ABSTRACT
The political map of Central Europe remained relatively stable following the partition of Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, apart from the continuing territorial losses of the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburgs and the Russian Empire. The Napoleonic wars disturbed this political order for a decade and a half at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. However, the Congress of Vienna (1815) largely recreated the region’s political map as it had been before. The biggest political change that stayed was the disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire. It dissolved in 1806, while the Habsburgs’ hereditary lands, in anticipation of such a development, had been made into an Austrian Empire in 1804. But European monarchs and diplomats assembled at Vienna in 1815 patched up the loss of this empire with a German Confederation. A more noticeable political change of a permanent character was that of Sweden’s loss of Finland to Russia, followed by Denmark-Norway’s loss of Norway to Sweden.
