The suppression of the dangerous conspiracy above described—however on many grounds we may sympathise with its authors—can hardly be considered in itself other than as an event favourable to the interests of Christian Europe. Unfortunately, however, the Austrian Government, not satisfied with the severity exercised on the leading conspirators, wreaked its impolitic and unjustifiable revenge upon the kingdom of Hungary at large. It was treated as a conquered country. The Protestant churches were closed; the preachers who declined to subscribe to conditions incompatible with the exercise of their functions were arrested, banished, and in some instances condemned to the galleys. Resistance and civil war ensued, more fertile in atrocities even than war with the Turk. The adherents of either party, as usual in cases of intestine strife, adopted popular designations long remembered for the misfortunes with which they were associated. The national partisans were called Kuruzzen, probably a corruption of Kreuzer, or cross-bearer; and the German lanzknecht was modified into the term Labanz. Each impaled, or flayed, or roasted the other on every opportunity. The Kuruzzen not unfrequently passed the Austrian frontier, reviving, wherever they appeared, recollections of the atrocities of the Sackman. The name to this day is coupled with that of the Turks in Lower Austria. Then, as at subsequent periods, the insurgents received aid and encouragement from France, and in 1679 they were even joined by a force levied in Poland, and officered by Frenchmen. The young Tekeli also came forward to wreak his vengeance upon Austria. He defeated the Imperialists in several encounters, and even led his forces, joined by hordes of Tartar cavalry, to the walls of Neustadt, over the March field, and far into Moravia. A pestilence which broke out in this year could hardly persuade man to resign to the powers of nature the task of decimating his species; and it was not till the mortality of disease had reached an awful pitch that the spirit of mutual destruction came to a pause. In 1681 a diet was convened at Œdenburg with views of reconciliation, and attended by the Emperor in person. A palatine was elected, old privileges and institutions, the power of the Ban, and the frontier militia were revived, the licence of arbitrary taxation restrained, a general amnesty conceded, and the laws of the empire re-established, under which religious freedom was to be enjoyed by the professors of the Helvetic or Augsburg forms of Protestantism. The disruption, however, had gone too far to allow of a speedy and solid reunion of parties. The spirit of ambition and revenge in the bosom of Tekeli was not to be appeased even by the concession of his marriage with the widow of Rakoczy, which conveyed into his hands the important fortress of Munkacs. The deputies of the Austrian Government also betrayed unfortunate and unreasonable indications of a lurking tendency to revengeful measures.