Timeline (A Federation of Equals)

The timeline of "A Federation of Equals" covers everything that has happened ever since the point of divergence, from the Danubian Revolution all the way to the current events of the interactive AAR.

However, if you wish to see everything before the point of divergence, in regards of the Danubian Federation, please check out the History of Austria and see everything pre-1848.

The page is currently WIP.

Klemens Wenzel von Metternich and Vlado Nikolić (1848-1852)
Main article: Prologue

By the time of the Danubian Revolution, Habsburg power had become regarded as an almost permanent fixture of European life. They had controlled the Holy Roman Empire since the middle of the 15th century and reigned over, at their peak, from Balboa in the West to Lviv in the East and from Amsterdam in the North to Syracuse in the South. Equally, however, the house of Habsburg had been on a seemingly inexorable decline, having lost all of her territories outside of Central Europe, and with her domination of Germany under severe pressure by the Prussians in the North.

Metternich: An Ominous Beginning (1848)
Main article: Assassination of Metternich

Metternich’s short time as acting-President was characterized by two things; controversy and catastrophe.

The former pertains to the tiny city state of Krakow, which had been formally independent for many years, but in that time it had always been firmly in Austria’s sphere. It distinguished itself during the Danubian Revolution in that it was the only of Austria’s allied states to side with either faction. During the war, Krakovian troops had supported Royalist forces in numerous battles throughout the Polish and Slovak regions of the country.

The Rise of Danubian Politics
Main article: The Rise of Danubian Politics

The death of Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in the days succeeding the Revolution, brought forth moments of radical turmoil on both ends of the political spectrum. It quickly became apparent that the Federal Government was to consist of members of all types of society and ideology, from Radicals, to Royalists. With such wide varieties of opinion, moderate and stable action seemed to be the best approach to many weary citizens, which became the embodiment of the Conservative Movement, backed by Károly Vörös de Nyitra, the Councillor for Hungary. Councillor de Nyitra, was one of the first outspoken critics of the Krakow Act, despite his Royalist sympathies of which many liberals believed was directly correlated to Jingoistic approaches. His call for peace, rallied together Conservatives and Moderate Royalists, who stood behind him as he put forth his name in the first Presidential election.

1848 Presidential Elections
Main article: 1848 Presidential Elections

In the four days after Metternich’s assassination, the issue of Krakow rose to the fore once more. That Krakow Act was narrowly rejected by congress (When initially presented to the Council, it gained the support of only 39% of the house, whilst a very similar private members bill put before the Assembly accrued only 37%.), the following day can largely be attributed to his absence. According to its detractors, the Krakow Act was “an act of supreme irresponsibility”, fuelled only by “petty revengism” and certain to “enrage the Russian Bear”.

Drawing the Lines
Main article: Drawing the Lines

The announcement of the candidates in the 1848 election caused significant stir among Councillors and Deputies. Many Liberals feared that a combined Conservative-Royalist alliance threatened the Federation in it's premature existence. Prominent liberals were quick to assert their desire for further equality among the people, one of which was Ion Horsa Cordinaru, who proposed the Petition of the Romanians of Transylvania, a motion that called upon Congress to acknowledge the equality of Romanians within the Federation. At the same time, Councillor Cordinaru, born in Transylvania and a staunch Romanian, put his supporters behind the Presidential Candidate, Vlado Nikolić. Conservatives, under with wing of Councillor Károly Vörös de Nyitra, took a risky move in the opposition of the Petition. Nyitra famously exclaimed against the act, "As to this Romanian Bill, I am completely opposed. Although I can tolerate the creation of a Transylvania State, I cannot agree with the disproportionate representation of Romanians in the Federal Government, as the bill intends. And further more, the conclusion of 'Magyarisation', a complete misrepresentation by the Romanians in any case, cannot be tolerated. The end of policies that support and protect the Hungarian population in Transylvania, labelled as 'Magyarisation', would completely violate and remove the rights of the Hungarian population."

Dalmatian Question
Main article: Dalmatian Question



In 1848, the Danubian Revolution erupted due to a combination of repression, ethnic nationalism, and Liberal/Radical sentiment from various sections of the populace. This established the Danubian Federation as a Federation of the former Austrian provinces, which began to lead to ethnic troubles within the Federation. Soon after the formation of the Federation, the Venetian irredentist movment began to form. These Venetian irredentists, led by Councillor Vitale Morosini, thought of the Federation as a renewed chance for Venice to gain its former glory after the Austrian humilation, beginning with Dalmatia, to which they had a historical and ethnic claim, at least in sections. In Croatia, on the other hand, nationalism arose defensively. Croatians felt repressed within the Federation, both as a result of the rise of the Irredentists in Venice, who threatened to take Dalmatia, and as a result of still not being recognized as fully equal within the Danubian Federation. They would be represented by Councillor Crepko Obradovic.

Nikolić: A Question of Statehood (1848-1850)
Main article: A Question of Statehood

By all accounts, the presidential election of 1848 was a landslide. Vlado Nikolić won almost three quarters of the Electoral College vote, and gained convincing victories in the vast majority of states. Hungary provided the only effective resistance to Nikolić’s bid, where his plans to alter the constitution came across badly with an electorate left tired from the Revolution. The bigger issues of the election were to erupt in the two states that plumped for the Reactionary von Salzburg: in Venice, Salzburg’s promise of reclaiming her former colonies in the Adriatic played to the nostalgia of a Republic twice annexed by foreign Empires; in Austria, von Salzburg’s personal militia, formally entitled the ‘Austrian National Militia Union’, became demonized as the ‘Royal Guard’ causing a constitutional crisis the day before the election. The conflict between Venezia and Croatia quickly became known as the Dalmatian Question. Both sides claimed the legal right to administer the province based on the former’s historical ties with the region and the latter’s cultural ties with its people. On 3rd December, von Salzburg’s declaration in support of the Venetians reignited an issue that had lain largely dormant since the dissolution of the Republic of Venice by Napoleon. Riots in Venice pushed the issue, but ultimately little was achieved through the Federal authorities. On 10th December and at the behest of the President, the Joint Council for the Future of Dalmatia was established to mediate between the two states. Both legislatures agreed a solution needed to be found and negotiations began, and a draft proposal was created whereby the province was to be administered by a bi-partisan body. Unfortunately for the states involved, a combination of the opposition of one or other of the state legislatures to each new draft and the stalemate that persisted in the Joint Council well into 1849 gradually led to the erosion of this body and the creation of a de facto autonomous state; the extent of the change in the politics of the region is evidenced by the fact that in the two years it took before the Joint Council dissolved itself in a mire of indecision, the Dalmatian Assembly had already began approving its own budgets and had replaced the roles of Co-Commissioners with a First Minister elected directly by the people.

Nikolić: Galician Troubles (1850)
The remainder of 1850 saw two important events in the Federation’s History; the first true interstate agreement and the first international war. Domestically, at least, the second half of 1850 was kinder to Nikolić’s government. Though there was little agreement over the wide range of reforms proposed, at least no crises emerged from them. The Ban on Private Militias Act brought none of the widely expected rioting that its detractors claimed. The Federal Army of the Danube Bill was quickly and cleanly introduced into the Army with the minimum fuss from those displaced.

The greatest domestic triumph of the time, though, had nothing to do with Nikolić or even the Federal system. The Dalmatian Question was finally resolved, after the failure of the Federal attempt at a solution prompted the states themselves to agree to a compromise. On 25th August, the interstate resolution, which was snappily titled the ‘Mutual Agreement towards the Establishment of the Veneto-Croatian Condominium of Istria and the Dalmatian Isles’, was signed into law in the city of Zadar by representatives of both Croatia and Venice.



This resolution, however, was taken badly by the de facto Dalmatian state, which officially declared independence from both states the same day as the agreement was signed. The resulting state was short lived, for, with the Naval Guard already in the province, Federal Troops assisted the state militias in suppressing the revolt (The revolt prevented a planned move of the Naval Guard to fight on the Russian front, meaning the Army of the Centre went in its place). The Dalmatian government was captured in Dubrovnik within just four days and forced to renounce any notion of Dalmatian independence before being tried for treason by a joint Veneto-Croatian prosecution and hung. With them died the revolution they had begun and the Condominium gradually became accepted by the populace.

The issue of Krakow, on the other hand, remained unsolved. The declaration of war the Federation passed against Russia came on the 24th August, but little activity on the Front was seen during that time. Opposition to an offensive war from both the Chief of the General Staff and the Minister of War meant that Federal troops set up a defensive line through the forests of Galicia and the Northern Carpathians. Meanwhile, Russia had time to move her armies westward.

Though it was universally thought likely that Danubian troops would be outnumbered, the scale of the Russian threat may have been underestimated by those in Vienna. On 12th November, the scale of the miscalculation became clear, as the 18,000 men of the 2nd Southern Army were attacked at their base just south of Przemysl by a Russian force of over 38,000 men. In the ensuing battle, despite the defensive advantage the Federation’s troops possessed, over 11,000 Federal troops were lost for under 6000 Russians, with a full rout only prevented by the timely appearance of the Army of the Centre to facilitate an orderly withdrawal from the area. By mid-December, there would be at least two Russians for every Danubian troop in Galicia. Indeed, defeat at Przemysl did little to push Vienna’s hand, with no further troops being deployed to the region for the rest of the year; the congress was more concerned with persuading a König reluctant to join the war effort. König Friedrich Wilhelm was reported to have said, “Russian troops will have to march through Berlin before I abandon my eternal friendship with the Tsar.”.



The rest of November marked a fairly constant retreat for Federal troops, with a defensive line eventually being drawn behind the Prut River as the last line of defence East of the Carpathians. Luckily for the Federation, two events in early December pushed Prussia such that, by 20th December, the Chancellor and the König both signed a declaration of war on the Tsar.

The first was the defeat of the Republican National Guard at the battle of Bielsko on 16th December marking the first Russian progress into the Carpathians. 37,000 Russians, buoyed by victory in Krakow, marched on the 15,000 men of the National Guard, who emerged defeated and badly scathed. Should the Carpathians fall, the plains of Hungary would provide little natural defence for the Federal troops, with the likely outcome being the fall of Vienna, a Federal surrender and a new Emperor of Austria. More pressingly for the Prussians though, the Russian victory came less than 50 miles from Prussian territory.

The second was the formal annexation of Krakow into Russia’s Polish territories on the 18th. In doing so, the Tsar made it as clear as day his actions were not in defence of Russian interests in the city, as he had claimed to the Prussian delegation in Moscow, but rather the aggressive ones that he had displayed during the Franco-Prussian war.



The Prussian declaration of war opened the taps, and most of the other states of the former German Confederation (The German Confederation was dissolved by the Austrian Empire in 1847 for fear that the new powerful Parliament of Prussia would use it as an instrument to further Liberalism within Germany. Though there was talk of reforming the confederation after the revolution, nothing was ever done and the project of a pan-German state seemed to have been put on hold.) had declared hostilities together with many of the North Italian states by the beginning of the New Year.

Nikolić: Beating Back the Bear (1851-1852)
1851 started well for the Federation. The panic inspired in Vienna following the defeats of the past half-year meant that the Federation’s entire professional army was on the front in Galicia by mid-January. Furthermore, Prussian troops were by now flowing East, as were regiments from states as disparate as Tuscany and Hannover. Indeed, the first battle of the New Year was won in Prussia by an army whose largest contingent was from Bavaria and was commanded by a Saxon.

The battle of Srem is regarded by most as marking the turning point in the war, followed as it was by victory for the Dual Alliance in the 2nd Battle of Bielsko on the 24th January, when the Republican National Guard and around 30,000 Prussian troops gained victory where but months before there had been one of the worst defeats of the war. To the people of the Federation, though, the early part of 1851 saw little respite; a seemingly inexhaustible supply of enemy troops continued to head towards the Federal line in the Carpathians and the Russian occupation of Galicia began in earnest while all little progress was made by allied armies in the North despite most of Russia’s might being applied in a concerted effort to knock the Federation out of the war. This lack of progress along the Prussian border through January and February 1851 can be largely attributed to a lack of an organised military command from the minor powers involved. In many ways the coalition victory at Srem was the exception rather than the rule, for the outcome of most battles where neither Federal nor Prussian forces were present is better reflected by the battle of Torun in early February, where some 30,000 Germans from a variety of states were repulsed by a Russian force of just over half the size when they tried to relieve the siege of Torun. The story goes that the leadership of the German force started ended up fighting amongst themselves over whose colours should be flown highest from the camp flag pole and didn’t stop even once the battle had started!

February proved to see little by the way of action anywhere along the line with the next major battle coming in mid-March when the Republican National Guard, once again backed up by a good deal of Prussian support recaptured the city of Tarnow. Meanwhile, troops from six North German countries, including almost 50,000 Prussians, crossed into Russian territory for the first time near Königsberg and the Red Star Fleet established a blockade of the Crimea that would last the rest of the war. The Federal ships in the Black Sea faced no resistance that’s in large part to the delay in the Fleet’s deployment; Prussia was perceived as the greater naval threat and all Russian warships were sent into the Baltic accordingly during the first months of the war.



April, however, would be the real test of the policies of the Chief of Staff, the Minister of War and basically every man with any influence in Vienna. A Russian Army of 30,000 men marched straight into the central Carpathians. They met the 2nd Southern Army at Volovets on 4th April and managed to push them back around 10 miles before reinforcements arrived, who happened to be conscripts drafted into service earlier in the year. Volovets was thus the test bed both for the Federal defence plans and the General Mobilisation: defeat was out of the question.

For twelve days the battle raged, on and off. By the end, more than 60,000 Federation troops and 70,000 Russians had been deployed to this small valley and its surroundings, with at least half of them being killed and numerous more invalidated home; the 2nd Southern Army suffered some 15,000 casualties alone (around 5/6ths of its total manpower). General Masaryk, who commanded operations at Volovets, is reported to have said during the final days of the battle that “this loss is more than can be understood by human minds; the only faith we have is in the salvation that victory brings.”

And victory he brought, but not for long; the 2nd Southern Army was quickly withdrawn in the aftermath of the battle to recoup, but few reinforcements remained in the area leaving a force that was almost entirely conscript and tired from the fray. Another large and entirely fresh Russian army of around 20,000 men approached from the East, and, though the strategic and numerical advantage lay with the Federal troops, the resulting battle on 20th April at Nehrovets (which is roughly 20 miles east of Volovets) left either side in much doubt as to who controlled the mountains. Actual casualties were far lower at the latter battle, but the strategic loss of the mountains hit the Federation hard, with near fatal panic erupting in the halls of the Hofburg: the concern everyone had but was too scared to ask was, ‘What was Franz Joseph’s plan following a Russian invasion?’

Fortunately for the people of the Federation, they never had to find out, for a string of Prussian victories in Poland diverted large sections of the Russian forces north and preventing any possible attack into Hungary and beyond. Gains made at Tarnow and Bielsko were forsaken to provide the strongest possible force to retake the Carpathians. In total, 80,000 men, or nearly two thirds of the Federal Army, marched into battle on 6th July. The battle of Uzgorord ensued, and though the losses on both sides remained fairly consistent throughout, sheer weight of numbers pushed the Russians out of the Mountains.



Virtually at the same time, a parallel battle was taking place in Northern Transylvania. The Army of Italy was ambushed just North of Cernauti by a far larger Russian force and was largely massacred. A once 15,000 men strong army was reduced to just 3000 in the space of one hour. Forced into headlong retreat, General Božidar Skala did all he could to prevent the full rout that seemed certain. He managed to make his way south with what remained of his force, but despite constant entreaties to the leadership for help, none came. The response was always the same: “The men are needed more at Uzgorord.”

By 19th July, Skala found himself short on supplies and stuck in a never-ending retreat. His chosen last stand was the old, abandoned castle just outside of Suceava. Not suited to 19th century conflict, the castle had largely been reduced to ruins by the winds of time, but nonetheless Skala’s performance left little to desire. Outnumbered almost 6 to 1, Skala’s men managed to hold the castle under more or less constant barrage for over 36 hours with little sleep and no food or running water. In the end, Skala was trapped in the deepest reaches of the keep and reportedly kept on firing back even after taking shots to his left arm and right leg before a bullet through his forehead silenced the resistance in the castle. In those 36 hours, Skala and his men managed to kill almost 7,000 Russian troops and prevent any further Russian attempts to gain ground in the south. His remains were sent back to Vienna, as was custom for military officers, where his remains were interred beside the Kings of yore in St Stephens Cathedral and tales of his bravery inspired the next generation of military leaders.



From thereon in, Federal forces suffered not one major defeat, with fairly constant progress being made towards the Russian front. In August, the last Russian attempt to take the Carpathians was repulsed by the Republican National Guard, before Prussian forces assisted Federal troops to victory in the 2nd battle of Tarnow. Victory after victory came, culminating in a rout of nearly all the Russian forces in Federal territory on November 8th at, fittingly, the place where it all started; Przemysl.



Such was the scale of the momentum now possessed by the armies of the Dual Alliance that an armistice request was received in Vienna by the 14th, stating that Russia accepted Federal terms as laid out by Congress the previous Summer. Fighting ceased the following day, with the official signing of the Treaty of Budapest on the 5th of January 1852. Under the terms of the treaty, the Russian gains from the Franco-Prussian war would be made a Federal territory of the Danubian Federation pending a plebiscite on whether it wished to join the Federation or be reincorporated into the Kingdom of Prussia, the city of Krakow would be released free of Russian influence and Franz Joseph would be extradited back to the Federation.

Both the transition of power in Ostpruβen and Krakow went relatively smoothly. In the event, Krakow voted almost immediately to apply for Danubian statehood and the plebiscite in Ostpruβen gave a slight edge to the Federation despite the area’s heavy links with Prussia. It is thought that the use of a council to administer the region prior to the plebiscite swung the lower classes, who were keen to experience democracy.

In many ways it was the last clause, almost added on as an afterthought, which proved the most contentious. Russian reservations over the Prince’s treatment left the possibility of further conflict on the table. It was only after the Prussians forced through a proviso that he was not to be harmed that the Treaty could go ahead. Despite protests, mainly though not exclusively from the opposition benches, the Prince was tried on 4 counts of Treason and sentenced (after a suspiciously speedy trial) to permanent house arrest. It took just three weeks for him hang himself inside the Schönbrunn Palace. With him the last dregs of the Royal Faction and the Royal Guard petered away.



With the last through months of legislative action, Nikolić pushed through his only lasting legacy, namely a series of school reforms that set up federally funded education for most children between the ages of 11 and 16. Meanwhile, a small number of acts were passed to increase naval funding and promote infrastructure, but the vast majority of genuine reforms proposed were rejected, even if by small numbers. Ultimately, federal government had achieved little during Nikolić’s entire four year term, though state legislatures managed to institute a wide range of reforms in the face of such stagnation, from the crowning of the Venice’s first Doge in over 50 years to increased rights for minority groups across the Federation.

1852 Presidential Election
The primary season before the 1852 election was really a non-event. Though all the major parties held nominating conventions, most either opted to stand under another party in a coalition or not field a candidate at all. In the end, only 3 candidates appeared on the ballot in all 9 states. By far the biggest reason for the blandness of the primaries was that the eyes of the political nation were almost all looking south as riots in Lombardia spilled over into an armed coup. A row that had developed within the Italian Independent Party (of which almost 90% of the citizens of Venezia and Lombardia were members in 1851) over leadership caused a split in the party, with the Venetian wing leaving the party in favour of the Conservatives. All over Lombardia, the traditional contempt of their water-loving neighbour fermented such that within just 3 days, the every population centre in the state had devolved into near anarchy. Out of the chaos emerged a reactionary and extremely ambitious militia commander by the name of Luigi Albinoni. He, through his powerful oratory, turned the Lombards’ anger against the Federation as a whole and used it to set up a military dictatorship within the state, with himself as its ‘acting’ Chairman. The Federal reaction was swift and effective. The Skala Italian Army was formed and discharged to recapture the state, fittingly, to be led by Skala’s son Johan. Within a month, and after victories outside both Bergamo and Milan, Albinoni was captured by Federal forces with most of his government having committed suicide in the final days of the regime. Secession was unilaterally declared to be illegal under the constitution by the Supreme Court the day after Albinoni’s removal from office. He was escorted to Vienna by armed guard to face trial. Though it was largely a formality for him, the accusations of Treason were levelled against all of Lombardia’s remaining representatives both at a Federal and State level. In total, 32 men sat in the dock alongside Albinoni as the proceedings got underway. The trial lasted just 4 days, with all those in Vienna at the time being cleared (ie the Federal Councillors and Deputies) while all those who remained in Lombardia were sentenced to death. Albinoni’s final words were reported to have been, “We must take care our words don’t condemn us to the fires, for the lies put against me surely merit hell alone. In death, my country and I shall be vindicated.” Prophetically, Albinoni’s demonic warning turned out to come true in a more temporal setting. The court case that had condemned him to death quickly gave birth to a number of side-cases, as terms like slander and libel were tossed around as if everyone had been transported one and a half centuries into the future and plonked in a room in London where a judge would listen to them all talk for several months before publishing a lengthy report that everyone would proceed to make a fuss about and then largely ignore. Indeed, the number of court cases filed during November and December 1852 would not be surpassed in Vienna (for the same time period) until 1987. That said, most of them ended in abject failure to come to any meaningful conclusion. What the court cases did do, however, was agitate the people of Vienna sufficiently that with just two weeks to go until the election, the President was forced to enforce a curfew on the city (though electorally it was thought by all at the time that it would make no difference because the conservatives held a solid majority in the state regardless). Meanwhile, the consequences of the Krakovian war were still being ironed out. Krakow herself had been officially affected into the Federation the previous month, but by the election it still wasn’t clear whether the city would become a state in her own right or part of Galicia or if some other solution would be favoured. Equally, the situation in Ostprussen was rapidly deteriorating. The rejection of her bid for statehood left the territory in a state of limbo that created a power vacuum into which gang leaders and militia commanders ably stepped. Prussia, seeking the return of her ancestral lands, demanded a conference with the Federation where a compromise could be sought.

Codrinaru: A Nagying Problem (1852-1854)
The presidential election of 1852 unfolded in stark contrast to the preceding primaries; no more could Danubian politics be called bland and predictable. In fact, not one single electoral forecast, be it through the rudimentary from of polling available at the time, party membership charts or complex extrapolation from existing social data, was able to predict either the eventual winner or the manner in which he took victory. Indeed, the coalition that formed between a flagging liberal party and a conservative candidate who looked increasingly sure of sealing the top office with little trouble left both the political left and right in a state of near shock, especially given their chosen candidate was neither actually standing for President at the time nor a member of the larger party. In doing so, Vice-President Ion Horsa Codrinaru had pulled off the greatest political coup of his age. His only remaining opponent, the Radical Union’s candidate, Petr Šik, recognised the coalition for the work of political genius it was, effectively pulling out of the race by announcing he would resign as the Union’s leader after the results were officially announced. The race for President was thus over in all but name, with Codrinaru securing the backing of all states other than the two northern radical strongholds. The one place that the election’s result did cause controversy was Hungary. Every Hungarian political party had either endorsed de Nyitra or was part of his coalition; it was the most solidly blue state there was. Many though, in particular the reactionary elements of the state, saw de Nyitra’s subordination as selling out to the Liberals. In Budapest, where tempers flared highest, the same signs that had precluded the Vienna riots began to emerge; random abductions, arson attacks and terrorist incidents slowing built through the winter following the election. The violence reached its peak on 7th March 1853, after the Hungarian Parliament approved the final version of the Plebiscite Act on Slovak Statehood. Fears of a reprise of the widespread anarchy that had characterised Vienna less than 5 years ago caused the Minister of War to order an entire Federal Army to march on the city. President Nagy, meanwhile, ordered the Hungarian Militia to both pacify the city from within and defend the city from without, forbidding the Federal government to cross the city limits. Codrinaru attempted to intervene, but his orders soon got lost in translation, as the Second Southern Army ended up camping outside the city rather then heading for the border. Though the Hungarian Militia, together with a concerted political effort to prevent conflict, caused the mob to dissipate, rumours of stolen weapons led to both the Army and the Militia remaining in the city’s vicinity. Hungary continued to rumble on, but by the Summer of 1847, the nation’s attention turned north, as Codrinaru left for a conference with Prussia in the Munich. Though he managed to secure a few alterations to the suggestion sent the previous year  by the Prussian Ambassador, only the states Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg were guaranteed as under Danubian influence while attempts to prevent a pan-German conference were blocked. Out of the deal, Prussia got assurances from the Federation about all states north of Prussia herself and the territory the Russians had taken the previous decade; the Federation, meanwhile, secured the former Austrian duchy of Silesia (which had almost twice the population of Ostpruβen and had been captured by Prussia after the War of the Austrian Succession). Silesia was near unanimously accepted as a federal state by congress on 21st August 1853 and the first 10-yearly census was brought forward to 1854 so as to allow the state to participate in elections in the 1856 elections. The German Union, the other main product of the Munich Conference and the direct replacement of the abandoned German Confederation, was signed into law by all of the successor states to the Confederation’s members at Frankfurt in January 1854. The result of the Slovak Plebiscite, which had taken place concurrently with Hungarian parliamentary elections, was announced on the 11th June 1854. It had been tight, with many being swayed by the new power to vote in state elections they had received, but the population supported statehood by a margin of just 1,264 votes. Not a ringing endorsement, but Nagy vowed to keep his word and presented the Deferred Slovak Statehood Act to the State Legislature. It sparked an uprising which proved the existence of those mysterious vanishing weapons that had been illegally stored since the revolution before being stolen. A well armed mob marched the streets, eventually laying siege to the Sándor Palace, the official residence of President Nagy of Hungary. Seeing the chaos, the Southern Army attempted to enter the city to restore order, in direct contravention of Codrinaru’s repeated orders. The Hungarian militia, seeing the advancing army and knowing they were to hold the city no matter what, fired upon the Federal troops. The end result was a siege within a siege; Nagy believed that the Militia, which outnumbered the mob by more than two to one, could restore order with little problem, while the Generals of the 2nd Southern were unwilling to leave the city to its own devices and kept demanding that the Militia open the gates. The climax of the Budapest Uprising came on the 15th when the mob stormed the Sándor Palace. As the Hungarian Cabinet retreated deeper into the complex and it became clear that there was no way that the Militia could cope, Nagy eventually sent a message to the walls that the Federal Army would be permitted to enter the city. It was, for the Hungarian President, however, too little too late; just two hours later, the Nagy was captured, forced to sign an executive order which voided the vote and then shot through the heart. Order was restored to the city after 5 further hours of heavy fighting, but the state of Hungary was left without any executive for two whole years and the Slovak statehood was once again repulsed thanks to one man’s intransigence. After Frankfurt, Codrinaru had continued his active foreign policy by leaving for Cairo, where he signed the Treaty of Alexandria, which cemented a political and military alliance between the two states in the wake of Ottoman motions threatening to retake the Levant (plus secured a significant amount of Federal investment in Egyptian infrastructure and industry). In return, the island of Crete was transferred to Federal control and Codrinaru got a pretext for war. Conflict became a certainty after, on 15th March 1854, the [I]DFS Sofa[/I] (one of the larger vessels in the Red Star Fleet) was fired upon by a small gun boat flying a Turkish flag while patrolling off the coast of North Africa. The “Gulf of Tobruk Resolution” was rushed through congress and promised that the Federation would oppose all Ottoman aggression in the Mediterranean. That war came in July 1854. The Turks issued an ultimatum on the 4th, with nominal British backing, that Egypt transfer all its possessions north and east of Sinai. Before the reply (which was unsurprisingly outright rejection) could reach Istanbul, the Federation issued its own demands of the Sultan. British action seemed assured, but a timely intervention by Foreign Minister Victor Kraus in resuscitating an old alliance with the Greeks and promising Federal support for their claims on the wealthy province of Macedonia pacified a government in Westminster that was keen not to get entangled in a major European land war, for which the British Army was ill prepared (especially given since Britain had not had a continental alliance with a Great Power since the War of Austrian Succession). Federal troops crossed into Northern Bosnia on the 16th in the start of what looked to be an easy war against a power ill-equipped to fight on three fronts.

Codrinaru: A Slight Setback (1854)
The war with the Ottoman Turks was hardly underway, when concerns arose of an increasingly dictatorial government in Vienna. The situation in Slovakia deteriorated in the days following the ultimatum, with the results of the plebiscite in dispute, the Slovak Provisional Assembly was announced in Bratislava, but was outlawed by the Hungarian Parliament before it could ever meet. A General Arrest Warrant was declared across the Federation by the Viennese Metropolitan Police (which became the basis of the last act to be signed into law by President Codrinaru as it became the Federal and Metropolitan Police, with expanded powers outside the city limits). The case of Councillor Sykora, who represented the state of Hungary but was a Slovak patriot at heart, became the prime example of the repression instituted by an increasingly reactionary Hungarian Parliament. Sykora was eventually pardoned by Codrinaru himself following the secession and released. He immediately travelled to Bratislava (which had stayed loyal to the Federation) to establish the Provisional Council of Slovakia legally. Its first meeting is still a bank holiday in Slovakia. Later examples, like the execution of four men whose only crime was to have been nominated to sit on the Assembly, were overshadowed in the eyes of many in Vienna who saw the persecution of their fellow politician as far more threatening to their way of life. Mob action, both in Budapest and Bratislava underlined the problem, but Codrinaru’s response of martial law only served to inflame an already tense situation. The direct result was twofold; the first was predicted long before it actually happened, the Hungarian Parliament, under the almost monarchical figure of Count Bethlen, declared its independence from the Federation by a vote of 234 to 65. The second was totally unexpected, as General Masaryk of the 2nd Southern Army raised his flag in rebellion against the President. The irony of the situation was not missed in Vienna, as Masaryk’s demotion from the rank of General which had precluded his rebellion was sparked a comment taken as insubordination that effectively said he would not fire on his own people. This coup proved to be literally fatal for the President. The defection the Republican National Guard, lead by General Eckhel, coming just two days after the coup began, proved to be the beginning of the end for Codrinaru. News reports to Vienna told of near daily defections, and with the Ministry of War in a state of utter confusion (Domenico Mocenigo, the Minister of War originally appointed by Codrinaru, had resigned amid fears that he was interfering in politics too much, before dying, reportedly of heart failure. A series of short-lived and ineffectual ministries in his wake proved incapable of asserting any control over the department and, with little or no information as to what was actually going on on the front, the Generals were effectively (and to that administrations eternal detriment) left to organise themselves. This irony, too, was not missed in the years after Codrinaru’s fall), the limited scope of the defections didn’t become clear. Panic erupted in the halls of government and it collapsed, essentially under the dead weight of its own hysteria. Codrinaru was found dead within just a week of Masaryk’s declaration. The toxicologist’s report attributed it to cyanide, but with proof coming in the 1980s of the fraudulent nature of his ‘suicide note’, questions have been raised about the reliability of a report commissioned by the Generals that succeeded him. A more likely explanation would be a political murder, but as yet no historian has been able to pin point the group responsible. Codrinaru’s sudden absence was filled by Victor Kraus (Kraus was tried for treason after his capture, but ultimately acquitted as the crimes he claimed responsibility for were almost entirely the work of others), but with the legitimacy of his government in question, little resistance was put up to the Generals as they approached Vienna. Indeed, Kraus’s administration lasted just one week before he was imprisoned by Eckhel; within two Masaryk had forced through an constitutional amendment to make himself the official head of state.

Masaryk: A New Direction (1854-1855)
Masaryk’s new government began with a constitutional crisis in the recently incorporated state of Silesia. A referendum on the state’s constitution was bugled by the state administration, leading to the two further referendums and a protracted trial that left both sides embarrassed, as the ingrained lack of true oversight in the state came into sharp focus with the conviction of the Chancellor of Silesia on charges of Electoral Fraud and Criminal Negligence, Otto von Tipitz, and the later trial of Inspector-General Kragenhof of the Federal and Metropolitan Police for falsifying evidence. In many respects, Tipitz was lucky, being sent to a penal battalion that was to assist maintaining order in the newly created and somewhat unstable territory of Slovakia; Kragenhof, for what would nowadays be seen as a slightly less serious crime, was sentenced to death by hanging. Rumblings in Silesia continued for some time, but gradually petered out as the status quo became the acceptable norm.

The only surviving photograph of Inspector-General Kragenhof

Considering that the Masaryk gained his mandate from the military, it is unsurprising that he had more success in war than in domestic matters. Though there were initially Hungarian incursions into Slovakia, which was claimed by the rebel leaders, a defeat for the Army of the Eagle in Budapest and some fairly large scale defections among Hungarian troops on the Southern front against the Ottomans, particularly in the 1st Southern Army where a majority of the troops swore loyalty to the Democratic Hungarian Republic, victories at Roznava and Nitra, not to mention Sisak and Kotor, left a weak rebellion looking pretty desperate. As the months passed, Federal troops pushed deeper into Hungary, not experiencing the sudden collapse that had characterised the Russian retreat only four years before, but every day moving a mile or two eastwards towards Budapest. The panic in Budapest reached such heights that the rebels were even reaching out to the Ottoman Turks for assistance, but the only state to reply was Prussia. Imagining the gains that could be made into Germany if there was no major power on her Southern border, the König convinced the Landtag to issue an ultimatum to Vienna. It simply read, “The Konig of Prussia demands the Danubian Federation accept the sovereignty of the Democratic State of Hungary and cease hostilities. Failure to comply will result in the termination of the Prusso-Danubian Defence Agreement.” The Federation’s official response came within a week; it was a resounding no. For Prussia, the results were devastating; she lost an ally but gained very little. Indeed, within just two weeks of the ultimatum, the Hungarian rebels had assassinated their leader and surrendered the city of Budapest to the Federal troops. Martial law was instituted in the state (this time without any political problems) to last until elections the following year, and the state was officially accepted back into the Federation. For the Federation, it was more of a mixed picture; yes, she had lost a valuable ally against the Russians, who were arguably the biggest threat at that time, but thankfully Codrinaru’s ghost continued to cast its altruistic gaze over the nation: a secret treaty with France, signed just two months before the former President’s death, came into effect. It stated that if ever the PDDA expired, the so-called ‘Alliance of Turin’ would become effective, which guaranteed mutual support if either was attacked (which was not only a marked improvement over the limited scope of the PDDA, but was with a stronger power). Meanwhile, in the south, the war against the Ottomans was plodding on, with neither side able to land a decisive blow. The Turks had scored a number of victories over Egyptian forces, most notable at Aleppo where an Egyptian army of approaching nearly 18,000 men was completely routed as the city fell. Elsewhere, news was more positive; a small detachment of Federal troops, successfully, joined the Greek army in taking parts of southern Macedonia, while Federal troops effectively pacified Bosnia. The relative weakness of the Empire in Europe was thanks to a highly effective naval blockade of the straights by an expanded Red Star Fleet; Istanbul herself was put under siege for a period of about a month, before Federal troops were forced back onto the ships. The only area where an effective defence was being made was in the Empire’s two vassal states, who managed to make the only territorial gains against the Federation.

The Turkish defeat in Libya was at the hands of the Swedes, who had allied with the Federation at the same time as the Prussians, but whose ties had, unlike those of Prussia, been deepened beyond a simple defence pact.

de Sanctis: Nobody's Business but the Turks' (1855-1856)
As the reign of the National Emergency Committee continued, fears rose about the return to democracy. Among the Liberal and Conservative journals of the political nation, Masaryk quickly became vilified as a tyrannical monster intent on imposing a radical dictatorship onto the Federation, entirely unjustly in the opinion of most contemporary historians given that he opposed such a measure and had neither the support of the political elite nor the generals who had put him in office in the first place. Nonetheless, Masaryk was forced out and Marshal de Sanctis took his place as Chairman promising a return to democracy, with elections set for early 1856. In that intervening period, and despite much mistrust the coup had brought towards the competence of the military, Vienna focussed not on the war itself but the expected gains. The issue of Religion quickly rose to the fore as provinces like Albania were majority Muslim. Though little was said in the constitution, the country was both nominally Christian and secular making the issues of non-Christian populations a matter of great debate. Though Jewish populations were in general disenfranchised, had little state protection for their religious organisations and often received disproportionate punishments, the small population size allowed the issue to be largely ignored; the sheer scale of the problem that inconsistent policy in the region would cause meant that this issue above all else would come, in some respects at least, to define the coming presidential term. All the focus on domestic policy in preference to the war led the Balkan-Levant War to be labelled across the Federation as the ‘Forgotten’ War. That said, it didn’t prevent the army making gains throughout the rest of the year. By the time the Presidential elections actually took place, all of Bosnia was under Federal control as was the majority of Albania and much of Northern Greece. In fact, gains were even made in Romania, where troops who had been occupied with Hungary were diverted south. Victories at the 3rd Battle of Nagyseben and the 2nd Battle of Bucharest among others forced Turkish troops to retreat back South. This string of victories culminated in the capture of Istanbul on 23rd December 1855, with those troops so recently forced back onto the ships in the straits reinforced from the mainland. Victory at Gallipoli two days prior to the fall of the city meant that the Turks now had no standing armies of any form in all of Europe. The fall of the capital was expected to lead to an almost immediate capitulation, yet when, after some 5 days of heavy fighting, the troops of the Skala Italian Army who had led the charge into the city breached the inner walls of the Topkapi Palace, it became clear that the entire government had fled the city long ago. The Sultan had left the capital for Anatolia on the declaration of war. Turkish policy was not one aiming for total victory – the times when Ottoman troops could realistically march on Vienna were long gone and the Imperial Navy knew they stood no chance of holding the straits. Instead, the Ottomans aimed to force the Federations hand in the Middle East by bringing Egypt to its knees, hoping to regain its stake in Europe on the strength of their ever advancing armies in the deserts of the Sahara and the Levant. In a very real way, the policy seemed to be working and the debates that earned the war its honorary title had every chance of being entirely futile.

The Primaries of 1855
The primaries of 1855 seemed in many ways to be a formality. It appeared clear that 3 groups would contest the election; the Radical Union which had been bypassed as the king-maker at the last election, but had since seen a slide in support in Congress and two coalitions formed in fear of the other - the centre-right All-Danubian Coalition and the centre-left Alliance. In fact, two of the three main primaries were uncontested.

Meanwhile, little was happening outside of the political nation. For example, in the month of December, over which the conventions were held, only two diplomatic notes of note were received in Vienna, one from Prussia and one from France, both urging the support of the status quo in Germany after rumours that the Federation was seeking to incorporate the south German states.

1856 Presidential Election
On the whole the primaries of 1856 were a sedate affair, with most of the political manoeuvring having already been performed. Indeed, the Radical Union’s pre-election conference served only to rubber stamp the unopposed Gabriel Soukup-Valenta. The Coalition’s nominating convention saw a spark of excitement when it was rumoured that Victor Kraus, who as leader of the ADCP and principle force behind the Coalition was the presumptive nominee, had pulled out of the race; in actual fact, he had merely been absent from Vienna on official Treasury business and therefore unable to attend one specific rally that was attended by large portions of the conservative press. He went on to win the nomination by such a significant margin that one of his opponents is reported to have said, “I’m beginning to doubt even my own mother would vote for me.” The real action of the primaries came in course of the Alliance’s record-breaking convention. Lasting for the best part of two weeks and comprising of 74 individual ballots, the contest was tightly fought to say the least. Two main candidates quickly emerged as frontrunners, Francesco de Palma and Rodrigo Vertucci, the former on his no-nonsense, confrontationalist approach to dealing with the perceived threat of the forces of reaction and  the latter on what he claimed was a more politically viable and pragmatic solution of compromise and consensus. For 12 days, neither man could secure the 2/3rds majority required by the coalition agreement; only on 21st December did was the deadlock broken. Vertucci’s subsequent defeat was unexpected by most commentators at the time in the light of the Pan-Danubian Party’s vastly greater membership than de Palma’s Republican Alliance, but can reasonably be accounted for by a variety of factors; time pressures, compiled with an increasing political fundamentalism and the admission of delegations from Federal Territories in addition to states, certainly had an effect. In many ways, however, the most surprising thing, from a historical perspective at least, about the 1856 Alliance election was the strength of the unity and resolve shown from within the convention hall in the face of very divisive ideas, especially in context of increasing particularisation and division within Danubian society. Only time would tell if this would be a true watershed in the nation’s political and social history or merely an interesting aside on the way to anarchy. Meanwhile, debate raged no less vociferously over reform of the Federal Council. Four bills, placed before Congress just prior to the Christmas recess, captivated the political nation. Dissatisfaction with one bill or another was shown by ordinary citizens up and down the nation. There were peaceful protests across the nation. Minor riots caused panic in both Bratislava and Budapest. Vienna suffered a series of strikes, the like of which had been unseen in almost a decade. The instability even led to a sizable increase in inflation and a banking crisis, with disaster only averted when Governor of the Bank of Austria suspended the gold standard for the Danubian Pound, allowing capital to flow back into the economy. The New York Times compared the unsustainable situation over Congressional reform to “filling the Hofburg with gunpowder while also constructing barricades for her defence.” It is worth noting that Danubian congressional reform was divisive abroad as well as at home. The New York Times, in the same article, said, “It is the cruellest of ironies that the people of this proud nation should have fought for liberation from the tyranny of the autocrat only to willingly subject themselves to the tyranny of overbearing states.” The very same day, the Richmond Examiner lashed out against, “the arrogance with which two constituent states of this Federation of ‘equals’ have in claiming an unnatural hegemony over all the others, which has the effect of enslaving them and destroying the inherent liberties and rights of any sovereign state.”

Kraus: Betrayed (1856)
The election of 1856 turned out to be fairly straightforward. Despite a last minute attempt by the left to unite, Kraus had amassed an unbeatable coalition. In the end, he fell just short of a majority of the popular vote, but regardless stood secure in terms of both his popular vote share and his position in the Electoral College. The government he appointed would always have been controversial. The interplay between State’s Rights and Federalism that was implicitly strained within the coalition agreements was the biggest of the many disagreements that threatened to set the government against itself. In the end, the predicted fracas between the Ministries of Security and the Interior across Michealplatz was averted; the seemingly irreconcilable opponents would come to be the only Ministers to remain loyal to Kraus. Kraus’s first aim was to set about the ending of the war. As such, he personally attended the War Council in Istanbul within the first month of his term. The plan was simple; gain total control of the Balkans and then push into Anatolia across the straits. The implementation, though, turned out to be far from simple. The first troops to land in Uskadar landed with little opposition at the end of July. The supposedly parallel invasion of Canakkale from Galipoli came almost a month later, by which point the Ottomans had given up their demands on Egypt, focussing all their efforts on protecting the Sultan in Ankara. The delay was caused by arguments within the War Council about whether the second crossing was a good idea given there was little Ottoman resistance in the area; some Generals argued that it was unwise to split their forces given the Ottomans would clearly divert their forces back North, but ultimately those who argued it was safer to secure the Straits entirely won through. In hindsight, this could be seen as a mistake, for the resulting weakness in the Republican National Guard on its push towards Ankara allowed it to be intercepted by the feared Ottoman General Halil Pasha at Bolu on the Black Sea. In the resulting battle, the great Pasha managed to encircle the Federal troops despite starting out in a much worse position. Total defeat was only prevented by mass reinforcements being shipped over from the Balkans. Pasha’s army was repulsed from the city with hefty losses and leaderless (Pasha was a great general but a rather outspoken critic of the regime. Though of noble birth, he had long argued that the Sultan’s absolute power would only lead to defeat. He was court-martialled after defeat at Bolu for suggesting (in somewhat heightened language) that the government should fall back to a more defendable position than Ankara). Nonetheless, the battle had shaken both sides enough that peace soon followed; Albania and Bosnia were transferred to Danubian control and referendums were scheduled for Wallachia and Moldavia. The biggest loser from the peace was Greece, and by extension her sponsor, Great Britain, who gained none of the territory she had been promised. Almost immediately, Kraus found his new peace was false. The smell of rebellion soon spread throughout his government. The odour of coup seemed rather sweet to many in the army too, returning from a war torn Balkans to a Federation that had so recently evicted the army from her political nation. The plotters quickly chose to elect an Emperor to lead them, and Marshal Elias de Sanctis proved ideal for this role. His subsequent assassination at the hands of an Austrian in Vienna left the rebels in a momentary state of confusion, but they soon rallied round the Chief of the General Staff, Alexander Kremvera. The loyalists, by comparison, were racked by the loss of support and were left at a significant military disadvantage, especially after Bavaria attempted in integrate Silesia in the name of the Royalist cause. Though many Royalists were equally annoyed at this perceived invasion, they welcomed the support at least initially. By mid-November, the siege of Budapest and the blockade of Candia by loyalist forces were both underway, while in the north, it was unclear which side would take Prague and with it much of Bohemia. The only battle between members of the regular forces resulted in victory for General István Balogh of the rebel army, cutting off the route into Bosnia for loyalist troops leaving the Ottoman Empire, though this was far from a major engagement and the real fighting had yet to begin.

The Situation in April 1857
The early months of the uprising saw little by way of active fighting. Winter quarters were sought in a style more similar to previous centuries than the fairly modern era in which the war was fought. Royalist forces in particular were slow to leave Bosnia, thwarting Kremava's plans to relieve Budapest, as the city fell to Klemens Eckhel and the Republican National Guard who had joined the Slovak militia and Hungarian loyalist forces besieging the city. Imre Than took over the state government proper, appointing more ministers from amongst his associates in Vienna than Budapest. Vazsary managed to escape the city by boat in the dead of night, but most of his government were tried and hung for treason. In Crete, flooding during January and unseasonably cold weather into early March meant harvests were poor. Food prices rose quickly, with the total naval blockade starting to bite and rumours abounded of potential starvation. Despite this, the Winter and Spring of 1857 could not be seen as a triumph for the Republicans. Royalist forces pushed out of Bosnia in late February, gaining great swathes of land, while the only major set piece battle proved to bring victory for the Monarchist forces of Bohemia.

The Situation in May 1857
The May of 1857 went badly for both sides. Long expected Bavarian intervention made President Kraus's numerical disadvantage ever more severe while Kremvera suffered from mass defections. By far the most telling of these defections was former Minister of War, Jovan Lilic, who had been one of the initial conspirators and who subsequently fled to Albania and then Greece, dismayed at the increasingly international flavour of the war. The rate of desertion among Kremvera's forces was high, particularly in the few days following Lilic's defection; the rebels lost the equivalent of almost four regiments in just five days. By the end of May, even some of the new elites Kremvera was installing were becoming twitchy, with the new Grand-Duke of Bosnia attempting to make peace only to be deposed forcibly at the cost of a further two regiments. Crete too suffered badly. By mid-May, the Duke had handed himself over to Federal authorities in line with a negotiated surrender of the island. Unpopular both with the merchants for his intervention and the people for the widespread food shortages, it is predicted that only around 1 in 5 Cretans supported the Duke by this point; however, many Historians argue that through a combination of smuggling past the blockade and rationing current supplies, the island could have lasted perhaps for another 6 months - time enough, some suggest, for Kremvera, or foreign powers, to break the blockade. Regardless, though the island was of little strategic value in a land war, the propaganda value for the President was indeed great. Despite all this, Kremvera managed to score victory after victory in battle. The rate of progress for his armies into Transylvania and Hungary was definitely far slower than in previous months, thanks to stronger resistance from Federal troops in the area and greater strain being placed on the existing resources; however, all armies did manage to gain a good number of miles over the month. The 1st Southern Army was especially successful, and Alexander took pride in leading it himself. Combined with the Army of the North, it surrounded the (Republican) Naval Guard in the city of Split. Without naval support to facilitate an evacuation, and with supplies starting to run low, General Aldo Orsatti was forced to face Kremvera in the field. The Battle of Solin which resulted (named after one of the towns just off the city's peninsular) was a resounding defeat for Orsatti and the Republican troops. Of the roughly 18,000 men stationed in the city, only around 4,500 men managed to escape the city limits. Furthermore, Kremvera lost less than half the number of men Orsatti did, and all those who escaped were harassed all the way up the Dalmatian coast to such an extent that only Orsatti and 3 of his bodyguard managed to reach the Republican command center in Ljubljana to convey the news; the rest of the 18,000 men of the naval guard were either killed or captured.

Kraus: The Greatest Enemy (1857)
It is often said that the pen is mightier than the sword, and there are few cases in history where this is truer than the fall of Alexander Kremvera. The styling of Napoleon where clear at the time, from the Imperial nature of his title to the opposition referring to him dismissively as the ‘Little General’, yet only in hindsight do the parallels between 1812 and 1857 become clear – both leaders were gaining victories and territory, but the cost of attrition, one to the bitter cold of the Russian winter and the other to the war of words, was too much for either army to bear. By the start of June, Kremvera’s forces had halved in size, but had not stopped going forwards; on the day of Kremvera’s death, Royalist forces were far enough North to be within 50 miles of both Vienna and Budapest and in full control of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Carniola and Trieste as well as large portions of San Marco, Austria, Hungary and Transylvania. In fact, to some observers in the capital, it appeared as if the Republic was doomed and talk spread of the need for intervention or governmental exile. Recent evidence suggests that no less than 4 different plans for the evacuation of the government were proposed. The only one to gain real traction within the governmental quarter of Vienna was the Democratic States of the Danube, proposed by Councillor Vertucci and quickly code named “Plan B”. Such a move would have seen the remainder of the cabinet, large parts of the civil service and those members of the Hofburg who had stayed loyal heading North through Prussia and the neutral North German states into France or some other acceptable location from which to organise the resistance movement to the new Imperial government. Many historians argue that Kraus’s policy of protecting Vienna at all costs made this territorial transfer inevitable but also ensured that it very unlikely that Kremvera would ever actually be able to gain absolute victory, yet few would disagree that foreign powers stood behind the rebellion over the Republic; with the notable exception of France, the other great powers would doubtless have sided with the self-proclaimed Emperor. From this point of view, Kraus’s decision not to call in his French allies in the face of Bavarian intervention can be regarded as the turning point of the war. Regardless, on the 12th June 1857, Kremvera was found dead with a bullet from his own pistol lodged in his right temple. It was declared a suicide, though there is no positive proof to this day that it was, and the royalist forces put down their weapons within just a few days. The court trials of those involved in the coup continued for well over a year at almost all levels of criminal courts, while the referendums for the liberated territories, plus Crete, were given an official date (5th January 1858). More than anything, 1857 was defined by the rise of a new force within Europe; the Federation’s “greatest enemy”, nationalism, made it’s mark felt in 1857 as never before. This term for nationalism can be attributed to Minister Janos Papp in his autobiographic work, The Castle of my Crimes. Many point to the cover of the book’s 1920’s English edition, designed by an unknown artist at the vanguard of the surrealist movement and depicting a soldier standing atop some battlements in front of a French flag as an African Swallow flies past carrying a coconut, as a major source of inspiration for the writers of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In Silesia, the Radical candidate, Günther Knittel, took victory by less than 1% in the race to replace the evicted Chancellor against an overtly pan-German opponent, while in Transylvania, protesters gathered in public places to call for secession and the formation of a larger Romania. In Italy, pan-nationalist Redshirts took arms in the city of Massa in the first revolt of its kind. In Bavaria, meanwhile, a fiercely nationalistic newspaper secured a copy of a contract between Kremvera and the King whereby the Bavarian crown renounced its claim on Silesia in exchange for 21% of the Federation’s gross income for 5 years. The Bavarian state’s desire to suppress the document was from an understandable fear of crisis, but Prussian and Russian hostility to the Federation meant that eventual ultimatum sent under pressure of popular support got warm receptions in both St Petersburg and Berlin; there were but three options – hand over Silesia, give over a fifth of the Federation’s net income away in the face of mounting debts or go war for the 4th time in a decade. In France, nationalism was even encouraged by the government. Under fire from a spreading Jacobin resistance to his rule, Napoleon III of France attempted that ever present mantra of the unpopular government – success abroad brings popularity at home. He tried to stir up nationalism in his favour within the country, with a fair deal of success, in the process, declaring war on Prussia for the Rhineland.

Quazi-Update
Mr Vazary has his sentence upheld, and the court of appeal subsequently increases Mr Weinberg's jail term to 25 years (This judge wasn't quite so resistant to political pressure as Lord Justice Kuel).

France cedes Alcase-Lorraine to Prussia after being comprehensively beaten. Two weeks later a Republic is proclaimed in Paris.

A group of around a thousand Hungarians from across all social groups in Budapest sign a manifesto renouncing their nationality in favour of 'Danubian'. A similar group follows them in Vienna, but so far few have followed them.

The conference in Bavaria has been convened.

A massive amount of state money has been spent building forts in the south as well as investing further in the railways.

Kraus: Peace (1857-1859)
The remainder of Kraus’s term was largely quiet. Referendums were held in the liberated territories in January of 1858, with only Wallachia opting to stay out of the Federation all together. Though the result in Bosnia was arguably more divisive given fear of Muslim power is said to have pushed many Christians in the area to have voted for union with Croatia rather than statehood, the refusal of the Duke of Moldavia to cooperate in the election had a more immediate consequence. Within two days of the news reaching Vienna that the Moldovan government would not allow elections, a Republic had been installed with martial rule – many argue that this intervention allowed Moldavia to join the Federation rather than follow Wallachia.

Regardless, with the Treaty of Innsbruck signed and ratified, the Federation was left free from external pressures for the first time in her short existence. Though the measures where unjustifiable in the eyes of many, they were easily complied with. Despite what the Bankruptcy Scare might have implied, the Federation’s economy boomed. The population started to grow properly from the first time in a decade. Industrial subsidies fell by 90% in 3 years, while the economy grew by around 10% over the same period. This growth in the economy led directly to the growth in the activities of trade unions, such that by late June 1859, the numbers taking to the streets in Transylvania (whose numbers showed little sign of diminishing) was dwarfed by the scale of the marches in Vienna and Budapest calling for the deregulation of trade unions. Tax revenues followed the latter, such that by Election Day over 90% of government expenditure was covered by conventional taxes, compared to less than half at the end of the Balkan-Levant War. On most days, the government surplus exceeded £1000; a previously unheard of figure. Indeed, the £400,000 owed to Bavaria was paid off in less than two years, in addition to £20,000 in interest and the eradication of some £60,000 in national debt, in addition to a large increase in the size of the Army, the reintroduction of funds to the proposed forts in Silesia and the south and the commission of 17 Novara-class ‘commerce raiders’ whose purpose ranged from patrolling the Adriatic to protecting the Federal Transport Squadron.

Some historians point to the National Unity Tour of 1858 as one of the great achievements of the era - this was an event that had the potential to mark the maturation of the Federation into adulthood, embracing the ideals of the revolution as one rather than becoming stuck in a perpetual loop of internal strife. Logistically, it was a great success, after all taking 20-odd politicians to almost every state in 3 months is a tall order. Politically too it reaped great rewards, with its organizer, Councillor Vertucci, reported as being the most popular Federal politician in every state except Austria at one point in 1858. Despite all this, the tour the significance of the tour is easily overestimated, for, not only were the effect short-lasting, but its success was largely due to the times rather than the idea - looking back, it is much more of a symptom of the age then its greatest achievement.

Overseas, a Portuguese attempt to subjugate Tunisia was rebuffed by French intervention. Seeking to assert her Great Power status, Portugal condemned herself to an unsustainable debt cycle and bankruptcy followed defeat as surely as the country’s brief foray in the spotlight quickly faded. The new French Republic’s government, meanwhile, only got suffering as reward for victory. Anarcho-Liberal groups claimed that the government’s support was rash and threatened to destroy the Republic – as time passed, their increasingly severe demands went unheeded, until the imprisonment of a leader of the French Libertarian Party set off a chain reaction that embroiled the country in yet another civil war. At home, the Adriatic Trading Company, in whom much of the political establishment held shares, claimed that the Tunisian navy were constantly harassing their peaceful shipping, with the sinking of the Acropolis in November 1859 leading to open demands for war. One group, called the ‘colonial league’ gained popular support across the nation – to them, such a colonial war was easy pickings, high reward and diplomatically stable given the French condition, and with the Primary season approaching, speculation  grew louder than ever.

1860 Presidential Election
The primaries of 1859 were nothing more than a rubberstamp. All the political dealings having gone on in the months before, many newspapers relegated the primaries well into their inner pages - the political nation had after all divided itself neatly into three competing blocs, with the All-Danubian Conservative Party, now the Federation’s sole party to have fought in all three elections, fielding Kraus’s Minister of Security, Janos Papp, and the Radical Union fielding the long time President of Bohemia, Gabriel Soukup-Valenta, under the banner of the National Reform Union. Even the usually boisterous liberals had united under one banner for the first time since the heyday of the Slavic and Romanian Liberal Party in the form of Councillor Rodrigo Vertucci and the Federal Democratic Party. All the while, further developments in Tunisia sapped the attention of the electorate. Hard talk in Vienna led to no change whatsoever, with the Adriatic Trading Company complaining that piracy was becoming all the more rampant and impressment of sailors common. As the situation developed without Federal action, two states, San Marco and Croatia, sent formal requests for a charter to expand into Tunisian territory. Even the Adriatic Trading Company began to become more forceful, citing the precedent of the British East India Company. The Company’s Directors made no bones about their intentions, with one being quoted in the Trieste Daily Star as saying, “occupation is inevitable. The question is, by whom?”



Soukup-Valenta: Dancing on the Edge (1860)
The election of 1860 was by no means clear cut. The implosion of the Liberal bloc led by the Federal Democratic Party effectively secured victory for the left, yet wafer thin victories for the Conservative party in Austria and Hungary prevented the whitewash predicted in the pre-election analysis, while the record low turnout took away the clear mandate that such a victory should have brought. Regardless, this first victory by a radical party was historic in itself. Abroad too, historic elections were taking place. In America, the election of President Lincoln seemed to signal the start of a prolonged civil strife, having gained easy victory in every free state of the Union while failing to win even one where slavery was legal. Yet, somehow, Lincoln managed to preserve peace in a miraculous way; state after state brought forward resolutions for secession, only for them to fall a few votes short of enactment. In Prague, particularly, radicals were emboldened by their victory. The city, long famous for its leftist tendencies, became the centre for radical thinkers. Within just two months of the new President’s inauguration, no less than three societies in the city were promoting a new brand of radicalism they called ‘socialism’. Two days after the promised complete deregulation of trade unions was signed into law, Austria’s Councillor Schmidt was in the city to proclaim a new socialist party dedicated to the betterment of the working peoples; he called it the Social Democratic Party. Its pronouncement brought fear across the political spectrum, from the conservatives who abhorred such rabble-rousing action to the President, unprepared for a split in his party so soon into his term. The President had other worries early in his term too. The appointment of his flagship Diplomatic Corps brought about accusations of cronyism and corruption. To many in the press and on the right, the reward of highly-paid, civil service jobs for prominent supporters of Valenta’s campaign was nothing less than an affront to democracy and the meritocratic principles upon which the state was supposed to be built. To the government, it was nothing more than previous governments had done to ensure their policies could be enacted and considerably more legal than some actions of the last decade. To satiate fears, the Minister of Justice, the very same Lukas Schmidt whose political machinations threatened to destroy the Radical Union, announced an independent judge-led inquiry into allegations of corruption since the Federations foundation. Lord Justice Poriski was charged with leading the investigations in conjunction with the Federal and Metropolitan Police, though the results would not be published for another couple of years. The Diplomatic Corps did have a wider affect than just on domestic politics. Their biggest success arguably came in Italy, where Giovanni Arpaio successfully managed to negotiate a treaty change with both Sardinia-Piedmont and Tuscany – in the deal, the relationship became much more like that between the Federal government and the states, with Federal government being given the power to legislate with respect to both of the two countries in return for deeper financial and political assistance and guarantees against Garibaldi’s red shirts. Meanwhile, Salamon Rosza’s posting to Britain convinced Westminster that the Federation was keen to promote trade, in what became a powerful message when combined with Valenta’s actions against the Tunisian pirates and his three-fifths cut in the overall tariff rate. Such was British enamour with this turn of events that a diplomatic cable received on the President’s desk in March 1860 asked for an alliance between the two nations. That said, the Diplomatic Corps did have one major failure, and it was one that played straight into the hands of those who argued politicians should not start replacing the professional and well established, Overseas and Diplomatic Service, which was part of the Foreign Ministry rather than accountable to the President’s Private Office. Such was French anger at the repeated faux pas committed by Pavel Pištora in his time in Paris, in particular his obstinacy in refusing French domination over Tunisia, that the Treaty of Milan was not renewed as it was scheduled to in the April of 1860. The logic goes that the ODS would have been less confrontational in its approach and that the alliance could have been salvaged if it weren’t for mistakes made by ill-experienced politicians. In Tunisia itself, the atmosphere was no less icy. An attempt by reactionaries in the state to seize power by force was thwarted in February, but this small victory for the Bey failed to restore order in any meaningful sense. Pirate attacks continued to mount throughout the spring and into the summer, while the Red Star Fleet became an ever more common presence in Tunisian waters. By March, the Adriatic Trading Company had bought, embezzled or captured 15 costal cities, primarily focussed around the northern port of Bizerte and the southern one of Gabes. In total, the company had 30,000 mostly German mercenaries in the country by mid-May when the unthinkable happened; while patrolling off the Maltese coast, the DFS Metternich, the Federal flagship, was lost to Davey Jones’s locker at the hands of the pirates. The issue could no longer be ignored and with no official word from the President in the morning papers, speculation mounted and ATC stock soared.



Soukup-Valenta: Into Africa (1860)
The siege of Tunis set the tone for the months that followed it. The city fell, but only after six weeks of Federal troops staring at the high walls. A combination of administrative and logistical errors meant that the artillery requested didn’t arrive in time to be of any use. Poor intelligence left commanders substantially overestimating the strength of the force beyond the gates, such that a direct assault was never attempted even though the Tunisians were at a clear disadvantage. Even once the siege was over, the results were distinctly underwhelming, with no Bey, no government and no real gain to be had. Over the next six months, Federal troops slowly gained ground, pushing back an elusive enemy from the coast into the desert. Where set piece battles could be claimed, such at Gafsa in October 1860, the Federal troops showed their great superiority. Yet as the war went on and the fighting left the leafy tidewater, more often then not the enemy would, in the words of one unknown soldier, “melt into the desert sands”. Federal troops were still making territorial gains throughout, with almost the entire coast under the Federation’s control by the start of the new year, yet attrition levels to both the elements and the guerrilla tactics the soldiers faced started to mount. Meanwhile, legal proceeds began in earnest against the Adriatic Trading Company in Vienna. Try as it might, Federal prosecutors were unable to actually pin anything on most of the leading figures in the ATC. For those few who were found guilty, it was only of minor cases of fraud which were generally unconnected with the Tunisian affair. The Supreme Court simply couldn’t find the legal basis for the illegality of actions performed in other countries. That is not to say that the ATC was on the way to recovery, because the Company was slowly imploding. Within two hours of the declaration of war on Tunisia, the Company was taken off the stock market. The all remaining shares were bought by the company for, on average, 12% of their original price. Just two weeks later, most of the Company’s ships were sold off to various private companies across the Adriatic. The very survival of what had become a shell of its former glory rested on retaining some influence in Tunisia – in an attempt to stop what seemed inevitable, the Company shovelled more and more money into the Bey and the Tunisian resistance. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the whole affair was the impact it had on the economy. Though the financial crisis was not as bad as was first expected, the growth of the Kraus administration vanished. Companies stopped hiring new staff and factories ceased to expand. It took the stock market in Vienna five months to recover from the downward spiral of decay that the ATC represented. Though it caused panic, the recession never came and, save for an unlucky few, most households were unaffected. Unemployment rose slightly, but an increase in government subsidies offset this trend, as did renewed investment into infrastructure. For the government, however, the financial picture was less rosy; a toxic mixture of planned tax cuts, shortfalls in revenue, increased domestic spending and fighting a war took their toll on the Federal exchequer. The Federal debt was reintroduced in July to allow the government to borrow the money it needed – deficits of several hundred pounds daily left a fairly hefty (and ever growing) debt on the shoulders of the Treasury. To many it seemed that the Government was falling apart from within, not least the prominent Croatian Councillor, Janos Papp, who is reported to have said, “This war is a useless expense to assert the already faltering authority of this government, not even a year after its election.” Overseas, the slave-owning, primarily southern Confederate States of America declared their independence from the Free states of the Union, following the lead of Virginia. President Lincoln officially recognised the rebellion in a speech to Congress on the 29th December 1860, where he famously quoted from the Gospel of Saint Mark, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” In the earlier words of King George III about the last time the Americans had a civil war, “blows must decide.”



Soukup-Valenta: Lawyers, Legacies and L-Shapes (1861)
Vienna was certainly busy in the first few months of 1861. The Hofburg was a hive of controversy with the question of the legality of monarchies continuing to rear its head, but 1861 also marked a coming of age of one institution within the palace formerly thought of as a mere formality. The select committees had, since the Republic’s inception in 1848, scrutinised and offered amendments to the legislation passing through the Hofburg, but, on 28th June 1861, the Select Committee for Political Reform blocked a bill that had the approval of both the Assembly and the Council. This historic first was reaffirmed by the courts in spite of legal challenges by the government. According to the Committee, the Referendum Requirements Act was impractical to institute and dangerous if it did, and that was that; the bill got no further. The courts, meanwhile, were dealing with a row that emerged from Tunisia over the appointment of Matthias von Marius-Parsifal, a socialist councillor for the small state of Carnolia, as Military Governor of the occupied territories. Famed for its beaches, despite having just 27 miles of coastline of which the vast majority is mountainous and rocky, the state has been far more successful in keeping its image in spite of circumstances than the man who was quickly ratted and evicted from his post. Ironically, the league of trading companies that united against him failed in their primary aim of removing the barriers to trade he instituted, with the Chief of the General Staff electing not to revoke them when he took over the reigns of Tunisian government. Political strife in Vienna over what would become the Beylik and Protectorate of the Tunisian Emirate, a quasi-colony ostensibly under the rule of a native Bey but in reality under the control of a federally appointed Governor, contrasted with the success gained by the Naval Guard in subduing those areas of the nation still resisting Federal control. Helped by the termination of ATC funding to the Tunisian forces as the company sought to prevent nationalisation at all costs, victory can largely be attributed to a series of top-down reforms originating from Symon Revenjo which promoted the use of the irregular style employed by the enemy forces. In the end, it took until August for the war to be officially declared over, and, despite fears that the Tunisians would continue to resist, the region remained largely calm. The 21st of August also marked the official end of the Adriatic Trading Company. Amid a growing government debt, £100,000 was spent compensating the remaining investors for their losses; the ATC simply didn’t own the assets that the Government planned to sell on nationalisation. However, the one thing it did have left made the purchase a bargain. The Suez Canal, constructed by the company and opened just weeks before, made Danubian waters in the Mediterranean the prime route to the East and the Federal Government had got it for just £100,000. For the ATC, it also provided a silver lining – the canal remains to this day a lasting legacy of the Company, with even the monolithic Adriatic House in Vienna not surviving even a year longer than its constructor. It was a splendid last hurrah and a fitting end to a Company that defined the politics of its day.

The Canal required groundbreaking construction techniques, yet somehow its existence remained unknown to most Europeans until it was opened with much fanfare in 1861.

Meanwhile in America, neither side of the conflict could score a conclusive blow to take the upper hand. As the fighting wore on, focused on a the L-shaped area that makes up Virginia, Kentucky and the Mississippi valley, the Union pressed its initial advantage in terms of population and naval might to increase the pressure on Richmond, scoring victories at Huntington, West Virginia, Lexington, Kentucky, and Malden, Missouri, as well as on the Pacific coast and Idaho; yet the success gained by Confederate forces in  mitigating Union territorial gains and even liberating some areas, like Louisiana which had fallen into the Union’s hands, meant that the war was far from over. To many in Richmond, the military size of affairs was secondary to the diplomatic struggle – it was argued that recognition by the Great Powers of Europe for the new state would make it impossible for the Union to win the political struggle that formed the basis of the civil war. While such recognition was roundly rejected in Vienna, epitomised through the deportation to New York of the Confederacy’s Ambassador, Britain and France continued to sit on the fence and the war hung in the balance.



Soukup-Valenta: Out of the Frying Pan (1861-1862)
In America, the civil war raged on, with the Union continuing to retain the upper hand. For President Valenta, this war would remain “an all-American affair” as long as it was within his power to keep Britain and France from intervening. Calls for a peace conference from his own back-benchers were rebuffed by the President, unwilling as he was to recognise the Confederacy in the way such a meeting would have required; yet, his own Vice-President was dispatched with all haste to Paris and London in an effort to present a unified European front – initial responses to this idea were positive, yet only time would tell if it would be enough to stop Europe from sticking its collective noses into the American’s war. Domestically, little of note occurred over the period. The Treasury managed to decrease the Federal debt by around a fifth and Congress, as ever, was busy with inane arguments. The only truly momentous occasion came on 28th August 1862. Two days before the one year deadline described in the act that created it, the Referendum on Federal Monarchies was finally held. In spite of a heavy police presence, violence was rife. Riots broke out in cities as disparate as Breslau and Bucharest as tensions ran high. Three states (Silesia, Crete and San Marco) were placed under martial law as the conflict continued to mount throughout the weeks proceeding the vote and the National Guard was called out in far more. Vienna saw arguably the worst of the violence, being split between the traditionally conservative Austrians and the left-leaning urbanites and bureaucrats; the estimated cost in the city alone, with taking account for fatalities, is somewhere in the region of £50,000, or 5/6 of the sum Federal debt. Nationally, the Government estimated that 1,200 lost their lives in the biggest wave of coordinated action since 1848; historians today put the figure far higher. Even the result was controversial; official figures from the Federal Electoral Commission put turnout at 63% with 74% in favour of making monarchies illegal. However, in some states, most notably Transylvania and Carniola, turnout hardly reached 30%; some states, such as Silesia, were against the proposal by 5 to 1. Compounding all this were accusations made by both sides of vote rigging, which the FEC refused to investigate given the chaos that surrounded the day. The vote came before Congress with the clock ticking to accept the result of the referendum or face fresh elections; it was nothing if not controversial. Less than three weeks later, with the provinces still not truly calm, a messenger arrived from the Egyptian Embassy stating that the Kingdom of Spain had declared war upon the state, which had been under Federal protection since the Treaty of Trieste and the transfer of Crete. The Spanish Embassy confirmed the situation, stating that they were only taking this action to restore rightfully Ottoman territory. Rumour had it in Vienna that this was a last ditch attempt by a failing Spanish regime to restore its international prestige. The only question that remained was, would the Federation be going to war again, having only been at peace for a year?



Soukup-Valenta: At What Cost?... (1862-1863)
Following the narrow defeat of the referendum in the Hofburg palace, apocalyptic visions of the descent into anarchy abounded. The reality couldn’t have been further from the truth; the average Transylvanian or Galician really didn’t have the depth of feeling to cause trouble. Indeed, the talk of revolution and secession in the towns of Silesia disappeared overnight. That said, the period was hardly tranquil; President Valenta attempted to prevent the dissolution of Congress through executive action, but the Supreme Court dismissed this action as unconstitutional. Historians have long debated if the dissolution of Congress would have been harmful to the country, but, perhaps fortunately, it never came. The Danubian Revolutionary Brigades, a Republican militia formed during the Kremvera’s civil war and later having seen action in the fields of Bavaria, took action into its own hands; having found too little support in the regions to cause chaos nationally, the group went into what seemed like hibernation but was actually a dormant state of planning and preparation. Suddenly, on 26th February 1863, with no warning, the DRB marched on Bratislava with some 10,000 of its most radicalised supporters. Within a week, their number had more than quintupled. Then, they marched on Vienna. The Republican National Guard did make an attempt to keep back the rebels at Hainburg an der Donau on the Austrian border, but a combination of poor leadership and overconfidence lead to a humiliating defeat. All that was left was to organise a full scale retreat from the city. The institutions of Government were transferred south to the city of Sopron, just inside Hungary, where the Supreme Court suspended the snap Congressional elections until when they were scheduled to occur anyway – in a sense, the DRB had achieved a stability that had eluded even the President. On the other hand, they had seized the capital by force, which is hardly conducive to a stable democracy. In Crete, Federal troops had far more success. The Danubian Expeditionary Force, stationed in Albania at the time of the uprising, was scrambled to the island. They arrived on October 1st, the same day, incidentally, as the states of San Marco and Lombardia officially merged to from Cisalpina. By this point, Metaxas had total control of the island. His Revolutionary Guard had routed out those who openly opposed him fairly brutally; public hangings were not uncommon. As soon as the DEF landed in Chania it became clear Metaxas had failed. The Federal troops were greeted as liberators by many, even some who had been ardent supporters of the Venetian Dukes. The same was true in every town the DEF entered; Kalyves, Vamos, Lappa, Rethimnon, Perama. Only in the outskirts of Heraklion did the atmosphere change. Metaxas was a native of the city and almost every member of his Government came from the city, not to mention the money he had lavished on the city, at the expense of the rest of the island. It was quickly decided that, with naval support unavailable, there was no choice but to storm the city walls. The ensuing battle was gory, to say the least, resulting in the death of some 2,000 Federal troops and most of the Revolutionary Guard. Metaxas was eventually captured in the city’s Ducal Palace and handed over to the Republican authorities. Meanwhile, the Federation was actually officially at war facing more than just some organised rebels. The Navy was quickly deployed to cancel out any threat from the Spanish ships. The first few engagements actually went fairly badly, because Tuscan and Sardinian ships were set upon by Spanish vessels before the Federal Fleets had even passed Sicily. Only the timely arrival of the Adriatic Protection Fleet averted the end of Tuscan and Sardinian support through the sinking of their fleet. Twin victories at Sassari and Toulon vindicated the expense of the new ships with their first taste of battle. By the end of 1862, not a single port on the Spanish mainland was operational, such as the dominance of the Federal ships and the efficacy of the ensuing blockade. The rest of Phase 1 on General Revenjo’s master plan for the war was the invasion of the small areas of Spanish Europe outside of Iberia. By April 1863, both the Balearic Isles and Melilla were in Danubian hands with the Canaries being slowly occupied by the Southern Reserve Corps. The plan was taken up even more eagerly by the Sardinians, who sent a small detachment to the Philippines. The biggest event of war actually occurred near the city of Nice in the spring of 1863. 95,000 Spaniards marched over the Pyrenees and the south of France, where they met the two Federal armies and all the troops the Sardinians could muster, totalling just under 92,000 men. The battle for the city lasted from 16th January, when the Federal Fourth Army first engaged the Spanish Sixth Army, until 20th March when, at the cost of some 54,000 men, the Federal forces were proved victorious as the Spanish armies fled. The losses were terrible, but with 84,000 lost on the Spanish side, the calamity was nothing compared to the Iberian national tragedy. In America, the Civil War continued to progress with the Union occupying ever more of the South. Valenta schemes within Europe seemed to be working. With this in mind he sent observers on behalf of the Federation to investigate reports of new weapons. The biggest innovation they reported during the first six months of the investigation stole the imagination of the President to such an extent that he ordered 10 of them to be constructed within the Federation as soon as they could be. The Ironclad was the latest revolution in shipbuilding technology and gave the US Navy supremacy all the way from Charlestown to New Orleans over the (much smaller) Confederate Navy.



Soukup-Valenta: Royally Screwed (1863)
1863 had started badly for the Federation. Vienna was in the hands of the Danubian Revolutionary Brigades, many of the military leadership, including Minister of War, Andrei Popa, and Chief of the General Staff, Symon Revenjo, in league with the rebels and even many Congressmen refusing to condemn the rebels, instead preferring negotiations. That is what President Valenta delivered, and as they got underway, moderation won out, and those who had initially endorsed using violence tried to scramble back to where they had been. In a final gambit to get back in with the Federation, Revenjo ordered what guns he had to fire upon Vienna. It was a stupid move, outnumbered as he was; most of the armies he had ordered to converge on Vienna were hardly leaving their quarterings. Regardless, one short barrage was enough to get him acquitted in a court of law when charged with treason. The damage was minimal to the city and his troops, who retreated as soon as the DRB attempted to return fire, but not perhaps for his reputation; though he was restored to command in Spain, many in Vienna continued to view his motives with suspicion. Popa did not get off so lightly; he was eventually convicted for his responsibility in the secession of Romania and jailed for the rest of his life. In the end, the vast majority of the DRB’s demands were passed over, yet the President did offer three things: a general amnesty for all rebels, with their leader Lukas Schmidt being held responsible for all crimes, the foundation of a committee to reform the Electoral College and the abolition of all monarchies within the Federation. Eric Schmidt was found guilty of sufficient crimes to imprison him for three hundred years and hang him fifteen times. His moral defence, that his crimes were legitimised by the spirit of the Revolution that had brought the Federation into being, continues to be studied by linguists, historians and lawyers alike; the courts ruling, that rebellion against the legitimate government and the law was not sufficient excuse for committing such crimes is still seen by many as the real end of the Danubian Revolution. Congress, however, did not accept the President’s right to negotiate such sweeping change. In the Declaratory Act, Congress nearly unanimously affirmed the supremacy of Congress over the Presidency. A Supreme Court challenge on behalf of the Schönbrunn failed to repeal the act, but did confirm the right of the President to act through executive order. As such, only the constitutional change barring monarchies was blocked. In the Hofburg, the debate dragged on and on, but it became unclear if either world-view would prevail. One man, the newly appointed Minister of War, Wojciech Gomułka, attempted to carry the treaty with force. Though some military elements did pledge support, he had totally misjudged the mood in Vienna – tired of the constant conflict, the majority had no desire for more war. His coup never took off, and he ended it within two days of its declaration; his suicide from within the chambers of the Hofburg itself deeply shocked the political nation, but the President seemed unphased as he declared Imre Than his third Minister of War in less than a month. Even so, the issue remained unresolved; as the clock ticked down on the 4th Congress, no agreement could be found. Meanwhile, the long predicted protests started to materialise. In Vienna, people angered at the chaos brought by the DRB took to the streets as pro-choice. These men were not pro-monarchies per se, but they did oppose intervention by the Government on these issues. Outside the city, the DRB had a completely different effect, galvanising those who supported abolition, in proof that their voice could achieve something. Though there were copycat violent groups formed, mostly in more traditionally radical areas like Slovakia and Bohemia, the majority of protests remained peaceful. Indeed, the biggest night of violence seen over these months of discontent was seen in Vienna, as the pro- and anti- monarchy protestors met. Within the space of two hours, a hundred and fifty people are estimated to have died as isolated incidents in the streets turned into all out rioting. Order was only restored when the Republican National Guard left its barracks. The city was getting quite a reputation for violence. In Spain, by contrast, the news was extremely positive. The invasion of Valencia, though admittedly an inheritance from his predecessor, was relentlessly pursued by Minister Than to great success. At losses considerably lower than had been seen in Nice, the Spanish army was more or less destroyed and the Spanish mainland put under considerable threat.

Revenjo even managed to make up for his prior mistakes with a crushing victory over Spanish forces trying to force the 1st Southern Army back into the sea. The navy, meanwhile, scored victory after victory; the new Ironclad ships proved themselves capable in open combat, the first Ironclads under Danubian flags had experienced. By October, Spain was forced to the negotiating table, ceding the city of Melilla to the Federation. Victory had been achieved and, most importantly, Federal interests in Egypt had been protected. Concerns that the Federation was open to attack from Reactionary forces were further satiated as Prussia found itself embroiled once more in war with France over the latter’s claims on Alsace-Lorraine, though the state of the Federal treasury certainly didn’t make for pleasant reading for the radicals as the primary season approached once again.

Soukup-Valenta: Déjà vu? (1864-1865)
The election of 1864 was remarkable in many ways. To give just a few examples, the presence of a Liberal on every electoral ticket or the complete failure of the Liberal leadership to commit to a coalition even when it became clear that there simply was insufficient support for the outmanoeuvred FDP and there was the possibility of union with both of the other candidates. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect, though, was the outcome, which saw Gabriel Soukup-Valenta become the first President to gain re-election. Often attributed to the strength of the Radical Union on a local level and the loyal following in the industrial cities of the Carpathians, the President overcame fiscal woes and personal attacks to swear the Oath of Office for a second time at the High Altar of St Stephen’s Cathederal. Being a Catholic Cathedral, St Stephen’s was a controversial choice for the inaugurations of a supposedly secular Presidency. The venue was only selected as the permanent site of inauguration prior to Codrinaru’s ascension after a clause was implemented, but which was never used, allowing the oaths to be taken at Metternich’s tomb instead. His victory was by no means assured, however, with his lead both in terms of popular vote and Electoral College seats eroded by his opponents. Concurrently, the state of Carniola conducted a vote to determine its future. Emboldened by the unification of the Danubian-Italian states, pan-Slavic nationalists, of the sort not seen since the heyday of the Slavic and Romanian Liberal Party, forced a motion for the integration of the small state into Croatia onto the ballot. The result was uncompromising; 89% supported this new Illyrian construct. Fears of Austro-Hungarian dominance, fostered during the state’s rule by the tiny German minority and the internal conflicts of the Federation’s early years, made the Slovenes reach out to their Slavic neighbours for support. It was only a few months later that accusations of a massive Russian funding campaign emerged. No conclusive proof ever materialised, but the circumstantial evidence suggested Russian businesses in the region were merely covers for a wider operation. A small number of the papers were outraged, becoming increasingly xenophobic and anti-Russian. The more sensible ones urged caution, arguing that wild accusations would only harm relations with Russian and other powers alike. The new government’s first actions were aimed at addressing the yawning deficit. A raft of legislation was forced through Congress expanding the Treasury’s powers to levy taxes, seeing tax rates increase for the first time in a decade. In addition, the Finance Minister, Crepko Obradovic, published his “peace-time budget”, a document slashing capital expenditure and reducing the military budget slightly, on the back of a commitment to the retention of peace. Councillor Than, the FDP candidate for the Presidency, was quoted as saying, “I should sue that thief for plagiarism”, referring no doubt to the similarity between his own platform and the administration’s fiscal actions, though he later denied the statement and neither party came off particularly well from the debacle. Initially all seemed well, but the cracks in the plan began to emerge as the figures rolled in over the coming months. State after state reported increased unemployment and industrial stagnation. For a country whose factories were primarily tuned to heavy industry and the armed forces, this austerity brought with it suffering. The fact that the populace were still largely employed by agricultural activities averted chaos, yet it spelled trouble for Obradovic and Valenta’s grand plan. Their policy of intervention may have saved the country from greater troubles, but it meant that 10% of the deficit still remained: by March that year, subsidies to industry had risen almost fivefold, the majority of which was accounted for in a small number of artillery and small arms factories and canneries in Slovakia, Silesia and Bohemia. It must be stressed that this phenomenon was acute to these heavy industries, showing clear correlation with government spending; capitalists in states like Austria were happily setting up more consumer-focused plants dealing in materials like glass even as the bust deepened in the North. As the crisis deepened, Valenta’s government took further action, but much of the press simply mocked what was labelled as “Emergency Inaction” - minimal changes, like a small increase in the taxes of the richest third and the sale of 10 wind-powered capital ships to Brazil, were made to a scheme that few outside the administration would actually support and even government agencies were happy to openly attack. As the economic situation continued to deteriorate, the rest of Germany seemed to be following the Federation down the plug hole. In Bavaria, Pan-German nationalists role up, and though defeated, marked the start of an era in which such nationalists were happy to fight against the Great Powers of Europe, and in the back of the everyone’s mind was the knowledge that sooner or later these nationalists would strike in the north, where war with the French had just left the Prussian Eagle, battered and bruised, running home as fast as its wings would carry it. Little over five years had passed since the Prussian state had annexed the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine when they were forced at the Peace of Antwerp on 1st July to hand it back. This peace might have heralded humiliation for the Prussians, but for their Southern neighbour it was a more joyous affair than could be anticipated – for Valenta, the military men of France did more than the Danube’s politicians ever could. Peace in Europe meant prosperity and, though those heavy industries struggled and continued to rely on the state, tax receipts and duty payments went up just as spending decreased thanks to projects like the new Ironclads that would form the Blue Star Fleet being completed on budget and ahead of schedule. By mid-September, the Government made its first repayment of £10,000 on the £183,000 accumulated and hope returned to the nation. Then two events broke the spell of good fortune. The first was the Wallachian Integration Bill; an act aimed at the total annexation of the Duchy of Wallachia, which had been legally tied to the Federation since the end of the Balkan and Levant War. The bill, proposed by Councillor Drăculeşti of Romania, was intentionally incendiary, declaring, “For too long the petty kingdom of Wallachia has put down the natives Vlachs under Wallachian jackboot”. In Vienna it achieved widespread contempt – to some it was a breach of an international treaty, to others an affront to the principles of democracy and to others a vehicle for Romanian domination. The irony here did not go unnoticed in the press. Not so long ago Transylvanians had lived in fear of their Hungarian ‘oppressors’, now the aggressors were most definitely the Romanians. For historians, the watershed moment of this change is best illustrated by the state’s changing name; the former symbolising to its people the past’s subjugation and the other the hope for expansion. Abroad, it was received with a cold silence, save for in two nations. In Bucharest, the Wallachian capital, the reply came as a stern no; not in a million years. This response is largely seen as the death of the Romanian Unification Movement, which had held protests across the state for years, but the more important answer came from Istanbul, where the Sultan, aggrieved by his loss of the Duchy not long before, issued a hands-off warning. Had the Ottomans not been scheming in other areas, it is possible war might have been averted, but events on the Nile conspired to bring war upon the Danube. Ottoman officials had slowly been building power within Egypt under the noses of the Danubian administrators, under the pretext of aiding development but actually supporting an isolationist policy that would eradicate Western influences, culminating on the Egyptian Embassy Crisis of January 1855. Egyptian troops attempted to enforce an eviction notice sent to an unsuspecting President in Vienna. For two days the siege lasted, but, with no orders from above due to poor communications, the Ambassador was forced to surrender. His final act of defiance sparked what would become known as the War of Egyptian Submission, as he sent the Governor of Suez an order to resist Egyptian forces. This order spiralled into all out war, as the Valenta administration watched on helplessly. First the Ottomans declared their full support for the Egyptian cause, citing the Federations encroachment on their state and the situation in Wallachia. Then, they pulled in their ally, the United Kingdom, a nation beaten by the French with a government heading into an election and desperate to salvage some victory while still angry about the Federation’s failure to support Greece and worried about the implications of a foreign controller of Suez. History was set to repeat itself, as the Federation went to war once more with the Turks and the budget looked sure to spiral out of control again. The question was what action would be taken to ensure a Federal victory overseas against the most powerful naval force in the world, and could the Exchequer survive the trip?



Soukup-Valenta: Once More Unto the Breach (1865)
As January rolled into February, and as the troops were still marching happily to war without the knowledge of what was to come, two momentous events occurred just outside the Federation’s borders. The first was an invasion, as quick as it was unexpected, of the tiny Italian city state of Lucca. Despite being an ally of the Federation, no notification reached the desk of the President until the Belgian King, Leopold I, declared the state officially integrated into his realm. No sources survive explaining the lack of such notification, but various historians have proposed theories from internal rebellion to a pro-Belgian coup to explain the mysterious oversight and even mischief from among the civil service keen to retain the Federation’s alliance with Belgium. The only thing we really know for definite is that the invasion was bloodless, as is testified in numerous contemporary accounts of the city’s surrender, and that it was quickly accepted by the majority of European powers, both as too insignificant to matter and, tentatively, beneficial in a region that had seen much nationalist violence. Meanwhile, a second successive attempt by the Romanians to enforce their hegemony, this time via the ballot box, drove events beyond even the imagination of the infamous Councillor Drăculeşti. Following the example of Tuscany and Piedmont-Sardinia, the Wallachian Prince had embraced the Danubian spirit into which he had been so unwillingly thrust and enacted a series of reforms creating the state’s first ever elected parliament and Prime Minister. The week after there was to be a referendum, earlier than billed under the Romanian legislation but brought forwards under the directive of the Interior Ministry that this issue should not be left to fester. There is a saying nowadays that a week is a long time in politics, but never has this proved more the case than in that short week in February. On the first Sunday, the elections were held, inconclusive in their nature leaving the broad range of parties frantically trying to form coalitions. Monday and Tuesday passed and still the Prince had not appointed a Prime Minister, with his preferred parties each in turn failing to amass the required majority. In the Royal Palace, the situation became ever more fraught until, under pressure from his advisors and almost certainly from elements within Romania too, the Prince appointed Radu Banciu, a well-known Liberal activist and a personal enemy of the Prince. Their relationship was perceived as so fraught that, the following day, the Ministry of Security, again most likely under Romanian pressure, was forced to guarantee the referendum and sanction the use of the Romanian militia to ensure order, albeit with the oversight of Federal officials. No-one was more pleased by this than Councillor Drăculeşti himself, declaring in a private letter that “This will allow us to apply the necessary pressure with ease. Those Federal pansies don’t have eyes everywhere!” In Bucharest, the mood was less jovial; Banciu called an emergency session of Parliament on the Friday to officially reject the Federation’s right to interfere in Wallachian internal affairs. By noon on the Saturday, with Parliament still in session, Banciu had been given almost complete dictatorial powers. Within two hours, and with the full support of the (fiercely nationalistic) Army, he had abolished both the Monarchy and the Parliament which had given him power, executed the Prince, declared himself President and unilaterally annulled all treaties the Wallachian state had with the Federation. By Sunday, the coup was complete and both Romania and Vienna were powerless to act. The referendum was no more. Internally, the Federation was gearing up for war. Along the corridors of power, one of the fiercest debates was over the wartime budget. The questions were simple: how far should the Government’s budgetary targets stand in the way of the war effort and how much far could they tax the populace? The latter, to those with any say over the budget, was simple; a long, long way. By mid-march, when the war really got underway, the highest tax payers were subject to rates as high as 66% and even the lowest were supposed to contribute well over half of their income to the state, leaving little money in the pockets of investors and seeing the rate of growth slow in a more uniform manner than the year before; yet there were certainly pockets of growth, with the Slovak steel industries being a prime example. Rejuvenated by greater military spending necessitated by the war, the factories of the region went from sucking up hundreds of pounds everyday to contributing to the economy. Similar revivals were underway in other states afflicted by the recession of ’64 even though the lack of investment still bit hard in these areas, with no new constructions and factories in need of expansion but lacking the capital to do so. The real debate emerged over what sort of provisions should be made in the governments spending plans to account for the war they found themselves in. To many there was only one clear course of action – the Finance Minister, Crepko Obradovic, and keeper of the keys to the Treasury, was ironically one of the most ardent supporter of a ‘war at all costs’ approach. The President, however, won the day, arguing that the nation was now “fighting a war on two fronts; one with guns and one with gold.” The underlying logic was certainly gamble on the strength of the enemy, because it would risk leaving the soldiers undersupplied and the regiments undermanned, but the administration argued that fighting the strongest economic power in the world meant that the exchequer would have to sustained for the long term; controlling the debt burden remained the government’s focus, therefore, even as war came to the Danube. This constancy did ensure that the Treasury was still typically earning money over the course of the war, and a small amount of the debt was paid off over that first year, but ultimately the success of the policy would not become clear until the war had been concluded and the result settled. The war can largely be divided into three theatres, though the last of these was by and large the most important; at sea, in Egypt and in the Balkans. First blood came at sea as the small British contingents in the Mediterranean were slowly picked off, before a largely unchallenged circumference was established in the Red Sea and off Gibraltar. The only serious attempt by the Royal Navy, in late June, saw nigh on 80 ships face off against each other but only one actually sunk. Indeed, the fact this was the only real effort made by the British to involve themselves in the first year of the war largely explains the success of the ‘Spiros Plan’ (as it was rather egotistically christened by its creator). In Egypt, the Federal forces swiftly outnumbered the few Egyptians who were trying to take the canal, recording a sweeping victory in the war’s first engagement on land. As the year went on, victory after victory was secured, at Manusra, Dumyat and under the shade of the Great Pyramid, leaving Egyptian forces few and far between. By December, the troops had captured Sinai in the east and the near side of the Nile Delta, starting the sieges of both Cairo and Alexandria in the late stages of the year. Victory seemed assured in the deserts; yet, with the rebellious government reportedly in Istanbul and their support persistent, the fight was certainly not up. The focus for the year was instead along the Federation’s southern border. The Minister of War, the aforementioned Aetios Spiros, was adamant that victory would come not through a mad dash for the Straights, as the previous war with the Turks could be seen, but through the mantra of Aesop’s Tortoise; “slow and steady wins the race.” The progress made by Danubian forces over the course of 1865 was certainly slow – the first land battle in Europe, a rather inconclusive victory for a numerically superior 1st Army at Pristina was only fought in late April – a full three months after war was declared. Federal troops were slowly capturing towns and cities, but the Federation struggled in open battle. To his credit, Artur Georgescu, the Chief of the General Staff and General of the 1st Army, was never forced into retreat, but often his efforts were worthy of Pyrrhus of Epirus. At the Second Battle of Pristina, for example, Georgescu managed to lose twice as many men as an Ottoman force that numbered less than half that of the armies under his direct command. This sort of failure to capitalise on the advantages at their command prevented the Generals of the day from carrying through Sprios’s plan for steady progress. In its place comes a very patchy picture indeed of the Balkan front; though advances were made, they were particularly strong in the south and west, encompassing by the end of the year Ottoman Montenegro, Southern Serbia, and Macedonia, with Federal forces strong and largely unopposed in their occupation of Ottoman Greece. This strength came both from fortune, in that Ottoman resources were more focussed on the East of the front as the Federal forces continued to advance, and from some excellent generalling on the part of men like Ernst von Kirbach, who managed to repulse a larger, well-defended Ottoman force in Bitola, and then repel Turkish troops in southern Albania without any drastic casualties. It must be remembered that for the Danubian populace at the time, this entire war was fairly light given the memories of the slaughter in Nice just a few years previously; however, the performance of some of the generals in preventing casualties where they were not needed leaves much to be desired for the modern historian. The Eastern half of the front, however, showed just why Sprios’s plan for steady progress wasn’t working entirely as was desired. There were some great victories, such as the Sardinian-led battle at Stara-Zafora  where almost half of the largest Ottoman force was destroyed for just 8,500 men, and a great deal of progress, certainly in the Spring and Summer of 1865 - Stara-Zafora  was deep inside Ottoman territory. Yet the momentum could not be conserved. Victories were often wasted as Ottoman forces were allowed to retreat (A belated memo from the Chief of the General Staff confirmed the prerogative of the armies to pursue a retreating enemy, but the notification came too late for many and was often ignored in favour of the Minister of War’s favourite slogan. The victory at Stara-Zafora came off the back of a successful defence of the city of Sofia, but Arif Pasha’s Turkish force was only followed after the Sardinians elected to ignore their ally’s advice and attack anyway: Gavril Dunăren and the 2nd Army had little choice but to follow), while defeats were not uncommon and disaster was often only averted by tiny margins – the attack of Edvard Masaryk’s 3rd Army on a smaller Turkish force at Silistre, just South of Wallachia, in December was only saved by the timely arrival of some South German allies; even then, the allied armies as a whole lost some 24,000 men and Masaryk was forced to combine with other forces in the region because the 3rd Army was crippled. Indeed, after some 9 months of good progress in the West, the Turkish forces were certainly tuning the tide, removing the occupying forces from areas of the Black sea coast and winning numerous battles. As the New Year dawned, two questions were left; could the Turks sustain a defence of Ottoman Europe? And when would the British make their mark?

Soukup-Valenta: Strength at the Straits (1866)
The first year of this war had been successful, but by no means an unqualified one. Indeed, Minister Spiros found himself under fire from some quarters for the supposedly unnecessarily high casualty figures; in the words of the Chief of the General Staff, who certainly was not one to mince words, “The problem is most certainly the losses we are taking against a technologically and numerically inferior foe.” In the barrage, the Minister did make certain concessions, leaving the comfort of Vienna for the new forward command base at Skopje in occupied Macedonia and granting further freedoms to Generals to pursue retreating enemy forces. He also removed the only remaining army within Federal territory, the Rebulican National Guard, such that it could lead a newly mandated push for Istanbul and the Straits in what was termed as an effort to “to pick up the pace”. In combination, these changes proved supremely effective at consolidating territorial gains in Europe; over the next four months, victory was achieved in all 6 major engagements, both within Federal borders, as the First Army proved in eradicating a Turkish incursion into Bosnia, and without, as the much depleted 2nd and 3rd Armies held off an Ottoman force some 3 times their size in the year’s opening days at Shumen, though admittedly with considerably higher losses, and the Republican National Guard, assisted ably by both the Army of Germany and the Naval Guard, stormed to victory in a string of battles at Varna, Stara Zaroga and Erdine. This last battle in particular has been seen since as a vindication for the changes the Chief of the General Staff argued so vociferously in favour of – by sunset on 4th April, all eleven thousand Ottoman troops in the city had been killed or had surrendered in the culmination of nigh on two months of constant hounding by Federal forces. Yet, the Minister never truly abandoned his master plan, in a sense creating a Plan A (mark 2) rather than any sort of Plan B; for Sprios, his policy of ‘slow and steady’ had always been the right one; whether he could continue to say “I do not believe that it is because of my strategy” for much longer would only become clear with time. Surely the key area for Sprios was in this regard the war at sea. That the Mediterranean was being held “against any expectations“, to quote Georgescu once more, cannot be interpreted as any sort of contemporary vote of confidence in the Admiralty or their ships; yet the blockade of Gibraltar is regarded by many historians as the most vital activity of the war, at least in its early stages when the Turks could still put up a good fight, simply because it prevented the British from really participating in any meaningful way. It is therefore with great surprise that news of repeated victory by the chronically underestimated Federal Navy was received in Vienna as the Royal Navy was repulsed over and over from the Straits of Gibraltar. By the end of August, seven ships bearing the prefix HMS were sitting at the bottom of the sea between Cape Trafalgar and Cape Spartel as the result of three engagements. The Federal Navy maintained its record of no ships sunk whatsoever. On the other side of the Med, meanwhile, a curious war was bringing unexpected rewards for an otherwise engaged Admiralty. The Kingdom of the Two Scillies, the only real independent power remaining in the Italian Peninsular, had declared war upon Egypt the previous year for the transfer of areas of Syria to the Ottoman Empire. The strange thing about the war was that the Ottomans upheld their Egyptian alliance against their own material gain, presumably keen not to lose their only regional ally. By mid-1866, this had translated into a Sicilian control of the Straits, which meant that Federal forces need not be diverted from one Strait to the other to prevent a attack on Europe from Anatolia. Despite the naval supremacy in the Mediterranean, not one attack was made by Federal forces outside of Europe or Egypt in the year to August; the only notable nation to do so in the Danubian Alliance was Tuscany, who had by this point occupied both Cyprus and tiny Bermuda. In Vienna, meanwhile, the Government’s focus remained firmly on reducing the debt burden, managing to pay off around a third of that remaining in these first 8 months of 1866. Their efforts risked being undermined as the Romanian legislature voted on yet another nationalist bill, this time to direct all income from taxation on property and land through the state administration, thereby threatening the income of the government in its largest state. Denounced as unpatriotic at a time of war, and with President Valenta himself weighing in on what many saw as a firmly state-based issue, it failed at the first reading; yet it proved for many of the Romanians’ ability to cause trouble and further encouraged anti-Romanian thinking on a very local level across the nation. In the capital, peaceful protests were taking hold of the city as the Working Hours Directive further reduced the maximum legal working day to 12 hours in line with existing Federal legislation. These protests were not, as one might assume, from the conservative right for whom this law was an affront to the free market economy for which many longed, though in the Hofburg there was no end of debate on this issue. Instead, the vast bulk of the protestors were calling for the introduction of unemployment subsidies, irate that working hours were being reduced over reforms that they argued would help the millions affected by the recession and the sluggish recovery. In total, it is estimated that some 1.5 million men took to the streets nationwide over the worst weekend of the protests, or just over 10% of the adult male population. Vienna was also the host of a great display of military might on behalf of the Austrian state government. On 10th May, the entirety of the Austrian Militia marched through the city’s streets. The event, aimed at galvanising support for the war, was hijacked by the President who organised an official reception for the ambassadors of the Great Powers of Europe on the same day. The scale of the reserves at the nation’s disposal at a time of war was greatly prestigious, so perhaps formed part of the logic behind the reception; however, the President’s true motive seems to have been to float the idea of a second Congress of Vienna to resolve the situation in Europe to the other powers. The response was mooted at best; the Prussians, for example, gave only lukewarm support stating they would not partake in any Conference unless the British did also. Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador had, unsurprisingly, declined the offer to attend the parade. The Russian ambassador proved to be the only foreigner to give support for the idea, perhaps sensing an opportunity to limit the Federation’s influence from extending further south. Either way, as May passed into June, any chance of the Foreign Minister’s much fêted ‘Balkan Congress’ actually materialising seemed to lie in tatters. The Army, though, had other plans. Victories at Burgas, Varna and, most of all, the second battle of Shumen ensured an end to Ottoman military plans in Europe. The completion of the Siege of Istanbul at the end of August meant that, for the second time in just over a decade, Federal troops, this time lead by the Republican National Guard, stormed the Topkapi Palace, only to find it once again abandoned. There were even allied armies crossing the Bosporus towards an ever retreating Sultan. In Egypt, Federal troops had spent the year further occupying largely unopposed. The only place where minor setbacks were experienced was Tunisia, where just 3,000 Turks were making good on the Government’s refusal to protect the colonies. All in all, without British support in the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire faced collapse and finally acquiesced to demands for an International Conference, though only if it was held in neutral territory; the Prussians, keen to see their ally extracted from this humiliation offered to host and the British were forced to include themselves for fear of the Federation’s wishes in the region coming true. The stage was set and, as the war raged on in the South, politicians from across the continent headed for the Congress of Berlin.

London’s Burning
As of the Congress of Berlin, the war had been a disaster for Britain both at home and abroad. The notion that ‘Britannia rules the waves’ was starting to wear thin overseas and the Royal Navy, once the pride of a nation, began to lose its air of invincibility. Not since Napoleon had the British faced such a challenge at sea, but, outgunned, outwitted and outmoded, the Royal Navy didn’t seem likely to win a battle at Trafalgar any time soon. Domestically, though, the nation was in far deeper difficulties. In the dying days of Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston’s second and final ministry war had come to Albion. His powers certainly didn’t fade even right up to his death in October 1865. Indeed, having been a key supporter of President Valenta’s push to prevent recognition of the Confederate States of America, a diplomatic effort which has often been linked to the Union victory after the war, it came as a surprise to many in Vienna the ease with which Palmerston turned on the Federation in support of the Ottomans, reaching across the political divide to the Tories to ensure the passage of the declaration of war. Yet there are two very simple political reasons for his actions. The first, born out of sheer conviction, was that the nation’s chief political concern should be the defence of Turkey – for him, and a great many Brits, the Sublime Porte was the last bastion against a Russian dominated Bosporus and the re-establishment of Federal influence in Egypt. The second, and possibly more important, was the political necessity to retain his majority in the House of Commons at a time when the Tories had hegemony in the Lords; though it is not clear exactly whether the war was instrumental in electoral victory, the political nation certainly held great respect for the man who stood up to the aggressive republic and the elections of July 1865 returned an increased Liberal majority in the lower house. On his death, he was accorded a state funeral (only the fourth in the nation’s history for a non-royal) and interned into Westminster Abbey on the insistence of his cabinet and against his personal wishes. His passing was greatly mourned, but by none more so than the Liberal party; in the words of AJP Taylor, “Irresponsible and flippant, he became the first hero of the serious middle-class electorate.” Without him, the Liberal Party found itself divided and chaotic. The man who tried to bridge the gap was John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Palmerston’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and formerly Prime Minister between 1846 and 1852. His second ministry was remarkable purely for the length of time he managed to hang on to power against all the odds, lasting for almost a year. Around him the Liberal Party crumbled and his support waned as the failure of the war became ever more evident. In fact, his government was only pulled down by the revelation that he had actively encouraged attempts by the Ottomans to make a white peace separately in the hope that it would tempt the Federal forces out of the Mediterranean. The Conservative right, led by Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, lambasted this cowardice as attempts to back out of the war. In the short term, Derby got his way, overcoming the Tory’s minority position in the Commons and edging into power in June 1866, pushing the Liberals ever more into the wilderness in the process, but this association between  the Conservative Party and the continuation of the war effort at all costs would come back to haunt the Earl’s third ministry. Beset by increasingly bad health, Derby’s failure to break through at Gibraltar despite increased efforts started a row within the Conservatives he would prove incapable of healing. With the fall of Istanbul at the end of August and the international acceptance of Wolfgang Liberalen’s ‘Balkan Congress’, barely two months after he took office, he tendered his resignation. He left behind a party that could not agree on whether to continue supporting what had become a largely futile war. Some of the hard-liners, such as Derby’s Lord Chancellor, Frederic Thesiger, 1st Baron Chelmsford, attempted to take control of the party and assert Britain’s naval dominance, yet they were thwarted, supposedly by an intervention by the young Queen, who appointed Benjamin Disraeli, Derby’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and a more diplomatic man, to the top job in government. Disraeli started in a perilous position, lacking a majority in the Commons and with Derby’s legacy leaving his party unpopular his actions at the Congress would have to rescue his fortunes, all the time with the nagging itch of Chelmsford on one side and an ever more united Liberal Party under William Ewart Gladstone on the other. His objectives remained just like those of Palmerston and just as British policy always had been (which, as Sir Humphrey Appleby so elegantly phrased in the popular British sitcom ‘Yes, Minister’, can be summarised thus: “Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe”). For Disraeli, the strength of the Ottoman Empire had to be maintained, both as a barrier to Russian and Danubian expansion. Furthermore, the newly independent government in Egypt must be maintained to prevent Federal dominance of the Suez Canal zone, which had proved increasingly useful in the years before the war to facilitate British trade to India. In short, the Prime Minister wished to live up to the title of his party and bring conservatism to European diplomacy.



The Return of the Reactionaries
Spring of 1866 broke in the Venice of the North just as in any other year. Russian diplomats across Europe may have been locked in a state of ever worsening anxiety over the progression of the war waged within Russia’s rightful sphere of influence, but to the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias such minor matters need never apply, and the Russian social calendar continued as planned. This tranquillity wouldn’t last, and unfortunately for Alexander II, it wouldn’t last because of a gun. As he left Peter the Great’s Summer Gardens, Dmitry Karakozov ran forwards and shot at the Tsar, only missing after he was jostled at the last second by Osip Komissarov, a peasant-born hatter's apprentice. Karakozov, for whom all aristocrats ever did was “suck the peasants' blood” (an assertion that was ironic not just because of his noble birth but also due to reforms like the Emancipation of the Serfs which had gained Alexander the epithet ‘The Liberator’) was a 26 year-old man who had been expelled from both Kazan and Moscow State Universities and attempted suicide on at least one occasion. His final note is said to have read, “I have decided to destroy the evil Tsar, and to die for my beloved people”, but it was never read; according to folklore, it was lost in the post! The Karakozov Affair proved largely irrelevant to the course of Russian history, unlike the Reaction borne out of Alexander’s eventual assassination, but it did have one important consequence in terms of Russian diplomacy. With Alexander and his Chief Minister otherwise engaged trying to calm a fraught domestic situation, not to mention trying 36 men on charges related to the attack, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Gorchakov, was given free reign in the appointment of the Russian delegation at the Congress of Berlin, and many historians speculate the Russian attitude might been less hard-line had the events of 4th April not occurred. Gorchakov elected to lead from the front, picking to take along men like Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev, Russian Ambassador to Istanbul, and Dmitry Andreyevich Tolstoy, Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod. Between them they represented the reactionary wing of an already pretty regressive nation. Ignatyev had been working on an unofficial level to undermine the Ottoman grasp on the Balkans since his appointment to the city two years before. Tolstoy, meanwhile, was Orthodox through and through, advocating Pan-Slavism and Russian power within the Balkans. Gorchakov, for his part, was appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shortly after the Russian defeat to the Prusso-Federal forces; he was about as anti-Danube as it is possible to get, engineering such schemes as the ‘alliance’ at the start of Valenta’s first term which was really just a ploy to delay Federal action in the Balkans. To the West, a different series of events was manufacturing another lurch to the right. In Berlin, fresh elections to the Landtag showed just how hollow the revolutionaries’ victory over the old order had been, with the Junker aristocracy ever more coming to dominate the elected body though gerrymandering and sheer money. Fear of Pan-Germanic nationalists, especially in the form of the rebels and mobs that blighted the smaller German states in the wake of the 2nd Franco-Prussian War pushed the expanding middle-classes into the arms of their upper class cousins. More worryingly, defeat at French hands had left the Liberals broken and awakened a revanchistic fervour that empowered those

with the bluest of blood to bring about a revolution of their own, albeit in the form of diminishing the role and franchise of the Landtag. Any resistance, and there was a great deal of strife in the major cities, was greeted with brutality as a nation once held up as a shining light of liberalism descended once more towards autocracy. More than anything the government wanted peace abroad so that the new system could be easily maintained and strengthened; having their strongest ally, Britain, embroiled in an embarrassing war threatened to let their old enemy, France, back in to the equation once more and further endanger any hope of cementing the new old-order’s power. With this in mind, Wilhelm I demanded his new ‘Iron’ Chancellor, the man leading the rise of the right within Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, host the conference that would bring ‘Peace in our time’.

The Best of the Rest (Actually, just ‘The Rest’!)
Since the recapture of Alsace-Lorraine, the French Republic has been on the ascendancy. Domestically, the Democratic Republican Alliance has dominated politics, winning every election since the revolution which overthrew the most recent Bonapartist Emperor, and leads a nation that is stable and prosperous. Abroad, the army is the country’s pride, having brought victory over the Prussians, while the perceived failing strength of the Royal Navy has led to increased funding into the French fleets. The word of the French President would no doubt hold great sway, though Émile Ollivier was more concerned with obstructing the British and keeping the issue of the Balkans open to the detriment of all three Eastern Great Powers such that the Republic could continue to rise unchecked.

Spain was a defeated and disgraced power when she arrived in Berlin, yet her position on the Mediterranean gave her a unique position to punch above her weight. For Madrid, the reclamation of Gibraltar was paramount, and she was willing to concede the rest of the sea in return for those Straits at the edge of Europe. With the trouble the British found themselves in at sea, this demand started to seem enforceable, and the nations of Europe knew it, not least London.

Portugal was not the power it once was either, but as the only power in Western Europe willing to support the British they served perhaps to counteract any Spanish threat. In terms of the Congress though, the sheer distance from the Balkans limited the extent to which Lisbon would be able to exert influence directly.

The inclusion of the Ottomans was controversial in some circles, though it was nonetheless expected. The circumstances in which the Turks pushed Britain into the Congress was not. The Sultan, however, having fled East to India, had an ever diminishing role in Ottoman governance, with the diplomatic apparatus, virtually the only remaining branch of a collapsing bureaucracy, being left in the hands of the newly appointed Grand Visier Mütercim Mehmed Rüşdi Pasha. Skilled as he was at diplomacy, the Ottoman hand was simply too weak to achieve anything and the Ottoman delegates would be forced to grin and bear any resolution made by the Congress.

This Congress was regarded as the Holy Grail for the smaller Balkan states. Serbia and Montenegro saw it as a chance to expand at the expense of the Ottomans, and giving them some more breathing space from the Federation at the same time. For Greece, the promise of expansion heralded a return to normality by helping to prop up the ailing government. Blighted for years by a reactionary rebel army calling itself the ‘League for Hellenic Redemption’, though colloquially known as the ‘White Shirts’, the Prime Minister bet his job, and potentially his head as well, that the Congress would be kind to him, promising to reclaim Thessalonica before an expectant nation. Wallachia, meanwhile, had other problems, with rumours of potential Romanian military movements against the state, the Congress struck the country’s President as a matter of life or death – international recognition of the state had to be achieved, or else his neck was also on the line.

For the Two Sicilies, a nation also at war with the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, though only really in it for the international recognition, saw this Congress as a chance to make gains both in the Mediterranean and in the Italian Peninsular. The state laid claims on islands like Malta in a hopeful plea for concessions, but their demands for a sphere of influence in Italy aroused anger in both the Federation and France, especially because the French regarded the Papal States, the only neighbour of the Two Sicilies, as under their protection. The other independent Italian states were simply fighting for their existence, fearful that they might become the next Lucca, while Tuscany and Piedmont-Sardinia were under duress to support Federal aims.

Bavaria certainly looked upon itself as a Great Power by 1866, and, for the King, being taken seriously here was a matter of international prestige. The location of the state, both landlocked and set between the might of the Federation and Prussia, the state’s government faced a difficult task; be too timid and the country would become irrelevant, be too vocal and you risked war. This balancing act in a country whose aims were also primarily to balance the two powers against each other could be considered of little importance, yet the increasing influence of the state among its smaller neighbours meant that it had the potential to unite the German states one way or the other. Between them, the German states had the potential to greatly moderate a debate that showed so many signs of being polarised.

Delegations were sent from all five of the nations in the Low Countries and Scandinavia, but, even with Swedish power in the Baltic taken into account, there was little influence they could exert over the proceedings. For the Belgians, the retention of Lucca was the only thing they really cared about. For the Swedes, anything that would distract Russia and Prussia from the frozen North was good news. For the rest, nothing save a few alliances was really determining their stance; for these nations of limited power, the Balkans were a very long way away.

Switzerland is an interesting case, being the only nation in mainland Europe to decline to send a delegation, maintaining that neutrality meant staying out of peace negotiations.

A Country of Controversy
The autumn of 1866 began almost as well as the summer had ended. September brought the crossing of the Straits on both sides of the Sea of Marmara, an invasion more successful than could have been imagined, partly thanks to the wholesale destruction of Ottoman forces during the occupation of Europe and partly thanks to the fact that the Turkish underbelly had already been subject to attacks further south by Sicilian forces. Within the four short months to the end of the year, and the beginning of the Congress, the occupying forces had even begun the siege of the second city, Ankara, having already secured the vast majority of territory to its west. October, too, brought little but good news. In Tunisia, the Royal Guards returned and utterly quashed the invaders, restoring all territory and entering into Libya before the year was out, having spent the long Summer months in the Holy Land, over fifteen hundred miles away (For those of you wishing that were in a more familiar unit, it is roughly equivalent to 400 leagues or 1.3 million Smoots. Oh, or 2250km). Even further away from Vienna, October saw a fourth victory at Gibraltar and an increasing desperation in London. While the Royal Navy had at last managed to sink a Federal Ship, the SBD Kopernik (The acronym SBD has been adopted the previous year to prefix all Federal ships, at the same time as the new crest was established. Derived from the German, “Schiff der Bundesmarine der Donau“ (Literally meaning “Ship of the Federal Navy of the Danube”), SBD replaced the wide array of regional and ship-specific prefixes, which are usually denoted in English as DFS (for “Danubian Federation Ship”)), only the second to have found its way to the bottom of Davy Jones’s Locker, and the first in wartime. In return, another six British vessels followed it. It was clear to all; nothing short of a miracle would bring the British into the war.



One thing that threatened to bring such divine intervention were the actions of the Minister of War. By all accounts he was a brilliant tactician, having guided the nation to the brink of one of its most conclusive victories and in the face of the world’s greatest military power. His resolution and determination were limitless, helping him to, in an apt metaphor, stick to his guns; a trait often credited with the efficiency with which the war was conducted, especially in its later stages. As the winter of 1866 drew ever nearer, he was being described, perhaps a little overzealously, as ‘the greatest military mind of his generation’ (The Times of Vienna, 18th November 1866), yet he was also capable of doing some very stupid things. On the face of it, his relocation to Istanbul was a sensible military move to a big city and nearer to the front. Indeed, his tour of the front in the weeks beforehand had been hugely popular both among the troops and at home, where he had been credited as, among other things, “A man who can deal in high office and still see the all the way down to the ground” (The Prague Gazette, 20th October 1866). Yet, when he arrived in Constantinople just as the golden bloom of autumn started to be hidden under the season’s first snow, he made a massive mistake with catastrophic diplomatic connotations. In the words of one (Turkish) historian, “Sprios only travelled to the city to give a big, fat, middle-fingered salute to the Sultan and his allies, as if in mocking anticipation of the end of the Empire.” While this view may be somewhat unfair on the poor man, he certainly caused a storm, intentionally or not. He slept in the Topkapi Palace for every night during his stay, for example. It was once the primary palace of the Sultan, but having been converted into the military headquarters by Federal forces it stood as a testament to Ottoman failings. To have a government Minister, and the Minister of War at that, stay there, reportedly sleeping in the Sultan’s own bed, was an affront to Ottoman pride, but the repercussions of this accusation, regardless of whether it was ever substantiated and in spite of however much it was denied, reverberated through Europe; this upstart Republic, born out of the flames of revolution, would remain tinged by the militarism with which it was perceived to be opposing the established powers of Europe. In spite of accusations on the part of the intelligentsia that the nation would soon become the “Pariah State of Europe” (A notion famously backed up by the Russian Foreign Minister’s first words to President Valenta when they met at a pre-Conference reception, “Ah, President Valenta. It’s an honour to finally meet someone so infamous as you! This Congress may have been established in your name, but I’m going to make sure it does nothing less than break you and your upstart little nation.”), the masses lapped up the patriotic sense of ambition held by their Minister of War. In some cases, there was perhaps a little too much entertainment extracted from the affair, with the Dalmatian Chronicle asking furtively whether Minister Sprios had yet “experienced the fabled delights of the Ottoman Harem.”

Controversy wasn’t far away either when considering the politics of this four month period. In such a short space of time, three elections were held, two of which in less than harmonious circumstances. Crete was the exception – elections were organised, then held, the President appointed on the basis of this vote. In the event, it was a landslide victory for Vasilios Mitsotakis of the All-Danubian Conservative Party, in an election where none of the other mainstream parties really fielded candidates of any respectable calibre and electioneering hardly extended beyond polite greetings in the street. The debacle in Trieste that led to fresh elections, on the other hand, remains largely a mystery. The facts are thus; a statement was issued on the 18th September stating that “Signore Agostino Francesco Luigi Tommasso Savonarola has been confirmed in his position as Prime Minister of our Free Territory”, which was then refuted by a number of political parties sitting inside the House. Due to a strange set of rules limiting reporting on the activities of Parliament to official announcements, mostly relics from the era of Venetian rule in the city, we simply do not have any more evidence than this. As the reaction to Savonarola bubbled up to the surface, he bowed to demands for fresh elections, which duly produced a victory for his coalition, if not his party. The entire debacle was over within three weeks, but left the city-state deeply divided. Savonarola might have been the Prime Minister, but it didn’t mean he would ever truly escape the initial scandal, so deep was the riddle at the heart of his opening gambit.

The events that unfolded in Melilla were by contrast all too apparent, and firmly in the public eye. A public spat between President Valenta and the Consul-General of Melilla, Joachim von Kirchberg, over the failure of any National Reform Union member to qualify for ballot access. Little was made of it initially, with the odd exception of a little, deeply- hypocritical, political point-scoring in the Viennese dailies over whose opponents were sinking to lower depths in attempting to exploit the affair. None were more giddy with anticipation than the Vienna Morning Herald when it was announced on the first day of October that the Interior Ministry would send a team from the Federal Electoral Commission to investigate the allegations, denouncing the move as,”just another cynical ploy by the Radical government to use state apparatus as a weapon against those with different opinions.” None were more embarrassed than the Vienna Morning Herald when a week later the Commissioner announced that electoral fraud had indeed occurred. Typically, however, they printed the twenty word long apology hidden fifteen pages into their Thursday edition and tucked in the bottom right hand corner on a page full of small ads. It read simply: “In the wake of revelations of fraud in Melilla, we regret any offences that may have been caused by misunderstandings.”. Correspondence examined in a ‘raid’ on the Consul-General’s office cleared his name, but it was not until after the FEC held the elections themselves that the actual perpetrator was convicted. In essence the fault was in the system employed to place parties on the ballot; a strange cross between party-lists and first-past-the-post, once a party amassed 800 signatures they were eligible to present a candidate for every position up for grabs. In reality, no party achieved the active support of the 28% of the population required and the official who had designed the system panicked, forging over 1,200 just to get three parties on the ballot and save face. In its wake came a simple system where any man of sound finances and mind could stand with as little as DF£5 and 10 valid signatures. The elections were held smoothly, but the row between NRU and von Kirchenberg’s PDU had tarnished their reputations in the city meaning their local wings achieved just 7% and 12% of the vote respectively. The real winners were those centrist parties would had largely stayed out of the battle. The Conservative League of Melilla and the Federalist Citizen's Council between them won 78% of the vote and 87% of the seats on offer; the Federalists taking a majority in the city’s upper house and the Conservatives falling just two seats shy on one in the lower house. Soon after the contest in Melilla had resolved itself, the nation’s eyes turned north. Just two weeks separated close of the polling stations in the African colony and the grand opening of the Congress of Berlin. The delegation had long been announced by this point, the selection in its time having attracted its own controversy, but with the rag-tag group largely already in Prussia, President Valenta, who completed the compliment of five when he arrived on the 6th January, could rely on them to do their utmost to serve their nation. Possibly the most surprising choice was Artur Georgescu, the Chief of the General Staff, simply because he was neither a diplomat not a politician, but a general, and one who had just been going about the business of fighting a war with many others in attendance. As a proud Romanian, Georgescu wished to expand his state’s borders, seeking international recognition for an invasion of Wallachia. Yet he also went to the Congress with a great many military ideas, such as the desire for defensive border states in the Balkans or monetary reparations for the war, it was this aspect that saw Valenta plump for a representative for what he called, “the nation’s sword and shield.”His second delegate was Pier Paolo Arpaio, a man whom sceptics might say was picked for his socialist ideals (a criticism that really did hit hard when you take into consideration the lack of any voice for the right in this delegation). It was his work in Italy that made his name as a diplomat, and though he did wish for a certain amount of Italian Pan-nationalism especially in the wake of the Belgian actions in Lucca, Arpaio came with a well drawn out plan, and apparently even a map. While he did want to further expand the Federation, he knew the diplomatic dangers, so preferred to carve the Balkans into a Russian and Danubian sphere of influence, pushing the British out of the Med almost entirely in the process. The Foreign Minister, Wolfram Liberalen, was presumably an easy choice for the President. Praised as “a skilled orator, successful writer and politician”, Liberalen ticked all the right boxes, having served for almost eight years in the Foreign Office and another three as an Ambassador. Trying to draw off Metternich’s system of conferences that maintained the Concert of Europe, in certain journals he was increasingly called ‘the Prince’ as if he were the Federation’s founder himself. His wish was to forge a ‘Balkan Federation’ in the Danubian one’s image, though he really just wanted to end the vilification of the Federation at the hands of the other European powers. The delegation’s fourth member was a curious choice. Jan Jaromír was a politician who freely admitted he had no real aims for the conference and only wanted to go because he was asked to. Selected to represent Illyria, the other state affected by the war, Jaromír was only really in attendance because of interventions by the likes of the Finance Minister who wanted the southern state to have a voice. For his own part, President Valenta knew one thing for certain: Obtaining more land through this war in the name of the Federation, even if they were not the aggressors, would not sit well with the rest of the European powers. In many ways he believed that for the cunning and opportunist politician, a cause for war with the Federation could be easily found by the mere acquisition of territory. He advocated for a Balkan Federation on the basis that he suspected the people of the region would not be interested in joining the Federation and even if they did it could have political and diplomatic ramifications. At the very least they would no longer be under the yoke of the Sultan, they would now be free. Following their successes in the war against the British, Egyptians and Ottomans, the President knew that the Federation needed to be victorious in a new front: the negotiation table. With the likes of Bismarck and Disraeli representing their respective nations he could think of no better word to describe the challenge than ‘monumental’. Despite his thoughts on the Prussians dating back to the civil war and their offensive, though tacit, recognition of the rebels, he held respect for Bismarck and the same went for Disraeli, although for different reasons. The mission behind the selection of the delegation was two fold: represent as many voices within the nation as possible at the negotiating table and to ultimately counter the other delegations. Their objective: ensure that the treaty is accepted as much as possible abroad, with possible doses of pragmatism kept in mind. The question: would they succeed?

Four Weeks in Prussia
For two long weeks, the Congress was stuck in a state of constant obstructionism. The Russians, backed by a Prussia afraid that inequality in the Balkans would only lead to war, attempted to gain as much land as possible for their sphere of influence. The French, meanwhile, were far more concerned with retaining a status quo they saw as the perfect climate for a war – a war, no doubt, they would have refrained from dirtying their hands with. Add in a Federal delegation intent on creating a Balkan Federation – an entity never clear on how much it would resemble its big brother – and you get an idea of how little was actually achieved in these first two weeks. In the Federation, the majority of the blame was levied against the Russians, with whom Valenta and his team spent a good deal of time. Such blame was not entirely without reason, since the insistence of the Russian delegation that Serbia and Montenegro should not be party to referendums to decide the extent of the proposed Balkan Federation and that at least some of the land in the region should be put under direct Russian influence as an independent nation effectively killed the Foreign Minister’s simple idea for peace stone dead. Even as the delegation recognised this and started to see the futility of the entire affair, they still hoped that the approval of the other Great Powers might be enough to overturn the Russian obstinacy.

This breakthrough came immediately following the Congress had reconvened in the wake of an already scheduled half-time break. The move, dubbed “Georgescu’s Pivot” by the papers back home, amounted to selling Germany to win the Balkans, a move no doubt popular in his native Romania. Two short treaties with Prussia first sacrificed the Danubian prerogative to gain any sort of influence within the German states and then crafted an alliance for the safeguarding of the Balkans. While questions were raised within the delegation as to whether such a sweeping turn away from Vienna’s traditional outlook was wise, the promise of a strong ally proved too alluring. Liberalen, as the Austrian representative, did manage to extract some concessions safeguarding the Federation’s right to pursue normal diplomatic relations with the German states, but it did nothing to stop the torrent of hatred the delegation received after the event from certain circles within Austrian society. Together with a new, more moderate, proposal for the region’s borders from the Chief of the General Staff, it won over Bismarck’s delegation and stole them away from their ideological allies; in the words of the great man himself, “Security in the Balkans breeds safety at home.” As that third week drew to a close, and a new spirit of joviality in progress swept the Federal delegates, if not the Russian ones, the President made his single biggest mistake of the entire conference. Looking for another backer to cement Georgescu’s proposal, the Federation entered negotiations with the British delegation. As a defeated power and a major player in the region, Valenta had hoped to secure both concessions in terms of land and wealth and support for the Federation’s proposals, giving little in return. Such a sweeping success already seemed in doubt with Disraeli’s own political career on the line combining with ingrained idea that Britannia was innately superior; yet, when Valenta mistook the British protectorate of the United States of the Ionian Islands for Ottoman property and attempted to sell islands to the British, he hardly made his position any stronger. Taken as some strange attempt to insult him and his nation, Disraeli refused, vastly cutting down the already depleted offers and threatening to oppose the Danubian plans outright. For the Viennese press, such a gaffe hardly mattered. When a letter from Georgescu to his wife which mentioned the incident was leaked, the press set upon the British Empire like hounds, demanding the delegation use all means necessary to force the British from the Mediterranean, cursing their temerity and attempting to vilify them even more than the Russians. Indeed, it was suggested by many that the Federation should threaten to uphold the Spanish claim on Gibraltar and generally just go around seizing British territory in the Mediterranean. Valenta, however, was far more concerned with not alienating the rest of Europe – Liberalen’s proposal for a Balkan Federation had, after all, been one designed to set the minds of Europe at rest by merely creating a buffer state; now, the Foreign Minister again urged restraint and pragmatism. So it came to pass that the British got off lightly from a war they had struggled even to involve themselves in, retaining all their lands in the region and gaining a Danubian guarantee on Gibraltar at the expense of a mere 3% of annual income and Danubian ownership of Cyprus.

With the treaty more or less patched up and just 3 days of the month-long time limit to spare, a small treaty with the Sicilians, almost added as an afterthought, nearly brought war to the continent again. As a courtesy to the Sicilians, who had had their own war against the Ottomans at the same time as the Danubian one, the delegation offered the Italian nation the island of Rhodes. The Sicilians had other ideas, asking instead for the treaty to transfer Lucca from Belgian hands to their own, with the Federation gaining the Sicilians as allies for the favour. The proposal met with moderate support from the Federal delegation, believing they could then take Rhodes for themselves, but, fresh from the debacle with the British, Valenta had grown wise enough to check what impact it would have. The French and the British seemed at first largely indifferent to the fate of Lucca, and, though the minor Italian states did object, there seemed to be a general consensus that nothing was awry. Unfortunately, one of these tiny states informed the Belgian delegation, who demanded that the Congress leave issues outside the Balkans as they were out of its remit and kicked up such a fuss that the Russians took it as their opportunity to demand concessions or war. The French fearful of being dragged into a war by their Russian allies over the city, which was near enough to actually warrant some sort of French intervention, brokered a compromise with the Russians which prevented the transfer of Rhodes, removed Lucca from the treaty and blocked the unification of Wallachia and the Federation. With no time left before the Congress expired, and with the knowledge that war would come again to Vienna if they did not accept, Liberalen and Jaromír signed the treaty on behalf of the Federation as the two required signatories. President Valenta would have signed instead, but delayed over the nation’s recognition of Lucca as Sicilian in one of the sister treaties. Georgescu, for his part, refused point blank to be party to any treaty that deprived the nation of Wallachia. As the ink dried on the treaty, the delegation returned home ready for one final battle in Congress to decide whether the Federation would ratify the treaty or not – all the while, the nation and Europe watched expectantly.

1868 Presidential Election
And so it came to pass that the primaries of 1867 were uneventful, seeming decided before they even began – the margin of victory was so great for Di Sanctis in the DPU’s primary that it was rumoured that not even his opponent voted against him! The election looked set to be anything but, with both parties holding conventions roughly equal in size and a close contest promised by all. In many ways, this distinction between an exciting election and a fairly short and dull primary season made it typical of the elections that had come before it, but in one crucial respect it was different – for the first time, the people of the Danube would not just be electing a President, but also crowning a Prince. This symbolically contentious change came as a result of the events in the Balkan nation of Wallachia, promised as in the Danubian sphere pending a referendum by the Treaty of Berlin. When the President of the former Duchy declined to host the vote, through the simple statement that they had never signed the above treaty, and erected new border controls on their northern frontier with the Federation. When the Electoral Commissioners were predictably turned away, Vienna authorised Romania to ‘use any means necessary to ensure these Federal officials can carry out their duties.’ Needless to say, within a period of around a week, this ended up as an invasion by the Romanian militia. Fears of war with Russia were compounded as they issued statement after statement, in a seemingly more frantic fashion, denouncing ‘any and all attempts to abuse the sovereign rights of independent nations.’ No ultimatum ever came though, and, once the Wallachian President was captured and executed in a show trial in Bucharest, the Russians could find no response whatsoever and simply chose to ignore the issue. Though insufficient evidence exists to confirm anything, most historians believe that it was under French pressure that war was averted. Russian communiqués exist in Paris calling upon the French government to echo their protestations, but all records suggest that after a meeting between the Russian Ambassador and the French President two days prior to the Romanian troops crossing the border, these ceased, possibly as a result of a clear refusal by the French to intervene against the Treaty of Berlin. This may be speculation, but the Romanian control of the state that was the end result was a fact that greatly worried Valenta. Had it not been for a further intervention by the President ensuring the vote was carried out by Federal officials, the state’s annexation may well have been but days away. On the day, numerous reports of intimidation by Romanian militiamen keeping order filtered back to Vienna, and though it seems unlikely that these isolated incidents actually affected the outcome of the referendum, which handed the Federation a new client state, they suggest that dirty forces were at work attempting to unify the ‘Romanian fatherland’. With this in mind, it was decided by a small convention that the old monarchist constitution from the days before the Presidential Dictatorship would be revived, with a few small changes to accommodate proper elections and the like. It only remained for the monarch to be picked but, with the old Duke dead at the hands of the dictator, no remaining blood relative to be found and a not altogether unpredictable aversion to Presidents, the convention adopted a clause that made the President of the Federation their monarchy. Though Valenta would not be able to travel to Wallachia prior to the election being appointed merely ‘Lord Protector and Prince Regent of the Principality of Wallachia’, the title of ‘Grand Prince of Wallachia and Sovereign of Her People’ was to be borne by all his successors.

Liberalen: Full Circle (1868)
The Presidential Election of 1868, coming as it did as the nation’s twentieth anniversary, would always have been more prominent than in times past, but with Valenta’s resignation and the Radical Hegemony seemingly drawing to a close, (These two events were often linked by contemporary authors in what could only be described as a watered-down Cult of Personality. Though it may seem fantastical now, Valenta, who would go on to become the Foreign Minister under the new administration in an elegant role-reversal, should not be underestimated as the force behind the Radical electoral machine that had solidly controlled the nation for nigh on a decade, or half its existence. While many reject this notion of a one-man radical movement out-of-hand, some historians maintain that the Radical Union only survived 1868 because Valenta remained behind the scenes to pull the strings, and to train the next generation of puppet masters.) a tightly fought race brought with it a series of firsts; the first election to poll over a million votes, the first election since 1848 to have less than 1 in 5 men not vote, the first election where both main candidates failed to win in their home state, the first election to see an independent  candidate win the Presidency or even gain over 10,000 votes and the first election for the nation’s largest party not to field a candidate at all, the first election to be won by a margin below 5% and the first Presidential election to hold a state-wide recount. Though it might not be reflected in Liberalen’s Electoral College landslide, the 400,000 votes Di Sanctis lost by was the smallest margin in the Federation’s history. Indeed, it was in just three battle-ground states - all of which were supposedly strongholds for the Danubian Political Union - Hungary, Romania and Illyria, that the election was won by as few as 10,000 votes. Hungary was won by the conservatives only after a recount precipitated by a border dispute with Austria – another hundred German voters being enough to tip the state’s balance. By then though, shock victories for Liberalen, first in Illyria, by some 7,000 votes, and then in ever-fickle Romania, by even fewer. We may have but circumstantial evidence that Liberalen’s visit to Romania in the days before the election saw him promise the Romanian state a free hand in the East, though the accounts we do have tend to agree that he was a great orator and statesman who consistently wanted what was best for the Romanian people, later events tend to suggest that this was more or less the case. In any case, this trip is credited with flipping a ‘safe’ state and winning the election for the charismatic Liberal.

The failure of the Conservatives to win back the reigns of power is often cited as a major cause of the Restoration movement. Over the course of the following year, the Triestines and the Albanians followed the Cretan legislature in presenting amendments that would restore monarchy to these lands, despite the former never having had such a position and the latter not for many, many years. Republican critics of the movement, supposedly designed to build the conservative base at a more local level, even argued that the Cretan monarchy was never legitimate due to its revolutionary birth (though it could be said that such republicans would regard all monarchies as illegitimate). Though they struggled initially to gain much ground even within the states themselves, as soon as legal issues were resolved, such as whether it was legal to change the constitution of Trieste (It was established that the constitution, while never ratified by referendum as was planned, did have de facto legal rights and the power of precedence behind it. All that was required was a 2/3rds majority of the city’s governing council and the signature of the city’s Grand Mayor; though it was argued that the amendment should be ratified by a referendum of the people, the Restorationists argued that such a referendum was not necessary in cases where it was not performed on the constitution it amends, the Supreme Court’s backing of which meant that State Governments were free to act as they would, since no constitution in the whole nation was ratified by a vote of its electorate.) (or even, somewhat perversely, whether such a document existed), and more practical ones, as when the Albanian crown was to be offered to a native rather than a foreign Prince, the movement gained enough support to be seriously considered by the legislatures and for votes to be called. It is notable that, while many were warning of the monarchical conflicts of Von Salzburg and Kremvera, no such violence was seen in any state where such changes were proposed in the year to October. Interestingly enough, the only city in which there is a recorded instance of civil disobedience over this issue was Bratislava, where citizens were said to have marched upon the state’s government to demand it annul all treaties with Monarchist States, in effect amounting to secession by stealth. The President refused and some 30 men were reported dead as the crowd attempted to storm the Parliament building on the first night of the stand-off. The matter only calmed when the President resigned in disgrace the following week; his Vice took office and immediately issued a statement of discontent at the resurgence of the monarchies, but simultaneously reaffirmed the state’s place in the Federation by calling upon the legislature to reaffirm the Slovakia’s ties with Vienna in a rousing speech noted more for the spontaneous signing of the Federal National Anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, than its actual content. In any case, only 12 of the 200 MPs voted against the motion and Slovakia’s statehood was no longer in question.

It was foreign-affairs, however, that continued to dominate the headlines, perhaps aptly for a President who had transformed himself from author to statesman through his role as a diplomat. Nationalism, surely the Federation’s oldest adversary and that which would eventually cause its downfall, was on the rise in both Germany and Italy. By mid-June, the entire state of Tuscany had fallen into the hands of the notorious Garibaldi’s unionist brigades. By mid-September, the same fate was sealed for the small German state of Hesse-Kassel. Though the rebels were not regarded as anything but by the international community, it would only be a matter of time before they would be the only viable government in their respective nation. Indeed, had other events not got in the way, the assassination of the Bohemian Minister-President Pavel Pištora at the hands of an extreme German Nationalist group originating in the (in their own words) ‘Occupied German Provinces of the Sudetenland’, resentful of the state’s ‘oppression’ of the German majority there, might well have sparked an intervention against the Pan-Germanic militias. Instead, both the Pan-Germanic militia’s and Garibaldi’s citizen armies were left unmolested, Bohemia had to mourn quickly prior to another election and the Federation stared into the worsening abyss that was Wallachia.

Despite his royal blood, Liberalen abdicated from the crown of Wallachia as his first action as President, nominating the High Minister of Wallachia, Gavril Dunaren, in his place. His reign began with somewhat of a false start, as the Wallachian Parliament petitioned the President to retain the crown and demanded not to be ruled by a Romanian; Liberalen refused to act unilaterally and Dunaren simply ignored the request, so the new order remained. Yet quickly, Dunaren managed to win the trust of the Wallachian masses; one particular speech, made to the Romanian Parliament just days before he was due in Bucharest for the coronation, is often cited as the watershed – his mature reflection that past administrations were used to “treating the people of Wallachia as though they were hostile strangers instead of our brothers and friends” struck a chord with many, and his pleas for a détente were answered in kind. All was well, despite a continued Russian undercurrent of diplomatic grumbling, but as Dunaren’s promises to become “full partners in a joint national endeavor” began to seem less of a pipedream and more of a possibility the international climate shifted. It was with a bill in the Wallachian legislature that would integrate the nation into its northern neighbour that there came the only Ultimatum needed to signal the end of the Treaty of Berlin’s short lived peace. Though it seemed likely that the Parliament in Bucharest would have opposed the measure under normal circumstances, the threat of Russia compelled them to seek protection under the wing of Romania and the Federation. The vote, carried by a majority of just 3, was followed the following day by a Russian declaration of war on Vienna, to ‘liberate’ the Wallachians. The Prussians, as they had promised, joined the fray, and the French, reluctantly, weighed in on behalf of their allies. This much was to be expected – the sudden rush of defections from the Federal alliance system, like the end of the treaties with Sicily and Bavaria, were not, nor were the associated declarations of war from nations who held the two Germanic states responsible for their losses in the Treaty of Berlin. Though the two forces were relatively well matched in terms of size, Minister Spiros would have his work cut out to prove to the press he really was a military hero – the Prusso-Federal Alliance was encircled by forces that would later be tied together by the Pact of Paris, bringing into the being the “Coalition for the Maintainence of the Concert of Europe”. What had once been a matter of any importance only to some crazy nationalists in the Federation’s most distant corner, now was the most important issue in the whole of Europe, and the Federation was stuck right in the heart of it.

Liberalen: Don’t Mention the War (1868)
For a nation at the heart of the world’s biggest conflict, more pressing concerns were somehow created across the nation, and specifically in four of the states along the Adriatic. Illyria was home to yet another referendum as the province of Carniola was set to vote on a divorce from the Slavic union after less than a decade together. Of the four Adriatic states with constitutional difficulties in the latter stages of 1868, Illyria was by far the calmest, with no major incidents being reported. Turnout was high, but the margin of victory for the nationalists was not so great – of the roughly 86% of men who voted, 52% came out in favour of a new state; a margin of just over 8000 votes in an electorate of approaching a quarter of a million. By the end of the year, the province, under the new name of Slovenia, was petitioning the Federal Congress for statehood. Crete the restoration of the Venetian Duchy amid political confusion – within just two weeks of the old monarchist constitution being restored, a new Duke had been crowned. Many within the state were unhappy that the referendum that had established the republic was being overturned without popular consent, but with the opposition in disarray and many seeing the old Duchy as the legitimate government in any case, Crete saw the smoothest transition of any Monarchical Rebirth of 1868. Albania saw far more trouble. Though the amendment was passed without opposition in the state’s Parliament unlike that in Crete, the reception was not met with the same enthusiasm, or even resignation. Without any precedent within living memory, the restorationists found it hard to convince much of the population of the merits of their movement – by initially appointing a foreigner to the throne, they bungled any chance of appealing to the strong sense of Albanian patriotism. Militant groups were quick to arise, and clashes between protestors and police became a regular occurrence in the state’s larger cities. Despite all this, by 1st November, with all the pomp and circumstance such an occasion requires, a glorious coronation in Tirana heralded the nation’s third monarchical state.

This was nothing, though, compared with the mayhem that unfolded in the tiny city state of Trieste. The troubles began when an amendment to the constitution that would abolish the position of Grand Mayor and replace it with a monarchical head of state was vetoed by the Grand Mayor of the city. The city council, the 25-member body that held the state’s legislative power, passed a further motion declaring the council’s supremacy and unilaterally overriding the Grand Mayor’s veto, justified on the questionable legal basis that he couldn’t have a veto as the position no longer existed. The Grand Mayor refused to accept the council’s ruling and was imprisoned. This was seen by the city’s new administration as a conclusive victory, but the delay it caused allowed a bill to be passed in the Federal Congress that would profoundly alter the new government’s fortunes. The State Referendum Act, proposed by the President of Cisalpina, required Federally administered referendums for all successive constitutional amendments at state-level. Perhaps ironically, since it was unlikely that Marconi actually had this all planned out, it was Cisalpina that ended up as the only state to really take anything positive out of the act in the short term, gaining the administration of the city – in Crete and Albania, where the amendments had long since been signed into law, the act renewed the spirits of the protest movements against the new monarchs. In Trieste, it caused a civil war. The Triestine government, under pressure from Federal authorities and wary that the courts could order a referendum in any case, acted pre-emptively and invited the Federal Electoral Commission to confirm the amendment through the ballot box. However, the vote never took place because the enormity of the day led to a crescendo of violence between the two sides; the situation, like a man on an escalator at the Imperial War Museum, was slowly escalating towards conflict. By the date the vote was supposed to take place on, the city was embroiled in street fighting between two rival militias, ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Regiment’ and ‘The Free Citizen Army of the Republic of Trieste’. Both were ignoring demands to stand down from their supposed leaders and both were making any sort of constructive debate impossible. Indeed, the city's Grand Mayor was murdered by a Royalist militia who stormed his prison before he could even face trial. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court cancelled the referendum, in the process effectively dissolving the Triestine state; since neither version would be confirmed there was now no constitution, and therefore there was no government. To compensate, the Court granted a Mandate to Cisalpina, who quickly deployed their militia to restore order. The Court did not, however, make the city’s eventual fate clear, potentially leaving that up to the legislature.

With all this going on, it became a running joke in Vienna that there was war going on at all; one backbench deputy was reported to have said to a reporter after a particularly strenuous debate on the State Referendum Act, “Listen, don't mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.” The Deputy responsible, one Mr Basil Watt, aged forty and from Barcelona, was somewhat of a bungling fool; there are many other charming quotations attributed to Mr Watt, such as telling an American guest requesting a Waldorf salad that, “I think we're just out of Waldorfs” or that a certain favourite piece of music his wife was rather rude about “That's Brahms! Brahms' Third Racket!”. The government, in line with the proposals of President Valenta, started building three new Ironclad ships, but didn't expand into the new range of larger ships called Monitors, recently invented by the Royal Navy. Equally on land, though there was no expansion of the regular army, of which some estimates suggested at least another 58 regiments could be raised, the country saw its first ever General Mobilisation. As an aside, the state of Bohemia deserves some praise for the number of conscriptees it was able to raise, with 39,000 men signing up in Prague and its environs alone. Some historians believe that, by this time, Danubian military strength was second only to the British Empire. Diplomatically, though there was every effort made by the Foreign Minister and his subordinates, little was achieved: France remained in the war and no other nations could be persuaded to join the Federation in their fight. Even Greece, who approached the Federation requesting an alliance in thanks for the work done during the Congress of Berlin, would not commit to take up arms against the foe. On the battlefield, the war was very much a tale of two sides. In the West, the French pushed the front ever eastwards, as the Prussians faltered in the Rhineland and the Sardinians fell in Savoy. Even Federal troops there suffered badly – the Royal Tunisian Guard was defeated at the battle of Tunis losing half its number and forcing an evacuation from the colony, the Western defenders attempting to prop up the Sardinians were badly out-numbered and faltering as they faced battles over the New Year. In the East, however, it was an entirely different story, as the Russian bear failed to live up to its menace. The last Russian army was evicted from Federal borders in early December as Konstantin Fravlov’s force was repelled by a smaller Federal army at the battle of Chisinau. Great victories were achieved, such as the surrender of 17,000 Russian soldiers for the loss of just 500 at the battle of Przemysl, and even some territory was taken, but this didn’t help dispel the fear that Russia would still swallow up the Federation as she had taken Napoleon before her. The sheer number of victories in battle, both on land and at sea, gave the Federation the impetus to push for peace as the ‘victor’ but no embassy was willing to greet even a white peace – the question was surely whether the Russians would crumble in the East before the French conquered in the West.

Liberalen: An Unbearable Offer (1869)
1869 was meant to be a year of great things. Many members of the government had great plans. Former President Valenta, in his capacity as Foreign Minister, was going to rid Sweden of Russian influence and end the war through tact and diplomacy (while at the same time, in his capacity as Radical-in-Chief challenge, the new monarchies through the courts). The Cisalpine President, Silvestro Marconi, was going to give the city of Trieste a vote on its future. The province of Carniola was going to be readmitted as a state under the name of Slovenia. The Finance Minister was going to keep the country out of debt, President Liberalen would lead the country out of a war and the Chief of the General Staff was going to win that war. By August, however, none of these things had happened, and the government looked increasingly likely never to achieve any of them. Valenta was ignored diplomatically and in a legal dead end, as the Russians rejected all offers of a white peace and the Supreme Court decreed that constitutions are not bound by referendums unless they bind themselves. President Marconi was six feet under after a show trial at the hands of the French Army, where he was found guilty of organising armed resistance and of treason against the French state: his head would lie forevermore separate from his body and he would never preside over the referendum in Trieste. Slovenia got the Congressional assent it needed to become a state, and even adopted a new constitution, but with so many men off to fight, elections to form the new government there were delayed over and over again, so that it remained, in effect, a province of Illyria. De Palma did what he could, but in the end had little impact on the budget deficit while Liberalen was hardly seen for much of the year, deferring to his ministers in a policy he called “Responsible Delegation” – his absence was most telling in the delay in recruiting new soldiers for the war effort, with the Vice –President assuming responsibility for the action only after four more months of indecision – but when compared to Georgescu, all these men had had it easy. The Chief of the General Staff was in trouble by August 1869, and it was at this point that government received an offer of peace – an offer that would be intrinsically offensive to any government, but an offer that must be considered nonetheless. As Parliament was recalled from its summer recess, the same question was on everyone’s lips: would they agree to the unbearable offer? (The phrase was coined by a columnist for the British Newspaper, The Times of London. The story originally ran, “I find it hard to believe any truly sovereign state could accept an offer which is so unbearable from a beast so wild as the Russian bear,” but was quickly seized upon as the war’s defining pun by the British intelligenza. Sadly, this marvellous piece of wordplay on behalf of the English language doesn’t translate so well into foreign tongues, so the offer had more mundane names outside of the Anglo-sphere – in Vienna itself, for example, most Congressmen simply called it “the Russian offer”.)

At the start of the year, however, no one would have anticipated the way things were going to pan out. All that emerged from the eastern and southern fronts was a constant stream of good news. In the year’s opening two months, the Federation won battles at Vidin, Kovel, Bucharest, Izmail, Lublin, Pervomaisk, Ruse, Kovel again, Shumen, Odessa and Nikolaev while only being forced to retreat in the second battle for the city of Bucharest. Furthermore, the Federation came off a lot better from these battles losing just under 60,000 men in those two months fighting against the Russians and Ottomans compared to the enemy’s figure of 110,000 – in one battle were more than 10,000 Federal troops killed or captured, compared to the enemy’s figure of 5, and in just one battle. The first battle of Kovel, did the Federal forces sustain more damage. At the battle of Vidin, an entire Ottoman force of around 15,000 men surrendered for the loss of just 2,000 home-grown fighters; the Ottomans front saw no active fighting after the last Ottoman army in Bulgaria surrendered on 21st March. Even in the West, where orders came to withdraw from Piedmont culminated in a humiliating withdrawal from Turin at a casualty rate of around four-times that of the French, the relatively calm exit of the rest of the armies from the battle. By the end of January, the troops were safely back in home-territory to recuperate and prepare their defences, a new sense of calm said to be found for many after the turmoil of near catastrophic defeat – something that was not shared by what remained of the Piedmontese army and government, left to flee back behind Federal lines, or the government of Cisalpina, which was abandoned to the French in the hopes of better defensive ground. While the state did put up  more than token resistance to the French occupation and its people showed great spirit resisting its oppressors, Cisalpina was quickly subdued by the might of the French, her President dead and her government neutered, but with reinforcements shortly arriving from the Ottoman front, it seemed increasingly likely that the war could be won through resistance alone.

What came next defied belief for many in Vienna, let alone those in the corridors of power – the Eastern front collapsed. There was no warning and there appeared at first to be no apparent cause. All plans hinged on success in the East and assumed that if anywhere was going to crumble, it would be against the French. No mitigation policy had been made to limit losses if the Eastern front fell and no reinforcements were on their way, save some of Than’s new recruits who would still take at least a month to muster. The real turning point was a massive defeat at Radom in Russian Poland – deep in enemy territory after pursuing the foe, well over half of the Eastern front found itself against a force of Russians with 50,000 more men behind it. In the month long battle, the Federal forces managed to again outgun the Russian troops and force hard losses on their opponents, but ultimately sheer weight of numbers prevailed and the retreat that followed was nothing less than a rout. Some of the troops fleeing the battle were captured in the following weeks and even those that made it back were in no shape for battle. Defeat in Chinisau in mid-April cemented the Russian victory and forced the entire front to retreat towards Vienna. Events in the Tirol merely worsened matters. Though Federal troops did manage to capture an entire French army of 23,000 men in Innsbruck in late April and they did take 35,000 Spaniards for just 6000 men a week later in Bozen, the Federal forces faced the same steamroller as they did in the East. Sheer weight of numbers meant that the French army could afford to lose consistently twice the number of men the Federal armies did and still push onwards. Defeat at Treviso and Verona forced the Western front backwards towards the capital from which point a ring was created around the city for its defence, which certainly did its initial job of clearing Vienna and its environs of some stray French regiments, though it was untested against serious opposition.

It was in this atmosphere that the Russian Ambassador arrived with an offer. Many historians think that the sheer weight of early victories left the Federation ahead a rather opaque and technical term called “war score”, which for reasons of clarity and ease of understanding shall merely be expressed here as a measure of the success of a nation In a war, though even when this score came out really rather strongly in favour of the Federal forces prior to the battle of Radom, the Russians would not accept the white peace repeatedly offered by the Foreign Minister. Their proposal was simple, accept our demands and we will end the war - the implied threat being that a total defeat would mean far worse, though with the French then also able to dictate terms, the result might be markedly different. The Russian motives were clear; end the war so that the Tsarist regime could focus on suppressing pro-democracy rebel groups and end the war to ensure the party who made gains where themselves, rather than France. What was not clear, however, was whether the Federation would bow to the Empire’s demands.

Liberalen: On the Revenjo Plan (1869-1870)
“The Revenjo Planen Mark III is widely considered the last desperate action of the Danubian Federation, facing the institution of a Hapsburg Emperor at the hands of Franco-Russian forces.” (This extract derives from the well-respected and factually-accurate account of the Revenjo plan written by one of his descendants.) The rejection of the Russian peace offer did not come as a surprise to any in Vienna (Some historians suggest that it wasn’t a surprise in Russia either, asserting Tsar Alexander II once said, “they may be weak, but they are not fools”, though there is little documentary evidence to prove this.) and for a time it was expected that the political experiment that had made such an impact on central Europe was soon to be no more. The Russian ambassador, angered at the callous behaviour of his hosts towards him, left the country without any replacement being sent and recommended to the Tsar that the Federation should be dissolved upon the restoration of order by the Franco-Russian forces: this was not just a very real threat to the continuation of the Federation, but occupied areas were being established as independent in this light. While the French government continued to administrate Piedmont-Sardinia as their own, the Cisalpine union was torn asunder in the granting of Lombardy its own (nominally independent) government; in Galicia, the state’s legislature was forced to declare its independence from the Federation by Russian forces. By contrast, occupied areas of Prussia were largely ignored politically by the occupying forces. The message from both St Petersburg and Paris was clear, if never said aloud – when we win, we will wipe you off the map. Facing this existential threat, Revenjo’s “last desperate action”, endorsed by the Chief of the General Staff Artur Georgescu, was certainly effective and served to alleviate the more immediate issues, but its shortcomings also highlight some of the more systematic failings inherent in the Danubian position.

Before continuing, it is important to stress the superb effort made by the army in this period. Under some of the best leadership Federal forces would ever see and in the face of near constant retreat over the previous few months, the Army fought back against the odds to achieve a feat many saw as impossible. The General Revenjo should not be faulted for his actions, nor should the bravery of the troops be ignored, but neither should we ignore the raft of other factors that turned impending doom into some semblance of success. The biggest of these is the simple fact that the Danubian military’s position was never as bad as it was perceived to be in Vienna or St Petersburg, or even as poor as modern popular wisdom would believe. Not only was there a large body of spare manpower from which to lead a new surge of military recruitment and a well-rested body of troops concentrated around the capital with whom the military elite could organise the fight-back (Neither of these factors could viably be credited to General Revenjo, much as some over-awed historians have attempted too, the former being a simple advantage of the sheer size of the country and the latter merely the result of the forced retreat and subsequent unwillingness to act that had been the ultimate result of defeat on both fronts.), but the relative strength of the enemy is easily overstated. By late-1869, French supply lines were stretched to breaking point, with reinforcements scarcely making it to the Front and the Generals there struggling to communicate. In Spain, Anarcho-Liberal rebels were sweeping the country largely unchecked, though Spanish forces did continue to serve on the front. The perception of strength in the south also encouraged the French to withdraw more of their armies from Italy into Germany and the fight with Prussia, who continued to pose a threat to France in a way that Paris thought the Federation unable, but perhaps the biggest failure of the Franco-Russian forces in 1869 was to allow the Federation time to regroup – had there been a concerted and coordinated attempt to deliver a knock-out blow, or even any sort of aggression with a view to taking Vienna, it seems unlikely there is much that Federal forces could have done. Instead, arrogance and a distinct lack of reliable information led to a strategy of occupation and bought Revenjo time to act.

If we add to this misperception some of the underlying strengths that country still possessed, it starts to become clear why Revenjo was able to turn the situation on its head quite as much as he did. The nation’s size, for example, very simply meant that there was time enough and space enough to retreat and prepare in peace. Her populace, empowered by their democratic rights and no stranger to having to fight for them, were creditable in the level of resistance they offered. Financially, the Federation might have been losing money by the shed-load, but her record for repaying her sovereign debt combined with the fresh availability of neutral, British credit ensured low cost borrowing and financial solvency. These factors and many more, combined to well prepare the Federation for prolonged conflict and ensure the stability of the state at a time when it looked deeply vulnerable to external influence. Almost certainly, however, the nation’s strongest non-military asset was its government. Liberalen’s administration provided all the materials required by the army, increasing its funding despite tight-finances, and carried out the necessary diplomacy with courage and flair. The Foreign Minister’s pet project, Operation Brotherhood, gained cabinet approval late in 1869. Initially opposed by Liberalen as costly and diplomatically volatile, it was an attempt to incite rebellion in Russian territory by exploiting ethnic differences and the funding of separatist groups. When Berlin cited concerns about the impact this would have on their own Polish provinces, Vice President Imre Than was dispatched to quell the Prussians’ fears. The success of the trip and the Prussian endorsement of the policy (if not contribution) was overshadowed by the Vice President’s capture by a Russian scouting force less than 50 miles north of Breslau. For the Russians their new hostage was but a consolation; though the impact of Operation Brotherhood was minimal, it scared the Russian establishment to such an extent that it is often cited as the main reason the Russians returned to the table the following year. Some historians also argue that Operation Brotherhood was the catalyst for the intensification of the policy of ‘Russification’, whereby minorities were actively repressed in an attempt to make them more Russian. More orthodox diplomacy also brought success, with the end of hostilities against the Ottoman Turks and the Greek entrance into the war turning the balance of power in the Balkans in the Federation’s favour and a historic alliance secured with the newly reunited United States to bring about their first entrance into a major European conflict.

By November 1870, the Russians were back at the table, offering a restoration of the pre-war status quo. The Russian Foreign Minister himself was sent to deliver the offer as a sign of sincerity, though for the papers this simply drew attention to the Russian detention of the second-most important man in the country. Although what the Russians were asking for, namely the ‘liberation’ of Wallachia, was not a white peace with regards to the facts on the ground, it is worth considering the many weaknesses that had either been exposed by Revenjo’s plan or were visible when it had concluded. The first and most obvious was that large parts of the nation were still occupied by enemy forces - though the French had been driven out of Federal territory almost entirely, both Piedmont and Tunisia remained firmly in French hands and the amount under Russian ownership, particularly in Romania and Slovakia, had actually increased over the year to November. Contrary to what the diplomatic rearrangements might suggest, French intervention in the Balkans had actually ended the uneasy truce in the region – Greece had failed to defend itself in the face of superior firepower and Albania was slowly being captured by the French. At sea, too, the Federation’s early advantage had been lost; while the Federation probably remained the world’s foremost naval power behind Great Britain, her dominance of the Mediterranean and Black Seas was ended with defeat to the Russians off the Crimean coast and the increasing success of the French in evading Federal blockades. The spare manpower available in 1869 had been used up and the sheer scale of the losses made in increasingly harder for regiments to reinforce themselves and the question of rebels remained of the utmost importance, particularly with the fate of Tuscany still under the control of Italian pan-nationalists unclear. The Federation’s biggest problem, however, was Prussia. With no other consequential European ally, and no indication that America would actually do anything to aid Federal forces, the Prussian collapse was of great concern. Despite numerical superiority in the West, the Prussians had allowed almost all of the Rhineland to fall under occupation. In the East, the story was even worse, with no Prussian troops remaining to halt the Russian march on Berlin. The imminent defeat of the Prussian fleets in the Baltic hardly helped while from Pomerania to Württemberg German pan-nationalists were making an unwelcome return and further compounding the woes of the Prussian state.

Liberalen: Italy Rises (1870-1871)
The Peace of Berlin brought an end to what was arguably the most destructive war of the 19th century. In the space of two years, a little under two million military personnel lay dead in the fields of Europe – around three times more men were lost in the Federation’s first international  war, which was formerly its bloodiest conflict, and five times more soldiers were lost per year than in the all-consuming Napoleonic wars. Much of the Federation, particularly in Galacia and Italy, was left in tatters, as were vast swathes of Germany and the Balkans. Though the central powers made concessions to the Russians under the treaty, the only change of any importance was the admission of Wallachian independence under Russian guidance. Satiated that the Danubian advance into the Balkans and towards the Straits had been arrested, Russian rhetoric towards their Western neighbours softened commencing a period of détente. The Foreign Minister even managed to negotiate the unconditional release of the then captive Vice President, Imre Than. Sadly, Valenta’s triumph was marred by the death of Than to the Russian winter just north of Vilnius. Valenta returned to Vienna empty handed, but with keen stories of unexpected Russian hospitality. More significant diplomatic changes were afoot elsewhere as the Prussian King, Wilhelm, under pressure from a newly elected Conservative government and increasingly vocal reactionary militants, refused to renew his alliance with the Danubian Federation. In compensation the only new alliance proposals given were from the minor states of Hesse-Darmstadt and Switzerland. It was also in Switzerland where the Geneva Convention, designed to draw up the rules of engagement for future conflicts, was nearing its end and the Congress in Vienna would have to choose whether or not to sign it.

Domestically, the country was returning to prosperity. By the end of 1871, the country was the third wealthiest nation making up around 10% of world GDP. Per capita, Danubian citizens were better of than those of all but five nations, with only the French placed better on both metrics. Indeed, most historians reckon that around this period the Federation drew level with or even overtook France to become the second greatest nation on the planet. There were also many signs of an increasing internal acceptance from areas only recently incorporated into the Federation of their position; parts of Bosnia, particularly in the Croat-dominated west, became part of the Federations patrimony to such an extent that they start to be seen by modern historians are part of the Federation’s core territory. Only one sector floundered during this period of benign neglect – the end of the war dramatically decreased demand for the armaments and food that many of the Federations factories were producing, forcing them to rely on state subsidies and in turn preventing any real recovery in the state of government finances. Politically, 1871 also saw the birth of a new movement. In the North German city of Oldenburg, at the sixth meeting of the International Workingman’s Association, the socialist movement split in two – a new brand of the movement, called Communism, emerged, which professed Marxist teachings should be followed more strictly than the socialists and the radicals had done in times past.

The government’s biggest success actually came outside the Federation’s borders. With the end of the war, and the withdrawal of the financial support the Federation had been supplying to their satellite states, the Tuscan state was finally forced to declare itself bankrupt. With it, any hope the reclamation of the nation by the King’s forces were dashed, and the Pan-Nationalist forces, led by the infamous Giuseppe Garibaldi, were able to establish a provisional Republic of Italy. Garibaldi was, however, outmanouvered by the King of Sardinia-Piedmont, Victor-Emmanuel II, and his government. A popular revolt in the Two Sicilies a month after the Provisional Government’s establishment, which successfully overthrew the temporal powers of the Church only thanks to Garibaldi’s assistance, crowned the Sardinian as King of Italy, mainly thanks to the work of a Sardinian spy-ring in Naples. Within a month, every independent Italian state except for the Republic had either suffered a successful rebellion in favour of Victor-Emmanuel, as happened in the Papal States, or had voted in favour of annexation to the new state. Garibaldi’s victory was also his undoing, as the Italian state he had helped to foster turned upon him. Garibaldi died under house arrest two years later. In January of 1871, Garibaldi’s ministers ejected him from power to join the fledgling nation. The Pope became a ‘Prisoner in the Vatican’, having lost all temporal powers and refusing to accept the existence of the Kingdom it was encircled by. Save from the city of Lucca and the Danubian state of Cisalpina, Victor Emmanuel had succeeded in unifying Italy; yet his new state remained bound by the treaties it had signed with the Federation and, despite its obvious increase in strength, the Kingdom of Italy would remain a satellite of the Federation.