In the political sphere, the Austrian Empire's high officials had gained quite a few more unrealistic fantasies. For instance, what if the House of Romanov died out?
Would they then need to consider a personal union with Russia? At the very least, they now had a claim to the Russian throne.
A person had to have dreams. What if Russia, too, produced a madman like the former Spanish prime minister Ferrante Duway, who slaughtered every last member of the House of Romanov?
Nineteenth-century Hesse could truly be called ill-fated. At the turn of the century, they had chosen to bet on Napoleon, and Hessian mercenaries had marched south and fought north for the First French Empire, winning distinguished merit across the land.
Yet with Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia, tens of thousands of Hessians left their bones beneath Russia's ice and snow.
In the wars that followed, even more Hessians became cannon fodder. In a region where the combined population of several states was barely over a million, such losses were impossible to bear.
As great numbers of able-bodied young men died, Hesse inevitably fell into economic decline and widespread social unrest. During this period, Hesse's population plummeted.
After the War of the Sixth Coalition ended, Hesse's king and nobles began settling old scores, making the people's lives even worse.
Then, as if by ill fortune, natural disasters struck as well, and the Hesse region erupted in a peasant uprising so rare that all of nineteenth-century Europe scarcely saw its like.
But nineteenth-century peasant uprisings posed very little threat to European regimes, and it was swiftly bloodily suppressed. The result was that the Hessians lived even more miserably.
In the years that followed, droughts and floods did not pass them by either. In 1848, they once again sided with the