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The War of the Spanish Succession was a European great power conflict fought between 1701 and 1714. The immediate cause was the death of the childless Charles II of Spain in November 1700, which led to a struggle for control of the Spanish Empire amongst supporters of the claimant Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties.
- Overview
- Dynastic claims
- Strategy of the war
- 1701: The Emperor and Louis XIV begin hostilities
- 1702: The war becomes general
- 1703: The tide of the war turns in favour of the French
- 1704: The French threat to Vienna is checked
- 1705: Stalemate
- 1705–06: The war turns against France and the opening of peace negotiations
- 1707: The imperial and Maritime Powers suffer reverses
War of the Spanish Succession, (1701–14), conflict that arose out of the disputed succession to the throne of Spain following the death of the childless Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. The war was primarily a struggle to determine whether the vast possessions of the Spanish Empire should pass to the House of Bourbon or to the House o...
Of the two daughters of Philip III of Spain (Charles II’s grandfather), the elder, Anne, married Louis XIII of France, and the younger, Maria Anna, married the future Habsburg emperor Ferdinand III. Two sons of these marriages, Louis XIV and the emperor Leopold I, respectively, married their Spanish cousins Marie-Thérèse and Margarita Teresa, the daughters of Philip IV and sisters of Charles II. Marie-Thérèse explicitly renounced her claim to the Spanish succession upon her marriage to the French king, as her aunt Anne had done on the occasion of her marriage to Louis XIII. Margarita Teresa, however, made no renunciation and, moreover, was named in Philip IV’s will as the next heir after his son Charles (Charles II of Spain).
Consequently, when Margarita’s daughter Maria Antonia, who in 1685 married the Bavarian elector Maximilian II Emanuel, gave birth in 1692 to a son, the electoral prince Joseph Ferdinand, this prince could be regarded as heir presumptive to Charles II. Leopold I, however, had persuaded Maria Antonia to bestow her right to her mother’s succession on him, and on the sons of his third marriage, with Eleonore of Palatinate-Neuburg. The validity of this bestowal, upon which the immediate Habsburg claims to the succession were based, was dubious. The Bourbon claim was similarly dubious, being based on a disregard for the acts of renunciation made by the French queens. The claim of the electoral prince Joseph Ferdinand, on the other hand, appeared superior to both.
In the precarious lifetime of Charles II, French influences at the Spanish court were heavily counterbalanced in the field of international politics by the attitude of the Maritime Powers—England and the United Provinces of the Netherlands. United after 1688 under the personal rule of William III, they were strongly opposed to the Bourbon claim, fearing not only the aggrandizement of French power but also the loss of their well-established trade with Spain and the West Indies. Louis XIV, becoming convinced that a Bourbon success would result in a general European coalition against him, and to avoid the Spanish possessions passing to a Habsburg, in October 1698 agreed with William III in a Partition Treaty (signed at The Hague) to recognize Joseph Ferdinand’s rights to Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Indies. Milan was to go to the archduke Charles (later the emperor Charles VI), the emperor’s younger son (who would presumably be excluded from the imperial throne by his elder brother Joseph); and the rest of Spanish Italy, as well as the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, was to go to the dauphin Louis.
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Spain was indignant at this partition treaty, and in November 1698 Charles II created a will naming Joseph Ferdinand heir to the whole inheritance. In February 1699 Joseph Ferdinand died. A second Partition Treaty (October 1699) between France and England, which was subscribed in March 1700 by the United Provinces, offered Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Indies to the archduke Charles. The dauphin was to get all of Spanish Italy except Milan, instead of which he would have Lorraine. The emperor, whose approval of the First Partition Treaty had been sought in vain, now also declined to accede to the second, hoping to win the whole succession for the archduke Charles. To counter this new partition, Charles II in October 1700 made another will, leaving the Spanish dominions, which were to be undivided and to be kept separate from any other crown, to Philip, duc d’Anjou, the second son of the dauphin Louis; failing Philip, to his younger brother Charles, duc de Berry; and failing Charles, to the archduke Charles.
The War of the Spanish Succession possessed the complexity of any major war fought between two groups of allies whose interests and ambitions were sometimes in sharp conflict. It was fought on five fronts: the Low Countries, the Rhine, the Danube, northern Italy, and Spain—as well as at sea. It was a war of considerable movement, for it was conducted according to the strategic conception of the 18th century, which advocated maneuver and countermaneuver to contain an enemy, rather than the Napoleonic strategy of striking at the enemy’s main force regardless of losses. Armies of the 18th century, before the days of national conscription, were too difficult to replace for generals to be eager to risk heavy casualties if these could be avoided.
One very interesting fact that emerges in the study of the conflict is how often John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, favoured a strategy that was much more forceful and “Napoleonic” than was usual in the early 18th century, and it is clear that his bold plans were sometimes too unorthodox for his imperial ally, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Other points of interest are the relative importance of the various allies in determining the outcome of the war, the number of times that military operations were interrupted by attempts at peace negotiations, and the extent to which the final outcome of the war was decided not by victories in the field but by political developments in the capitals of the combatants. It is a curious fact that the fate of Spain was decided principally by campaigns in the Low Countries or on the Danube, with very little regard to what was actually happening on the Iberian Peninsula.
The war may be said to have begun in March 1701 when French troops seized Spanish fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands. For the rest of that year, however, the war was essentially one between Louis XIV and the emperor Leopold I, and its principal theatre was northern Italy, where the French had taken control of the Spanish possessions in the valley of the Po. Prince Eugene assembled an imperial army in Tirol and marched south with great secrecy through the territory of neutral Venice along the east bank of the Adige River. Marshal Nicolas Catinat, commanding the French, failed to attack a numerically inferior imperial diversionary force that had drawn his attention from Eugene’s move on Verona (May 28). Catinat also declined to cross the Adige and engage Eugene’s main army, though this too was inferior in numbers to his own.
Eugene maintained the initiative and forced the French to retreat westward behind the Mincio River. He then succeeded in following them across this river (July 28), so that, to defend Milan, Catinat had to fall back still farther westward beyond the Oglio River (August 16). These humiliating maneuvers were reported to Louis XIV by Catinat’s enemies at the French court, and he was replaced by François de Neufville, duc de Villeroi. When the new commander tried to take the offensive, he was sharply defeated by Eugene’s forces at Chiari (September 1). The campaigning season ended with imperial forces in command of most of the duchy of Mantua. During the winter of 1701–02, Eugene executed a brilliant raid on Cremona, where he captured Villeroi, a success that led the dukes of Modena and Guastalla to declare their support for the emperor.
By 1702 the efforts of the diplomats had transformed the struggle into a general European war. France and Spain had the support of two reluctant allies, Portugal and Savoy, which feared to oppose the Bourbons, whose forces controlled Spain and the Spanish possessions in northern Italy. Two allies who were to be of more value to France were the Wittelsbach brothers, Maximilian II Emanuel, elector of Bavaria, and Joseph Clement, elector of Cologne. The emperor had the support of the United Provinces and England by the Treaty of The Hague (September 1701), as well as Frederick I of Prussia and a great many minor German princes.
The first year of the general struggle saw little decisive action. In Italy Eugene’s communications with Vienna were cut by Louis Joseph, duc de Vendôme, who had taken over Villeroi’s command; nevertheless, Eugene was able to maintain himself and to harass the French. At sea an English expedition under Adm. Sir George Rooke against Cádiz (August–September 1702) was a failure, but Rooke managed in October to destroy the Spanish silver fleet that had taken refuge in Vigo harbour.
In the Low Countries, the Maritime Powers were outnumbered by the French so that there was a serious threat to Holland. This had a deep effect on the Dutch deputies, who remained excessively cautious and timid throughout the war. The Franco-Spanish forces had two fortified lines, one running from Antwerp to Huy, on the Meuse River, the other from Antwerp along the Scheldt and Leie (Lys) rivers to Aire. In July Marlborough assembled an army near Nijmegen and attacked southwest toward Diest, driving back Louis-François, duc de Boufflers, toward his fortified lines. Marlborough outmaneuvered him and reached the lines first, but the Dutch refused to allow him to attack, being satisfied that Marlborough had forced Boufflers to abandon his threat to the United Provinces. The Maritime Powers did, however, succeed in capturing Kaiserswerth (June) and Rheinberg on the lower Rhine and thus improved their line of communications with the emperor.
The 1702 campaign on the Rhine opened uneventfully, but the end of the summer saw a development that was in the next year to become one of the most important operations of the war. An imperial army under the margrave Louis William I of Baden, which had been gathered round the Neckar River, crossed the Rhine north of Speyer (June 1702) and threatened Alsace. Catinat, now in charge of the German front, was uncertain whether to mass the French forces on the Lauter or the Ill River, and Louis William successfully besieged and captured Landau in September. It was at this point that the development took place that was to grow into the major campaign of 1703–04. Maximilian II Emanuel now openly declared for France and captured Ulm. This threat in his rear forced Louis William to retreat to the east side of the Rhine. Claude-Louis-Hector (later duc) de Villars, who had replaced Catinat, followed the retreating imperial army, crossed the Rhine at Hünningen, and defeated the imperial forces at Friedlingen (October 14, 1702).
In 1703 fortune began to favour the French, although in three theatres of war the imperial forces and the Maritime Powers managed to achieve minor successes. In the Mediterranean the English fleet was able to blockade the French fleet at Toulon, and this convinced the Portuguese government that England could provide effective protection against the Bourbons. In May 1703 Portugal, therefore, relinquished its uneasy alliance with France and joined the Maritime Powers. On the lower Rhine Marlborough invaded the electorate of Cologne and in May captured Bonn. By the end of the summer Marlborough had managed to push the French out of the country between the Meuse and the Rhine. In Italy Vendôme was justifiably suspicious of the loyalty of his ally Victor Amadeus II, the duke of Savoy, and demanded that he hand over Turin and Susa to the French and even disband his troops. This demand eventually pushed Victor Amadeus to abandon his uneasy alliance with France and join the emperor. This he did in October, but it was too late in the year to have any effect on military developments in Italy that season.
These minor successes for the emperor and his allies, however, were more than outweighed by the French and Bavarian threat to Vienna itself. In March Villars had crossed the Rhine at Kehl and, pushing through the Black Forest, had in May joined the elector of Bavaria near Ulm. The imperial forces under Louis of Baden had offered no resistance but had remained to the north in the lines of Stollhofen, on the Rhine, watched by a French force under the comte de Tallart. The situation facing the emperor was very grave, but the elector of Bavaria lacked Marlborough’s initiative. Instead of pushing down the Danube and striking directly at Vienna, the elector decided first to establish control of Tirol so as to safeguard his communications with Milan. This more cautious strategy might have been justified, for the elector was able to reach the Brenner Pass at the beginning of July, but Vendôme’s force, which he had hoped would be there to join him, did not manage to push north through Italy until some weeks later. By this time the elector had been forced to retreat toward Bavaria.
When the campaigning season opened in 1704, the serious effects of the elector of Bavaria’s delays were not yet apparent, and it looked as if the French and Bavarian threat to Vienna was as dangerous as ever. In April strong French forces crossed the Black Forest and, in May, joined the elector of Bavaria near Dillingen. Louis of Baden failed to stop the junction of these two armies, and, although Eugene himself had been moved to the Danube front to replace Styrum, it seemed impossible with the forces available that he would be able to stop the French and Bavarian armies from striking at Vienna. Another French force under Tallart was to the north, near Kehl, to protect the communications between France and the French army on the Danube. A third French force, under Villeroi, was in the Netherlands, holding Marlborough. It was at this point that Marlborough showed his genius for appreciating the strategy of the war as a whole and his consummate skill in moving troops with unexpected speed and complete secrecy.
Marlborough knew that he would never be able to gain the consent of the Dutch for a move to relieve Vienna from the French and Bavarian threat if this seemed to leave Holland unprotected. Therefore, he pretended that he was going to turn the Villeroi’s flank with a move up the Moselle. Marlborough crossed the Meuse to the Rhine and made his way up that river, reaching Mainz at the end of May. Tallart, from his position farther south, at once crossed to the left bank of the Rhine, fearing that Marlborough intended to attack Alsace, but Marlborough only made a feint of attempting to cross the Rhine at Mannheim. Instead, from Mainz he pushed southeast across the Main River, up the valley of the Neckar, across the watershed between the Neckar and the Danube, and by the middle of June joined forces with Louis of Baden just north of Ulm.
The imperial commanders had been able to discuss plans with Marlborough during his march, and it was decided that Eugene should move westward to contain Tallart at Stollhofen, while Marlborough and Louis of Baden were to attack the French on the Danube. Marlborough was able to take Donauworth (July 2), thus forcing the French and Bavarian troops, under the elector and the comte de Marsin, Villars’s successor, to retreat south up the Lech River. This enabled Marlborough to get between his enemies and Vienna. At this point the French forces were increased, for Villeroi, once he had realized that Marlborough had given him the slip, moved south from the Netherlands to join Tallart on the Rhine in Alsace. Tallart, therefore, was free to cross the Rhine at Kehl (July 6) and join the elector of Bavaria near Augsburg (August 6).
On his march Tallart made the serious mistake of wasting five days trying to capture Villingen. As a result, Eugene, who had marched from Stollhofen along the north bank of the Danube, was able to reach Hochstadt and join forces with Marlborough on the same day that Tallart joined the elector. Marlborough’s force was then large enough for him to detach Louis of Baden to besiege Ingolstadt, the one strong point on the Danube east of Donauworth held by the Bavarians, and which was a serious threat to communications with Vienna. The French and Bavarians, learning that Louis of Baden had gone, moved north to attack Eugene, crossing the Danube at Dillingen. Marlborough had remained south of the Danube to cover the siege of Ingolstadt but was not out of touch with Eugene and was able to move to his assistance. A forced march brought his army to the north of the Danube and into line with Eugene near the village of Blenheim. Marlborough and Eugene attacked the enemy at the Battle of Blenheim on August 13, 1704, and achieved a victory that shattered the reputation of the French army and compelled the French to withdraw to the west of the Rhine. By the end of 1704 the whole situation on the Danube front had been altered. Vienna was no longer in danger. The French invasion had been destroyed, and the elector of Bavaria was now a fugitive in France, the whole of his electorate falling into the hands of his enemies.
Marlborough had intended to launch an attack from the Rhine against France itself by way of Metz, but the Dutch failed to produce enough supplies, and the Rhenish electors did not provide sufficient transport. Moreover, the death of the emperor Leopold I in May 1705 had the effect of deflecting imperial forces to cover the election of the new emper...
In spite of French successes in Italy, where Vendôme in April 1706 drove the imperial army back into Tirol, Marlborough still had plans for joining forces with Eugene, expelling the French from northern Italy, and threatening Toulon. In the same month, however, Louis of Baden retreated eastward across the Rhine, and the Dutch rejected Marlborough’s ambitious scheme. Instead, England provided subsidies that enabled the emperor to buy 24,000 troops from German princes. In July Eugene attacked south down the left bank of the Adige, once more disregarding Venetian neutrality as he had in 1701. This time he struck south across the Po (July 18), then moved with astonishing speed westward up that river to join the duke of Savoy at Villastellone, south of Turin, and in September raised the siege of Turin. This victory decided the issue in northern Italy.
In the Netherlands, Villeroi, receiving information that Marlborough had not yet been reinforced by Prussian and Hanoverian forces, struck toward Liege but was heavily defeated by Marlborough at the Battle of Ramillies (May 23, 1706). Marlborough pursued the French with such vigour that they were unable to reform on the line of the Lys River and had to withdraw still farther to Courtrai. The result of this victory was that in less than two weeks Marlborough was in command of all Spain’s province of Brabant and most of its possessions in Flanders. Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, and Oudenaarde all capitulated, and in July the fall of Ostend improved Marlborough’s line of communications with England. At the end of August, he captured Menen; in September, Dendermonde; and in October, Ath.
The victory in the Spanish Netherlands was overwhelming. Marlborough’s success directly aided Eugene’s 1706 campaign in Italy, because, after the Battle of Ramillies, Vendôme was recalled from Italy to replace the discredited Villeroi. Marlborough’s victory also had the effect of paralyzing the French forces on the Rhine, for troops were transferred from that quiet sector to reinforce the shattered French forces in the Netherlands. In Spain the imperial forces and their allies also achieved successes in 1705–06. A siege of Gibraltar by Bourbon forces was relieved in March 1705. Henri de Massue, earl of Galway, commander of the allied forces in Portugal, advanced from Portugal into Estremadura and compelled René de Froulay, comte de Tessé, to abandon Andalusia. The English admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell took a squadron into the Mediterranean and enabled Charles Mordaunt, 3rd earl of Peterborough, to capture the fort of Montjuich near Barcelona in September and to take Barcelona in October 1705. This caused Catalonia and Valencia to declare for the archduke Charles. In 1706 Tesse besieged Barcelona, but he was compelled to withdraw in May when an English fleet forced the French ships supporting Tesse to retire to Toulon. In June imperial and English forces seized Madrid, though Galway was unable to maintain his hold on the capital and had to withdraw to Valencia.
So decisive were the reverses experienced by France and its allies in 1706 that in August Louis XIV made an approach to the Dutch for peace. He was prepared to cede Spain and Spanish America to the archduke Charles if Philip retained Milan, Naples, and Sicily. The Dutch were offered a strong “barrier” of fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands, but the English and imperial governments would not consider terms that envisaged the partition of the Spanish empire.
In Germany the emperor’s situation became critical because of developments in the Second Northern War, which was raging in the Baltic region. Charles XII of Sweden had established himself in Saxony in September 1706, and there was a serious danger that where the elector of Bavaria and French troops had failed in their attack on Vienna, Charles might succeed. The emperor was already short of troops because many minor German princes were reluctant to supply troops to him when they might be needed for their own defense. Charles XII was not prepared to collaborate with France to attack Vienna, and the crisis soon passed. Its effects were felt, however, on the Netherlands front, where the absence of German troops made it impossible for Marlborough to achieve anything of note against Vendôme.
On the Rhine the imperial forces were weakened by the death (January 1707) of Louis of Baden, whose successor in command, Margrave Charles Ernest of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, proved considerably less able. Villars managed to take the lines of Stollhofen in May and was able to raid the whole of Swabia until the margrave of Bayreuth was superseded by George, elector of Hanover (later George I, king of Great Britain). In September Villars withdrew in good order to the west of the Rhine after some of his troops had been diverted to the Provence front. In Spain the emperor and his allies experienced considerable reverses. Galway and the archduke Charles quarreled and separated, the archduke retiring to Catalonia. This left Galway with only 15,000 men, who were decisively defeated by a Franco-Spanish force commanded by James Fitzjames, duke of Berwick-upon-Tweed, at the Battle of Almansa (April 25, 1707). Aragon, Valencia, and Murcia were lost to the allies, and in Catalonia they were compelled to remain on the defensive.
In northern Italy the emperor decided that Eugene should launch an attack against Toulon. Unfortunately, Savoy delayed sending help, and some imperial troops under Wirich, Graf von Daun, were also diverted to capture Naples. After the defeat at Almansa, the help that Eugene expected from Spain was not forthcoming, and instead French troops returning victoriously were able to reinforce Tesse at Toulon. Eugene’s siege of Toulon (July–August) had finally to be broken off, and the only success achieved by Eugene’s thrust was the scuttling of the French fleet in the harbour.
In spite of the improvement in French fortunes during 1707, Louis XIV was still eager to end the war. The conflict in Italy came to a close with the Convention of Milan in March 1707. Louis XIV gave up his attempt to control northern Italy and withdrew all his troops from that theatre. In the winter of 1707–08, envoys from Louis and Philip V made a fresh overture to the Dutch, baited with offers of commercial advantages at the expense of Spain. Once again the negotiations were checked by the uncompromising attitude of England, where in December in the House of Lords the Whigs passed a resolution refusing to make a peace by which a member of the House of Bourbon should retain any of the Spanish possessions.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The campaigns of the Duke of Marlborough and his allies in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13) stopped France from dominating Europe. They also earned the British Army an enduring reputation for courage and discipline on the battlefield.
The War of the Spanish Succession was a large military conflict that encompassed most of western and central Europe spawning additional fighting in the Americas and the world’s oceans. Hostilities began with the invasion of Lombardy by imperial forces in 1701 and were concluded be the treaties of Utrecht (1713), Rastatt, and Baden (1714).
War of the Spanish Succession, (1701–14) Conflict arising from the disputed succession to the throne of Spain after the death of the childless Charles II. The Habsburg Charles had named the Bourbon Philip, duke d’Anjou, as his successor; when Philip took the Spanish throne as Philip V, his grandfather Louis XIV invaded the Spanish Netherlands.
29 de jun. de 2015 · Of Louis XIV’s many wars, his last, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), remains the most studied. Not only do the war’s results appeal to those seeking to humble the self-declared Sun King, but the war’s conduct also raised several military commanders to the status of great captains as well as resulting in a series ...
The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) was a European conflict triggered by the death of the last Habsburg King of Spain, Charles II, in 1700. He had reigned over a vast global empire and the question of who would succeed him had long troubled ministers in capitals throughout Europe.
