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Chapter VI: The War of the Habsburg Inheritance and the War of the Lublin Confederation, 1745-1750.
In March 1745, Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia (as Charles II), and King of Hungary and Croatia (as Charles III) died, aged 59. Four years before the birth of Maria Theresa, faced with his lack of male heirs, Charles provided for a male-line succession failure with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. He thereby favoured his own daughters over those of his elder brother and predecessor, Joseph I, in the succession, ignoring the decree he had signed during the reign of his father, Leopold I. The reason for this was that his niece Maria Amalia of Austria was married to Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, the successor of Maximilian II Emanuel, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bavaria. A Wittelsbach stood to inherit the thrones of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia until he issued the Pragmatic Sanction, which at the time had been accepted by Bavaria because Louis XIV hadn’t been interested in a war over the matter. Ultimately, Bavaria, Great Britain, Savoy, Saxony, Denmark, the DutchRepublic, the Papal States, Prussia, Spain, Venice and the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire recognized the sanction.
Bavaria was the first to renege on its recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction, refusing to recognize Maria Theresa as the Habsburg heir. In May 1745, a large Bavarian army of 70.000 men commanded personally by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI moved into Tyrol to defend his wife’s legitimate claims to the Habsburg inheritance. He vanquished an Austrian army of only 33.000 near Innsbruck on May 10th and kicking off the War of the Habsburg Inheritance. The Archbishops of Salzburg and the Bishops of Brixen, Passau, Augsburg and Trent – all appointed by the King of Bavaria since the War of the Spanish Succession, and bordering Habsburg lands – supported Bavaria with troops, allowing them to cut off Tyrol from the rest of Austria. Regensburg and Freising, neutral until then, followed and provided more troops. It looked like the Bavarians would be able to take Vienna since Austrian forces arrayed against them were numerically inferior, and more so because they enjoyed Ottoman support. The mere possibility of the Ottomans moving on Hungary meant that the Habsburgs could never focus their undivided attention on the Bavarians. Over the course of May and June the Bavarians won several skirmishes against the Austrians and inflicted another decisive defeat in the Battle of Gmunden on June 18th 1745. At this point Sultan Mahmud I, the successor and nephew of Ahmed III, moved an army to the Hungarian border, not to invade but to stoke rebellion among the Hungarians.
The War of the Habsburg Inheritance changed from a localized conflict to a larger one when King Frederick II of Prussia intervened on behalf of the Habsburgs in July. He didn’t have any love for the Habsburgs, but he believed the absorption of their lands by Bavaria would decide the Bavarian-Prussian rivalry over dominance in the Holy Roman Empire in Prussia’s disadvantage. The resources and manpower Bavaria would get by absorbing Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia would unavoidably stack the deck against Prussia so much that it’d have to play second fiddle, at least without outside backing. Frederick, however, pretty much correctly assessed that Prussia’s allies weren’t so close and concordant that they’d go to war for him, unless there was something to gain for them too. Just propping up Prussia against Bavaria out of principle, because they were allies, wasn’t good enough. Prussia couldn’t rely on its allies to back them up against a superior Bavaria (and didn’t want to be dependent), so they had to prevent Bavaria from becoming superior. Prussian participation would turn it into a European conflict.
Prussia’s intervention triggered Bavaria’s alliance with France. France declared war on Prussia in late July and Spain did the same, bound by alliance as well as family ties (King Philip V of Spain was the younger brother of Louis XV). Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony followed suit. He wanted to take back Lusatia, which Saxony had lost in the Great Northern War and was encouraged by French and Spanish participation (besides that, the Elector’s daughter Maria Amalia of Saxony was daughter-in-law to Philip V by virtue of her marriage to the future King Ferdinand VI Spain and sister-in-law to his younger brother, the future Charles IV of Spain). Great Britain traditionally opposed continental hegemony and did the same now, looking at the bigger picture: by going against the Bourbon Franco-Spanish alliance they weren’t just trying to stop Bavaria’s attempt to take over Central Europe, but they were trying to prevent France from spreading its influence all the way across southern Germany into the Balkans via the Bavarians, linking up with its Ottoman allies. Needless to say, Great Britain entered the war on Prussia’s side. In 1746, Russian Empress Elizabeth decided to fight a new war against the Ottoman Empire, invading Wallachia and Moldova, resulting in a declaration of war from France. Sweden declared war on Prussia in 1746 too, honouring its commitments to Bavaria and France, but incurring a Russian declaration of war in response. By 1746 Europe had been set ablaze.
Notably, the Dutch Republic remained neutral. The Dutch realized that by opposing France in the War of the Spanish Succession they had risked being annexed completely, which Louis XIV had planned to do next if the war had continued any longer. France had grown into a giant right on the doorstep of the Dutch and could still extinguish their independence if it wanted to. After the War of the Spanish Succession, the Dutch abandoned their alliance with Britain and the Habsburgs. They instead opted for a course of strict neutrality and not challenging their more powerful neighbour in foreign politics while maintaining their national sovereignty. Due to their economic decline and corresponding decreased military strength, while France had only grown stronger, they felt they had little choice but to become the inconspicuous wallflower among the European powers.
In the meantime, on July 25th 1745, a Prussian army of 33.000 men commanded personally by Frederick II advanced into Bohemia and met an army of 40.000 Bavarians commanded by Prince Ferdinand Maria, the brother of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. Superficially, the odds definitely favoured the latter, but there was more to it than numbers: under King Frederick William I, Frederick II’s predecessor, the Prussian army had been drilled to a level of perfection previously unknown in Europe. The infantry was able to fire four shots a minute to the Bavarians’ three; the cavalry and artillery were comparatively less effective, but still above average. Frederick II feigned a retreat in his centre after the enemy artillery bombardment had focused there, making Ferdinand Maria think the enemy was buckling. He became overconfident and ordered most of his entire cavalry into the enemy centre, upon which the trap shut and Frederick’s troops massacred the Bavarian cavalry in enfilading artillery and musket fire. The Prussian victory gave the Habsburgs a breather: Charles VI sent reinforcements north to aid his brother’s chaotically retreating army while sending messengers asking Louis XV to hurry. In the meantime, the Saxons sat on their hands and did nothing.
Louis had kept 60.000 of his 200.000 man army in reserve and split the remaining 140.000 into three armies. An army of 25.000 assembled near Brussels under the command of Maurice, Count of Saxony, and advanced through the (officially neutral) Prince-Bishopric of Liège (unsurprising since the French king appointed the Prince-Bishop). He seized the isolated Duchy of Cleves and County of Mark from Prussia, encountering no major resistance. Maurice hoped to march on the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, tied in personal union to Great Britain and the ancestral home of King George II. The French were pushing the Saxons to do the same from the east, knocking out Britain’s continental base, after which the French and the Saxons could devote their full attention on the Prussians (Austria by itself wasn’t a major challenge). Saxony, however, didn’t go for it. The Bavarians were expected to beat Prussia and Austria with French reinforcements. To that end, the main army of 80.000 men commanded personally by King Louis XV advanced eastward from Lorraine, thought it wasn’t expected to arrive before autumn, by which time the campaigning season would be pretty much over. As it turned out, the French arrived in time to help the Bavarians resist Prussia’s blitz invasion of Upper Austria of September 1745, which quickly ground to a halt in the face of a 2:1 numerical superiority, despite the tactical genius of the Prussian king. The latter feigned a collapse of his left flank, which had been made weak on purpose, to lure the French into a trap, destroying part of their army. Louis was surprised and frustrated about the losses the Prussians managed to inflict on his army, but was no fool and didn’t rush to take revenge. His bloody nose taught him not to underestimate his foe.
The third component of France’s stratagem was an army of 35.000 men commanded by Ulrich Lowendal, which moved to secure the Duchy of Milan, which was under French control. It was intended to further increase French influence over northern France. From Milan, Lowendal supported the Duchy of Parma, which was under Spanish suzerainty and was being administrated by Philip V’s second son, the future Charles IV of Spain. Duke Francesco III of Modena also supported France and Spain and Lucca joined them since the French looked certain to win (Genoa and Savoy remained neutral). Together they faced the Grand Duchy of Tuscany ruled by the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, which was largely cut off from Austrian support (Venice was neutral, making it difficult for Austria to help Tuscany; they were unwilling to force Venice to let their armies pass through, fearing the Venetians would side with France). To make matters worse for Tuscany a Spanish-Neapolitan army of 33.000 men advanced north through the Papal States, which were supposed to be neutral.
King Philip V of Spain had bullied Pope Benedict XIV, who wasn’t particularly pro-Bourbon, into letting his army pass through Papal territories. He was highly sceptical about French and Spanish claims to be the “defenders of the Church” given their alliance to the Ottoman Empire. Relations with the Vatican were also strained due to Gallicanism: the notion that national customs might trump Catholic Church regulations. This expressed itself in the habit of Louis XIV to appoint bishops and archbishops, a practice which the two brothers Louis XV and Philip V happily continued. Despite its reservations, Rome had no choice but to let the Spanish-Neapolitan army pass through unmolested. By November 1745, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was under occupation and Grand Duke Francis Stephen, Maria Theresa’s husband, had fled to Austria.
Tuscany was subsequently partitioned: the exclaves of Pontremoli and Bagnone were annexed by adjacent Duchy of Parma; the exclaves of Fivizzano and Barga were awarded to the Duchy of Modena; another exclave, Pietrasanta, was annexed by the Republic of Lucca; the last tiny exclave of Tuscany, Badia Tedalda, was awarded to the Papal States as recompense for the Spanish-Neapolitan violation of their neutrality. The remainder, the lion’s share of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, ended up ender the suzerainty of Spain, which became the dominant power in Italy. Separate from the war, France also got some expansion in the region by taking Corsica off Genoa’s hands; Genoese rule over Corsica had been plagued by endemic rebellion for nearly twenty years, so in 1748 they decided to take the French up on their offer to buy the island. With Corsica and Tuscany under their rule, the Bourbons had completed their dominance over the western Mediterranean Sea.
In the meantime, hostilities in Europe took off again in the spring of 1746 and the starting positions were advantageous for France, Spain and Bavaria. The Franco-Bavarian army by itself was numerically superior to the armies fielded by Prussia and Austria. Besides that, France and Spain had already won the Italian campaign by conquering Tuscany, enabling them to threaten Austria from the south, assuming they were willing to bribe and/or bully Venice into compliance, which they were perfectly willing to do. They promised Venice some minor border corrections at Austria’s expense: the County of Gorizia sufficed. The Venetians agreed and opened up another front against Austria in May 1746, which was soon bolstered by Franco-Spanish reinforcements. The Alpine landscape made for an easy defence on the part of the Austrians, but it increased pressure on them and forced them to divert some troops away from their fight against Franco-Bavarian forces further north.
Russia was too preoccupied fighting Sweden and the Ottomans at the same time to assist Prussia, but they used their sway over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in order to compel it to join the war. Its ruler Michael II, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, reluctantly agreed. Michael II was Michal Fryderyk Czartoryski, the oldest son of Casimir V, who had successfully established a hereditary succession. No matter how feeble it was, that was a feat in itself since there hadn’t been a father-son succession since the end of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Michael II, however, realized that the tentative establishment of a hereditary monarchy and a centralization of the state were the result of Russia and Prussia backing him up against the nobility. The nobles, willing to defend their excessive autonomy and power, were ready to rebel at a moment’s notice if the opportunity arose. Michael II went to war because Russia and Prussia threatened to withdraw their support if he didn’t. Unbeknownst to him, their ability to support him was already largely gone because they were fully committed to the war. A Polish army moved into Bohemia to support the Prussians and the Austrians.
King Frederick II again confronted King Louis XV, this time on May 26th in the Battle of Cham in the Upper Palatinate, Bavaria. Frederick commanded 46.000 of his own Prussians, another 22.000 Poles and a small Russian contingent of 10.000 men, facing a French army of 75.000 men and without Bavarian assistance (most Bavarian forces had been redirected to the Austrian heartlands to exploit the dispersal of Habsburg forces as a result of the Ottoman threat and Venice joining the war). This battle was part of Frederick’s plan to directly attack Bavaria.
Louis XV assessed that Frederick II was a very capable as well as aggressive military leader and planned a trap of his own. Their armies were of roughly equal match so a full frontal assault wouldn’t do the trick. He reasoned that that would just devolve into a slogging match or that it could turn bad because the opposing army was slightly larger. The town of Cham lay on the river Regen, a left tributary of the Danube, in the Cham-Further lowland, bordered on the south by the Bavarian Forest and on the north by the Oberpfälzer woods. Louis XV utilized the features of the Bavarian Forest, a wooded low-mountain area, to his advantage. As bait, he set up an encampment of 20.000 men near Cham on the right bank of the Regen River protected by an earth wall with a palisade on top. The other 55.000 troops under his command would stay on the high ground of the Bavarian Forest with the woods to their rear; the tough forested terrain made it difficult for them to be attacked in their rearguard. The encampment at Cham was bait and the troops there were to provide only brief resistance before retreating to the foothills of the BavarianForest, where artillery batteries with overlapping fields of fire had been set up on the high ground. When Frederick arrived and noticed a much smaller enemy army he indeed attacked and pursued aggressively and then encountered Louis’s main force. He realized he’d fallen into a trap when his army got pummelled by artillery, with cannonballs tearing through his ranks. He knew better than to attack a force holding the high ground and ordered the retreat, suffering serious but not crippling losses in the process. He’d been beaten but not broken.
In the meantime, in the northern theatre of the war, the campaigning season saw the confrontation between Sweden and Russia. Sweden had invested heavily in its defences but also its army with help from France and, unlike in the Great Northern War, the Swedes weren’t alone in this. The Ottomans were putting up a serious defence, having built a string of fortresses designed by French architects to defend their borders. The Russians were heavily committed in the Balkans and in the Crimea as a result and in naval terms they weren’t having an easy time of it either thanks to Ottoman investment in their navy, partially funded by France. As a result the young King Gustav III Adolf was optimistic and ordered a joint operation by the army and the fleet against Vyborg, which fell into Swedish hands very quickly, defeating a force under the command of General Peter Lacy. A Swedish army of 50.000 men commanded personally by the young king advanced further to St. Petersburg, but had to stop and set up their winter camp because winter came early.
1746 ended without a decisive victory for anybody, but something was stirring in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Poland’s nobles were fine with a home-grown dynasty, but resented the centralization and bureaucratization of the administration and the growth of the royal army since it completely undermined their power. Besides that, they were opposed to the way Russia and Prussia dictated Poland-Lithuania’s foreign policy and, to a certain extent, even its domestic policies. They were being treated like vassals or even a protectorate and that was unacceptable! The war, in which Poland-Lithuania stood to gain nothing, was the latest example of this. The wealthy magnates wanted to pull out of it and regain their influence by forcing intermediary of organs staffed by nobles onto the King to affect how the country was run. In a meeting in Lublin in June 1747 they organized a confederation – a legal military association opposing the government on the grounds of unjust rule – and launched a rebellion against King Michael II. This was the Rebellion of the Lublin Confederation, which was led by Karol Stanislaw Radziwill, the wealthiest magnate of Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Radziwill family was opposed to reform and, besides that, had been the nemesis of the Czartoryski family for a long time.
King Michael II turned around and marched his army straight back to Poland to save his throne, abandoning the Prussians. Prussia and Russia were now confronted by a country in chaos in between them, stretching from the Vistula to the river Dnieper. Besides that, Prussia was outnumbered by the Bavarians and the French without Polish reinforcements to supplement their army. Moreover, Prussia and Russia had to consider the distinct possibility of Poland-Lithuania switching sides to shake off their influence. Spies had told them Radziwill and his co-conspirators had already established contacts with France, Sweden and Bavaria to gain their support. This was confirmed when they elected Franz Ludwig, Count of Holnstein, the illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.
In the meantime, without Polish support, King Frederick II was no longer able to keep the Bavarians and the French from marching into Vienna, which they did in June 1747. With the over Habsburg lands winding down, the War of the Lublin Confederation commenced. The Prussian army withdrew into its fortresses in Silesia, taking up a defensive posture. Simultaneously, distracted by events in Poland, Russia had trouble keeping the Swedes and the Ottomans at bay simultaneously. Gustav III Adolf, who proved to be a military genius comparable to his father, the famous Charles XII, captured St. Petersburg. Some were urging him to invade Russia and attack Moscow too, to where Empress Elizabeth had relocated her court, but the young Swedish king knew better. If he advanced on Moscow, the Russians would simply withdraw further and sap his army’s strength through scorched earth tactics. Russia was too big to invade so he decided to stay encamped outside St. Petersburg with his army to await the Russian response, setting up an earth wall with a palisade in defence.
In high level talks between Prussia and Russia, Frederick II urged Empress Elizabeth to give the Swedes what they wanted in return for dropping out of the war and then focus on Poland-Lithuania. Russia, however, wouldn’t make peace with the Swedes without at least retaking St. Petersburg and save some face. Therefore, General Lacy launched a counterattack in August with an army twice the size of Gustav’s, retaking the city with heavy losses; besides that, Russia had to abandon its gains in Wallachia and Moldova to make this possible. Swedish success had come at losses they could barely afford while the Russians had men to spare, so they accepted the Russian peace offer, much to the outrage of France and Bavaria: by the Treaty of Abo Sweden regained the parts of Karelia, Kexholm and Vyborg they had lost in the Great Northern War. Russia saved face by keeping their capital and Sweden was allowed to linger on as a member of the great power club. It was a short term success, but a long term loss for the Swedes: France and its allies wouldn’t so readily help them in another confrontation against the Russians, and it was not a matter of if but when that confrontation would occur.
In the meantime, Russia could devote its attention to Poland-Lithuania, using the freed up forces to invade Poland-Lithuania from the east. Prussia remained on the defence in Silesia while also sending an army in to put down the Lublin Confederation. France supported the Krakow Confederation through Hungary, which was under occupation by French and Bavarian forces. They were, however, at the far end of a long supply line and were tired after several years of fighting and couldn’t really help the Poles. In the meantime, King Michael II was killed in battle, which was convenient for Prussia and Russia, which had plans to deal with the troublesome Poles definitively. The Lublin Confederation fell apart when their provisional capital of Lublin was conquered and their leader Karol Stanislaw Radziwill fled to France with as much of his enormous fortune as he could take with him to avoid certain execution. He would live a life in comfort in a modest estate outside Paris, watched powerlessly how his country was carved up by the victors and died an embittered but very wealthy man in 1790.
In the Treaty of Breslau Prussia and Russia divided the Commonwealth’s territories in an arrangement that preserved a semblance of Polish and Lithuanian autonomy. Russia directly annexed the vovoideships of Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia and Braclaw and Empress Elizabeth claimed the title Grand Duchess of Lithuania. Lithuania was thusly tied in personal union to the Russian crown, theoretically a separate country with its own institutions and laws but in practice less than a vassal. In St. Petersburg a “Lithuanian Prikaz” (a judicial, territorial and executive office) was set up that effectively ran the country. Prussia directly annexed the Chelmno, Inowroclaw and Kalisz vovoideships while the title King of Poland fell to Frederick II. Much like the Russians, Frederick created a “Polish chancellery” for all of his Polish affairs while government institutions in Warsaw merely became executive bodies. Frederick II visited his Polish kingdom a handful of times and Elizabeth never visited Lithuania at all.
In the meantime, the British had contributed little to the war in Europe other than financing and supplying its continental allies Prussia, Russia and Austria. At sea, however, they had done the lion’s share of the fighting, the most crucial confrontation being the Battle of Oléron on July 9th 1746. France fully intended to invade Great Britain, not to conquer the British Isles – for which they lacked the manpower due to their involvement in the fighting on the continent – but to get them to leave the war. When the British heard rumours of the French and Spanish fleets converging, the Royal Navy immediately set sail to prevent that, but struggled with unfavourable winds. The Royal Navy deployed 29 ships of the line and six frigates while the French fleet assembling at Oléron, an island in the Bay of Biscay, had 22 ships of the line and five frigates. A big battle ensued in which the French had favourable winds while the British had numbers, which they used to turn the slogging match to their advantage. The Royal Navy’s delay, however, meant that a Spanish flotilla of eight ships of the line and three frigates arrived at the peak of the battle, providing fresh reinforcements to the French. The Royal Navy lost six ships of the line, the French lost five and the Spanish lost two frigates, making the battle inconclusive at best. The naval balance of power remained the same, but the French decided to put off the invasion of Britain nonetheless, ultimately making it a British victory.
Besides the seas, the other major theatre where British and French forces clashed was India, where Governor-General Joseph-François, Marquis Dupleix, led French forces to victory. His ambition now was to acquire for France vast territories in India, and for this purpose he entered into relations with the native princes, and adopted a style of oriental splendour in his dress and surroundings. He built an army of native troops, called sepoys, who were trained as infantrymen men in his service. The British took the alarm (the danger to their settlements and power was partly averted by the bitter mutual jealousy which existed between Dupleix and Bertrand François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, French governor of the Isle of Bourbon). Dupleix’s forces seized control of Madras and also of Fort St. David near Cuddalore. This situation barely changed until peace negotiations finally started in 1750 after five years of war on a global scale and two million deaths.
