The Habsburgs consolidated their rule and under Maria Theresa (1740–1780) adopted enlightened absolutism, with distinct institutions of the Bohemian Kingdom absorbed into centralized structures.

After the Thirty Years' War ended, the Czech lands definitively passed onto the Habsburgs who eradicated Protestant Hussitism in the 1620s and upheld the strict Counter-Reformation measures.

From 1599 to 1711, Moravia (a Land of the Bohemian Crown) was frequently subjected to raids by the Ottoman Empire and its vassals (especially the Tatars and Transylvania).

[1][2][3] In 1664 Habsburg armies under command of Jean-Louis Raduit de Souches attacked the Ottomans, conquered Nitra and Levice and freed some of the captive Moravians.

The reigns of Maria Theresa (1740–1780) and her son Joseph II (1780–1790), Holy Roman Emperor and coregent from 1765, were characterized by enlightened rule.

Influenced by the ideas of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, Maria-Theresa and Joseph worked toward rational and efficient administration of the Bohemian Kingdom.

The Prussian king, Frederick II, joined by the dukes of Bavaria and Saxony, invaded the Bohemian Kingdom in 1740 in the First Silesian War.

Although Maria-Theresa regained most of the Bohemian Kingdom and was crowned queen in Prague in 1743, all of the highly industrialized territory of Silesia except for Tesin, Opava, and Krnov was ceded to Prussia in the 1742 Treaty of Breslau.

The Czech estates were stripped of the last remnants of their political power, and their functions were assumed by imperial civil servants appointed by the queen.

Further reforms introduced by Maria-Theresa and Joseph II reflected such Enlightenment principles as the dissolution of feudal social structures and the curtailment of power of the Catholic Church.

The enlightened rule of Maria-Theresa and Joseph II played a leading role in the development of a modern Czech nation, but one that was full of contradictions.

On the one hand, the policy of centralization whittled down further any vestiges of a separate Bohemian Kingdom and resulted in the Germanization of the imperial administration and nobility.

Many of the nobles sublet their lands and invested their profits in industrial enterprise, such as the development of textile, coal, and glass manufacture.

In 1804, Francis II transferred his imperial title to the Austrian domains (Austria, Bohemian Kingdom, Hungary, Galicia, and parts of Italy), and two years later the Holy Roman Empire was formally dissolved.

From 1815, after the conclusive defeat of Napoleon, the policy of reaction devised by Austria's foreign minister, Prince Metternich, dominated European affairs.

The concept of the "nation," defined as a people united by linguistic and cultural affinities, produced an intellectual revival that laid the foundation for a subsequent struggle for political autonomy.

Of Moravian Protestant descent and attracted by the nationalist spirit of the Hussite tradition, Palacký became the great historian of the Czech nation.

Palacky further suggested that the various Slavic peoples of the empire, together constituting a majority, should form a political unit to defend their common interests.

In the end, the 1848 Revolution was crushed by the Austrian imperial forces, aided by a Russian military intervention to restore the Habsburg monarchy on the Danube.

At first it seemed that some concessions would be made to Bohemia, and that the state would become a tripartite federal monarchy with a German Austrian, Czech and Slovak, and Hungarian division.