Note (Back) — Chapter XXIV

496. Austrian Encroachment: the Pragmatic Sanction.—The immediate effect of the termination of the Turkish wars was to enhance yet further the despotism of the Hapsburgs in Hungary. In 1687 the Emperor Leopold I. induced a rump diet at Pressburg to abrogate that clause of the Golden Bull which authorized armed resistance to unconstitutional acts of the sovereign, and likewise to declare the Hungarian crown hereditary in the house of Hapsburg. After upwards of seven hundred years of existence, the elective Hungarian monarchy was brought thus to an end. In 1715 King Charles III.[648] persuaded the Diet to consent to the establishment of a standing army, recruited and supported under regulation of the Diet but controlled by the Austrian council of war. By the diet of 1722 there was established a Hungarian court of chancery at Vienna and the government of Hungary was committed to a stadtholder at Pressburg who was made independent of the Diet and responsible to the sovereign alone. The diet of 1722 likewise accepted formally the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 by which the Emperor Charles settled the succession to his hereditary dominions, in default of male heirs, upon his daughter Maria Theresa and her heirs;[649] and in measures promulgated during the succeeding year the Emperor entered into a fresh compact with his Hungarian subjects which continued the basis of Hapsburg-Hungarian relations until 1848. On the one hand, Hungary was declared inseparable from the Hapsburg dominions, so long as there should be a legal heir; on the other, the crown was sworn to preserve the Hungarian constitution intact, with all the rights, privileges, laws, and customs of the kingdom. The net result of all of these measures, none the less, was to impair perceptibly the original autonomy of the Hungarian state.