Owing to the counter-reformation the German element was driven out during the 18th century, and its place taken by the actual Slovak population.
The Reformation found only temporary acceptance at 'Regensburg, and was met by a counter-reformation inspired by the Jesuits.
The Czechs came under the sceptre of the Habsburgs after the battle with the Turks at Mohacs (1526), through an inheritance treaty confirmed by the vote of their Estates; an unsuccessful rebellion which they made in 1621 against the ruling house as protagonist of the counter-Reformation, brought them under the power of a ruthless conqueror, who wished to crush both their faith and their national independence.
It was not, indeed, till the settlement of Westphalia in 1648, after the Thirty Years' War, that this territorial division of Christendom became stereotyped, but the process had been going on for a hundred years previously; in some states, as in England and Scotland, it had long been completed; in others, as in South Germany, Bohemia and Poland, it was defeated by the political and missionary efforts of the Jesuits and other agents of the counter-Reformation.
The new humanism was a kind of revival of the Renaissance, which had been retarded by the Reformation in Germany and by the Counter-Reformation in Italy, or had at least been degraded to the dull classicism of the schools.