsburg’s farthest advance southwards; Belgrade and half of present-day Serbia owned allegiance to Vienna.  Then came the check of 1739, when these conquests were restored to the Sultan.  Due merely to incompetent generals, it need not have been permanent, had not Frederick the Great created a diversion from the north.  By the time that the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War were over, that expansion southwards which had seemed so certain was irrevocably postponed.  The organisation of fresh “Military Frontiers,” the colonisation of waste lands in South Hungary—­all was admirable so far as it went, but was already a defensive rather than an offensive measure.  Meanwhile a formidable rival appeared in the shape of the Russian colossus, and the history of two centuries is dominated by Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans.  Here we are confronted by the first of those lost opportunities in which the history of modern Austria is unhappily so rich.

During the eighteenth century Austria became, as it were, the chief home of bureaucratic government, first under Maria Theresa, one of the greatest women-sovereigns, then under her son Joseph II.  A series of “enlightened experiments” in government, typical of the age of Voltaire and of Frederick, and honestly conducted for the people, though never by the people, ended as such experiments are apt to end, in failure.  The most that can be said is that the bureaucratic machine had become more firmly fixed in the groove which it was henceforth to occupy.

The failure of Joseph II. was above all due to his inability to recognise the meaning of Nationality, to his attempt to apply Germanisation as the one infallible remedy for all internal difficulties in his dominions.  The idea of Nationality, already gaining strength, obtained a fresh impetus from the French Revolution.  While in the west it sowed the seeds of United Italy and United Germany, which the nineteenth century was to bring to fruition, in the Balkans it stirred waters which had seemed dead for centuries, and led to the uprising of the Serbs and Greeks, then of the Roumanians, and finally a generation later of the Bulgarians.  In the Habsburg dominions the same movement revealed itself in the revival of national feeling in Hungary, Bohemia, and Croatia, but nowhere more strongly than in Hungary, where it was accompanied by a remarkable literary revival and the appearance of a group of Magyar poets of real genius.