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Wars of Succession - 1700-1790

This inglorious and passive chapter of Italian history continued to the date of the French Revolution with the records of three dynastic wars, the war of the Spanish succession, the war of the Polish succession, the war of the Austrian succession, followed by three European treaties, which brought them respectively to diplomatic terminations. Italy, handled and rehandled, settled and resettled, upon each of these occasions, changed masters without caring or knowing what befel the principals in any one of the disputes. Humiliating to human nature in general as are the annals of the eighteenth century campaigns in Europe, there is no point of view from which they appear in a light so tragicomic as from that afforded by Italian history. The system of setting nations by the ears with the view of settling the quarrels of a few reigning houses was reduced to absurdity when the people, as in these cases, came to lie partitioned and exchanged without the assertion or negation of a single principle affecting their interests or rousing their emotions.

In 1700 Charles II died, and with him ended the Austrian family in Spain. The death of the last Habsburg king of Spain in 1700 provoked another European wide struggle for control of the Spanish crown and another series of invasions. Forty eight years later, when the fighting finally stopped with the signing of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, the political boundaries of Italy had been substantially changed. Naples and Sicily were reunited for the first time since 1502 and placed under a resident monarch. The Spanish hegemony in northern Italy had been replaced by an Austrian hegemony.

Louis XIV claimed the throne for Philip, duke of Anjou. Charles, archduke of Austria, opposed him. The dispute was fought out in Flanders; but Lombardy felt the shock, as usual, of the French and Austrian dynasties. The French armies were more than once defeated by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who drove them out of Italy in 1707. Therefore, in the peace of Utrecht (1713), the services of the house of Savoy had to be duly recognized. Vittorio Amedeo II received Sicily with the title of king. Montserrat and Alessandria were added to his northern provinces, and his state was recognized as independent.

Charles of Austria, now emperor, took Milan, Mantua, Naples, and Sardinia for his portion of the Italian spoil. Philip founded the Bourbon line of Spanish kings, renouncing in Italy all that his Hapsburg predecessors had gained. Discontented with this diminution of the Spanish heritage, Philip V. married Elisabetta Farnese, heiress to the last duke of Parma, in 1714. He hoped to secure this duchy for his son, Don Carlos; and Elisabetta further brought with her a claim to the grand-duchy of Tuscany, which would soon become vacant by the death of Gran Gastone de' Medici. After this marriage Philip broke the peace of Europe by invading Sardinia. The Quadruple Alliance was formed, and the new king of Sicily was punished for his supposed adherence to Philip V by the forced exchange of Sicily for the island of Sardinia.

It was thus that in 1720 the house of Savoy assumed the legal title which it bore until the declaration of the Italian kingdom in the 19th century. Vittorio Amedeo II's reign was of great importance in the history of his state. Though a despot, as all monarchs were obliged to be at that date, he reigned with prudence, probity, and zeal for the welfare of his subjects. He took public education out of the hands of the Jesuits, which, for the future development of manliness in his dominions, was a measure of incalculable value. The duchy of Savoy in his days became a kingdom, and Sardinia, though it seemed a poor exchange for Sicily, was a far less perilous possession than the larger and wealthier island would have been. In 1730 Vittorio Amedeo abdicated in favor of his son Carlo Emmaneule III. Repenting of this step, he subsequently attempted to regain Turin, but was imprisoned in the castle of Rivoli, where he ended his days in 1732.

The war of the Polish succession which then disturbed Europe was only important in Italian history because the treaty of Vienna in 1738 settled the disputed affairs of the duchies of Parma and Tuscany. The duke Antonio Farnese died in 1731; the grand-duke Gian Gastone de' Medici died in 1737. After the extinction of the Medici family in 1737, Tuscany had become a tributary of the consort of the Austrian empress. The Duchy of Milan, now under an Austrian governor, had expanded in the east and shrunk in the west. The Duchy of Savoy Piedmont increased by a third with the addition of land in western Lombardy and had risen to the rank of kingdom by the annexation of Sardinia. In the duchy of Parma Don Carlos had already been proclaimed. But he was now transferred to the Two Sicilies, while Francis of Lorraine, the husband of Maria Tlreresa, took Tuscany and Parma. Milan and Mantua remained in the hands of the Austrians. On this occasion Carlo Emmanuele acquired Tortona and Novara.

Worse complications ensued for the Italians when the emperor Charles VI, father of Maria Theresa, died in 1740. The three branches of the Bourbon house, ruling in France, Spain, and the Sicilies, joined with Prussia, Bavaria, and the kingdom of Sardinia to despoil Maria Theresa of her heritage. Lombardy was made the seat of war; and here the king of Sardinia acted as in some sense the arbiter of the situation. After war broke out, he changed sides and supported the Hapsburg-Lorraine party. At first, in 1745, the Sardinians were defeated by the French and Spanish troops. But Francis of Lorraine, elected emperor irr that year, sent an army to the king's support, which in 1746 obtained a signal victory over the Bourbons at Piacenza. Carlo Emmanuele now threatened Genoa. The Austrian soldiers already held the town. But the citizens expelled therrr, and the republic kept lrer independence.

In 1748 the treaty ot Aix-la-Chapelle, which put an end to the war of the Austrian succession, once more redivided Italy. Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla were formed into a duchy for Don Philip, brother of Charles III. of the Two Sicilies, and son of Philip V. of Spain. Charles III. was confirmed in his kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Austrians kept Milan and Tuscany. The duchy of Modena was placed under tire protection of the French. So was Genoa, which irr 1755, after Paoli's insurrection against the misgovern merit of the republic, ceded her old domain of Corsica to France.

From the date of this settlement until 1792, Italy enjoyed a period of repose and internal amelioration under her numerous paternal despots. It became the fashion during these forty-four years of peace to encourage the industrial population and to experimentalize in economical reforms. The emperor Fraircis I. ruled the grandduchy of Tuscany by lieutenants until his death in 1765. when it was given, as an independent slate, to his third son, Peter Leopold. The reign of this duke was long remembered as a period of internal prosperity, wise legislation, and important public enterprise. Leopold, among other useful works, drained the Val di Chrana, and restored those fertile upland plains to agriculture. In 1790 he succeeded to the empire, and left Tuscany to his son F'erdinand.

The kingdom of Sardmia was administered upon similar principles, but with less of geniality. Carlo Emmanuele made his will law, and erased the remains of free institutions from his state. At the same time he wisely followed his father's policy with regard to education and the church. This is perhaps the best that can be said of a king who incarnated the stolid absolutism of the period.

From this date, however, may be traced the revival of independent thought among the Italians. The European ferment of ideas which preceded the French Revolution expressed itself in men like Alfieri, the fierce denouncer of tyrants, Beccaria, the philosopher of criminal jurisprudence, Voltaire physicrst, and numerous political economists of Tuscany. Moved partly by external influences and partly by a slow internal reawakening, the people was preparing for the efforts of the 19th century. The papacy, during this period, had to reconsider the question of the Jesuits, who made themselves universally odious, not only in Italy, but also in France and Spain. In the pontificate of Clement XIII they ruled the Vatican, and almost succeeded in embroiling the pope with the concerted Bourbon potentates of Europe. His successor, Clement XIV, suppressed the order altogether by a brief of 1773.

As Italy's political fortunes fell in the seventeenth century, art continued to provide the principal diversion and a source of employment for a small number in the depressed economy. Baroque painting, sculpture, and architecture grew out of mannerism and went beyond it in size, exuberance, and imagination. It attempted to overcome all previous limitations on artistic expression and was designed to amaze and inspire by portraying supernatural events or exploring the full range of human emotions through the use of light and motion. Italian artists dominated the baroque period until about 1660.

The last half of the eighteenth' century saw the restoration of peace and the institution of major reforms in most of the Italian states, including the south, which was now free of the reactionary Spanish rule. The Enlightenment had taken hold in northern Europe, and its ideas of rationality, human progress, and social reform began to be felt in Italy after about 1764, thanks to the "enlightened despots" of Austria, Maria Theresa and Joseph II. As a measure of the Enlightenment's success, in 1786 Tuscany became the first state in Europe to abolish the death penalty. The economy recovered from the devastating depression of the previous century, and Italy became increasingly integrated into the European trading system as a result of the improvement of land and sea routes, including the completion of the first coach route across the Alps in 1771. Prosperity returned to many of the cities, and the population grew from about 13 or 14 million to 18 million.