After the final triumph of Italian and German nationalism in 1870 the Danubian lands and the Balkan Peninsula remained the one considerable area of unsatisfied nationalist aspirations in Europe. These aspirations provided the most considerable threat to the multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Yet in both cases the dynasty, in spite of recent challenges, was still sustained by a tradition of inevitability; both had existed for so long, and in spite of the declining glamour of the imperial or any other embracing role each could still ask with some plausibility what was to be put in its place. The question in the international field found a ready answer from the new Germany, which was soon to tell Russia that Austria-Hungary was a European necessity, and from Great Britain, which was still making the same extravagant claim for Turkey; and if Russian views were divided they were not pressed to the limit. At home, many could still not conceive of life without emperor or sultan. Echoing Palacký, Prince Charles Schwarzenberg asked the Young Czech extremists in 1891, ‘what will you do with your country, which is too small to stand alone?’ and in 1897 the Young Turk exile Murat Bey said that the ruling dynasty must remain at the head of the empire, for without it Turkish power had no existence. Nevertheless, the chance of survival for both Habsburg and Ottoman came to depend less and less on past glory or present convenience and more and more on two conditions: the international stalemate after 1878 and the hostilities which divided the national minorities and which postponed and confused their challenge to the state.