Leopold, having thus glutted his vengeance, defiantly convoked a diet and crowned his son Joseph, a boy twelve years of age, as King of Hungary, practically saying to the nobles, “Dispute his hereditary right now, if you dare.”  The emperor had been too often instructed in the vicissitudes of war to feel that even in this hour of triumph he was perfectly safe.  He knew that other days might come; that other foes might rise; and that Hungary could never forget the rights of which she had been defrauded.  He therefore exhausted all the arts of threats and bribes to induce the diet to pass a decree that the crown was no longer elective but hereditary.  It is marvelous that in such an hour there could have been any energy left to resist his will.  But with all his terrors he could only extort from the diet their consent that the succession to the crown should be confirmed in the males, but that upon the extinction of the male line the crown, instead of being hereditary in the female line, should revert to the nation, who should again confer it by the right of election.

Leopold reluctantly yielded to this, as the most he could then hope to accomplish.  The emperor, elated by success, assumed such imperious airs as to repel from him all his former allies.  For several years Hungary was but a battle field where Austrians and Turks met in incessant and bloody conflicts.  But Leopold, in possession of all the fortresses, succeeded in repelling each successive invasion.

Both parties became weary of war.  In November, 1697, negotiations were opened at Carlovitz, and a truce was concluded for twenty-five years.  The Turks abandoned both Hungary and Transylvania, and these two important provinces became more firmly than ever before, integral portions of the Austrian empire.  By the peace of Carlovitz the sultan lost one half of his possessions in Europe.  Austria, in the grandeur of her territory, was never more powerful than at this hour:  extending across the whole breadth of Europe, from the valley of the Rhine to the Euxine sea, and from the Carpathian mountains to the plains of Italy.  A more heterogeneous conglomeration of States never existed, consisting of kingdoms, archduchies, duchies, principalities, counties, margraves, landgraves and imperial cities, nearly all with their hereditary rulers subordinate to the emperor, and with their local customs and laws.

Leopold, though a weak and bad man, in addition to all this power, swayed also the imperial scepter over all the States of Germany.  Though his empire over all was frail, and his vast dominions were liable at any moment to crumble to pieces, he still was not content with consolidating the realms he held, but was anxiously grasping for more.  Spain was the prize now to be won.  Louis XIV., with the concentrated energies of the French kingdom, was claiming it by virtue of his marriage with the eldest daughter of the deceased monarch, notwithstanding his solemn renunciation