Habsburg-French opposition
Historians describe the conflict between the House of Habsburg and the Kingdom of France for supremacy in Europe , which lasted from 1516 to 1756, as the Habsburg-French antagonism . Fought both openly and covertly, it shaped the entire European power and alliance politics for 240 years and resulted in numerous wars , of which the Thirty Years War was the most devastating.
prehistory
The origins of the conflict were dynastic in nature and arose from the successful marriage policy of the Habsburgs . The winged word went back to this Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube ! - Wars may be waged by others. You, happy Austria, get married!
On January 5, 1477, Charles the Bold , Duke of Burgundy , fell at the Battle of Nancy without leaving a male heir. This ended the autonomy of the duchy, which under the House of Burgundy-Valois had increasingly developed into an independent state between the great European monarchies. On August 19 of the same year, the future Roman-German Emperor, Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg , married Charles's heir, Maria of Burgundy . In her name he made claims to the Burgundian inheritance just like the French King Louis XI. from the House of Valois , from which the Dukes of Burgundy descended. The inheritance included areas that were partly under the feudal sovereignty of France and partly that of the Holy Roman Empire . In the Burgundian War of Succession (1477–1493), which ended with the Treaty of Senlis on May 23, 1493, Maximilian was largely able to enforce the inheritance claims of his wife Maria, who died in 1482, and their son, Philip the Fair . Through the treaty, the Habsburgs came into possession of the Free County of Burgundy and large parts of the Burgundian Netherlands . This also included the rich county of Flanders , which had always been under French suzerainty. King Charles VIII , after the death of Louis XI. King of France from 1483 to 1498 , secured Picardy , Mâconnais , Auxerrois , Charolais and the Duchy of Burgundy for the French crown .
In 1496 Maximilian married his and Maria's son, Philipp, to Johanna , the Infanta of Spain . Their son, who later became Emperor Charles V , came to power in Flanders in Burgundy in 1515 and in the Kingdom of Spain the following year. France thus saw itself surrounded by Habsburg territories on almost all land borders. Charles's power was increased by the lucrative Spanish possessions in America , by the kingdoms of Sardinia , Naples and Sicily , which belong to Spain , as well as by his election as Roman-German Emperor as successor to his grandfather Maximilian I. In 1519, however, Karl did not succeed in the to unite heterogeneous Habsburg countries under one central power and thus to make the encirclement of France effective. His countries initially remained independent entities that were governed in personal union (“composite monarchy”), but whose estates each represented their own interests in foreign policy.
Development in the 16th century
France and Spain had been fighting for supremacy in Italy since 1494 . In addition to this already simmering conflict, the French crown began to endeavor to break free from the threatening clutches of the Habsburg possessions. In order to eliminate the House of Habsburg as a competitor for supremacy in Europe, King Francis I of France alone waged four wars . Others followed among his successors. The kings of France sought and found support from individual German imperial princes time and again . For example, the prince opposition to Charles V under Moritz von Sachsen entered into the Treaty of Chambord with the French crown in 1552 . An alliance was also formed with the Ottoman Empire , which was intended to curb Habsburg power. The situation for France became more favorable after the Reformation split the German territorial lords into hostile camps. Because of its maritime interests, Protestant England has also been in the anti-Spanish camp for more than a century since Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne .
The potential for conflict decreased only slightly, abdicated as Charles V in 1555 and his domain between his son Philip II. And his brother Ferdinand I. aufteilte. Ferdinand received the Austrian hereditary lands and the imperial crown, Philip received Spain and the Dutch and Italian possessions. However, the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs continued to coordinate their power-political interests and ensured that the inheritance of the dynasty was kept together through marriages between the Spanish and Austrian houses. As a result, France still saw itself encircled by Philip's domain. King Philip managed to centralize his possessions so in his hand that he could greatly increase the pressure on France. The Huguenot Wars in the second half of the 16th century considerably reduced the French crown's scope of action. With the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559, the struggle for European supremacy was initially decided in favor of Spain. Only when the country regained strength under the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, was France's weakness in foreign policy to end.
Development in the 17th and early 18th centuries
Resurgence of the conflict
Heinrich IV planned to intervene militarily in the Jülich-Klevischen succession dispute as early as 1610 and to resume the fight against the Habsburg powers. The prospects for this had improved considerably since an uprising against Spain broke out in the predominantly Protestant Netherlands in 1568. The Eighty Years War that followed was to weaken Spain decisively and lead to the independence of the Netherlands. For a long time they saw France as a natural ally. However, the outbreak of a great, general European war, which would have been possible through a French engagement in Jülich-Kleve, did not occur because Heinrich IV was murdered in 1610.
Thirty Years War and French Supremacy
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In the Thirty Years' War that broke out in 1618 , France initially did not intervene directly. The policy of Cardinal Richelieu , who for King Louis XIII. led the government, consisted first of all to support those princes with subsidies who face the threatened expansion of imperial power in Germany under Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III. opposed. These were in particular the princes of the Protestant Union and King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden . Only after the defeat of the Swedes in the Battle of Nördlingen in 1634 did France participate militarily.
In the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, France not only achieved territorial concessions in Alsace , but also pushed through other strategically important ideas: The Netherlands became formally independent from the empire, and the imperial princes were given the right to form alliances with foreign powers - including France close as long as they are not directed against the emperor or the empire. Above all, France had succeeded in separating the Austrian from the Spanish Habsburgs. While it made peace with some, it carried on at war with others. It was not until 1659 that it agreed the Peace of the Pyrenees with Spain , which was just as beneficial for France as the Peace of Munster before it. It marked the end of Spanish and the beginning of French domination in Europe.
Curb the French hegemony
After the death of Cardinal Mazarin , King Louis XIV took over the sole government of France in 1661. In the following years the Habsburg-French antagonism broke out again - but now under the opposite sign of a threatening French hegemony .
Ludwig's aggressive attack on the Netherlands in the Dutch War and on West Germany in the course of the Reunion policy and the Palatinate War of Succession changed the European alliance systems. First the Netherlands approached the Habsburg emperor in Vienna and finally also England after the Dutch governor- general Wilhelm of Orange ascended the English throne as a result of the Glorious Revolution in 1688.
The so-called Great Alliance faced France from 1701–1713/14 in the War of the Spanish Succession , which broke out after the death of the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II . Despite an agreement made by the European powers in the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697, Ludwig's diplomats Charles II had induced Philip of Bourbon , a grandson of the French king, as his sole heir.
The states of the Grand Alliance saw in this concentration of power of the Bourbons a considerable disturbance of the European equilibrium. They therefore advocated a Habsburg secondary school in Spain: Charles , the second-born son of Emperor Leopold I, was to ascend the throne in Madrid. The war that broke out over this burdened France enormously, but it was ultimately able to withstand the attacks of the Grand Alliance.
But in 1711, after the death of Emperor Joseph I , the older brother of Charles, he also inherited the other Habsburg possessions. With this the empire of Charles V threatened to rise again. Since this was just as unacceptable as French dominance for the previous allies of Austria, England and the Netherlands, they pressed for a compromise with King Louis XIV and his grandson Philip.
The Peace of Utrecht confirmed Philip V as King of Spain, but prohibited the unification of the French and Spanish crowns under the same ruler from the House of Bourbon. To compensate, the Spanish Netherlands fell to Austria. At the same time, France had succeeded in breaking the Habsburg clutches forever. The Peace of Utrecht and the death of Louis XIV in 1715 put an end to France's aggressive policy of conquest; it was able to maintain its hegemony in Europe while the House of Austria had risen to become a major European power.
The reversal of the alliances
After the Peace of Utrecht, the Habsburg-French antagonism had basically lost its substance. Apart from the Austrian Netherlands and the Breisgau in front of Austria , no Habsburg territory bordered France. The power-political interests of the two countries hardly overlapped, especially since Austria began to expand its power base in the Balkans at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.
Nevertheless, the traditional alliance systems continued to exist. In both the Polish War of Succession and the Silesian Wars , France supported the anti-Habsburg camp. During the War of the Austrian Succession , France then tried one last time to expand on the Upper Rhine at the expense of the Habsburgs and occupied the Upper Austrian capital Freiburg im Breisgau in 1744 , which it had to evacuate in the peace treaty in 1745 .
Only the strongest as Austria's opponent in the Empire, Frederick II. Of Prussia , in 1756, the Convention of Westminster , an alliance with France's rivals England completed, it came to the so-called reversal of alliances , the reversal of alliances . At the instigation of State Chancellor Kaunitz , Austria concluded a defense alliance with France, which developed into an offensive alliance during the Seven Years' War . In the war against Prussia, the two countries were on the same side for the first time. In the Peace of Paris in 1763 , the pentarchy emerged for the first time , the supremacy of the five great powers in Europe, which was to shape the 19th century. It prevailed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after France's military dominance in Europe was finally broken.
The Habsburg-French antagonism, the first germ of which was laid in 1477 by a princely wedding, was symbolically ended almost 300 years later by another marriage, the one between the French heir to the throne and later King Louis XVI. and the daughter of Empress Maria Theresa , Marie Antoinette . Both were to lose their lives during the French Revolution , with which - under completely different circumstances - another chapter of Franco-German conflicts began. In the course of its development in the 19th century, nationalist circles were supposed to interpret the purely power-political and dynastically motivated Habsburg-French opposition as the origin of the so-called “ hereditary enmity ” between Germany and France.
literature
- Matthew S. Anderson: The origins of the modern European state system 1494-1618 . London / New York 1998.
- Rainer Babel: Germany and France under the sign of the Habsburg universal monarchy. 1500-1648. Darmstadt 2005.
- François Bondy , Manfred Abelein : Germany and France. History of an eventful relationship . Econ, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1973, ISBN 3-430-11001-7 .
- Heinz Duchhardt: Balance of Power, Convenance, European Concert, Peace Congresses and Peace Treaties from the Peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna . Darmstadt 1976.
- Eduard Fueter : History of the European State System from 1492–1559 . Munich 1919 (reprint 1972).
- Alfred Kohler : The Reich in the Struggle for Hegemony in Europe, 1521-1648. 2nd Edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2010.
- Esther-Beate Körber: Habsburg European rule. From Charles V to the end of the 16th century . Darmstadt 2002.
- Ilja Mieck : European history of the early modern period . Stuttgart 1998.
- Horst Rabe: German history 1500–1600. The century of religious schism. CH Beck, Munich 1991.
- Lothar Schilling: Kaunitz and the Renversement des alliances. Studies on the foreign policy conception of Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz (historical research 50). Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-08084-X (= historical research , volume 50; also dissertation at the University of Cologne 1993).
- Jörg Ulbert (Hrsg.): Forms of international relations in the early modern times. France and the Old Reich in the European State System. Festschrift for Klaus Malettke on his 65th birthday. (= Historical Research 71) Berlin 2001.
Web links
Cards:
- France and Burgundy 1494
- France and the Habsburg territories at the time of Charles V
- Europe 1560
- France's expansion until 1766
- Europe 1740
Remarks
- ↑ Manfred Hollegger : Maximilian I (1459–1519) ruler and man of a turning point. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-17-015557-1 , p. 78 f.
- ^ JH Elliott: A Europe of Composite Monarchies. In: Past and Present 137 (1992), pp. 48-71.
