Both the allied Emperors had within their boundaries peoples over whom they held a sovereignty by force, and much against the will of the governed. The Russian great bear had his paw on a prostrate, but always protesting, Poland. The Austrian double-headed eagle had occasion to be on watchful guard in two directions, both east and south-west. The rulers of all the States of Italy held their governments virtually under Austrian direction, and by none, except perhaps the Pope, whom she had been influential in restoring to his Papal States, was she beloved.
Austro-Hungarian War
But she had more cause for anxious watchfulness on the east. In course of the gradual relaxing of the Turk's grip on Europe, that Oriental power had been forced to relinquish Hungary to Austria at the end of the nineteenth century. The population of Hungary was mixed, but by far the largest blend in the mixture was of people of Magyar race, which had affinity with the Finns, the natives of Finland. The language and the chief men were Magyar. They never blended kindly with the Germanic Austrians, and were jealous in maintaining their own national identity. In 1833 they obtained the concession that the debates in their own Parliament might be conducted in the Magyar language. But there was ever this constant friction, the Austrian Crown trying to reduce the Hungarians to more complete dependence and the Hungarians constantly striving for more freedom. Finally war blazed out, from all this smouldering trouble, just before the middle of the century, when the Austrian Emperor abdicated in favour of Francis Joseph, his nephew, and the Hungarians refused to recognise the nephew as their king.
The Magyar orator and statesman, Kossuth, was the great figure in this gallant effort of the Hungarians for their liberty. In the early period of the struggle the Hungarians gained victories, and there was a moment when it seems that, had they pushed forward, they might have taken Vienna itself, Austria's capital city. But they did not so push on. The Austrian armies were reinforced, and then Austria called in the help of her friend in the Holy Alliance, Russia. That was a combination against which the Hungarians could not well be successful. Their revolt was put down with cruel severity. For the time being they gave up the idea of independence, though their sense of a nationality distinct from that of their conquerors remained as vivid as ever.
This rising, and its suppression, occurred in the years 1848 and 1849. By the year 1866 a rift had appeared in the Alliance so-called Holy; and Austria was actually at war with Prussia. The war arose out of a work of spoliation done by the two allies two years before, when they had combined to take the provinces of Schleswig-Holstein from under the rule of Denmark. The population of those provinces was in part Scandinavian and in part Germanic, so that they were divided in their political desires, some of the people favouring union with Denmark and others wishing to be taken into the Confederation of German States. On their own part they were claiming their independence of the Danish rule. There was therefore a certain excuse for the action of these two Holy Allies; but now, when they had done the act of robbery, they quarrelled over the division of the spoils. Prussia claimed to take both Schleswig and Holstein under her own dominance. Austria said that she should at least be given one of them for her share. The result was the outbreak of that which has been called the Seven Weeks' War, in which Prussia was completely victorious.
And in this brief campaign there were Hungarian legions fighting on the side of Prussia against Austria, their own sovereign. That, however, did not imply that Austria's sovereignty was weakened, and in the following year, that is, in 1867, Francis Joseph the Austrian Emperor, was formally crowned King of Hungary at Buda-Pesth, the Hungarian capital.
In this way Austria and Hungary came to stand in a curious position towards one another. They were two kingdoms under the same ruler—a double kingdom.
Another outcome of that Schleswig-Holstein conflict and of the Seven Weeks' War was that the Confederation of the German States was reconstituted. The old single confederation was broken up into a North German Confederation, of which Prussia was the head, and a South German Confederation, the river Maine being taken as the boundary between them. Austria stood apart politically, though geographically belonging to the Southern group.
In spite of her defeat then, Austria maintained her old dominance over Hungary, but she did not succeed in maintaining for long the far less definite dominance which the European Powers had assigned to her, at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, over the various States of Italy.