They finally asked for redress of several grievances caused by the misrule of Rudolph.
The discords which followed on the break-up of the Carolingian power, and the weakness of the so-called Italian emperors, who were unable to control the feudatories (marquises of Ivrea and Tuscany, dukes of Friuli and Spoleto), from whose ranks they sprang, exposed Italy to ever-increasing misrule.
This change of masters brought some relief to the unfortunate Cretans, who at least exchanged the licence of local misrule for the oppression of an organized despotism; and the government of Mustafa Pasha, an Albanian like Mehemet Ali, the ruler of the island for a considerable period (1832-1852), was more enlightened and intelligent than that of most Turkish governors.
Justly to estimate the work done by Kallay, it is only necessary to point to the contrast between Bosnia in 1882 and Bosnia in 1903; for in 21 years the anarchy and ruin entailed by four centuries of misrule were transformed into a condition of prosperity unsurpassed in south-eastern Europe.
The Hungarian diet frantically opposed every Austrian alliance as endangering the national independence, but to any unprejudiced observer a union with the house of Habsburg, even with the contingent probability of a Habsburg king, was infinitely preferable to the condition into which Hungary, under native aristocratic misrule, was swiftly drifting.