ABSTRACT
The three most easterly Empires in Europe, the Austrian, Russian and Turkish, were all declining in the nineteenth century. By 1923 they had all perished. Attempts at reform, carried out sometimes despairingly and never confidently, were nowhere successful for any length, of time. The Habsburgs tried to preserve their heterogeneous monarchy by repeated constitutional experiments; the tsar, Alexander II, hoped to modernize and humanize Russian institutions; even the sultans periodically tried to rejuvenate their diseased Empire; all three failed to make any radical improvements.
