Tuesday, December 11, 1849.
On this day, everyone in Vienna rose early. Yet today was no festival—only a wedding.
Of course, perhaps from this day onward, it would become an official holiday of the Austrian Empire.
Ordinarily, Vienna's citizens should have welcomed the procession escorting the Empress at the city gates, but given the realities of Austria and Russia, this tradition had to be altered.
Vienna was nearly 1,800 kilometers from Saint Petersburg. Considering the actual state of the roads at the time, fetching the bride was more like a long-distance journey, conservatively estimated to take around forty days.
With Russia already in winter, and the two nations alternating between states of war, insisting on preserving this tradition would have been courting death. There were simply too many possible mishaps, including but not limited to illness, natural disasters, traffic accidents, warfare, and political assassinations.
Thus, the tradition became a wedding parade. The procession would depart from Schönbrunn Palace for St. Stephen's Cathedral, where the wedding would be held, then proceed to the docks and take a boat to receive the blessings of the people on both banks. It would sail downstream, disembark, circle Central Park, and finally return to Schönbrunn Palace.
The route encompassed the entire inner city, which was also an Austrian Imperial tradition. But Austria's inner city was now even larger than the entirety of Vienna had been in history, so they had no choice but to use boats to speed up the parade.
By four in the morning, crowds of spectators had already gathered outside Schönbrunn Palace. The spectacle inside the palace was even more astonishing—nearly every royal house in Europe had sent representatives to celebrate Franz's wedding.
The reigning royal houses of Germany and Italy went without saying. The House of Bourbon, the House of Braganza—the