War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–48

In October 1740 the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, the last male Habsburg ruler, died and was succeeded by his daughter Maria Theresa, the young wife of the grand duke of Tuscany, Francis Stephen of Lorraine. Although no woman had ever served as Habsburg ruler, most assumed at the time that the succession would pose few problems because of Charles VI’s diligent efforts to gain recognition for her. He had established a reasonably unified order of succession for all the lands under Habsburg rule (the Pragmatic Sanction) and, by making broad concessions to foreign powers and to the diets of the crown lands, had secured recognition of this act from most of the important constitutional units inside and outside the Habsburg lands. When he died, he had no reason to expect anything less than a smooth transition for his daughter.

The challenge to that transition came from a surprising source—the kingdom of Prussia. For the previous 40 years, Prussia had been a fairly loyal supporter of the Habsburgs, especially in matters related to the Holy Roman Empire and in matters involving Poland. The Prussian king Frederick William I (reigned 1713–40) had created perhaps the most proficient, if not the largest, army in Europe but had displayed no eagerness to use it except in the service of the empire, and then only reluctantly. But Frederick William had died about five months before Charles VI, and his son and heir, Frederick II (later called the Great), had no reluctance to use his father’s finely honed armed force. In December 1740 Frederick II invaded the Habsburg province of Silesia and thereby threatened not only to conquer the wealthiest of the Habsburg lands but also to challenge Maria Theresa’s right to rule the rest of them, a challenge soon joined by other powers.

As Maria Theresa prepared to meet these threats, she found that the resources left by her father were meagre indeed. The War of the Polish Succession and the war against the Turks from 1737 to 1739 had drained the monarchy’s financial and military resources and spread irresolution and doubt among its senior officials. The army sent forth to meet Frederick suffered defeat in the Battle of Mollwitz in April 1741. This defeat prompted the formation of an alliance of France, Bavaria, and Spain, joined later by Saxony and eventually by Prussia itself, to dismember the Habsburg monarchy. Faced by this serious threat, Maria Theresa called together her father’s experienced advisers and asked them what she should do. Most argued that resistance was hopeless and recommended that she make the necessary sacrifices in order to reach as quick an accommodation with her enemies as possible, a policy endorsed by her husband. This counsel offended Maria Theresa, who regarded it as defeatism; commenting on this period later, she described it as finding herself “without money, without credit, without an army, without experience, and finally without advice.”

Maria Theresa had no intention of surrendering. She resolved to drive off her enemies and then to create a government that would never again suffer the humiliation she experienced at her accession. To begin, she reached a settlement with Frederick, ceding to him Silesia by the treaties of Breslau and Berlin in June and July 1742. She did so only to focus resistance on the French and Bavarians, who in late November 1741 had occupied Upper Austria and Bohemia, including the Bohemian capital, Prague. In the wake of these conquests by anti-Habsburg forces, in January 1742 the electors of the Holy Roman Empire rejected the candidacy of Maria Theresa’s husband and chose as emperor Charles Albert of Bavaria (called Charles VII as emperor), the only non-Habsburg to serve in that capacity from 1438 to the empire’s demise in 1806. Perhaps as a portent of his unhappy reign as emperor, on the day of Charles Albert’s coronation in Frankfurt, Habsburg forces occupied his Bavarian capital of Munich, which they held until shortly before his death three years later.

The War of the Austrian Succession, as this conflict is called, continued until 1748. It rather quickly became a struggle of two alliance systems, with primarily France, Bavaria, Spain, and Prussia on one side and Austria, Great Britain, and the Dutch Republic on the other. Saxony and Sardinia began the war as members of the first alliance and later switched to the second. Russia joined Austria in a defensive accord in 1746, primarily to prevent Prussia from reentering the war after it had concluded the Treaty of Dresden with Austria in 1745.

The Treaty of Dresden and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 brought the various parts of the war to an end. Austria had to return some minor principalities in Italy to the Spanish Bourbons until such time as the Bourbon lines there became extinct and had to agree to a small frontier rectification in favour of Piedmont-Sardinia, but neither of these adjustments was of great consequence. For Austria the most serious loss was Silesia, which Maria Theresa found necessary to cede to Prussia first in 1742 and again in 1745. Losing Silesia opened the way to the rise of Prussia as the most serious rival of the Habsburgs in Germany. It also meant a considerable decrease in the proportion of Germans living within Habsburg lands, with important consequences in the rise of the national problem in the following century. Although as part of the cession Frederick II agreed to recognize the election of Francis Stephen of Lorraine as Holy Roman emperor Francis I in 1745, Maria Theresa never forgave his “rape” of Silesia; at the war’s conclusion she immediately undertook preparations first to deter Frederick from coveting more of her lands and then to take Silesia back. (See also Silesian Wars.)

Perhaps the most important result of the war for Austria, however, was the very fact that the monarchy was not dismembered. Nor did it become a satellite state under the tutelage of other great powers. The outcome of the War of the Austrian Succession, except for the loss of Silesia, was a genuine defensive victory that proved to the world that Austria represented more than an agglomeration of lands under the same rule, acquired by wars and marriage contracts. In the two centuries since Ferdinand I had become king in Bohemia, Hungary, and Croatia, as well as regent in the so-called hereditary lands, a certain cohesion between the major historical units had been clearly established.