Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary, the Dual Monarchy, was created by the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867 between the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, negotiated after Austria's defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Under the Compromise, Austria and Hungary became two formally equal, self-governing states sharing a single monarch, Emperor Franz Joseph I as both Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, along with common ministries for foreign affairs, defense, and shared finance; each half otherwise kept its own constitution, parliament, and administration, and non-Magyar and non-German nationalities within each half held the legal status of minorities despite forming large populations in both. The assassination of the monarchy's own heir presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 precipitated the July Crisis and the First World War, in which Austria-Hungary fought as the Central Powers' second major partner; defeat, the strain of the war on its multinational structure, and the wartime nationalist movements it could no longer contain brought the monarchy's collapse in October and November 1918, when Emperor Charles I renounced participation in state affairs on 11 November 1918 and the monarchy's constituent nationalities declared independent successor states.