ABSTRACT
Francis II’s abdication marked the formal extinction of a state that had spanned much of central and wester n Europe for more than a millennium. The Peace of Westphalia had represented a milestone in its long history but did not mark the start of its final decline. The imperial constitution had continued to display flexibility, absorbing both inter nal tensions and exter nal pressures to enable the Reich to preser ve its essential character istics throughout the prolonged warfare of the later seventeenth century. Although Habsburg dynastic objectives began to diverge from wider imperial interest with the conquest of Turkish Hungary and subsequent competition for the Spanish Succession, both Joseph I and Charles VI were able to maintain the imperial recovery begun by Leopold I. Ser ious problems emerged in the wake of Habsburg defeats after 1733, culminating in the double calamity of Wittelsbach imperial rule and Ger man civil war after 1740. However, even though the traditional political fabr ic was partly torn, new threads were still being woven in as the renaissance of institutions like the Reichstag after 1789 indicates.
