by January 1918 there were dangerous shortages, especially of food

Prompted by the difficult food situation and inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia (see Russian Revolution of 1917), a strike movement developed in the Habsburg lands

Demands for more bread and a demand for peace were combined with nationalist claims resulting in open opposition to the government

essential nature of a post-World War I settlement

peace

freedom of navigation upon the seas

Henry of Navarre

Mahomet II conquered Constantinople

One section of the citizens of Paris massacred the rest on Saint Bartholomew’s night

France was then sharply divided by religion. Thousands of Protestants, or Huguenots, had been massacred in Paris and other cities in 1572, but they remained strong in the south and west, while Paris was fiercely Catholic. Though a Catholic himself, Henry III lacked the means to take on the Huguenots in an all-out war.

accused the mignons of destroying Henry III’s virility

Monarchs were used to distributing special favours to certain members of their entourage in return for their loyalty and services. The first French king to do so was Philip III, ‘the Bold’ (1270-85). A long line of favourites can be traced through the succeeding reigns until that of Louis XIV, who had none. Henry III seems to have had more than any other French king. They can be divided into two groups: the first, formed in the 1570s, comprised some 20 young men, roughly of the same age as Henry. They belonged to families of the provincial nobility (or noblesse seconde), which had served the crown for generations. The second group was formed in the 1580s. It consisted of only two men, Anne de Joyeuse, baron d’Arques and Jean-Louis de La Valette. They became far more powerful than their predecessors and were known as the archimignons

The queen of France, Marie de’ Medici, had been crowned the previous day at the basilica of Saint Denis and was due to make her formal entry into the capital.

French queens were not crowned as a matter of course and Henry IV, king of France since 1589, saw no reason to go to the expense of a coronation for his second queen whom he had married in 1610

The alarm was shared by France, which had been at war with the Habsburg empire for much of the 16th century. Religion was also involved, as the Catholic Habsburgs were opposed by many German Protestant princes. Henry IV was urged to intervene militarily, but he had hesitated initially.

the diplomatic nightmare of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

the French crown maintained the only permanent embassy of Elizabeth’s reign

The Spanish embassy was a stormy one, suspended between 1572 and 1578 and permanently terminated in 1584

This was the reputation acquired by Francis the First in his own time and reverently preserved by subsequent generations. His mother, Louise of Savoy, laid its foundation even before it was certain that he would inherit the throne of his second cousin, Louis XII. In 1504 she had a medallion engraved in honour of the ten-year-old Duke of Valois

While Francis I has been remembered as the chivalrous leader who sustained a long and unequal struggle against the Hapsburg Emperor, Charles V, he has also been described as the King of the Renaissance

There are, however, other aspects of Francis I that are less consistent with the popular impression. He was the autocrat who built upon the work of Louis XI in creating the despotism of the new monarchy.

a Habsburg Emperor attended mass in the Imperial Chapel of Schönbrunn for the last time

The congregation, made up of loyal servants of the dynasty, knew that this was to be the last occasion of its kind

They knew that a whole political and social order had come to an end, that a whole way of life had become empty and meaningless. The next day, as the armies in France stopped fighting, Charles formally renounced his share in the government of the Austrian Empire; that evening, he left Schönbrunn with his family

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in central European history in the early modern period, with a greater appreciation of what the Holy Roman Empire meant before and after Westphalia, and a better understanding amongst English-language historians of the role of the Austrian Habsburgs.

the 'unmaking' of the empire not to much to inherent problems, which Charles Xl had largely overcome, but to the emergence of Russia and the consequent loss of the most essential part of the Swedish empire, the Baltic provinces

The Habsburgs, a family of aristocrats originating in modern Switzerland, ruled the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austrian Empire for over 600 years

The first true collector among the Habsburgs was Ferdinand I (1503-64)

Rudolf II (1552-1612), the grandson of Ferdinand I, made the Kunstkammer internationally famous

Habsburg rulers, the 'last knight', Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor from 1493 to 1519

The central starting point for the Trails is the city of Innsbruck which Maximilian made the centre of his rule and from where he set about fulfilling his ambitions to establish a complex scheme of dynastic and marital alliances The result of these enabled his grandson, Charles V, (nephew of Katherine of Aragon – the connection caused Henry VIII much grief when he was trying to persuade the pope to give him a divorce while Rome was under Habsburg occupation) to become by far the greatest ruler of sixteenth-century Europe with a travelling schedule that would be familiar to any chief executive of a multinational company today

His indecisive father, Frederick lll. King Arthur, Godfrey the first Crusader king of Jerusalem and his wife’s father Charles from the Bold of Burgundy (from who the Hapsburgs took over the order of the Golden fleece and a patchwork of rich low countries territories

The Spanish Inquisition is commonly associated with torture, cruelty and oppression

The concept of inquisitions to root out religious heretics was not novel when, in 1478, Pope Sixtus IV authorised the creation of a Spanish inquisition

These newly united kingdoms, under joint monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, decided to set up such a body

the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be the Monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long

The wars between the Kings of France and Britain were, on the contrary, waged for supremacy in the Caribbean itself and it was this aspect that gave West Indian history, from Cromwell’s Protectorate to the battle of Trafalgar, its special stamp

a handful of stubborn and self-reliant Commonwealth soldiers within five years got the better of the King of Spain

remote but wealth-providing islands on the other side of the Atlantic was always lively and inquisitive

The islands may be said to have European status not only because from the age of Queen Elizabeth to that of Napoleon they were involved in quite as many wars, rivalries and conflicts as were the great powers of the Old World themselves. The Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and, for a brief moment

Unlike the Spaniards, the British understood from the beginning the importance of a numerous and agile merchant navy

Philip II was a loyal son of the Catholic Church

Philip's sense of religious mission crucially shaped foreign and imperial policy

It was the 1590s before the Inquisition managed to extend its control over printed materials beyond Castile to the rest of Spain, and any resourceful person with a taste for suspect literature could obtain prohibited texts from Italy, France, and the Low Countries

September 1st, 1928, Europe gained a new kingdom and its only Muslim king: thirty-two year-old Zog I of Albania

the birth of the Kingdom of Albania – a native monarchy, not an alien imposition – did attract a flicker of international attention

For five decades, Albania was synonymous with hard-line Marxism-Leninism

History may not repeat itself, but there is no gainsaying its fondness for close affinities

When in 1807 Ferdinand, heir to the throne, stood accused by his father, Charles IV of Spain, of sedition and seeking to usurp the royal title, the young prince fearfully recalled the analogous events two hundred and forty years previously

In 1568 Philip II had similarly confronted his recalcitrant son Carlos, resulting in the latter’s imprisonment and mysterious death seven months later

he became heir to the French throne through his marriage to Margaret of Valois

Despite converting to Catholicism after becoming king of France in 1589, Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes to foster religious tolerance. He was killed on May 14, 1610, in Paris, France

the spread of civil war made him reflect on its disastrous effect on France

under whose reign the prolonged crisis of the Wars of Religion was made worse by dynastic rivalries arising because the male line of the Valois dynasty was going to die out with him