The letters from Strossmayer to Gladstone were all collected by R.W. Seton-Watson and included in the appendix to his book, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy, published in London in 1911 by Constable and Co. Seton-Watson thanks the trustees of Gladstone's estate for permission to use the correspondence, of which we have included four letters from Strossmayer to Gladstone. The letters reveal much about Strossmayer's attitudes towards the various peoples of the Balkan peninsula as well as the role of outsiders in the region. Strossmayer's correspondent, William Ewart Gladstone, was one year removed from the publication of his pamphlet on the "Bulgarian Horrors," in which he railed against the barbarity of Ottoman policy in the Balkans.

The dispatches from the US representative in Vienna were taken from Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, the official publication of US diplomatic correspondence. The documents chosen for reproduction here concern the nature of Austro-Hungarian government and the attitudes of the monarchy's political leaders towards the crisis in the Balkans.

For further reading:

M.S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923 (London: Macmillan, 1966)

David Harris, Britain and the Bulgarian Horrors of 1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939)

R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (London: Frank Cass, 1933)

B.H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937)