The Austro-Hungarian Empire
Discover the Austro-Hungarian Empire — the multi-ethnic state whose internal tensions and Balkan rivalries helped ignite World War I.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918) was one of Europe's great powers and one of its most complex. A dual monarchy uniting the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary under a single Habsburg ruler, it governed a patchwork of over a dozen major ethnic groups — Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Italians, and Bosnians — who increasingly demanded self-determination.
The empire was created by the Compromise of 1867, which gave Hungary significant autonomy following Austria's defeat by Prussia. This arrangement satisfied Hungarian nationalists but frustrated every other ethnic group, creating perpetual internal tension. Vienna and Budapest were cultural powerhouses — producing Freud, Mahler, Klimt, and Kafka — but the empire's political structures struggled to accommodate rising nationalism.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist was the spark that ignited World War I. Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia activated the alliance system that drew all of Europe into war. The empire disintegrated in 1918, replaced by the successor states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and parts of Poland, Romania, and Italy — new nations whose borders and ethnic tensions would fuel conflict for the rest of the century.