ABSTRACT
The reconstruction of the economy, as successful as it was, was not the Habsburgs' chief preoccupation, even if Leopold I had been able to surround himself with intelligent and innovative advisers. 1 For Ferdinand III, as for his son, what came before all else was the task of completing the Catholic Reformation which had been undertaken by Ferdinand II at Graz in 1598. Religious unification, according to the theories expounded by the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547—1606), offered the dynasty faced with such powerful orders a means of strengthening its power, while maintaining a large measure of decentralization, pursuing collaboration with the orders and respecting the differences between national cultures. When writing of this period, Czech historiography has dubbed it 'the time of darkness', a totally misleading epithet if it leads to the period being seen as a phase of Germanization and deculturation. The Habsburgs committed plenty of injustices without historians adding more. Rather, the Counter-Reformation was the work of Czech Catholics, the 'Spanish faction' and others, and the Church. Although it imposed, in the spirit of the Council of Trent, a Latin liturgy just as in the rest of Christendom, it did not put a stop to preaching in the vernacular and even supported bilingual or trilingual publications.
