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Spain | Facts, Culture, History, & Points of Interest - The early Bourbons, 1700-53 | B... - 0 views

  • Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire
  • In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain
  • In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain
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  • Austria refused to recognize Philip, a Bourbon
  • a Bourbon king in Spain would disrupt the balance of power in Europe in favour of French hegemony
  • Spain under a Bourbon king as a political and commercial appendage of France
  • He wished to regenerate and strengthen his ally by a modern centralized administration
  • the allied armies of Britain and Austria invaded Spain in order to drive out Philip V and establish the “Austrian” candidate, the archduke Charles (later the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI), on the throne
  • An efficient administration had to be created in order to extract resources from Spain for the war effort and thus relieve pressure on the French treasury
  • Castile was ferociously loyal to the new dynasty throughout the war. The support of Castile and of France (until 1711) enabled Philip V to survive severe defeats
  • Spanish lawyer-administrators such as Melchor de Macanaz
  • They were supported by the queen, María Luisa of Savoy
  • The opponents of reform were those who suffered by it
  • Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia
  • a Castilian centralizing imposition in conflict with the local privileges, or fueros
  • the church, whose position was threatened by the ferocious and doctrinaire regalism of Macanaz
  • The disaffection of all these elements easily turned into opposition to Philip V as king
  • war taxation and war levies drove Catalonia and Aragon to revolt
  • When Philip V tried to attack Catalonia through Aragon, the Aragonese, in the name of their fueros, revolted against the passage of Castilian troops
  • When the archbishop of Valencia resisted attempts to make priests of doubtful loyalty appear before civil courts, the regalism of Macanaz was given full course
  • This was the last direct triumph of the reformers. With the death of Queen María Luisa in 1714
  • Macanaz was condemned by the Inquisition
  • the fueros were abolished and Catalonia was integrated into Spain
  • The “Italian” tendency was influenced by Philip V’s second wife, Isabella, and her desire to get Italian thrones for her sons.
  • The attempt to recover the possessions in Italy involved Spain in an unsuccessful war with Austria, which was now the great power in Italy
  • Nevertheless, Isabella’s persistence was rewarded when her son, the future King Charles III of Spain, became the duke of Parma in 1731 and king of Naples in 1733, relinquishing his claims to Parma
  • The “Italian” and “Atlantic” tendencies existed side by side in the late years of Philip V’s reign
  • It made possible an alliance of France and Spain against Austria, giving Isabella the opportunity to settle her second son, Philip, in an Italian duchy
  • Ferdinand VI (1746–59) was concerned with the domestic recovery of Spain rather than the extension of its power in Europe
  • the treaty merely strengthened Spain’s position in Italy when Philip became duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The Atlantic tendency became dominant under Ferdinand VI
  • Because Britain was Spain’s most significant enemy in the Americas (as Austria had been in Italy), Spain’s “natural” ally was France
  • hence a series of family pacts with France in 1733 and 1743
  • The American interest was reflected in increased trade
  • Charles III, Ferdinand’s successor, implemented dramatic reforms that followed along the path set by Ferdinand.
manhefnawi

Charles III of Spain: an Enlightened Despot, Part I | History Today - 0 views

  • there is one man who stands out from the general level of mediocrity, a King who tried with some success to arrest the decadence—Charles III, King of Spain, 1759-1788
  • This zeal for the general welfare of his people brought him into rough conflict with the two main powers in the land; the nobility and the clergy
  • In October 1731 he set off for Italy to take over the Duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and to garrison Tuscany, an inheritance arranged for him by Isabella
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  • the Two Sicilies were happier under Charles than they had been for many a long century
  • he reversed his predecessor’s policy of neutrality and involved Spain in two expensive wars against Britain, for which she was ill-prepared; and he committed the country’s pride and strength to a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to recover Gibraltar
  • Born in Madrid in 1716, the son of Spain’s first Bourbon King, Philip V, and of his second wife, Isabella Farnese, he enjoyed in some respects a happy and normal childhood
  • to bend the foreign policy of Spain solely for the purpose of providing kingdoms for her offspring
  • I would like to deserve to be called Charles the Wise
  • Philip V inherited the melancholy, the longing for seclusion that at times overcame all reason
  • the King had become so deranged that he had to abdicate in favour of Louis
  • Philip had to withdraw his abdication; but the bouts of insanity continued, and Isabella Farnese became de facto ruler of the country
  • the Austrians had to withdraw and Naples was ensured a separate existence under the Bourbons. Charles returned to his regime of hunting, building and reform.
  • Taking advantage of Austria’s preoccupations elsewhere in the war of the Polish Succession, Isabella decided to attack in Italy. The aim was to recover for Spain the provinces of the Two Sicilies which had been Spanish for two centuries until 1713 when they had been handed over to Austria under the Treaty of Utrecht. Spain declared war on Austria in December 1733, and Charles was made titular commander-in-chief of the 30,000 Spanish troops that landed at Leghorn
  • Austria withdrew without a fight and in 1734 Charles became King of the Two Sicilies, a territory now independent for the first time. But as part of the general settlement he had to give up his rights in the Duchies; and a commitment was made, which for him cast a shadow before, that the crowns of Spain and of the Two Sicilies would never be united
  • As in Spain later, Charles challenged and reduced the powers and privileges of the aristocracy and clergy. He reformed the archaic legal and economic systems. His aim was ‘to sweep away feudalism’,
  • Naples before him had been without industry or trade
  • Naples rose and flourished, a European capital of the arts
  • he astounded the aristocracy of Madrid by the purity of his life
  • identify government not only with order and tradition, but with reform, and thereby helped to avert revolution.
  • he nourished a grievance against Britain
  • he helped to defeat the Austrian troops at Velletri. He showed courage and leadership in the battle, having survived an attempt at capture
  • His mother was once again meddling in Italian affairs, trying this time to exploit Vienna’s preoccupation with the war of the Austrian Succession to recover the central Italian duchies for Philip, her second surviving son. Charles was forced to send troops north to support his brother’s Spaniards who had landed under the Duke of Montemar
  • This routine was shattered in 1759 by the death of his childless half-brother Ferdinand VI who had been King of Spain since 1746; a King who, true to family tradition, had gone mad
  • But Louis XV dismissed Choiseul and wrote to Charles in his own hand: ‘My minister would have war, but I will not
  • From the moment of his arrival in Madrid in December 1759, Charles showed that he was not prepared to follow in Ferdinand’s easy-going footsteps. Government was a serious business, and would be conducted by himself in the interests of the people
  • Italian influence came in with him like a tidal wave, sweeping over muph of Spanish life
  • But it was in administrative reform that the sharpest note of change was stock. The economy of the country was sagging, yet Charles badly needed more money—among other things to pay off his father’s debts, and to strengthen the almost non-existent defences of Spain and the Indies. A flow of decrees poured forth regulating commerce and providing for the collection of revenue.
  • cleaning as was done was carried out by private enterprise, by troops of sweepers
  • Charles set about a radical clean-up
  • Since reaching Madrid, Charles had been under pressure from both sides to join in the war between Britain and Prussia on the one hand, and France and Austria on the other, which had broken out in 1756
  • Ferdinand VI had managed to stay neutral and Maria Amalia had been a strong influence for peace, but after her death, Charles changed his policy
  • life-long grudge against the British for having taken Gibraltar from his father—a feeling compounded by Commodore Martin’s insult
  • if he joined the French alliance, might help him to recover Minorca and Gibraltar. So in August 1761 he agreed to the Family Compact with Louis XV which brought him into war against Britain
  • Spain was heavily defeated by the British fleet which captured Havana and Manila
  • British power had greatly increased, partly at the expense of Spain
  • The country was exhausted, and there was much resentment against the French. Charles personally would have liked to have shaken himself out of the family straight-jacket
  • For months the kingdom of Spain languished under this rule
  • Charles had no alternative but to capitulate to the British
  • the Madrid mutiny of 1766
  • The favour he had shown early on towards the bourgeoisie, his concern for the poor, and the reforming zeal of his Ministers had all helped to generate distrust amongst the nobility and clergy
  • the discontent did not stop with the rich
  • There was widespread public unrest caused by the effects of the war, prolonged drought and high prices. Far from assuaging this, Charles had aggravated it, particularly in Madrid
  • public indignation
  • Squillace was the main target of public wrath
  • Within a week the King capitulated and agreed to everything
  • the Jesuits the scapegoat for the mutiny. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain with ruthless efficiency
manhefnawi

Louis XII of France: The Unlikely Lad | History Today - 0 views

  • Louis XII became king of France by accident. Or, more precisely, because of an accident. On April 7th 1498, his cousin, the reigning monarch Charles VIII, stumbled and hit his head on the lintel of a doorway through which he was passing on his way to watch a tennis match in the royal chateau at Amboise. The king had recently been ill. He seemed to be recovering but this final blow in a life full of hard knocks finished him off. Having no surviving male heir, the crown passed to his nearest male relative, Louis duke of Orleans, who was crowned king in Rheims cathedral on 27 May 1498
  • Louis ended his reign having reformed the French legal system, reduced taxes, having enjoyed some military success in Italy and bearing the loving accolade, 'Father of the People'. In many respects he stands comparison with his contemporary, Henry VII of England
  • Louis was born in 1462 during the reign of his second cousin Louis XI. His father was Charles duke of Orleans, a celebrated poet and the head of a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Louis XI was succeeded by his son, Charles VIII, in 1483
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  • his first priority was political security. This is the first respect in which his reign parallels that of Henry VII. The first Tudor had also rebelled against his sovereign, ultimately seizing the crown itself from Richard III in 1485
  • Within six months of his accession Louis had his first marriage, to Louis XI's daughter, Jeanne, annulled. He then married Charles's widow, Anne of Brittany, the daughter of duke Francis. Louis thereby retained the French crown's hold on Brittany. Like Henry VII's marriage to Elizabeth of York, Louis's marriage to Anne also enabled him to extend his domestic power base beyond his immediate family and those favoured by the previous monarch.
  • Henry did besiege Boulogne in October 1492, ostensibly to assert his claim to the crown of France following Anne of Brittany's marriage to Charles VIII in 1491. To buy him off, Charles offered Henry a pension of 745 000 crowns under the treaty of Etaples.
  • Like Henry VII, Louis was expected to ‘live off his own’. He was reasonably successful at this task. He did not make the monarchy profitable in the way Henry was able to, but neither did he impoverish it. Louis inherited a deficit of about 1.4 million livres and left Francis I a deficit of about the same amount – and this despite several very expensive military campaigns of the kind which Henry VII studiously avoided and Louis’s reduction of the taille
  • There was nothing in France to parallel the renowned English system of 'Chamber' finance begun by Edward IV and adopted by Henry VII to increase control over the collection and disbursement of domainal revenues.
  • This suggests that the system worked well enough until the end of his reign, but it was overhauled substantially by Francis I.
  • Louis was less innovative than Henry VII in developing legal machinery and institutions with which to control the nobility. Bonds and recognizances or institutions such as the Council Learned at Law were once seen as evidence that Henry VII was a 'new' monarch whose regime was dominated by lawyers and financial officials upon whom he depended to marginalise the unreliable nobility, the traditional royal servants
  • Louis continued Henry's pension conducted relatively warm relations with him, although he worried about England's ties with the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. He had good cause to after Henry VIII's accession in April 1509
  • Louis's fortunes began to fade in 1510. The new pope, Julius II, was determined to recover the papal lands which Borgia predecessor, Alexander VI, had with French help, alienated to his son Cesare
  • Then in August the Swiss invaded Burgundy and besieged the city of Dijon. They only withdrew on Louis's promise to relinquish his claim to Milan and to pay then a sizeable indemnity. On top of all of this, Queen Anne died in January 1514 leaving Louis no surviving male heir
  • Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain followed suit, deserting their erstwhile ally Henry VIII, who was furious. Under pressure from Leo X, Henry dramatically reversed his isolation by becoming Louis's ally. His young and very beautiful sister Mary married Louis in October 1514.
  • Compared with that of his successor, Louis' artistic and intellectual patronage was not exceptional. He did not influence Henry VII in the direct way that Francis I did Henry VIII
  • Louis XII died on New Year's Day 1515. Despite his apparently fatal vigour with which he took to his third marriage, it provided him with no son. He was succeeded by Francis of Angouleme, during whose reign Louis's was oevrshadowed on every count except. perhaps, popularity among commoners. His various campaigns against Milan were disparaged by the new regime. However, Francis's campaigns may have been more glamorous but ultimately they were no more successful. It would be idle to claim Louis as one of France's great military commanders, but for 12 of his 16 years as king he did practise successful warfare, outdoing the deeds of Maximilian, Ferdinand and Henry VII
  • Louis's ambitions were to secure his kingdom politically and to enhance the glory of his dynasty. For him, as for Henry VII, increased financial or judicial controls over the kingdom were means to these ends, not ends in themselves, As the founder of a new dynasty Henry's task was undoubtedly more difficult than Louis's and he showed greater ingenuity in developing methods of making his subjects accountable to him
  • Having begun uncertainly, both quickly projected a strong sense of their authority, but the efforts of some historians to characterise Louis as a 'proto-absolutist', anticipating the supposed ambitions of Francis I or even Louis XIV to centralise the state, were wide of the mark. Louis's 'good government' was essentially traditional
manhefnawi

Charles III | king of Spain | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • Charles was the first child of Philip V’s marriage with Isabella of Parma. Charles ruled as duke of Parma, by right of his mother, from 1732 to 1734 and then became king of Naples
  • he became king of Spain and resigned the crown of Naples to his third son, Ferdinand I
  • Charles III was convinced of his mission to reform Spain and make it once more a first-rate power
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  • His religious devotion was accompanied by a blameless personal life and a chaste loyalty to the memory of his wife, Maria Amalia of Saxony, who died in 1760. On the other hand, he was so highly conscious of royal authority that he sometimes appeared more like a tyrant than an absolute monarch
  • Charles III improved the agencies of government through which the will of the crown could be imposed. He completed the process whereby individual ministers replaced the royal councils in the direction of affairs
  • He particularly resented the Jesuits, whose international organization and attachment to the papacy he regarded as an affront to his absolutism
  • But Charles’s opposition to papal jurisdiction in Spain also led him to curb the arbitrary powers of the Inquisition, while his desire for reform within the church caused him to appoint inquisitors general who preferred persuasion to force in ensuring religious conformity
  • Fearing that a British victory over France in the Seven Years’ War would upset the balance of colonial power, he signed the Family Compact with France—both countries were ruled by branches of the Bourbon family—in August 1761
  • By the end of his reign, Spain had abandoned its old commercial restrictions and, while still excluding foreigners, had opened up the entire empire to a commerce in which all its subjects and all its main ports could partake
  • Within these limits he led his country in a cultural and economic revival, and, when he died, he left Spain more prosperous than he had found it
manhefnawi

The Spider King: Louis XI of France | History Today - 0 views

  • The occasion of his liberty was the joyous passage through Meung of the new King, Louis XI, whose reign was to change the France in which Villon had pursued his rogue’s career out of all recognition
  • Of all the princes that I ever had the honour to know”, wrote Commines, “the wisest and most dexterous to extricate himself out of any danger or difficulty in time of adversity was our master King Louis XI.”
  • Louis was born in 1423, the year after the Dauphin, his father, had claimed his inheritance at the deaths of Henry V of England and Charles VI
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  • He took advantage of a misunderstanding between his ineffective brother and Francis II to recover Normandy, and at the same time distracted Burgundy by encouraging the revolt of the cities of Dinant and Liege. Having bought off Brittany and Charles de France, he sought to detach them from their Burgundian alliance by revealing the details of their defection
  • Yet Philip the Good felt himself increasingly isolated by French negotiations with Frederick III and the Swiss cantons. The opportune arrival of the Dauphin allowed him to reassert his influence at the French court and to arbitrate between father and son
  • Louis XI appeared to represent all the forces of feudal and Burgundian reaction
  • The independent duchy of Brittany possessed its own governmental institutions, and its ruler, Francis II, refused anything but simple homage to both Charles VII and his successor
  • If his royal connections and foreign ambitions had induced this capricious and luxury-loving prince to avoid open conflict with the crown, his impetuous son, John of Calabria, was foremost in every plot and affray
  • Louis XI might dismiss his father’s favourites; but he could not afford to reverse his policy. He refused support for John of Calabria’s ill-fated venture in Italy, quarrelled with Philip the Good, and disputed the right of Francis II to control the church in Brittany.
  • The King did indeed learn much from the League of the Common Weal
  • The supposed humiliation of attending the sack of Liege by the Burgundian army cost him little; and he avoided the second condition imposed by Charles—the award of Champagne and Brie to Charles de France—by persuading his brother to accept the more remote province of Guyenne in their place
  • Louis XI also anticipated later methods of economic warfare. He deprived his Burgundian enemy of specie and procured the withdrawal of the support afforded him by the Medici bank. His concessions to English, Swiss and Hanseatic merchants were designed to detach them from Burgundian commerce
  • In these years Louis XI was conducting equally complex negotiations in Aragon and England
  • While Louis won over Warwick, and reconciled the King-Maker with Margaret of Anjou to secure the brief Lancastrian restoration of 1470, the Burgundian Duke responded by publicly welcoming the return of Henry VI, and secredy promoting the triumph of his Yorkist brother-in-law, Edward IV.
  • Pot-bellied and spindle-shanked, Louis XI was an unlikely figure, either as a monster of vice or, as he described himself, as the restorer of the splendours of Charlemagne and St. Louis
  • Louis employed the agents of the former financier, Jacques Coeur, whose condemnation under Charles VII he declared invalid. From Tours he drew the merchant financiers of the Beaune and Briçonnet families, and from Berry the Bochetels, who founded a notable line of royal secretaries
  • It is doubtful whether Louis XI had any general plan to transform the social order, but he found the middle classes his most convenient allies against the forces of disorder from above and below
  • In the towns Louis XI accelerated the trend to the formation of urban patriciates. He widened the special form of ennoblement available to municipal councillors.
  • From the number of national assemblies convoked by Louis XI it is sometimes conjectured that his government proceeded by consultative methods. But of the twelve such bodies convened by the King only one was a full Estates General, the others being merely assemblies of notables
  • The Estates General of Tours in 1468 was skilfully won over to the royal cause, and persuaded that to grant Normandy to the King’s brother would be to detach it from France and expose it to English and Burgundian influence
  • Trade prospered under Louis XI, but the recovery of agriculture was slow in the aftermath of the Hundred Years War. Choisnet had written in the Rosier des Guerres that “the King should see for himself the condition of his people, and should watch over them as a good gardener does his garden.”
  • Charles VII exiled him to his government in Dauphiné. The nine years he spent there were occupied with strengthening the provincial administration and resisting the authority of the Crown
  • As Charles VII had promoted the trade fairs of Lyon to ruin Geneva, so Louis established fairs at Caen and Rouen to challenge those of Bruges and Antwerp
  • Charles the Rash pursued chimerical schemes in Alsace, and clashed with the German Emperor. His preoccupation with affairs in the electorate of Cologne prevented him from supporting an English invasion of France in 1475, and Louis bought off Edward IV with the Treaty of Picquigny
  • Maximilian, the son of Frederick III, married the Burgundian heiress, Mary, and defended her lands against France until the Treaty of Arras brought peace in 1482. In all his calculations the Spider King could not have foreseen that Philip, the issue of this match, would marry the daughter and heiress of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile— an alliance which itself was in part a response to Louis’ policy in Catalonia
  • A new France had been nurtured by measures that seem at times not merely generations but centuries in advance of their age. Yet for all the surprising modernity of his policies, the manner in which Louis died revealed the extent to which he was still in thrall to the forces of the past.
  • The arcana of kingship which he bad penetrated were not of this kind. The first of modern national rulers went to his death surrounded by all the trappings of magic
manhefnawi

House of Habsburg | European dynasty | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • royal German family
  • of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century
  • The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg
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  • built in 1020 by Werner
  • in the Aargau
  • in what is now Switzerland
  • rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950
  • his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I.
  • Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408
  • Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins
  • the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers
  • Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy
  • The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him
  • Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232)
  • Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s
  • Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance
  • Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued
  • To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial
  • Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy.
  • Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720
  • Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line
  • he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts
  • The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands
  • By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza
  • acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession
  • Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy
  • The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward
  • her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of Habsburg–Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs
  • An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it
  • the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory
  • when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany
  • The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772)
  • The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes
  • On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted
  • a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise
  • The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire
  • German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia–Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy
  • Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia.
  • Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”
  • he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary.
  • The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars
  • Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864
  • In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey
  • World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper
manhefnawi

Gustav III of Sweden: The Forgotten Despot of the Age of Enlightenment | History Today - 0 views

  • In the seventeenth century, under a succession of outstandingly able soldier kings, Sweden had been a great power but after the death in 1718 of Karl XII, the last and most monomaniacal of the line, the country had become a by-word for weak government, corruption and impotence. Gustav III set himself the task of making Sweden great again. He was assassinated in March 1792 – the third Swedish monarch in 160 years to die of gunshot wounds
  • Under Karl XII’s successors, his central-German brother-in-law Fredrik I and his north-German second-cousin-once-removed Adolf Fredrik (Prince Bishop of Lubeck before the Swedish Riksdag chose him to be Fredrik’s heir) the country passed through the so-called Age of Liberty
  • When, shortly after his father’s death in February 1771, Gustav III met his uncle Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great), the latter sneered, ‘If there were Swedes in Sweden they would soon agree to bury their differences; but foreign corruption has so perverted the national spirit that harmony was impossible’. Gustav’s new kingdom was then the second largest in Europe after Russia. It comprised present-day Finland as well as Sweden, and a toe-hold in Germany in northern Pomerania.
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  • Adolf Fredrik, Gustav III’s father, was described by one English contemporary as having ‘the title of king, with hardly the privileges of a subject’. Unlike his British counterpart George II, he had no power to summon or dissolve his parliament.
  • Gustav was an unimpressive figure physically, weedy and foppish, and slightly lame since birth, but when he addressed the members of the Riksdag he made them flinch with his phrases of masterful contempt
  • The new constitution that Gustav now promulgated, in place of that of 1720-72, brought Sweden more into line with contemporary Britain.
  • The main difference between the British and Swedish systems was that, whereas in Britain the monarch’s executive power was in practice delegated to ministers more industrious, more  proficient and, for the most part,  more intellectually gifted than their royal master, in Sweden it was Gustav III himself who was indisputably in day to day charge
  • No other of the Enlightened Despots was more fond than Gustav of the time-wasting rituals of court life, the levées, formal audiences and ceremonial entries and exits.
  • Whereas Napoleon, in his coup d’etat of 19e Brumaire 1799 broke down and began mumbling in front of the popular assembly he was trying to overawe, Gustav III easily faced down his opponents in the Riksdag
  • Gustav III may well have held a record among monarchs prior to the nineteenth century for the number of other crowned heads he met. What Louis XV and Louis XVI of France or Ferdinand IV of Naples thought of him is uncertain, though none of these Bourbons were exactly noted for their insight into character. Pope Pius VI pretended to be delighted with Gustav (the first Protestant monarch ever to meet a pope) and made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. The other Enlightened Despots, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, agreed in thinking Gustav charming in a wearying sort of way, and faintly ridiculous. Leopold II, Joseph II’s brother and successor, perhaps the ablest politician among the Enlightened Despots – he was still only Grand Duke of Tuscany when Gustav met him
  • the Swedish king was a positive menace with his incessant scheming and readiness to interfere in other governments’ affairs
  • all radical improvements in national character take place during the severest wars’. Russia, having annexed the Crimea, had embarked on a titanic struggle with the Ottoman Empire which was absorbing stupendous quantities of manpower and treasure. At the beginning of 1788 he began making plans to attack Russia from the rear.
  • Gustav found himself far from his capital, stuck with an army that would not obey him. He was rescued  by the Danish government declaring war on him. Hurrying back to Sweden, Gustav rode to Gothenburg, 250 miles cross country in forty-eight hours – the last sixty miles quite alone and on borrowed farm horses, in blinding hailstorms – to rally the defences of the city against the invading Danes
  • The senior Swedish officers rejected all the courses of action proposed by Gustav and his latest discovery, William Sidney Smith, a British naval captain who had turned up without the permission of his own government; they even, according to Smith, talked of ‘proposing terms of Capitulation independent of the King’.
  • Catherine, still preoccupied with the war with Turkey, was glad to patch up a compromise peace
  • While the Stockholm crowds stood outside cheering him, Gustav confronted the chamber of nobles with a new constitution, and when they howled it down he coolly ordered the secretary of the chamber to record their vote as yes: a piece of blatant illegality combined with intimidation that anticipates the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. In fact, apart from giving the King the power to make war without the Riksdag’s consent, the new constitution marked little advance on that of 1772
  • Eleven weeks after Gustav rammed his new constitution down the throats of the nobles, the Estates General met at Versailles and by the time of the peace settlement with Russia the French ancien régime was well on the way to dissolution.
  • I cannot allow that it is right to support rebels against their Lawful King
  • Despite the fact that Sweden was virtually bankrupt in the aftermath of the Russian war he now offered to land 16,000 Swedish and 8,000 Russian troops at Ostend, in Austrian territory, and to march on Paris to overthrow the Constituent Assembly, with the support of an Austrian army advancing from the Rhine. In June 1791 he went to Aachen and was greeted there as a saviour by the French royalist exiles. While he was there Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made their bid to escape from Paris
  • Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, who had succeeded Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria the year before, was enraged by Gustav’s interference: there were some too, including Gustav’s uncle Henry of Prussia, who believed that his schemes for an armed intervention in France were merely a cover for a secret plan to seize Norway from the Danes
  • On March 1st, 1792, Leopold died – poisoned, it is said, by an aphrodisiac of his own concoction – but Gustav was destined never to learn that there was no longer any challenge to his self-appointed role as leader of the monarchist opposition to the French Revolution
  • Gustav III was only forty-six when he died. That was at least eight years older than the most brilliant of his predecessors on the Swedish throne, Gustav II Adolf, Karl X and Karl XII – and if he had lived a normal span he would still have been king at the time of Waterloo.
  • The economic weakness of his country, the inveterate opposition of the social class that elsewhere might have been a king’s chief support, and the increasing influence of the revolutionary ferment in France may have meant that, even if he had lived, he would not have been able to go as far as he dreamed: he is one of the great might-have-beens of history.
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Charles V | Biography, Reign, Abdication, & Facts | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • the problem of the succession in Spain became acute, since by the terms of Ferdinand’s will, Charles was to govern in Aragon and Castile together with his mother (who, however, suffered from a nervous illness and never reigned).
  • Making the most of their candidate’s German parentage and buying up German electoral votes (mostly with money supplied by the powerful Fugger banking family), Charles’s adherents had meanwhile pushed through his election as emperor over his powerful rival, Francis I of France.
  • Gradually, the other chief task of his reign also unfolded: the struggle for hegemony in western Europe. That goal was a legacy of his Burgundian forefathers, including his ancestor Charles the Bold, who had come to naught in his fight against the French Valois Louis XI. His great-grandfather’s quest was to become a fateful problem for Charles as well.
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  • The Roman Catholics, however, condemned the Augsburg Confession—the basic confession of the Lutheran doctrine faith presented to Charles at the Diet of Augsburg—and responded with the Confutation, which met with Charles’s approval.
  • In 1526 Charles married Isabella, the daughter of the late king Manuel I of Portugal.
  • In 1522 his teacher Adrian of Utrecht became pope, as Adrian VI. His efforts to reconcile Francis I and the emperor failed, and three years later Charles’s army defeated Francis I at the Battle of Pavia, taking prisoner the king himself.
  • Although Ferdinand, having lost his Hungarian capital in August 1541, pleaded for a land campaign against Süleyman I, Charles again decided on a naval venture, which failed dismally after an unsuccessful attack on Algiers.
  • North Germany was now on the brink of revolt. The new king of France, Henry II, was eagerly awaiting an opportunity to renew the old rivalry between the houses of Valois and Burgundy, while the German princes believed that the moment was at hand to repay Charles for Mühlberg.
  • In order to save what he could of that hegemony, Charles, already severely racked by gout, tried new paths by preparing the ground for his widowed son’s marriage with Mary I of England.
  • There he laid the groundwork for the eventual bequest of Portugal to the Habsburgs after the eventual death of King Sebastian (who was then still a child) with the help of his sister Catherine, grandmother of Sebastian and regent of Portugal. He aided his son in procuring funds in Spain for the continuation of the war against France, and he helped his daughter Joan, regent of Spain during Philip’s absence in the Netherlands, in persecuting Spanish heretics.
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