Austrian Succession, War of the (1740–1748)

AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION, WAR OF THE (1740–1748)

AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION, WAR OF THE (1740–1748). On 20 October 1740 the death of the last male Habsburg, the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740), precipitated a major European war for the succession both to his territories and to the elected position of emperor. The lands over which Charles had ruled consisted of the Austrian duchies, the kingdom of Bohemia (including Silesia and Moravia), the kingdom of Hungary, the duchy of Milan, and the ten provinces of the southern Netherlands. Over the course of his reign he had sought political guarantees from the territorial princes of the empire and the other great powers that they would uphold the Pragmatic Sanction (an edict he had first promulgated in 1713) and ensure that the succession to the Habsburg lands would pass to his daughter Maria Theresa (b. 1717) in the absence of a son. There were, though, two rival claimants for Charles's inheritance, the daughters of his elder brother, the emperor Joseph I (ruled 1705–1711): Maria Josepha, married in 1719 to Crown Prince Augustus of Saxony, and Maria Amalia, who married Crown Prince Karl Albert of Bavaria in 1722. Despite the renunciations of all claims to the Habsburg inheritance made by the two archduchesses, this did not stop the Saxons and the Bavarians from intriguing throughout the 1720s and 1730s to secure some or all of the lands upon Charles VI's eventual death. Moreover, the last three years of Charles's reign made a dismemberment of the Habsburg Monarchy all the more likely thanks to a massive increase in the state debt during an unsuccessful and demoralizing war against the Ottoman Empire, which had revealed to the rest of Europe serious deficiencies in the Habsburg military machine.

The War of the Austrian Succession was precipitated in December 1740 by the invasion of Silesia by Frederick II ("the Great") of Brandenburg-Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), who had himself succeeded to his throne only six months earlier on the death of his father, Frederick William I (ruled 1713–1740). Unlike Frederick William, the new Prussian monarch had little respect for imperial law and institutions if they stood in the way of securing his territories; and while Frederick's claims on Silesia had more justification than has sometimes been conceded, nevertheless it was an act that caused alarm across Europe. Following the invasion and Prussia's defeat of the Austrians at Mollwitz in April 1741, Maria Theresa's stubborn refusal to negotiate with Frederick almost cost her the rest of her lands: between May and September 1741 a coalition was assembled consisting of France, Spain, Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony that intended to seize large parts of the Habsburg Monarchy. Maria Theresa's truce with Frederick II, the Convention of Klein-Schnellendorf in October 1741, came too late to prevent a Franco-Bavarian occupation of Bohemia the following month; and this was followed in January 1742 by the election of Karl Albert (elector of Bavaria since 1726) as the new Holy Roman emperor. However, at the same time that Karl Albert was acclaimed as Charles VII, Maria Theresa's army, consisting in large part of loyal Hungarians, turned the tide, capturing Munich, the new emperor's ducal capital, after liberating Upper Austria from Bavarian control. This was followed in June by the provisional peace of Breslau between Prussia and Maria Theresa, and the final expulsion of the French from Bohemia in December that year.

From then on, the war took on wider European and even global dimensions, as Britain-Hanover and France, ostensibly still neutral, confronted each other in western Germany and at sea. In 1743 the French were almost completely forced out of the empire, and in March and April 1744 Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774) formalized hostilities by declaring war first on Great Britain and then on Austria. For the previous four years Britain and Spain had already been at war over trade with the Spanish American empire. In Europe, Spain, for its part, had been trying to divest Maria Theresa of Lombardy in northern Italy since 1741, but faced the opposition of Charles Emmanuel III, king of Sardinia and ruler of Piedmont (ruled 1729–1773), and warfare in northern Italy remained indecisive throughout the period up to 1746. In spite of renewed Prussian hostilities toward Austria, when Frederick II signed a full alliance with France in June, the 1744 campaigns in the Low Countries and the empire were also inconclusive.

The death of Charles VII in January 1745 changed the political picture dramatically. Max Joseph, his successor as elector of Bavaria, aware of the impossibility of the Bavarian position, promised to vote for Maria Theresa's husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, grand duke of Tuscany, to be the next emperor, which he accordingly became in October. But the military tide had not by any means turned, for French arms were proving dangerously triumphant in the Netherlands. On 11 May 1745 Maurice de Saxe, marshal of France, defeated the combined Anglo-Austrian-Dutch army at Fontenoy, and went on to capture a string of fortresses in Flanders stretching nearly as far as Antwerp by the end of the year. This was not least because the British contingent under the duke of Cumberland had been withdrawn to deal with the Jacobite rising in Scotland which was threatening to overcome the Hanoverian government of Cumberland's father George II (ruled 1727–1760). They were not to return in force to the continent until well into the following year. Meanwhile, Prussia forced Austria to sign the treaty of Dresden in December 1745, on broadly similar terms to that of Breslau three years earlier.

Nevertheless, Austrian fortunes still showed few signs of improving. Although Charles-Emmanuel largely succeeded in recovering and protecting his own territories and those of Maria Theresa in Italy during 1746, the advantages continued to go France's way in the Netherlands: in February, Saxe captured Brussels, while the following year saw him drive along the River Scheldt and into the Dutch Republic, capturing in September 1747 the seemingly impregnable fortress of Berg-op-Zoom. By now, however, a degree of exhaustion was setting in on all sides, symbolized by Saxe's pyrrhic victory over Cumberland at Lawfeld in July 1747. Warfare in the Caribbean had proved largely uneventful, while the British colonial authorities in Massachusetts back in June 1745 had succeeded with the help of the Royal Navy in capturing the French fortress of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, which Louis XV wanted back but could not regain by military and naval means. This was offset by the French capture of Madras from the British in September 1746, the only notable action in India.

The Peace of Aix-La-Chapelle of October–November 1748, which marked the end of the war, preserved most of the inheritance of Charles VI for Maria Theresa: she had formally conceded Silesia to Prussia in the December 1745 treaty of Dresden, and she now had to give up the western third of the duchy of Milan to Sardinia, and the duchies of Parma and Guastalla to Don Philip, half-brother of the Spanish king Ferdinand VI (ruled 1746–1759). But the price France paid for the return of Louisbourg and for Austrian concessions to the Spanish Bourbons was high: Louis XV returned to Austria all his conquests in the Netherlands, to the irritation of French public opnion. Aix-La-Chapelle was more of a truce than a definitive treaty, for even in Italy the creation of stability required another round of agreements in 1752. There was still plenty of unfinished business left over from the years 1739–1740, most notably Maria Theresa's personal refusal to reconcile herself to the loss of Silesia, and the persistent friction between the British on the one hand, and the French and Spanish Bourbons on the other over colonial matters in the Americas and India. Further conflict was both likely and imminent.

See also Bavaria ; Charles VI (Holy Roman Empire) ; Frederick II (Prussia) ; Frederick William I (Prussia) ; Habsburg Dynasty: Austria ; Louis XV (France) ; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, M. S. The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740– 1748. London, 1995.

Browning, Reed. The War of the Austrian Succession. New York, 1993.

McLynn, F. J. France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Edinburgh, 1981.

Scott, H. M., and Derek McKay. The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815. London, 1983. Chaps. 4–6.

Guy Rowlands