War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1714

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caleb Karges
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
Grand Alliance ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
United Provinces

The War of the Spanish Succession was a large military conflict that encompassed most of western and central Europe spawning additional fighting in the Americas and the world’s oceans. Hostilities began with the invasion of Lombardy by imperial forces in 1701 and were concluded be the treaties of Utrecht (1713), Rastatt, and Baden (1714). The trigger for the war was the long-anticipated death of the childless King Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his will, which ignored several partition treaties signed by other powers and passed the entirety of the Spanish monarchy to Louis XIV of France’s grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou (Philip V of Spain). The Austrian Habsburgs under Emperor Leopold I contested the will on the behalf of his second son the Archduke Charles (Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire). With the European balance of power jeopardized by the prospect of a Bourbon succession in Spain, the Kingdom of England (Great Britain after 1707) and the United Provinces joined the Holy Roman Emperor in forming the Grand Alliance in 1702. The Grand Alliance, heretofore referred to as the Allies, expanded to consist ultimately of the emperor of and the states of the Holy Roman Empire (with a few notable exceptions), Great Britain, the United Provinces, Portugal, and the Duchy of Savoy-Piedmont. The pro-Bourbon alliance opposing the Grand Alliance consisted of France, Spain, the Electorate of Bavaria, and the Archbishopric of Cologne. The main military operations largely occurred along the frontiers of France and in the Spanish possessions in Europe such as the Spanish Netherlands, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula. Of notable exception were the Bavarian campaigns in 1703 and 1704. Throughout the war, each side tried to exploit real and potential revolts/insurgencies in the other’s territory. The Allies maintained a large military presence in Catalonia and set up a rival court in Barcelona under the Archduke Charles as “Charles III of Spain.” The land war in Europe was characterized by the military victories of the Allied commanders, the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy in Flanders, Germany, and Italy. However, the Bourbons maintained their supremacy in Spain itself. As the war protracted, financial and political exhaustion beset all sides. Despite sustained losses bringing France to the brink of collapse, Louis XIV continued to resist until Allied resolve softened with the events of 1710 and 1711 (the Tory victory in the British elections, the battle of Brihuega, and the death of Emperor Joseph I). The war ended with the signing of the treaties of Utrecht, Rastatt, and Baden (collectively known as the Peace of Utrecht) in 1713 and 1714. The British gained significant colonial possessions and concessions from the Bourbon powers as well as the territories of Gibraltar and Minorca. The Dutch received a reinforced barrier in the Low Countries. The Austrians received Spain’s possessions in Italy and the Low Countries. Philip V retained Spain and its colonial possessions.

Leibniz’s Political Vision for Europe

2015 ◽  
pp. 663-683
Author(s):  
Friedrich Beiderbeck
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Church Politics ◽  
Cultural Structures

This chapter examines Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s political vision for Europe, beginning with his views on the Holy Roman Empire and the Peace of Westphalia. It considers how Leibniz viewed Germany’s political and cultural structures and his support for the Reich, along with his thoughts on order, security, and law. It also discusses Leibniz’s modern notion of state and his ideas of territorial power, diplomacy, and international politics; his views on France’s foreign policy under Louis XIV and the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1713/14); and his dispute with Abbé de Saint Pierre over peace and balance of power in Europe. Finally, the chapter looks at Leibniz’s pronouncements on denominational issues and church politics, particularly the presence of Protestants and Catholics in Germany, and his arguments with regards to the House of Hanover and the role played by Great Britain in power politics as a counterbalance to French hegemony.

Peace of Utrecht

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marsha Frey ◽  
Linda Frey
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Prince Edward Island ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Left Bank ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
The Road ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

The agreements that concluded the War of the Spanish Succession, often collectively referred to as the Peace of Utrecht, include the twenty-three treaties signed from January 1713 to February 1715 and that between Austria and Spain in 1725, prompting one contemporary to note that Utrecht “like the peace of God, [was] beyond human understanding” (Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, quoted in A. D. Machlachan, “The Road to Peace,” in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1714, edited by Geoffrey Holmes [London: Macmillan, 1969], p. 197). Moreover, the decisive military advantage of the powers allied against Louis XIV was not reflected in the settlement, except for that with Britain. That pacification, which may be considered the last of the partition treaties, ended a war that broke out in 1702 over the question of who would succeed Charles II. Negotiations began as early as 1706 and more seriously, though no less successfully, through 1709, until the Tory victory (1710) allowed the British ministry to initiate secret negotiations with the French. The negotiations at Utrecht, for the most part, merely ratified decisions reached previously either in Paris and or in London. During these diplomatic maneuvers the British managed to secure their own interests to such a degree that the duke of Shrewsbury refused to sign. He condemned the proceedings as “bargaining for ourselves apart and leaving your friends to shift” (Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, eds., The Treaties of the War of the Spanish Succession: An Historical and Critical Dictionary [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995], p. 431). The conference that began in January 1712 ended fifteen months later. Issues of religion, trade, and colonies bedeviled the congress. Many delegates signed the pacification on 11–12 April 1713, but the representatives of the Holy Roman Empire and of Emperor Charles VI decided to continue the fight until 1714 (the Treaties of Rastatt [Rastadt] and Baden). Charles VI gained the Spanish Netherlands and a strong hand in Italy, including Sardinia, Naples, Milan, Mantua, and the Tuscan ports. The Holy Roman Empire fared less well; it basically retained the Ryswick settlement. Britain gained Newfoundland, Acadia, the Asiento (or Assiento), recognition of the Protestant succession, and with its acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca, naval supremacy in the western Mediterranean. The Netherlands acquired a barrier (ultimately ineffective), and Savoy gained a more defensible, although not a more extended, Alpine barrier. Portugal had to be content with an antebellum frontier but did acquire Sacramento in the New World. Prussia gained recognition of the kingship and some minor territories. France kept the entire left bank of the Rhine but ceded all lands on the right bank except Landau. Louis XIV retained Cape Breton, what became Prince Edward Island, and the fishing rights in Newfoundland. Louis XIV’s grandson, Philip V, kept Spain and Spanish America but had to renounce his right of succession to the French throne. Louis XIV abandoned his Italian allies, but he continued to support the Wittelsbach electors of Bavaria and Cologne, who were restored. The British abandoned the Catalans, who lost their historic liberties. Except in Italy and North America, the frontiers remained remarkably durable.

Translating Sorrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-163
Author(s):  
Scott L. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Central European ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Italian Music

In the multilingual environments of Central European cities and courts, Italian musicians found a receptive market for their music. There they confronted a range of linguistic abilities that encouraged innovative approaches to musical composition and publication. Recent rediscovery of the opening sheets of Giovanni Battista Pinello’s 1584 Primo libro dele neapolitane enables us to assess one Genoese composer’s experience of a multi-ethnic, Central European milieu during an unprecedented migrational wave. As chapelmaster at the electoral court in Dresden with ties to aristocratic circles in Prague, Pinello also issued a German version that can be sung, according to the composer, simultaneously with the napolitane. This study examines the Central European market for Italian music, the role of the Holy Roman Empire in facilitating Italian migration, and cultural challenges foreign musicians faced in their new homes. Nineteenth-century myths of nationhood depended on histories of folk-like immobility, but in fact migration was a basic condition of early modern European life. Music historians have long been aware of individual musicians’ travels from the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with a new trend, emerging around 1600, toward northward emigration by Italian musicians. Nonetheless, there is much more to say about the social underpinnings of such movements. Pinello’s fusion of languages, poetic forms, and registers invites us to reimagine the multi-ethnic complexion of Central European musical centers in the late sixteenth century.

‘That Horrid Electorate’ or ‘Ma Patrie germanique’? George III, Hanover, and the Fürstenbund of 1785

1977 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. C. W. Blanning
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
European Perspective ◽  
Eastern Question ◽  
Founder Member ◽  
Domestic Affairs ◽  
Joseph Ii ◽  
George Iii

The League of Princes (Fürstenbund) was founded on 23 July 1785, when the representatives of Prussia, Hanover and Saxony signed at Berlin a main treaty and several secret articles relating to the domestic affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. During the following months a number of other German princes joined the League, notably the elector of Mainz, the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, the margrave of Baden and the dukes of Brunswick, Saxony-Gotha and Saxony-Weimar.s Its general objective was the preservation of the imperial status quo. More specifically, it was aimed at the Emperor Joseph II and the innumerable schemes of expansion popularly attributed to him, not always without justification. More specifically still, the League was designed to prevent any renewal of Joseph's most cherished ambition - the exchange of the Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands (which embraced the larger part of present-day Belgium) for the Electorate of Bavaria. From the European perspective, the League was soon overshadowed by the reopening of the Eastern Question in 1787, eclipsed by the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1788 and finally extinguished by the Austro-Prussian rapprochement in 1792, but during 1785–6 it assumed great importance. Not the least affected was Great Britain, whose king - albeit in his capacity as elector of Hanover - was a founder-member of the League and one of its most enthusiastic protagonists. Despite the official British view - repeated ad nauseam to sceptical foreign diplomats - that Georg Kurfürst von Hannover and George III King of England were two entirely separate beings and that consequently the actions of the former could have not the least effect on the latter's domains, British policy could not help but be influenced.

France, Prussia, or Germany? The Napoleonic Wars and Shifting Allegiances in the Rhineland

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-640
Author(s):  
Michael Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
First Republic ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
City States

The following article focuses on the Rhineland, and more specifically, the region on the left (or west) bank of the Rhine bounded in the north and west by the Low Countries and France. This German-speaking region was occupied by the armies of revolutionary France after 1792. De jure annexation followed the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), and French rule lasted until 1814. Most of the Rhineland was awarded in 1815 to Prussia and remained a constituent part until after the Second World War. The Rhineland experienced Napoleonic rule first hand. Its four departments—the Roër, Rhin-et-Moselle, Sarre, and Mont-Tonnerre—were treated like the others in metropolitan France, and it is this status that makes the region distinct in German-speaking Europe. This had consequences both in the Napoleonic period and in the century that followed the departure of the last French soldier. This alone would constitute sufficient reason for studying the region. More broadly, however, the Rhenish experience in the French period sheds light on the much broader phenomena of state formation and nation building. Before 1792, the Rhenish political order appeared in many respects a throwback to the late Middle Ages. Extreme territorial fragmentation, city states, church states, and mini states distinguished its landscape. These survived the early-modern period thanks in part to Great Power rivalry and the protective mantle provided by the Holy Roman Empire. Then, suddenly, came rule by France which, in the form of the First Republic and Napoleon's First Empire, represented the most demanding state the world had seen up to that point. This state imposed itself on a region unused to big government. It might be thought that bitter confrontation would have resulted. Yet, and here is a paradox this article wishes to address, many aspects of French rule gained acceptance in the region, and defense of the Napoleonic legacy formed a component of the “Rhenish” identity that came into being in the nineteenth century.

1703–1704

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Harris
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Public Credit ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The City

The fourth chapter shows the Marlborough-Godolphin partnership challenged by Nottingham for control of grand strategy. The expansion of the war into Portugal, Spain, the Mediterranean, and the Americas makes Godolphin anxious about over-extension of resources. He also has to bring about the union of England with a violently nationalist Scotland to fulfil the queen’s desire and safeguard the Protestant succession. Marlborough is prevented by the Dutch from following up his success in the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire comes under threat from France. But Godolphin’s rigorous management of the Treasury gains the confidence of the City, thus lowering the interest rates for public credit, enabling him to pay subsidies to the Allies, exercise control over strategy, and fund Marlborough’s secret plan to save Vienna. With the aid of Robert Harley, Marlborough and Godolphin use the parliamentary contest over Occasional Conformity to divide the Tory opposition.

Distant Echoes

2019 ◽  
pp. 162-196
Author(s):  
Francesca Trivellato
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
Private Finance ◽  
United Provinces

This chapter analyzes the echoes of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange beyond France up to 1800 and how they intersected with a variety of discourses about the morality of commercial credit. The legend that pointed to Jews as the creators of European private finance did not travel along confessional lines. Developed in Catholic France, the legend also appeared in England, the Reformed areas of the Holy Roman Empire, and the United Provinces. A lag of more than fifty years separates the legend's appearance in French and its circulation in other languages. Translations of works by the Savary family and Montesquieu were the legend's most influential vehicles of diffusion and transmutation. Most non-French versions of the legend, however, adapted the tale to make it palatable to new readerships. At the same time, an increasing number of writers challenged the legend's accuracy.

Catholic refuge and the printing press: Catholic exiles from England, France and the Low Countries in the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 532-561
Author(s):  
Alexander Soetaert
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
French Speaking

The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.

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