It was fortunate for Austria that, just as the obligations of a peace and internal confusion had prevented the Turks from attacking Hungary during the Thirty Years' War, so this rising was not taken advantage of by the Porte, in spite of French solicitations, till after the peace of Nimuegen in 1679. During the contest with France, from 1673 to 1679, the Polish war had occupied the attention of the Turks, and the Austrian government had been untroubled. They had not at the same time to wage open war with the East and West. Yet even now, though peace nominally continued in Western Europe, France was glad to avail herself of those difficulties of the Court of Vienna, to which she herself was contributing. Louis seized Strassburg, and quietly annexed other places by the pretended legal decisions of packed tribunals. He attacked the Spanish Netherlands, and conceived himself to be acting generously in that he refrained from taking Luxemburg. It was enough that Austria should be spared the task of fighting, at the same time, on behalf of Spain against the French, and on her own behalf against the Infidels. That the house of Bourbon should strive to embarrass the house of Hapsburg, by intrigues in Turkey, in Hungary and in Poland, was but in accord with a traditional policy, which no danger to their common Christendom could be expected to overrule. But 1683 was a year of disaster for Louis. In that year he lost two of his natural sons, his Queen, and his greatest minister, Colbert. Above all, in that year his designs against the Emperor were destined to be foiled by the interference of Sobieski, the _Deus ex machina_ for Christendom and for the Empire. FOOTNOTE: [5] "If the Grand Vizier (Kiuprili) be so great a man as he is reputed in politics as well as in arms, he will never consent, by an invasion of Hungary, to make way for the advance of French progress into the Empire, which a conquest of the Low Countries would make easy and obvious; and so great accessions (with others that would lie fair and open in the Spanish provinces upon the Mediterranean) would make France a formidable power to the Turk himself, and greater than I suppose he desires to see any in Christendom."--Sir W. Temple, Works, ii. 212, edit. 1814. CHAPTER III.