War of the Austrian Succession

War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), series of interconnected conflicts that followed the death (October 1740) without a male heir, of the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria, Charles VI, and the succession to the scattered Habsburg dominions of his inexperienced daughter, Maria Theresa. Charles himself, in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, had reserved the succession to his own descendants, overriding the claims of his two nieces, the daughters of his elder brother, Emperor Joseph I, who were married to the electors of Bavaria and Saxony. It was not these latter, however, but Frederick II of Prussia who ignited the war by invading Maria Theresa’s northernmost province of Silesia in December 1740. Frederick had made his calculations well: two unsuccessful wars in the 1730s had left the Habsburg state militarily and financially exhausted; its long-standing Russian ally was distracted by a dynastic crisis followed by a war with Sweden; and the British and Dutch, who had traditionally supported Austria in wars against France, were indifferent to the fate of Silesia (while Britain’s king, George II, fearful for his electorate of Hanover, was above all anxious to stand well with his Prussian neighbour). Prussia’s initial successes, notably at the Battle of Mollwitz (April 10, 1741), spurred the electors of Bavaria and Saxony to pursue their territorial claims. However, they only became a serious threat when they secured the backing of the two great Bourbon monarchs: Philip V of Spain who, along with his wife Elizabeth Farnese, was opportunistically seeking to turn Habsburg Parma and Milan into a client state for their youngest son, Don Philip; and Louis XV, who was pursuing a more long-standing aim of establishing French patronage over the princes of the Holy Roman Empire. In January 1742 their client, the elector of Bavaria, was duly elected emperor as Charles VII. Indeed, already in the autumn of 1741, with Spanish, French, and Neapolitan forces on the offensive in Italy, Prussian and Saxon troops in the Bohemian lands, and a Franco-Bavarian army in Prague (where Charles VII was crowned king of Bohemia), Maria Theresa’s cause had seemed lost.

Maria Theresa owed her survival partly down to the disunity of the opposing coalition: Frederick II, concerned only to hold on to Silesia, and with no interest in enhancing the power of potential Bavarian and Saxon rivals, repeatedly withdrew from the conflict, leaving his German and French allies to face their opponents alone; and in Italy, Franco-Spanish cooperation was undermined by rivalry and jealousy. Meanwhile, Maria Theresa’s western opponents were seriously embarrassed by the financial, military, and diplomatic efforts of Britain. Not only did British subsidies make a significant contribution to Austria’s war effort throughout, but the Royal Navy, cruising off the Italian coast from the end of 1741, prevented Spain from reinforcing her troops by sea, and forced the Kingdom of Naples into an impotent if sulky neutrality; while an Anglo-Hanoverian-Hessian “Pragmatic Army” (commanded, at the Battle of Dettingen in June 1743, by George II himself) harassed the French in Germany. Perhaps even more importantly, the British diplomatic pressure on Maria Theresa forced her to concentrate on Britain’s Bourbon opponents, buying off Frederick (by abandoning Silesia to him), and purchasing Sardinian help in Italy by ceding a slice of Milan to King Victor Emmanuel, all of which, while intensely resented in Vienna, eventually paid dividends in terms of Austrian successes. The years 1743 and 1744 saw the French hard pressed on their eastern frontier, while 1745 saw Maria Theresa’s husband elected Holy Roman Emperor on the death of Charles VII, and Bavaria and Saxony reduced to the status of Austrian satellites. True, Austria’s recovery alarmed Frederick II sufficiently to bring him to re-enter the war against her in 1744, but when the British again forced Maria Theresa to confirm him in possession of Silesia, by the Treaty of Dresden (December 25, 1745), the war in Central Europe could have come to an end.

Already in 1744, however, the conflict had assumed wider dimensions with formal declarations of war by France on both Britain and Austria. If French support for the Young Pretender in the Jacobite uprising in Britain in 1745-1746 was ineffective (see The Forty-Five), the brilliant successes of Marshal Saxe over the ill-assorted and squabbling Austrian and Anglo-Dutch armies in the Austrian Netherlands (in particular at the Battle of Fontenoy on May 11, 1745) were threatening by 1747 to bring the whole of the Low Countries under French domination, with alarming implications for British security across the English Channel. By comparison, such fighting as occurred overseas at that time was, for all parties, of distinctly peripheral importance: in the Caribbean, the War of Jenkins’ Ear that had broken out between Britain and Spain in 1739 petered out ignominiously amid problems of logistics and disease; in North America and India, the British conquest of the fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island in 1745 was balanced by the French conquest of Madras. But it was events nearer home that inclined both the British and the French towards peace by 1747. While the British were desperate to head off French control of the Netherlands, the parlous state of the French economy—primarily the result of a bad harvest in 1747, but also due to the effects of the British naval blockade—made Louis XV decide to settle for a peace based, as far as Britain and France were concerned, on the status quo. He was all the more ready to do so as France’s long-term prospects in the Netherlands were clouded by the re-emergence of Russia on the diplomatic scene, courtesy of the Austro-Russian Treaty of the Two Empresses in 1746, with an offer of military assistance to Marshal Saxe’s opponents.

The upshot was the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed on October 18, 1748, by Britain and France, who then proceeded to impose their terms on their resentful junior partners, Austria and Spain. In so far as Britain and France simply restored to each other their overseas conquests, leaving frontiers in North America as ill defined as before, the treaty marked a return to the status quo of 1740 and the war had indeed changed nothing. Territorial changes in Italy were minor—Don Philip was established in the formerly Habsburg Parma and Piacenza, and Victor Emmanuel duly acquired his slice of Milan—but the treaty was a major landmark in international history, in that it established an equilibrium between Habsburg, Bourbon, and native Italian forces that put an end to the three-century-old rivalries, and made Italy a peaceful backwater in the states system for almost two generations until the deluge of the wars of the French Revolution overwhelmed the peninsula. In Germany, the treaty guaranteed Prussia’s acquisition of Silesia by the Treaty of Dresden, thereby apparently confirming the most significant change wrought by the War of the Austrian Succession to the European states system—the establishment of “dualism” in Germany, with the rise of Prussia, if not exactly to the status of a great power, at least to that of the leading German power after Austria (and, in military terms at least, to that of Austria’s equal). At the same time, Austria had survived, and if her experiences in the war led Maria Theresa to institute military and administrative reforms to enable Austria to assert herself more effectively on the international scene, they also left her bitterly resentful and, above all, determined to recover Silesia. Maria Theresa’s hopes were encouraged by the revival of the Russian alliance, and if her British and Dutch allies had proved a disappointment, perhaps something might be made of French resentment over Frederick II’s repeated displays of bad faith in the recent war. In so far as the stalemate that ended the war was the harbinger, not of stability, but of a state of “cold war” between Austria and Prussia in Germany, and between Britain and France overseas, the War of the Austrian Succession was the precursor of the Diplomatic Revolution and, indirectly, of the Seven Years' War.