ABSTRACT
Holstein). Thus, a dozen states controlled about 90 per cent of the Confederation's total area.
Elsewhere, the picture was more confusing and the drift of developments less easy to characterize. In the case of Poland, the kingdom erected in 1815 gave the illusion that the work of the late eighteenth-century partitions had been substantially undone. To a realistic observer, however, the appearance of this Russian puppet, with the tsar as its king, could not hide the fact that one of the larger European nations of 1780 was no more. On the other hand, the birth of an independent Greece at the very end of our period constituted an extremely significant change in the map, one pregnant with meaning for the future of the crumbling Ottoman Empire.
