DISRAELI SAW a fresh opportunity to loosen the Dreikaiserbund when in July 1875 the wild Ottoman Balkan province of Herzegovina revolted, raising the Eastern Question to the center of European diplomacy once more.

Its forlorn hope was that Russia would accept a punishment of Serbia for the sake of ending the terrorist-revolutionary threat to all thrones, including Russia's, and that then Austria and Russia could settle their other differences (above all the Ruthenian quest ion) and restore both good relations and the old Dreikaiserbund (the "Three Emperors' League") as well.

Especially in the nineteenth century, from the Napoleonic Wars through the convulsions of 1848 to the disaster of World War I, the Habsburg domain was central, geographically as well as politically, to the diplomatic maneuverings that any student of the origin of the Great War knows by heart: the Dreikaiserbund, the German-Austrian alliance of 1879, the Triple Alliance, the Russo-German Reinsurance Treaty, and so on down through that prologue to disaster, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.