man
archbishop of Prague and of all the ecclesiastics who were endowed with
landed estates. The diet was deprived of all legislative power, which
was exclusively vested in the sovereign. At its meetings the diet was to
discuss such matters only as were laid before it by the representatives
of the king. The estates continued to have the right of voting taxes,
but they were specially forbidden to attach any conditions to the grants
of money which they made to their sovereign. It was finally decreed that
the German language should have equal right with the Bohemian one in all
the government offices and law-courts of the kingdom. This had indeed
become a necessity, since, in consequence of the vast confiscations, the
greatest part of the land was in the hands of foreigners to whom the
national language was unknown. Though these enactments still left some
autonomy to Bohemia, the country gradually lost all individuality. Its
history from this moment to the beginning of the 19th century is but a
part of the history of Austria (q.v.).

Bohemia under Austrian domination.

Bohemia was the theatre of hostilities during a large part of the Thirty
Years' War, which had begun in its capital. In 1631 the Saxons for a
time occupied a large part of Bohemia, and even attempted to
re-establish Protestantism, During the later period of the Thirty Years'
War Bohemia was frequently pillaged by Swedish troops, and the taking of
part of Prague by the Swedish general Konigsmark in 1648 was the last
event of the great war. The attempts of the Swedish envoys to obtain a
certain amount of toleration for the Bohemian Protestants proved
fruitless, as the imperial representatives were inflexible on this
point. At the beginning of the 18th century the possibility of the
extinction of the male line of the house of Habsburg arose. The estates
of Bohemia, at a meeting that took place at Prague on the 16th of
October 1720, sanctioned the female succession to the Bohemian throne
and recognized the so-called Pragmatic Sanction which proclaimed the
indivisibility of the Habsburg realm. The archduchess Maria Theresa, in
whose favour these enactments were made, none the less met with great
opposition on the death of her father the emperor Charles VI. Charles,
elector of Bavaria, raised claims to the Bohemian throne and invaded the
country with a large army of Bavarian, French and Saxon troops. He
occupied Prague, and a large part of the nobles and knight