his legitimate throne and all efforts
of the decent Spaniards to get rid of this curse and make Spain a
constitutional kingdom ended in bloodshed and executions.

Portugal had been without a king since the year 1807 when the royal
family had fled to the colonies in Brazil. The country had been used as
a base of supply for the armies of Wellington during the Peninsula war,
which lasted from 1808 until 1814. After 1815 Portugal continued to be
a sort of British province until the house of Braganza returned to the
throne, leaving one of its members behind in Rio de Janeiro as Emperor
of Brazil, the only American Empire which lasted for more than a few
years, and which came to an end in 1889 when the country became a
republic.

In the east, nothing was done to improve the terrible conditions of both
the Slavs and the Greeks who were still subjects of the Sultan. In
the year 1804 Black George, a Servian swineherd, (the founder of the
Karageorgevich dynasty) had started a revolt against the Turks, but he
had been defeated by his enemies and had been murdered by one of his
supposed friends, the rival Servian leader, called Milosh Obrenovich,
(who became the founder of the Obrenovich dynasty) and the Turks had
continued to be the undisputed masters of the Balkans.

The Greeks, who since the loss of their independence, two thousand years
before, had been subjects of the Macedonians, the Romans, the Venetians
and the Turks, had hoped that their countryman, Capo d'Istria, a native
of Corfu and together with Czartoryski, the most intimate personal
friends of Alexander, would do something for them. But the Congress of
Vienna was not interested in Greeks, but was very much interested in
keeping all "legitimate" monarchs, Christian, Moslem and otherwise, upon
their respective thrones. Therefore nothing was done.

The last, but perhaps the greatest blunder of the Congress was the
treatment of Germany. The Reformation and the Thirty Years War had not
only destroyed the prosperity of the country, but had turned it into a
hopeless political rubbish heap, consisting of a couple of kingdoms,
a few grand-duchies, a large number of duchies and hundreds of
margravates, principalities, baronies, electorates, free cities and free
villages, ruled by the strangest assortment of potentates that was ever
seen off the comic opera stage. Frederick the Great had changed this
when he created a strong Prussia, but this state had not survived him by
m