The country of Hungary is currently decked in mourning for the death of their king last week, Ferenc V, who'd ruled in Hungary since just after the Anglo-German War ended in the late 1930s. One Hungarian newspaper called Ferenc "the unshifting rock in the sands of politics". And while it's certainly true that his chancellors had some very uncomfortable dressings down from their "constitutional" monarch, the king held very little power in day to day affairs after the Revolution of 1921 removed those powers from his newly-ascended father, Gyorgy III.

But what if the Rakoczis had never climbed into the drivers' seat in Hungary in the first place? Several times, Ferenc I was close to being defeated by Habsburg forces, and it was only the Holy Roman Emperor Josef I's attack of smallpox in 1711 that meant the Hungarians (with French and Russian support) were able to finally see the back of the Habsburgs. However, the Habsburgs under the recovered emperor didn't take the loss of their kingdom of Hungary well, and included the style of "king of Hungary" in their plethora of titles - it only being in the reign of Emperor Karl VIII in the 1790s that they managed to finally make peace with the country next door.

By that time, Hungary and the Holy Roman Empire were far different entities to what they'd been in 1711. By the 1790s the Habsburgs had focused more on Germany and become viewed as the "natural" leader (by all except France and Prussia) in Germany. While Hungary had undertaken several joint-effort wars with Russia against the Turks to get back not an insignificant part of Serbia, Oltenia and Transylvania. But, then in the 1780s Russia's ambitions in Poland and the Black Sea led to the Rakoczis (under King Ferenc III) making nice with the Habsburgs (under Karl VIII) in the decade which followed, and them forming a bulwark against Russian expansion into Europe (everyone knows that the king of Poland by that point was a Russian puppet).

So, what if Ferenc I's rebellion had been unsuccessful (what are some of the points it could've foundered)? Would Habsburg rule have continued in Hungary? What about the regions of the Balkans that the Hungarian Crown managed to "liberate" from the Ottoman yoke? Would they still be under the Turkish boot?
 
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