In the history of the Austria-Hungary, trialism was the political movement that aimed to reorganize the bipartite Empire into a tripartite one, creating a Croatian state equal in status to Austria and Hungary. Franz Ferdinand promoted trialism before his assassination in 1914 to prevent the Empire from being ripped apart by Slavic dissent. The Empire would be restructured three ways instead of two, with the Slavic element given representation at the highest levels equivalent to what Austria and Hungary had at the time. Serbians saw this as a threat to their dream of a new state of Yugoslavia. Hungarian leaders had a predominant voice in imperial circles and strongly rejected Trialism because it would liberate many of their minorities from Hungarian rule they considered oppressive. At the end of World War I, its advocates obtained support for a trialist manifesto, but the monarchy as a whole crumbled shortly thereafter. History The movement originated in the 1880s in aristocratic and clerical circles of the Empire as a reaction to Hungarian nationalism and must be contrasted to the revolutionary, secessionist Yugoslavism, as it worked within the Habsburg state apparatus with support from Croat politicians and Austrian officials, including the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The hope of trialist Austrian imperialists was that Serbia might eventually join the great Croatia that was to be created, while putting pressure on the Hungarians and allowing Vienna to continue to dominate the Empire as a whole. In the early and mid-19th century the movement was Pan-Slavic and demanded that, in addition to the Austrian and Hungarian crowns, a third Slavic crown be established (North Slavs and the South Slavs separately), to allow the empire to resist claims from other Slavic countries and nations (Russia and Serbia). With the collapse of the early pan-Slavic (Czech-Slovak and Croatian-Slovene-Serb) movements, the new concept of trialism was strictly relegated to Croatia. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the Croatian-Hungarian Compromise of 1868 there was great dissatisfaction among the Croatian population that was divided between the two crowns of the empire (Croats in Istria and Dalmatia under the Austrian crown, Croats in Croatia and Slavonia under the Hungarian, and Bosnia-Herzegovina divided between them.) Strong pressure for the reorganization of the empire arose mainly from Croatia-Slavonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, who since the 1848-49 defeat of the Hungarians had resented their association with them. There were many trialist propositions proposed but the common idea was