The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 marked a pause for breath in German affairs, with the failure of the Emperor Charles V either to establish an effective monarchy in the empire or to suppress the Lutheran heresy. Rather than be a party to the registration of the double defeat, Charles relinquished the authority to promulgate the legislation implementing the peace to his brother Ferdinand, the first of a line of rulers whose authority was to endure on the eastern marches of Germany for some three and a half centuries. The basis of Ferdinand's power lay in the lands that had been ceded to him and his descendants by his brother: the Austrian archduchy proper with its double set of institutions ‘above and below the Enns’, the various Alpine provinces extending from Tyrol and Vorarlberg to Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and the scattered remnants of the ancient Habsburg patrimony in Swabia and along the upper Rhine. In addition, Ferdinand by his marriage to the heiress of the Jagiellons had acquired a claim to the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary with their dependencies, a claim subsequently fortified by a show of election by the parliaments of the two kingdoms, though there was some opposition in Bohemia and a great deal in Hungary. The possessions over which he directly asserted his sway thus extended impressively over much of central Europe, from Alsace to the Carpathians, from Silesia and Lusatia in the north German plain southwards to the Adriatic.