THE WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION
[1738-1742 A.D.]
This general accommodation among the arbiters of Italy procured only a brief interval of repose for the degraded people of the peninsula, before they were exposed to far greater evils than those which they had suffered in the short course of the late war. The emperor Charles VI died only two years after the confirmation of the Peace of Vienna; and the very powers who by that treaty had guaranteed the famous Pragmatic Sanction—or act by which the emperor, as he had no son, was allowed to settle his hereditary states upon his daughter Maria Theresa—conspired to rob her of those dominions. The furious war of the Austrian Succession which followed, filled Italy during seven years with rapine and havoc.
In the year after the death of Charles VI, a Spanish army under the duke of Montemar, disembarked on the Tuscan coast to attempt further conquests in Italy; and although these troops arrived to attack the territories of his consort, the new grand duke was obliged to affect a neutrality and to permit their free passage through his dominions. On the other hand, the king of the Sicilies, who desired to aid his father’s forces in their operations, was equally compelled to accept a neutrality, by the appearance of a British squadron in the bay of Naples, and the threatened bombardment of that city. This humiliation, to which the exposed situation of his capital reduced him, did not, however, prevent the Neapolitan monarch at a later period from taking part in the war. But his engagement in the contest had only the effect of drawing the Austrian arms into southern Italy, and inflicting the ravages of a licentious soldiery upon the neutral states of the church and the frontiers of Naples (1742).
But northern Italy was the constant theatre of far more destructive hostilities; and the Italian sovereign, who acted the most conspicuous part in the general war of Europe, was Charles Emmanuel III, the king of Sardinia. That active and politic prince, pursuing the skilful but selfish and unscrupulous system of aggrandisement, which had become habitual to the Savoyard dynasty, made a traffic of his alliance to the highest bidder. He first offered to join the confederated Bourbons; but the court of Spain could not be induced to purchase his adherence by promising him an adequate share of the Milanese states, which the Spaniards were confident of regaining. Charles Emmanuel therefore deserted the Bourbon alliance to range himself in the party of Maria Theresa. But it was not until he had extorted new cessions of territory from that princess in Lombardy, and large subsidies from England which protected her, that he entered seriously and vigorously into the war, as the auxiliary of Austria and England. As soon as Charles Emmanuel began to declare himself against the Bourbon cause, his states became immediately the prey of invasion. Although the Spanish dynasty pretended to lay claim to the whole succession of the house of Austria, the real motive which actuated the court of Madrid in these wars was the ambition of the queen of Spain, Elizabeth Farnese, to obtain an establishment in Italy for another of her sons, the infante Don Philip; and that prince, leading a Spanish army from the Pyrenees through the south of France, overran and occupied all Savoy, which was mercilessly pillaged by his troops. But Don Philip was unable to penetrate into Piedmont; and meanwhile the duke of Montemar, with the Spanish army already in Italy, had been oppressed successfully by the Austrians and Piedmontese on these opposite frontiers of Lombardy.
[1742-1748 A.D.]
But Charles Emmanuel, even after he had formally pledged himself to England and Austria, was perpetually carrying on secret and separate negotiations with the Bourbons; and it was only because he could not obtain all the terms which he demanded of them, and because he was also as suspicious of their ill-faith as he was conscious of his own, that he maintained his alliances unchanged to the end of the war (1743). His states were almost constantly the theatre of hostilities, equally destructive to his subjects, whether success or failure alternately attended his career. Yet he displayed activity and skill and courage, scarcely inferior to the brilliant qualities which had distinguished his father, Victor Amadeus. When, however, the infante Don Philip had been joined by the prince of Conti with twenty thousand men, all the efforts of the Sardinian monarch, though he headed his troops in person, could not resist the desperate valour of the French and Spanish confederates; who, forcing the tremendous passes of the Alps, broke triumphantly into Piedmont, and for some time swept over its plains as conquerors (1744). But reinforced by the Austrians, Charles Emmanuel, before the end of the same campaign, turned the tide of fortune, and obliged the allies to retire for the winter into France. They still retained possession of the duchy of Savoy, and crushed the inhabitants under every species of oppression.
In the following year, Genoa declared for the Bourbon confederation; and the Spanish and French forces under Don Philip, being thus at liberty to form a junction in the territories of that republic with the second Spanish army from Naples, the king of Sardinia and the Austrians were utterly unable to resist their immense superiority of numbers (1745). In this campaign, Parma and Piacenza were reduced by the duke of Modena, the ally of France and Spain; Turin was menaced with bombardment; Tortona fell to the Bourbon arms; Pavia was carried by assault; and Don Philip, penetrating into the heart of Lombardy, closed the operations of the year by his victorious entry into Milan.
But such were the sudden vicissitudes of this sanguinary war, that the brilliant successes of the Spanish prince were shortly rendered nugatory by a growing misunderstanding between the courts of Paris and Madrid, and by the arrival of large reinforcements for the Austrian army in the peninsula (1746). Don Philip lost, in less than another year, all that he had acquired in the preceding campaign. He was driven out of Milan; he was obliged to evacuate all Lombardy; and the French and Spanish forces were finally compelled, by the increasing strength of the Austrians, to recross the Alps, and to make their retreat into France. The king of Sardinia and his allies carried the war into Provence, without meeting with much success; and the French in their turn endeavoured once more to penetrate into Piedmont. But while that quarter of Italy was threatened with new ravages, the peninsula was saved from further miseries by the signature of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).
One of the declared purposes of the European powers in their assembled congress was to give independence to Italy; and if that object could have been attained without the restoration of ancient freedom, and the revival of national virtue among the Italians, the provisions of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle would have been wise and equitable. The Austrians were permitted to retain only Milan and Mantua; and all other foreign powers consented to exclude themselves from the peninsula. The grand duke Francis of Lorraine, now become emperor, engaged to resign Tuscany to a younger branch of his imperial house. The throne of the Two Sicilies was confirmed to Don Charles and his heirs, to form a distinct and independent branch of the Spanish house of Bourbon; and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were elevated anew into a sovereign state in favour of Don Philip, who thus became the founder of a third dynasty of the same family. The king of Sardinia received some further accessions of territory, which were detached from the duchy of Milan; and all the other native powers of Italy remained, or were re-established, in their former condition.