Ludovico Luigi Carlo Maria di Barbiano e Belgiojoso

Barbiano-Belgiojoso

Ludovico Luigi Carlo Maria di Barbiano e Belgiojoso (born January 2, 1728 in Belgioioso ; † May 15, 1801 in Milan ) was a Habsburg administrative officer and diplomat of Italian nationality.

There are numerous slightly different forms of names in the literature, e.g. B. Louis or Ludwig Count of Barbiano and Belgiojoso , Don Ludovico Belgiojoso or Louis Charles Marie Count Barbiano di Belgiojoso .

Life and military career

Ludovico grew up as the second son of Count Antonio Barbiano e Belgiojoso and Barbara Luigia Elisabetta, nee. d'Adda, Countess of Bronna. At the age of six he became a formal knight of the Order of Malta . The father spent his life as an ambassador and privy councilor in the imperial service, for which he was raised to the rank of imperial prince in 1769 .

Barbiano began his military career in 1757 as a captain of the imperial army without any military training. In this service he slowly rose further, although a longer period of military service cannot be proven, so the promotions were more honorable: in 1773 he became major general , in 1783 lieutenant field marshal , and in 1787 he was retired. The decree on his appointment to the Brussels office (see below) also designates him as the holder of an infantry regiment .

Barbiano spent the last years of his life mostly in Vienna without any influence on the political and military situation, which was completely changed by the French Revolution from 1789.

Diplomatic, civil servant and court career

In 1756, at the age of 18, Barbiano was made imperial chamberlain in Vienna, from 1764 to 1770 Barbiano stayed primarily in Stockholm as an authorized minister , from where he was transferred to London . In 1777 he accompanied Emperor Joseph II on a trip to France with stops in Paris , Brest (Finistère) , Bordeaux , Bayonne , Toulon and Lyon , from where he returned to London.

In June 1783 Barbiano became the chief administrative officer of the Austrian Netherlands in Brussels under the formal governorship of Joseph's sister, Maria Christina and her husband Albert Kasimir von Sachsen-Teschen . He appeared to the emperor to be much more suitable for implementing his reform ideas than Georg Adam von Starhemberg's predecessor in office . Resistance to Joseph's reforms was very strong in all Habsburg areas, but nowhere stronger than in the southern Netherlands, which has always been far away from Vienna and has always been concerned with regional and class privileges. Barbiano's attempts to enforce imperial edicts to introduce civil marriage (1784), to limit processions and pilgrimages and to abolish some religious communities (1786), as well as the measures to streamline and centralize administration (1787), generated great unrest and general Dissatisfaction in the country, which in January 1787 led to the first public acts of refusal by the previously responsible authorities: the Brabant Council refused to publish the new edicts, followed by the refusal of pending payments in March. Barbiano, extremely unpopular as the supposed author of these edicts, was then called to report in Vienna, from where he did not return. So Barbiano had failed.

Publications

• Curiosità storiche e diplomatiche del secolo decimottavo; corrispondenze segrete di grandi personaggi (ed. by Felice Calvi, Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 1878)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry on Barbara d 'Adda on geneall.net, accessed on March 5, 2016.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} article BELGIOJOSO, Louis-Charles-Marie, comte DE BARBIANO et der Biographie Nationale de Belgique , Volume 2, accessed on March 22, 2016.

predecessor	Office	successor
Theodor of Christiani ( Gt )	Habsburg envoy to Sweden from 1764 to 1769	Benedict de Caché (Gt)
Johann Lukas von Raigersfeld	Habsburg Ambassador to the United Kingdom 1770 to 1782	Johann Friedrich von Kageneck