The Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria-Hungary completed 60 years on the throne in 1908, and when he died in 1916, he was only two years away from what would have been an unprecedented Platinum Jubilee.
This would have marked an astonishing 70-year reign, something no modern monarch has yet achieved.
At his Diamond Jubilee, there was appropriate praise for the sovereign who had weathered the European revolutions of 1848, who had brought peace and prosperity in the later decades of his reign, and who had presided over the extraordinarily vibrant cultural life of fin de siecle Vienna.
But there was also a widespread feeling that it was only the emperor himself who was holding together his diverse, disputatious and increasingly disaffected realms, and that with his death the Habsburg Empire must break up - which, indeed, it did, in 1918, only two years after Francis Joseph's passing.