Group items tagged

who had been their king (1704–09) when the Swedes had temporarily forced Augustus II to be deposed and who also had become connected to France via the marriage of his daughter Marie to King Louis XV

Lombardy, which remained a Habsburg possession

But when a Russian army of 30,000 approached Warsaw, Leszczyński fled to Gdańsk, and another sejm of 3,000 delegates named Frederick Augustus as Poland’s new king, Augustus III (Oct. 5, 1733). France consequently formed anti-Habsburg alliances with Sardinia-Savoy (September 26) and Spain (November 7) and declared war on Austria (October 10)

It provided for Augustus to remain king of Poland. In addition, Don Carlos was to retain Naples-Sicily but had to give Austria both Parma and Piacenza, which he had inherited in 1731,

Don Carlos, the Spanish infante, led a Spanish army of 40,000 across Tuscany and the Papal States to Naples, defeated the Austrians at Bitonto (May 25, 1734), conquered Sicily, and was crowned king of Naples and Sicily as Charles III.

Leszczyński renounced the crown

On Nov. 18, 1738, France and Austria signed the final Treaty of Vienna, in which the provisions of the preliminary agreement were confirmed and in which France also conditionally guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, by which Holy Roman emperor Charles VI named his daughter, the Austrian archduchess Maria Theresa, as the heiress to his Habsburg lands

Livonia, then in Swedish hands

Augustus formed an alliance with Russia and Denmark against Sweden

he invaded Livonia in 1700, thus beginning the Great Northern War (1700–21)

which ruined Poland economically

In July 1702 Augustus’s forces were driven back and defeated by King Charles XII of Sweden at Kliszów, northeast of Kraków. Deposed by one of the Polish factions in July 1704, he fled to Saxony, which the Swedes invaded in 1706

formally abdicating and recognizing Sweden’s candidate, Stanisław Leszczyński, as king of Poland

In 1709, after Russia defeated Sweden at the Battle of Poltava, Augustus declared the treaty void and, supported by Tsar Peter I the Great, again became king of Poland

He tried unsuccessfully to create a hereditary Polish monarchy transmissible to his one legitimate son, Frederick Augustus II (eventually king of Poland as Augustus III), and to secure other lands for his many illegitimate children. But his hopes of establishing a strong monarchy came to naught

Poland had lost its status as a major European power, and when he died the War of the Polish Succession broke out

Upon Augustus’s death in 1733, Stanisław I, seen this time as a symbol of Poland’s independence and supported by France (his daughter, Marie Leszczyńska, married Louis XV), was elected once again. The counterelection of Augustus III followed, and Russian troops drove Stanisław out of the country. He abdicated, receiving as compensation (after the so-called War of the Polish Succession) the duchy of Lorraine.

The reign of Augustus III (1733–63)—during which 5 out of 15 Sejms were dissolved while the remainder took no decisions—witnessed the nadir of Polish statehood. The Commonwealth no longer could be counted as an independent participant in international relations; the king’s diplomacy was conducted from Dresden in Saxony. Poland passively watched the once-Polish territory of Silesia pass from the Habsburgs to Prussia as a result of the War of the Austrian Succession. Prussia, under Frederick II (the Great), whose grandfather had already been recognized in 1701 as “king in Prussia” by Augustus II, was becoming a great power. During the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Austrian and Russian troops marched through Poland, and Frederick flooded the country with counterfeit money. The Commonwealth was being treated as a wayside inn.

Rising from the middle nobility (though his mother was a Czartoryska), the candidate was handpicked by Catherine II (the Great) of Russia not only because he had been her lover but because she felt that he would be completely dependent on her.

The king’s adroitness and personal charm allowed him in time to win over some of his adversaries, but he lacked a strong will and showed none of the military inclination so cherished by the Poles.

The king’s policies, however, were constantly undermined by neighbouring powers. Frederick II’s view that Poland ought to be kept in lethargy was shared by St. Petersburg, which sought to isolate Stanisław by encouraging both religious dissenters (i.e., non-Catholics) and the conservative circles to form confederations. The presence of Russian troops terrorized the Sejm, and Russia formally guaranteed as immutable such principles of Polish politics as liberum veto, elective monarchy, and dominance of the szlachta.

Austria, which had opposed the scheme (Maria Theresa had found it immoral), unwittingly created a precedent by annexing some Polish border areas.

By the time this program had been brought to success and Stanisław Leszczyński elected king of Poland—Augustus being forced to accept the settlement by a Swedish invasion of Saxony in September 1706—Charles XII had matured both as a general and as a statesman.

After negotiations for Charles’s marriage to a Danish cousin, the daughter of Christian V, were begun on Denmark’s initiative, Charles’s advisers held back until the outcome of Danish negotiations with other powers was known. These negotiations led in fact to a coalition between Denmark, Saxony, and Russia that, by attacking Sweden in the spring of 1700, began the Great Northern War. The speedy success hoped for by the three allied powers did not materialize, and rumours of rebellion by the Swedish nobility against the absolutist monarchy, in case of war, proved false.

Most significant of these personal decisions was that to fight Augustus II in Poland and to transform Poland from a divided country, where Augustus had both partisans and opponents, into an ally and a base for the final campaign against Russia.

His first necessity in 1706, however, was to secure Sweden’s position in relation to Russia, which, under Peter I the Great, had from 1703 onward made good use of Charles XII’s campaigns in Poland to train its army and undertake a piecemeal conquest of the Swedish east Baltic provinces.

He became the object of Turkish intrigues and in February 1713 had to fight a regular battle, the kalabalik of Bender (modern Bendery, Moldova), to avoid a plot to deliver him into the hands of Augustus of Saxony, now restored in Poland. The closing of the Turko-Habsburg frontier due to the plague, and the determination of the anti-French alliance in the War of the Spanish Succession to prevent Sweden from using its bases in Germany to attack its enemies further circumscribed Charles XII’s freedom of action in these years. The Swedish council, virtually in charge of affairs at home during his absence, was preoccupied with threats to Sweden from Denmark.

Charles XII was not the simple and uneducated soldier-king he has often been made out to be. His intellectual pursuits were many and varied. He became increasingly occupied with new ideas in administration, and many of his administrative reforms were far ahead of their time. He demanded considerable sacrifices of those classes in Sweden who were lukewarm about the war effort once the years of bad fortune set in after 1709.