In the struggle between German emperors and Roman Popes, the Emperors represented oriental despotism, the Popes the Western respect for universal law. Poland was the only country independent of the Germans in Central Europe, and the federation of Poland and Lithuanian excited envy and hate among the German dynasties, increased when the Lithuanian Jagellons ruled also in Bohemia ad Hungary in the xvth century.
The Old German dynasty of the Habsburgs conquered these countries not by the force of arms but by marriages. When Louis, the last Polish King of Bohemia and Hungary fell in 1526 at the battle of Mohacz, in defence of western civilisation against the Turks, oriental despotism invaded these two free countries under Ferdinand, husband of the last king's sister Anna, grand daughter of Casimir, king of Poland.
This was a great victory of the Habsburgs over the
Jagellons. But a greater triumph of German despotism was the pacific conquest by marriage of the Turanian state of Muscovy, the eastern neighbour of Poland. This was brought about by a German princess, the daughter of a Prussian officer, Sophia von Anhalt Zerbst, who, owing to the protection of Frederick II of Prussia, married in 1745 Peter von Holstein Gottorp and, after his assassination, became in 1762 empress. Known as Catherine II, she started a new dynasty in Russia.
It is to her that oriental despotism owes its greatest success in Europe : the destruction of the Polish Republic which had been for four hundred years the stoutest enemy of despotism.