Because Royal Hungary was governed from Pressburg, it was also punished from Pressburg. In 1673 and 1674 an extraordinary court sitting in this town summoned hundreds of Protestant pastors and teachers and put them on trial; those who would neither convert nor go into exile were condemned, and a group of them was marched across Europe and sold as galley slaves at Naples. It is one of the harshest episodes of the Counter-Reformation in this country and it happened here, in a courtroom, not on a battlefield. Then in July 1683, as the Ottoman army marched on Vienna, the town capitulated to the kuruc rebels of Imre Thököly, and only came back into Habsburg hands after the Turks were beaten outside Vienna that September. The Rákóczi uprising swept the country again between 1703 and 1711, and each of these years taught the same lesson: a city with the kingdom's parliament in it is never a bystander.Keďže sa kráľovské Uhorsko z Prešporka spravovalo, z Prešporka sa aj trestalo. V rokoch 1673 a 1674 predvolal mimoriadny súd zasadajúci v tomto meste stovky evanjelických farárov a učiteľov a súdil ich; tých, ktorí neprestúpili na katolícku vieru ani neodišli do vyhnanstva, odsúdil, a časť z nich hnali cez Európu a predali ako galejníkov do Neapola. Je to jedna z najtvrdších epizód protireformácie u nás a odohrala sa tu, v súdnej sieni, nie na bojisku. V júli 1683, keď osmanské vojsko tiahlo na Viedeň, sa mesto vzdalo kurucom Imricha Tököliho a do habsburských rúk sa vrátilo až po tureckej porážke pod Viedňou v septembri toho roku. V rokoch 1703 – 1711 sa krajinou prehnalo Rákócziho povstanie a každý z týchto rokov učil to isté: mesto, v ktorom sedí krajinský snem, nikdy nie je iba divákom.
