ABSTRACT
Francis II’s abdication marked the formal extinction of a state that had spanned much of central and western 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 internal tensions and external pressures to enable the Reich to preserve 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. Serious problems emerged in the wake of Habsburg defeats after 1733, culminating in the double calamity of Wittelsbach imperial rule and German civil war after 1740. However, even though the traditional political fabric was partly torn, new threads were still being woven in as the renaissance of institutions like the Reichstag after 1789 indicates.
