In time the administration of the Bohemian Crown was entrusted to an executive who received the title of Chancellor, and when the kings no longer resided in Prague, having taken up a permanent abode in Vienna, the Chancellory was removed thither, ostensibly on the ground that the Chancellor was required to be near the person of the sovereign. In reality, however, the transfer was a part of a preconceived plan to make Vienna the centre of the empire, from which the Hapsburg “provinces” were to be ruled. Under one pretext or another the Chancellory was being gradually shorn of its powers, until Maria Theresa (1740-1780) abolished it altogether. Henceforth even purely local matters were administered from Vienna direct, and the officials began to style the once proud kingdom a “province of Austria.” During the Thirty Years’ War thousands of villages were destroyed by fire and many of them have never been rebuilt. The population, which before the war was estimated at 3,000,000, was reduced by fire, sword, and pestilence to about 800,000. Fields lay fallow for years for lack of workers to cultivate them. Of the 151,000 farms before the war hardly 50,000 remained. Native nobility was reduced to beggary by the confiscation of their estates, and the peasantry that survived was reduced by alien lords to a degrading condition of serfdom. Between 1621 and 1630 400 Prague citizens went into exile. The Nové Město (one of the Prague quarters) alone had at one time 500 vacant houses. The town of Žatec, which in 1618 had 460 citizens, counted ten years later 205 of them. In Kutná Hora, of a total of 600 houses, 200 remained without owners or tenants. The population of the city of Olomouc in Moravia, by 1640, was reduced from 30,000 to 1,670. Wherever the armies marched nothing was seen but waste and ruins. According to notes taken by Swedish soldiers, 138 cities and 2,171 villages were totally ravaged by fire. The textile industry, which had been the source of the wealth of the country, was almost wholly destroyed by the war. The defeat at White Mountain could not have been productive of such disastrous consequences had it not been for the fact that the nobles were the standard-bearers of Bohemian nationalism and the sole representatives of the nation’s culture and traditions. The peasantry in those days and for a long time afterward was yet helplessly dependent on the aristocracy.