ABSTRACT
By early 1629 the interests of the House of Austria seemed more secure than at any time in recent years. Within the Habsburgs’ own territories, serious threats of various kinds had now long since been dissipated: Bohemia was quiet, if sullenly so, under its imposed constitution of 1627–8; closer to home, Upper and Lower Austria had been fully pacified, especially after the fairly easy suppression of a violent peasant uprising in 1626; and in Hungary the unpredictable Bethlen Gabor had been brought to heel once and for all. In Germany, of course, the end of the Danish campaigns had brought imperial domination of virtually all of northern Germany and with it a militarily unchallenged hegemony over the rest of the country as well. Further abroad, Spain’s failure to subdue the Dutch was increasingly troubling and some potentially dangerous issues had arisen from the Mantuan succession crisis soon to be discussed; but the overall outlook for Vienna was a solidly positive one.
