History of the Austrian Empire embraces all that is wild and wonderful in history; early struggles for aggrandizement, the fierce strife with the Turks, as wave after wave of Muslim invasion rolled up the Danube, the long conflicts and bloody persecutions of the Reformation, the thirty years' religious war, the intrigues of Popes, the enormous pride, power and encroachments of Louis XIV, the warfare of the Spanish succession and the Polish dismemberment. All these events combine in a sublime tragedy which fiction may in vain attempt to parallel.