78 The Origins of the Thirty Years War and the Revolt in Bohemia, 1618
parallel elsewhere in their domains. Some background information may
therefore be helpful.
At this time the Habsburg possessions comprised three main ele-
ments: the ‘hereditary lands’, the lands of the Bohemian crown, and
the Habsburg-controlled part of Hungary. Only in the first group of
territories, however, which were mainly in Austria, was Habsburg rule
relatively secure. In the Bohemian lands and Hungary, even in 1617,
almost a century after Ferdinand I had gained the crowns for himself, his
dynasty was by no means assured of the continuing succession. In both
cases the position of king was dependent upon election or acceptance
by the Estates, and while the eldest son of the previous incumbent was
traditionally approved, at least in Bohemia, even then the magnates usu-
ally drove a hard bargain over the promises the candidate was required
to make in the capitulation. Should there not be a son available, as was
the case in 1617, the succession could become much more problematic.
The king thus needed to tread carefully politically in order to main-
tain support not only for himself but for his prospective heir, while
his powers were further limited by the extensive freedoms guaranteed
to the Estates both by constitutional precedent and by the king’s own
individual capitulation. Taxation, the appointment of government offi-
cers, and the administration of the legal systems were in large measure
either subject to the approval of or actually controlled by the Estates,
which in Hungary were even more powerful and independent than in
Bohemia. Moreover Hungary was divided, disputed, and under con-
stant threat from the Turks or their Christian tributaries, principally
Transylvania, constraining the freedom of action of the Habsburg rulers
still further.
In the Middle Ages the Habsburg family had been minor dukes in the
area where the Swiss cantons, Alsace and south-west Germany meet, and
in the early seventeenth century their hereditary lands still included a
number of small territories, confusingly known as Further Austria, in
this region. Their real power base in Austria itself had been acquired
under the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf I in 1282, but this too was a patch-
work of individual provinces, each with its own name, constitutional
traditions and Estates. The terminology is equally confusing, further
complicated by various reorganisations of the territories among mem-
bers of the family through inheritances, but essentially there were four
main parts. The north west was known as Upper Austria, with Linz as its
principal city, while the north east, governed from Vienna, was Lower
Austria. As the boundary was the river Enns, a tributary of the Danube,
they were also commonly referred to at the time as the lands above