quartering foreign garrisons in national territory, it raised illegal taxes wherewith to pay the armed oppressors. The government at Vienna threw off its mask at last; the Hungarian constitution was abolished, and Hungary reduced to the condition of a province of Austria (1673). Whilst the government thus succeeded in subverting the constitution of the country, it showed no less activity and success in the prosecution of its other aim, the Romanizing of the people. There was no law to protect those professing the new faith; they could be oppressed with impunity; their churches were taken away from them; hundreds of their ministers and teachers were sentenced by the tribunal to slavery on the galleys, or were sent adrift by private persecutions. It was an open secret that the king himself was eager to exterminate the last heretic, and just as the oath of the king to protect the constitution had been forgotten, so were the various treaties of peace, guaranteeing the freedom of worship, doomed to oblivion, as soon as there was no Transylvanian prince to recall them to royal memory by force of arms. And yet it was Transylvania, in her weakened condition, that now came to the assistance of Hungary, which had become a prey to Austrian rapacity. Many of those who were compelled to fly from the persecutions of the sanguinary policy of the government sought and found a refuge in Transylvania, and they were continually urging Apaffy, the prince of Transylvania, and the Turks to intercede with arms in behalf of the Hungarian cause. The Viennese government assailed Stambul with letters requesting the sultan not to allow Transylvania to be the place of refuge of certain “thieves,” but to no purpose. The Porte, indeed, so far from favorably receiving these epistles, secretly promised aid against the Austrians. A fresh insurrection broke out in 1672. The refugees flocked into the Upper Country and inaugurated a warfare which, for cruelty and mercilessness, stands alone in the history of Hungary. The era of this contest, commencing in 1672, and covering a period of nearly ten years, is called the _Kurucz-Labancz_ era. This aimless and purposeless struggle was kept up between the Kuruczes (insurgents) and Labanczes (Austrians), within the limits of the territory lying between Komárom and Transylvania, and there was no end of the horrors the contestants were guilty of in the course of their hostilities against each other. To cut tobacco on the enemy’s bare back, or to cut strips from his quivering skin, to drive thorns or iron spikes under the finger-nails, to bury him in the ground up to his head and then fire at him, to skin him alive, to put a stake through him,—in a word, to perpetrate tortures at which humanity shudders, these were the every-day courtesies exchanged between the two belligerents. The combatants of that day respected neither God nor man; they acknowledged only one guide for their actions: a bitter