Successive rulers of the Austrian House of Hapsburg were chosen as German Emperors too, and the effect of this was to make Hungary seem to them insignificant, and they tried to incorporate it as a part of their dominions without recognising the Hungarian people as a strong nation which had freely invited them to rule. However, when the Turks were driven out of Buda, and the nation had time to settle her internal affairs, things began to look better. The Hungarians voluntarily gave up their right of election in the case of their kings, and settled the succession in the House of Hapsburg; unfortunately, it was only a short time after this that the then reigning monarch, Leopold I., treated them with such disdain that they arose against him in fury, and made war on him, a struggle which continued for eight years and was ended by an honourable peace in 1711, when the constitutional independence of Hungary was fully confirmed. In 1740 the Emperor, Charles VI., died, and left an only daughter, but before his death he had done his best to secure her inheritance to her by inducing the Pragmatic Sanction in 1723 to extend the right of succession to the female line. She was only twenty-three at the time of her accession, and had four years before married Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who became Grand Duke of Tuscany. Though the way had been cleared for her, yet on her father’s death a host of claimants for the inheritance sprang up. The Prussian, Bavarian, French, Saxon, Spanish, and Neapolitan rulers all wanted what she had got! The chivalry of the Hungarians was called to the surface by her position, and when she appeared at Pressburg (called by the Hungarians Pozsony), then the capital, with her infant son in her arms she was greeted by the loyal and splendid cry, “Moriamur pro reges, Maria Teresa,” which has rung down the ages. Her accession welded the nations together as nothing else could have done. She proved a popular monarch and conciliated the Hungarians with womanly tact; she had sixteen children, of whom her eldest son Joseph succeeded her as Joseph II. and became also Emperor. One of her daughters was the beautiful and unfortunate Marie Antoinette. CHAPTER II THE MAKING OF MODERN AUSTRIA Others of Maria Teresa’s descendants, besides Joseph, held the title of Emperor, but as the Germanic states grew more united among themselves this tended to become an empty dignity. It was dropped at last by Francis II., who ascended the throne in 1792. But before that, Francis had gone through the terrible wars of the Napoleonic era, and had been shorn of all his dominions beyond Austria and its immediate dependencies. The first of his outlying dominions to be taken by the French was the Netherlands, in the same year that he became sovereign.