Meanwhile the king of Denmark, remaining the independent sovereign of Denmark, Iceland, and Sleswick, entered the German Confederation for his duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg. ♦Disputes and wars in the Duchies.♦ Disputes and wars made no geographical change till the war which followed the accession of the present king. The changes which then followed have been told elsewhere.[75] ♦Transfer of Sleswick and Holstein, with Lauenburg to Prussia. 1864-1866.♦ They amount to the transfer to Prussia of Lauenburg, Holstein, and Sleswick, with a slight change of frontier and a redistribution of the smaller islands. A conditional engagement for the restoration of northern Sleswick to Denmark was not fulfilled, and has been formally annulled.
♦Losses of Prussia. 1806.♦
In the lands which had been Poland and Lithuania, the immediate result of the French wars was the creation of a new Polish state; their final result was a great extension of the dominion of Russia. Prussia had to surrender its whole Polish territory, save West Prussia.[76] ♦Bialystok added to Russia.
Danzig a commonwealth.♦ A small Lithuanian territory, the district of Bialystok, was given to Russia; Danzig became a separate commonwealth. ♦Duchy of Warsaw♦ The rest of the Prussian share of Poland formed the new Duchy of Warsaw. This state was really no bad representative of the oldest Poland of all. Silesia was gone; but the new duchy took in Great Poland and Cujavia, with parts of Little Poland, Mazovia, and Lithuania. It took in the oldest capital at Gnesen and the newest at Warsaw. ♦Enlarged by part of Austrian Poland. 1810.♦ The new state was presently enlarged by the addition of the territory added to Austria by the last partition. Cracow, with the greater part of Little Poland, was again joined to Great Poland. ♦Extent of the Duchy.♦ Speaking roughly, the duchy took in nearly the whole of the old Polish kingdom, without Silesia, but with some small Lithuanian and Russian territory added.
♦Arrangements of 1815.♦
It was the Poland thus formed, a state which answered much more nearly to the Poland of the fourteenth than to the Poland of the eighteenth century, which, by the arrangements of the Vienna Congress, first received a Russian sovereign. ♦Danzig and Posen restored to Prussia.♦ Prussia now again rounded off her West-Prussian province by the recovery of Danzig and Thorn, and she rounded off her southern frontier by the recovery of Posen and Gnesen, which had been part of her South-Prussian province. The Grand Duchy of Posen became again part of the Prussian state. ♦Cracow a commonwealth. Annexed by Austria. 1846.♦ Cracow became a republic, to be annexed by Austria thirty years later. ♦Kingdom of Poland united to Russia. 1831-1863.♦ The remainder of the Duchy of Warsaw, under the style of the Kingdom of Poland, became a separate kingdom, but with the Russian Emperor as its king. ♦Russia takes old Polish territory for the first time.♦ Later events have destroyed, first its constitution, then its separate being; and now all ancient Poland, except the part of Great Poland kept by Prussia and the part of Little Poland kept by Austria, is merged in the Russian Empire. Thus the Russian acquisition of strictly Polish, as distinguished from old-Russian and Lithuanian territory, dates, not from the partitions, but from the Congress of Vienna. It was to the behoof of Prussia and Austria, not of Russia, that the old kingdom of the Piasts was broken in pieces.
The changes of the nineteenth century with regard to the lands on the European coasts of the Euxine have been told elsewhere.[77] ♦Fluctuation of the Russian frontier towards Moldavia. 1812-1878.♦ They amount, as far as the geographical boundaries of Russia are concerned, to her advance to the Pruth and the Danube, her partial withdrawal, her second partial advance. ♦Advance in the Caucasus.♦ Meanwhile the Russian advance in the nineteenth century on the Asiatic shores of the Euxine and in the lands on and beyond the Caspian has been far greater than her advance during the eighteenth. It is in our own century that Russia has taken up her commanding position between the Euxine and the Caspian seas, one which in some sort amounts to an enlargement of Europe at the expense of Asia. The old frontier on the Caspian, which had hardly changed since the conquest of Astrakhan, reached to the Terek. The annexation of Crim made the Kuban the boundary on the side of the Euxine. ♦Incorporation of Georgia. 1800.♦ The incorporation of the Georgian kingdom gave Russia an outlying territory south of the Caucasus on the upper course of the Kur. ♦Advance on the Caspian. 1802.♦ Next came the acquisition of the Caspian coast from the mouth of the Terek to the mouth of the Kur, the land of Daghestan and Shirwan, including part of the territory which had been held for a few years in the eighteenth century. ♦Advance in Armenia and Circassia. 1829.♦ The Persian and Turkish wars gave Russia the Armenian land of Erivan as far as the Araxes, Mingrelia and Immeretia, and the nominal cession of the Euxine coast between them and the older frontier. ♦1859.♦ But it was thirty years before the mountain region of Circassia was fully subdued. ♦1878.♦ The last changes have extended the Trans-Caucasian frontier of Russia to the south by the addition of Batoum and Kars.
♦Advance in Turkestan. 1853-1868.♦
In the lands east of the Caspian the new province of Turkestan gradually grew up in the lands on the Jaxartes, reaching southward to Samarkand. ♦1875.♦ Khokand to the south-east followed, while Khiva and Bokhara, the lands on the Oxus, have passed under Russian influence. The Turcoman tribes immediately east of the Caspian have also been annexed. The Caspian has thus nearly become a Russian lake. Hardly anything remains to Persia except the extreme southern coast which was once for a moment Russian.
♦Advance in Eastern Asia. 1858.♦