THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN HOHENZOLLERNS AND HABSBURGS
[Sidenote: Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa]
In the struggle between Prussia and Austria—between Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs—centered the European diplomacy and wars of the mid- eighteenth century. On one side was the young king Frederick II (1740- 1786); on the other, the young queen Maria Theresa (1740-1780). Both had ability and sincere devotion to their respective states and peoples,—a high sense of royal responsibilities. Maria Theresa was beautiful, emotional, and proud; the Great Frederick was domineering, cynical, and always rational. The Austrian princess was a firm believer in Catholic Christianity; the Prussian king was a friend of Voltaire and a devotee of skepticism.
[Sidenote: Coalition against Maria Theresa]
Frederick inherited from his father a fairly compact monarchy and a splendidly trained and equipped army of 80,000 men. He smiled at the disorganized troops, the disordered finances, the conflicting interests in the hodge-podge of territories which his rival had inherited from her father. He also smiled at the solemn promise which Prussia had made to respect the Austrian dominions. No sooner was the Emperor Charles VI dead and Maria Theresa proclaimed at Vienna than Frederick II entered into engagements with Bavaria and France to dismember her realm. The elector of Bavaria was to be made Holy Roman Emperor as Charles VII and Prussia was to appropriate Silesia. France was suspected of designs upon the Austrian Netherlands.
[Sidenote: Frederick's Designs on Silesia]
Silesia thus became the bone of contention between Frederick II and Maria Theresa. Silesia covered the fertile valley of the upper Oder, separating the Slavic Czechs of Frederick's Bohemia on the west from the Slavic Poles on the east. Its population, which was largely German, was as numerous as that of the whole kingdom of Prussia, and if annexed to the Hohenzollern possessions would make them overwhelmingly German. On the other hand, the loss of Silesia would give Austria less direct influence in strictly German affairs and would deprive her of a convenient point of attack against Berlin and the heart of Prussia.
[Sidenote: Outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740]
Trumping up an ancient family claim to the duchy, Frederick immediately marched his army into Silesia and occupied Breslau, its capital. To the west, a combined Bavarian and French army prepared to invade Austria and Bohemia. Maria Theresa, pressed on all sides, fled to Hungary and begged the Magyars to help her. The effect was electrical. Hungarians, Austrians, and Bohemians rallied to the support of the Habsburg throne; recruits were drilled and hurried to the front; the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) was soon in full swing.
[Sidenote: Entrance of Great Britain and Spain]
A trade war had broken out between Great Britain and Spain in 1739, [Footnote: Commonly called the War of Jenkins's Ear. See above, p. 311] which speedily became merged with the continental struggle. Great Britain was bent on maintaining liberal trading privileges in the Belgian Netherlands and always opposed the incorporation of those provinces into the rival and powerful monarchy of France, preferring that they should remain in the hands of some distant and less-feared, less commercial power, such as Austria. Great Britain, moreover, had fully recognized the Pragmatic Sanction and now determined that it was in accordance with her own best interests to supply Maria Theresa with money and to dispatch armies to the Continent to defend the Netherlands against France and to protect Hanover against Prussia. On the other side, the royal family of Spain sympathized with their Bourbon kinsmen in France and hoped to recover from Austria all the Italian possessions of which Spain had been deprived by the treaty of Utrecht (1713).
The main parties to the War of the Austrian Succession were, therefore, on the one hand, Prussia, France, Spain, and Bavaria, and, on the other, Austria and Great Britain. With the former at first joined the elector of Saxony, who wished to play off Prussia against Austria for the benefit of his Saxon and Polish lands, and the king of Sardinia, who was ever balancing in Italy between Habsburg and Bourbon pretensions. With Austria and Great Britain was united Holland, because of her desire to protect herself from possible French aggression.
[Sidenote: Course of the War]
The war was not so terrible or bloody as its duration and the number of contestants would seem to indicate. Saxony, which inclined more naturally to Austrian than to Prussian friendship, was easily persuaded by bribes to desert her allies and to make peace with Maria Theresa. Spain would fight only in Italy; and Sardinia, alarmed by the prospect of substantial Bourbon gains in that peninsula, went over to the side of Austria. The Dutch were content to defend their own territories.
[Sidenote: Success of Frederick]
Despite the greatest exertions, Maria Theresa was unable to expel Frederick from Silesia. Her generals suffered repeated reverses at his hands, and three times she was forced to recognize his occupation in order that she might employ all her forces against her western enemies. By the third treaty between the two German sovereigns, concluded at Dresden in 1745, Silesia [Footnote: Except a very small district, which thereafter was known as "Austrian Silesia.">[ was definitely ceded by Austria to Prussia. Frederick had gained his ends: he coolly deserted his allies and withdrew from the war.
Meanwhile the Austrian arms had elsewhere been more successful. The French and Bavarians, after winning a few trifling victories in Bohemia, had been forced back to the upper Danube. Munich was occupied by the troops of Maria Theresa at the very time when the elector was being crowned at Frankfort as Holy Roman Emperor. The whole of Bavaria was soon in Austrian possession, and the French were in retreat across the Rhine. Gradually, also, the combined forces of Austria and Sardinia made headway in Italy against the Bourbon armies of France and Spain.
In the last years of the war, the French managed to protect Alsace and Lorraine from Austrian invasion, and, under the command of the gifted Marshal Saxe, they actually succeeded in subjugating the greater part of the Austrian Netherlands and in carrying the struggle into Holland. On the high seas and in the colonies, the conflict raged between France and Great Britain as "King George's War," which has already been separately noted. [Footnote: See above, pp. 311 f.]
[Sidenote: Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): Indecisive Character of
Struggle between Prussia and Austria]
The treaties which ended the War of the Austrian Succession were signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. They guaranteed the acquisition of Silesia by Frederick II of Prussia and restored everything else to the situation at the opening of the conflict. The Wittelsbach family was reinstated in Bavaria and in the Palatinate, and the husband of Maria Theresa, Francis of Lorraine, succeeded Charles VII as Holy Roman Emperor. France, for all her expenditures and sacrifices, gained nothing. The War of the Austrian Succession was but a preliminary encounter in the great duel for German leadership between Prussia and Austria. It was similarly only an indecisive round in the prolonged battle between France and Great Britain for the mastery of the colonial and commercial world.
[Sidenote: Coalition against Frederick the Great]
In the war just closed, Austria had been the chief loser, and the resolute Maria Theresa set herself at once to the difficult task of recovering her prestige and her ceded territory. Her first efforts were directed toward internal reform—consolidating the administrations of her various dominions by the creation of a strong central council at Vienna, encouraging agriculture, equalizing and augmenting the taxes, and increasing the army. Her next step was to form a great league of rulers that would find a common interest with her in dismembering the kingdom of Frederick. She knew she could count on Saxony. She easily secured an ally in the Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia, who had been deeply offended by the caustic wit of the Prussian king. She was already united by friendly agreements with Great Britain and Holland. She had only France to win to her side, and in this policy she had the services of an invaluable agent, Count Kaunitz, the greatest diplomat of the age. Kaunitz held out to France, as the price for the abandonment of the Prussian alliance and the acceptance of that of Austria, the tempting bait of Frederick's Rhenish provinces. But Louis XV at first refused an Austrian alliance: it would be a departure from the traditional French policy of opposing the Habsburgs. Kaunitz then appealed to the king's mistress, the ambitious Madame de Pompadour, who, like the Tsarina Elizabeth, had had plenty of occasions for taking offense at the witty verses of the Prussian monarch: the favor of the Pompadour was won, and France entered the league against Prussia.
[Sidenote: The "Diplomatic Revolution">[
Meanwhile, however, Great Britain had entered into a special agreement with Frederick with the object of guaranteeing the integrity of Hanover and the general peace of the Germanies. When, therefore, the colonial war between Great Britain and France was renewed in 1754, it was quite natural that the former should contract a definite alliance with Prussia. Thus it befell that, whereas in the indecisive War of the Austrian Succession Prussia and France were pitted against Austria and Great Britain, in the determinant Seven Years' War, which ensued, Austria and France were in arms against Prussia and Great Britain. This overturn of traditional alliances has been commonly designated the "Diplomatic Revolution."
[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War, 1756-1763]
The Seven Years' War lasted in Europe from 1756 to 1763, and, as regards both the number of combatants and the brilliant generalship displayed, deserves to rank with the War of the Spanish Succession as the greatest war which the modern world had so far witnessed. The story has already been told of its maritime and colonial counterpart, which embraced the French and Indian War in America (1754-1763) and the triumphant campaigns of Clive in India, and which decisively established the supremacy of Great Britain on the seas, in the Far East, and in the New World. [Footnote: See above, pp. 312 ff.] There remains to sketch its course on the European continent.
[Sidenote: Frederick's Victory at Rossbach, 1757]
Without waiting for a formal declaration of hostilities, Frederick seized Saxony, from which he exacted large indemnities and drafted numerous recruits, and, with his well-trained veteran troops, crossed the mountains into Bohemia. He was obliged by superior Austrian forces to raise the siege of Prague and to fall back on his own kingdom. Thence converged from all sides the allied armies of his enemies. Russians moved into East Prussia, Swedes from Pomerania into northern Brandenburg, Austrians into Silesia, while the French were advancing from the west. Here it was that Frederick displayed those qualities which entitle him to rank as one of the greatest military commanders of all time and to justify his title of "the Great." Inferior in numbers to any one of his opponents, he dashed with lightning rapidity into central Germany and at Rossbach (1757) inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon the French, whose general wrote to Louis XV, "The rout of our army is complete: I cannot tell you how many of our officers have been killed, captured, or lost." No sooner was he relieved of danger in the west than he was back in Silesia. He flung himself upon the Austrians at Leuthen, took captive a third of their army, and put the rest to flight.
The victories of Frederick, however, decimated his army. He still had money, thanks to the subsidies which Pitt poured in from Great Britain, but he found it very difficult to procure men: he gathered recruits from hostile countries; he granted amnesty to deserters; he even enrolled prisoners of war. He was no longer sufficiently sure of his soldiers to take the offensive, and for five years he was reduced to defensive campaigns in Silesia. The Russians occupied East Prussia and penetrated into Brandenburg; in 1759 they captured Berlin.
[Sidenote: French Reverses. The "Family Compact">[
The French, after suffering defeat at Rossbach, directed their energies against Hanover but encountered unexpected resistance at the hands of an army collected by Pitt's gold and commanded by a Prussian general, the prince of Brunswick. Brunswick defeated them and gradually drove them out of Germany. This series of reverses, coupled with disasters that attended French armies in America and in India, caused the French king to call upon his cousin, the king of Spain, for assistance. The result was the formation of the defensive alliance (1761) between the Bourbon states of France, Spain, and the Two Sicilies, and the entrance of Spain into the war (1762).
[Sidenote: Withdrawal of Russia]
What really saved Frederick the Great was the death of the Tsarina Elizabeth (1762) and the accession to the Russian throne of Peter III, a dangerous madman but a warm admirer of the military prowess of the Prussian king. Peter in brusque style transferred the Russian forces from the standard of Maria Theresa to that of Frederick and restored to Prussia the conquests of his predecessor. [Footnote: Peter III was dethroned in the same year; his wife, Catherine II, who succeeded him, refused to give active military support to either side.] Spain entered the war too late to affect its fortunes materially. She was unable to regain what France had lost, and in fact the Bourbon states were utterly exhausted. The Austrians, after frantic but vain attempts to wrest Silesia from Frederick, finally despaired of their cause.
[Sidenote: Treaty of Hubertusburg (1763): Humiliation of the Habsburgs and Triumph of the Hohenzollerns]
The treaty of Hubertusburg (1763) put an end to the Seven Years' War in Europe. Maria Theresa finally, though reluctantly, surrendered all claims to Silesia. Prussia had clearly humiliated Austria and become a first-rate power. The Hohenzollerns were henceforth the acknowledged peers of the Habsburgs. The almost synchronous treaty of Paris closed the war between Great Britain, on the one hand, and France and Spain on the other, by ceding the bulk of the French colonial empire to the British. Thereafter, Great Britain was practically undisputed mistress of the seas and chief colonial power of the world.
[Sidenote: Frederick the Great and the Partition of Poland]
Frederick the Great devoted the last years of his life to the consolidation of his monarchy [Footnote: For the internal reforms of Frederick, see below, pp. 440 ff.] and to enlarging its sphere of influence rather by diplomacy than by war. Frederick felt that the best safeguard against further attempts of Austria to recover Silesia was a firm alliance between Prussia and Russia. And it was an outcome of that alliance that in 1772 he joined with the Tsarina Catherine in making the first partition of Poland. Catherine appropriated the country east of the Düna and the Dnieper rivers. Frederick annexed West Prussia, except the towns of Danzig and Thorn, thereby linking up Prussia and Brandenburg by a continuous line of territory. Maria Theresa, moved by the loss of Silesia and by fear of the undue preponderance which the partition of Poland would give to her northern rivals, thought to adjust the balance of power by sharing in the shameful transaction: she occupied Galicia, including the important city of Cracow. Maria Theresa repeatedly expressed her abhorrence of the whole business, but, as the scoffing Frederick said, "She wept, but she kept on taking."
The partition of Poland was more favorable to Prussia than to Austria. In the former case, the land annexed lay along the Baltic and served to render East Prussia, Brandenburg, and Silesia a geographical and political unit. On the other hand, Austria to some extent was positively weakened by the acquisition of territory outside her natural frontiers, and the addition of a turbulent Polish people further increased the diversity of races and the clash of interests within the Habsburg dominions.
When, a few years later, the succession to the electorate of Bavaria was in some doubt and Austria laid claims to the greater part of that state (1777-1779), Frederick again stepped in, and now by intrigue and now by threats of armed force again prevented any considerable extension of Habsburg control. His last important act was the formation of a league of princes to champion the lesser German states against Austrian aggression.
By hard work, by military might, by force of will, unhampered by any moral code, Frederick the Great perfected the policies of the Great Elector and of Frederick William I and raised Prussia to the rank of partner with Austria in German leadership and to an eminent position in the international affairs of Europe. Had Frederick lived, however, but a score of years longer, he would have witnessed the total extinction of the Holy Roman Empire, the apparent ruin of the Germanies, and the degradation of his own country as well as that of Austria. [Footnote: See below, Chapter XVI.] He might even have perceived that a personal despotism, built by bloodshed and unblushing deceit, was hardly proof against a nation stirred by idealism and by a consciousness of its own rights and power.
[Illustration: THE HOHENZOLLERN FAMILY (1415-1915): ELECTORS OF
BRANDENBURG, KINGS OF PRUSSIA, AND GERMAN EMPERORS]