ustria-Hungary is a museum of political
curiosities, but it contains nothing so extraordinary as the relation
between Austria and Hungary themselves."[644] In its present form this
relation rests upon the memorable Ausgleich, or Compromise, of 1867.
The historical phases of it, however, may be traced to a period as
remote as the first half of the sixteenth century, when, in 1526,
after the Hungarians had suffered overwhelming defeat by the Turks at
the Battle of Mohacs, a Hapsburg prince, the later Emperor Ferdinand
I., assumed, upon election by the Hungarian diet, the throne of the
demoralized eastern kingdom.[645] Until the eighteenth century the
union of the two monarchies was always precarious, much of the time
practically non-existent. Set in the midst of a whirlpool of races and
political powers, the ancient Hungarian state, recovered from its days
of disaster, struggled unremittingly to preserve its identity, and
even to regain its independence, as against the overshadowing (p. 442)
Imperial authority of which Austria was the seat. The effort was
fairly successful and as late as the Napoleonic period Hungary, while
bound to her western neighbor by a personal union through the crown,
maintained not only her essential autonomy but even the constitutional
style of government which had been hers since at least the early
portion of the thirteenth century. A rapid sketch of the earlier
political development of the two states seems a necessary introduction
to an examination of the institutions, joint and separate, which
to-day enter into the texture of their governmental organization.

[Footnote 644: Lowell, Governments and Parties,
II., 177.]

[Footnote 645: See p. 448.]

I. AUSTRIAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT TO 1815

*486. Origins.*--The original Austria was a mark, or border county,
lying along the south bank of the Danube, east of the river Enns, and
founded by Charlemagne as a bulwark of the Frankish kingdom against
the Slavs. During the ninth century the territory was overrun
successively by the Moravians and the Magyars, or Hungarians, and all
traces of Frankish occupation were swept away. At the middle of the
tenth century, however, following Otto the Great's signal triumph over
the Hungarians on the Lech in 955, the mark was reconstituted; and
from that point the development of modern Austria is to be traced
continuously. The name Oesterreich, i.e.