Continuing Dynastic Struggles

War broke out again in 1733 when the king of Poland-Lithuania died. France, Spain, and Sardinia joined in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–1735) against Austria and Russia, each side supporting rival claimants to the Polish throne. Prussia chose to sit on the sidelines. Although Peter the Great had been followed by a series of weak rulers, Russian forces were still strong enough to drive the French candidate out of Poland-Lithuania, prompting France to accept the Austrian candidate. In exchange, Austria gave the province of Lorraine to the French candidate, the father-in-law of Louis XV, with the promise that the province would pass to France on his death. France and Britain went back to pursuing their colonial rivalries. Prussia and Russia concentrated on shoring up their influence within Poland-Lithuania.

Because its armies still faced the Turks on its southeastern border, Austria did not want to become mired in a long struggle in Poland-Lithuania. Even though the Austrians had forced the Turks to recognize their rule over all of Hungary and Transylvania in 1699 and had occupied Belgrade in 1717, the Turks did not stop fighting. In the 1730s, the Turks retook Belgrade, and Russia now claimed a role in the struggle against the Turks. Moreover, Hungary proved less than enthusiastic about submitting to Austria. In 1703, the wealthiest Hungarian noble landlord, Ferenc Rákóczi (1676–1735), raised an army of seventy thousand men who fought for “God, Fatherland, and Liberty” until 1711. They forced the Austrians to recognize local Hungarian institutions, grant amnesty, and restore confiscated estates in exchange for confirming hereditary Austrian rule.

When Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI died without a male heir in 1740, another war of succession, the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), began. Most European rulers recognized the emperor’s chosen heiress, his daughter Maria Theresa, because Charles’s Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 had given a woman the right to inherit the Habsburg crown lands. The new king of Prussia, Frederick II, who had just succeeded his father a few months earlier in 1740, saw his chance to grab territory and immediately invaded the rich Austrian province of Silesia. France joined Prussia in an attempt to further humiliate its traditional enemy Austria, and Great Britain allied with Austria to prevent the French from taking the Austrian Netherlands. The war soon expanded to the overseas colonies of Great Britain and France. French and British colonials in North America fought each other all along their boundaries, enlisting native American auxiliaries. Hostilities broke out in India, too.

Maria Theresa (r. 1740–1780) survived only by conceding Silesia to Prussia in order to split the Prussians off from France. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) recognized Maria Theresa as the heiress to the Austrian lands; her husband, Francis I, became Holy Roman Emperor, thus reasserting the integrity of the Austrian Empire. The peace of 1748 failed to resolve the colonial conflicts between Britain and France, however, and fighting for domination continued unofficially.