I well remember as a child in Bucharest being taught by a reputable high school teacher that to speak kindly of Romanian-Magyar sympathizers was tantamount to asking for a failing grade. From elementary school on I can recall only the most disparaging remarks by my teachers about my Hungarian neighbors, and I challenge my friend Istvan Deak to say that sympathizers of the Romanians were ever more kindly treated in the lyceums of Budapest or Debrecen. Fortunately, we are sufficiently sophisticated today to realize that the writing of history is a matter of dates. I am, nevertheless, bewildered by the thought that the same Romanian schoolboy studying the revolutions of 1848 in classrooms of 1940, 1952, and 1976 has been and is being taught that the villains of yesterday are the heroes of today.

The general congress, designed either to end wars or to prevent them, dominated the diplomacy of peacemaking in eighteenthcentury Europe. When writing about these peace conferences historians understandably have focused their attention on those that achieved success. Equally important, however, were those that failed. They revealed, more clearly than the successful congresses, the difficulties governments faced in judging military and diplomatic conditions, the vicissitudes of negotiation, and the frustrations of policy making. One of these futile congresses was the Congress of Nemirov, which was convened in southern Poland in 1737 for the purpose of ending the Austro-Russian-Turkish war begun the year before. Hopefully, examination of the conference from the Austrian point of view will offer insight into the general policy of one of the participants, the results it expected to achieve, the problems its plenipotentiaries encountered both in preparing for and attending the sessions, and the question of why the congress disbanded without resolving the differences between the belligerents.

The Serbs occupied a unique position among the nations living in the Habsburg empire in the eighteenth century. They were the only Orthodox Christians who had full religious equality, and collectively they enjoyed the advantages of a privileged and autonomous group. Beginning in the early part of the eighteenth century, when it gradually became apparent that the Serbs would be integrated into the monarchy as permanent residents rather than as temporary refugees and allies, the special status of the Serbs posed difficult problems for the Habsburg government. The Magyar authorities, the central government offices in Vienna, and the Serbs themselves became involved in recurrent struggles within the bureaucracy as each faction continually maneuvered to gain advantages for its position.

The consensus on the moral aspect of the Papal election of 1829 expressed in the above statements represents an unusual agreement between two men who seldom agreed about anything, least of all about the conclave of 1829, which had been a battleground for their conflicting interests. This battle between two old rivals, their last conflict, as it turned out, adds interest to an event that was in itself important for the course of Restoration history. Although Chateaubriand's role has been studied, primarily from the viewpoint of literary rather than of diplomatic history, Metternich's part has been strangely ignored. Since it was the Austrian chancellor rather than the French ambassador who won this particular encounter, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich deserves greater attention from historians than he has received. Consequently, this article is devoted primarily to the Austrian side of the struggle to elect a Pope in 1829.