of their states and, after allying himself with Rumania, had carried out
an agreement with the Bulgarian committee for the amalgamation of Bulgaria
with Serbia, thus obtaining a commanding influence in the Balkans. With his
death, Serbia fell into the hands of Milan and Alexander, whose weak and
erratically despotic reigns ushered in an era in Serbian history from which
she emerged in 1903, through the assassination and the extinction of the
last of the Obrenovics, a country without a good name, a nation which,
through no special fault of its own, had become degraded.

It was in the midst of this political decay that the Bosnians revolted in
1875 and that Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, and Rumania became involved in
the Russo-Turkish war. Space forbids but the most hasty survey of the
occupation and administration by Austria of Bosnia and the Herzegovina by
virtue of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.

Bismarck, Francis Joseph, and Andrassy were swayed by differing motives
whose total result was that Austria was to become a Balkan power--the
outpost of the German _Drang nach Osten_--and that it was worth while
making a greater Serbia impossible, even at the cost of increasing the
number of Slavs in the Habsburg monarchy, which, now reenforced by the
Ausgleich, could stand the strain of advancing democracy and the necessity,
therefore, of granting further rights to the Slavs.

The occupation of Bosnia led to the first real quarrels in modern times
between Croat and Serb, for the former wanted Bosnia in Greater Croatia in
order to have connection with Dalmatia; the latter wished it annexed
to Greater Serbia, because it was Serbian. Magyar and German, further,
quarreled as to the status of Bosnia and left it unsettled. But one thing
was settled by the occupation in 1879 and the annexation in 1908. Neither
Greater Croatia nor Greater Serbia were any longer truly possible as a