This rising, and its suppression, occurred in the years 1848 and 1849. By the year 1866 a rift had appeared in the Alliance so-called Holy; and Austria was actually at war with Prussia. The war arose out of a work of spoliation done by the two allies two years {198} before, when they had combined to take the provinces of Schleswig-Holstein from under the rule of Denmark. The population of those provinces was in part Scandinavian and in part Germanic, so that they were divided in their political desires, some of the people favouring union with Denmark and others wishing to be taken into the Confederation of German States. On their own part they were claiming their independence of the Danish rule. There was therefore a certain excuse for the action of these two Holy Allies; but now, when they had done the act of robbery, they quarrelled over the division of the spoils. Prussia claimed to take both Schleswig and Holstein under her own dominance. Austria said that she should at least be given one of them for her share. The result was the outbreak of that which has been called the Seven Weeks' War, in which Prussia was completely victorious. And in this brief campaign there were Hungarian legions fighting on the side of Prussia against Austria, their own sovereign. That, however, did not imply that Austria's sovereignty was weakened, and in the following year, that is, in 1867, Francis Joseph the Austrian Emperor, was formally crowned King of Hungary at Buda-Pesth, the Hungarian capital. In this way Austria and Hungary came to stand in a curious position towards one another. They were two kingdoms under the same ruler--a double kingdom. Another outcome of that Schleswig-Holstein conflict and of the Seven Weeks' War was that the Confederation of the German States was reconstituted. The old single confederation was broken up into a North German Confederation, of which Prussia was the head, and a South German Confederation, the river Maine being taken as the boundary between them. Austria stood apart politically, though geographically belonging to the Southern group. {199} In spite of her defeat then, Austria maintained her old dominance over Hungary, but she did not succeed in maintaining for long the far less definite dominance which the European Powers had assigned to her, at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, over the various States of Italy. Italy was later than any other land of Europe in settling down into the national boundaries which remained without any break of importance until the Great War. We may indeed say that the very idea of Italy as a single nation had scarcely existed before the year 1830 or thereabouts. Men did not regard Italy as a unit; but thought of Tuscany, of Venice, of the Papal States, of the Kingdom of Naples, and so on. [Sidenote: The Young Italy Party]