Essay On The First Nest War

640 Words2 Pages

The First Silesian War The First Silesian War inaugurated, and is generally seen in the context of, the wider ranging War of the Austrian Succession. It owed its origins to the Pragmatic Sanction of 19 April 1713 whereby the Habsburg emperor Charles VI decreed the imperial succession arrangements as set out in his will, according precedence to his own daughters over the daughters of his (by now deceased) elder brother Joseph I. This proved prescient: in May 1717 the emperor’s own eldest daughter was born and on his death in 1740, she duly succeeded as Archduchess of Austria as well as to the thrones of the Bohemian and Hungarian lands within the Habsburg Monarchy as Queen Maria Theresa. During the emperor’s lifetime the Pragmatic Sanction …show more content…

The Bohemian king Ferdinand of Habsburg, aware of the Hohenzollern ambitions, had immediately rejected the agreement; nevertheless, in 1675 the "Great Elector" Frederick William of Brandenburg raised claim to the principalities, when with the death of Duke George William of Legnica the Piast line finally had died out. At that time no attempt had been made to implement these old treaty provisions, and when in the course of the 1685 Edict of Potsdam the Elector entered into an alliance with the Habsburg emperor Leopold I, he was persuaded to renounce his claims in return for the assignment of the Silesian Świebodzin (Schwiebus) exclave and a payment. However, after the accession of Frederick William's son and successor Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the emperor in 1695 enforced the restitution of Świebodzin, which allegedly only had been personally assigned to late Frederick William for life. Furious Frederick III in turn again insisted on the centuries-old Brandenburg claims to the Silesian …show more content…

King Frederick II was supported by the electorates of Bavaria, Saxony, and Cologne, as well as by the kingdoms of France, Spain, Sweden, and Naples along with various smaller European powers. The shared objective within the alliance was the destruction or at least the diminution of the Habsburg Monarchy and of its dominant influence over the other German states. The Habsburgs found themselves supported by the Russian Empire along with the maritime powers, the Dutch and the British (in personal union with the Electorate of Hanover), whose imperial aspirations beyond Europe always inclined them to join available eighteenth-century European wars on the anti-French side. Britain and Austria were bound by the Anglo-Austrian Alliance, which had existed since

More about Essay On The First Nest War

Open Document