For thirteen years after the conclusion of the war of the Quadruple Alliance, Italy was left in profound and uninterrupted repose. The first half of the eighteenth century was completely the age of political chicanery; and the intricate negotiations, which engrossed the attention and only served to expose the laborious insincerity of the statesmen of Europe, seemed to be ever threatening new troubles. But the treaties, which followed that of the Quadruple Alliance in thick succession for many years, had no other effect in Italy than to secure the Parmesan succession to the infante Don Charles of Spain. Francesco and Antonio, the two surviving sons of the duke Ranuccio II of Parma and Piacenza, who died in 1694, had both inherited the diseased and enormous corpulence of their family. Neither of them had issue; the duke Francesco terminated his reign and life in 1727; and Antonio, his successor, survived him only four years. The death of the youngest of her uncles realised the ambitious hopes which Elizabeth Farnese had cherished of conveying the states of her own house to her son (1731). The male line of Farnese having thus become extinct, the youthful Don Charles, with a body of Spanish troops, was quietly put in possession of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and reluctantly acknowledged by the last prince of the Medici as his destined successor in the grand duchy of Tuscany.
THE WAR OF THE POLISH SUCCESSION
[1731-1738 A.D.]
The final settlement of the Parmesan and Tuscan succession seemed to eradicate the seeds of hostilities in Italy; but it had become the unhappy fortune of that country to follow captive in the train of foreign negotiation, and to suffer and to bleed for the most distant broils of her foreign masters. Only two years had elapsed after the elevation of the Spanish prince to the ducal throne of Parma, when Italy was suddenly chosen as the field for the decision of a quarrel which had originated in the disputed election of a king of Poland. Upon this occasion, the two branches of the Bourbon dynasty united in the same league against the house of Austria, and resolved to attack its possessions in Italy. Charles Emmanuel III, the new king of Sardinia, joined their formidable confederacy, and the imperial strength in the peninsula was crushed under its weight.
While Charles Emmanuel, at the head of the French and Piedmontese troops, easily conquered the whole Milanese states in a short time, the Spaniards at Parma, being delivered of all apprehension for the issue of the war in Lombardy, found themselves at liberty to divert their views to the south. A Spanish army of thirty thousand men disembarked in the peninsula under the duke of Montemar, and joined Don Charles; and that young prince, at the age of seventeen, assuming the nominal command-in-chief of the forces of Spain in Italy, led them to attempt the conquest of the Sicilies. The duke of Montemar, who guided his military operations, gained for him a complete and decisive victory at Bitonto in Apulia over the feeble imperial army, which was intrusted with the defence of southern Italy. The opposition of language, and manners, and character, between the Germans and Italians, rendered the cold sullen tyranny of Austria peculiarly hateful to the volatile Neapolitans; and they eagerly threw off a yoke to which time had not yet habituated them. The capital had already opened its gates before the battle of Bitonto; and the provinces hastened to offer a ready submission to the conquerors. The Sicilians imitated the example of their continental neighbours; and at Naples and Palermo Don Charles received the crowns of the Two Sicilies (1735).
For the facility with which the Spaniards had effected these conquests, they were principally indebted to the powerful operations of the French in Lombardy, and to the vigour with which the armies of Louis XV pressed those of the emperor in Germany, and prevented him from despatching sufficient succours to his Italian dependencies. The court of Madrid now began to cherish again the hope of recovering the whole of the Italian provinces, which the Spanish monarchy had lost by the Peace of Utrecht; and the duke of Montemar conducted his army into Lombardy to unite with the French and Piedmontese in completing the expulsion of the Austrians from the peninsula. But the emperor, discouraged by so many reverses, made overtures of peace; and the French cabinet was not disposed to indulge the ambition of Spain with further acquisitions.
Negotiations for a general peace were opened, to which Philip V was compelled to accede; and at length the confirmation of the preliminaries by the Peace of Vienna once more changed the aspect of Italy. The crowns of Naples and Sicily were secured to Don Charles. The provinces of Milan and Mantua were left to the emperor; the duchies of Parma and Piacenza were annexed to his Lombard possessions to recompense him in some measure for the loss of the Sicilies; and the extinction of the house of Medici by the death of the grand duke Giovan Gastone, while the negotiations were yet pending, completed a new arrangement for the succession of Tuscany. Francis, duke of Lorraine, who had lately received the hand of Maria Theresa, the eldest daughter and heiress of the emperor, took possession of the grand duchy, in exchange for his hereditary states; and Charles VI was gratified by this favourable provision for his son-in-law and destined successor in the imperial dignity. Finally, the king of Sardinia, in lieu of the ambitious hopes, with which he had been amused, of possessing all the Milanese duchy, was obliged to content himself with the acquisition of the valuable districts of Tortona and Novara.
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.