In the seventeenth century the Emperor Leopold I declared the ancient crowns of St. Stephen (Hungary) and St. Wenceslas (Bohemia-Moravia, that is roughly modern Czechoslovakia) as hereditary possessions of the Habsburg family, along with the Holy Roman one made for Otto the Great in 962 and the almost equally famous Iron Crown of Lombardy. At the same time he began the process of whittling away Hungarian and Czech liberties, thus planting the seeds of two particularly virulent nineteenth and twentieth-century nationalisms.
