Francis I

The Austrians, however, retake Prague, and Maria Theresa is crowned queen of Bohemia in the spring of 1743.

Aided by a British diplomatic campaign, Austria also makes important military gains in Central Europe.

Thus, when Charles Albert unexpectedly dies in January 1745, his son makes peace with Austria and agreed to support the Habsburg candidate for emperor.

This enables Maria Theresa's husband, Franz (r. 1745-65), to be elected Holy Roman emperor in October 1745.

In the west, the war with France and Spain gradually settles into a military stalemate, and negotiations finally lead to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.

Although Maria Theresa emerges with most of her empire intact owing largely to the early support she receives from Hungarian nobles—Austria is obliged to permanently cede Silesia, its most economically advanced territory, to Prussia.

Recognizing that the costly war with France has done more to promote British colonial interests in North America than its own interests in Central Europe, Austria abandons its partnership with Britain in favor of closer ties with France.

This reversal of alliances is sealed by the marriage of Maria Theresa's youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, to the future Louis XVI of France.

Maria Theresa's husband is emperor but she rules the Habsburg lands.

However, when her son Joseph becomes Holy Roman Emperor after the death of her husband in 1765, she makes her son coregent.

Following Maria Theresa's death in 1780, Joseph II reigns in his own right until his death in 1790.

The Counter-Reformation's political and religious goals have largely been accomplished by the time Maria Theresa comes to the throne, but maintaining Austria's great-power status urgently requires broad internal reform and restructuring to strengthen the central authority of the monarchy and curtail the power of the nobility.

The secret Löwenwolde's Treaty promoting the candidacy of Infante Manuel of Portugal for the Polish throne, signed by Empress Anna of Russia, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, and King Frederick William I of Prussia in 1732, reflect their their unwillingness to allow former Polish Stanisław Leszczyński to become king despite their irritation with Augustus II of Saxony.

Stanisław is supported in his bid to regain the throne by his son-in-law, King Louis XV of France, who hopes to renew France's traditional alliance with Poland as a way to balance Russian and Austrian power in northern and eastern Europe.

France's prime minister, Cardinal Fleury, sees the Polish struggle as a chance to strike at Austrian power in the west without seeming to be the aggressor.

While he cares little for who should become King of Poland, the cause of protecting the King's father-in-law is a sympathetic one, and he hopes to use the war as a means of humbling the Austrians, and perhaps securing the long-desired Duchy of Lorraine from its duke, Francis Stephen, who is expected to marry Emperor Charles's daughter Maria Theresa, which will bring Austrian power dangerously close to the French border.

Fleury's diplomatic moves will bring additional powers into the coming war that have no interest in Polish affairs, most notably Spain and Charles Emmanuel, the King of Sardinia, who is also the Duke of Savoy.

Polish kings have been elected by Polish nobility since the death of Sigismund II Augustus in 1572.

The process gives the nobility a great deal of power over the king, but the sejms (meetings of delegates) to elect kings and conduct other business have in latter years been paralyzed by the institution of the Liberum Veto, which gives any individual in the sejm the power to negate its decisions.

As a result, Poland's powerful neighbors have been able to exert significant influence on the decision-making process, and by the early eighteenth century the system had gone into decline.

Stanisław hopes to be elected king once again upon the death of his old adversary, Augustus, who has failed in his attempts to make the Polish crown hereditary within his family.

Stanisław had been installed as king of Poland thirty years earlier by King Charles XII of Sweden during his period of dominance in the early part of the Great Northern War, and had been ousted following the Battle of Poltava by the victorious Russians.

The secret treaty between Emperor Charles VI and Francis Stephen of Lorraine, signed on May 4, 1736, exchanging the Duchy of Lorraine for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, as France had demanded that Maria Theresa's fiancé surrender his ancestral duchy to accommodate the deposed King of Poland.

The Emperor had considered other possibilities (such as marrying his daughter to the future Charles III of Spain) before announcing the engagement of the couple.

If something were to go wrong, Francis will become governor of the Austrian Netherlands.

Francis, who was  born in Nancy, Lorraine (now in France), the oldest surviving son of Leopold Joseph, duke of Lorraine, and his wife Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, daughter of Philippe, duc d'Orléans, is connected with the Habsburgs through his grandmother Eleonor, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand III, and wife of Charles Leopold of Lorraine, his grandfather.

He was very close to his brother and sister Anne Charlotte.

The Emperor favors the family, who, besides being his cousins, have served the house of Austria with distinction.

He has designed to marry his daughter Maria Theresa to Francis' older brother Leopold Clement.

On Leopold Clement's death, Charles had adopted the younger brother as his future son-in-law.

Francis had been brought up in Vienna with Maria Theresa with the understanding that they were to be married, and a real affection has arisen between them.

Brought to Vienna at fifteen, he had been established in the Silesian Duchy of Teschen, which had been mediatized and granted to his father by the emperor in 1722.

Francis had succeeded his father as Duke of Lorraine in 1729, and in 1731 had been initiated into freemasonry (Grand Lodge of England) at a specially convened lodge in The Hague at the house of the British Ambassador, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield.

During a subsequent visit to England, Lorraine had been made a Master Mason at another specially convened lodge at Houghton Hall, the Norfolk estate of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole.

Maria Theresa had arranged for Francis to become "Lord Lieutenant" (locumtenens) of Hungary in 1732.

He was not excited about this position, but Maria had wanted him closer to her, so had agreed to go to Pressburg in June 1732.

When the War of the Polish Succession broke out in 1733, France had used it as an opportunity to seize Lorraine, since France's prime minister, Cardinal Fleury, was concerned that, as a Habsburg possession, it would bring Austrian power too close to France.

A preliminary peace had been concluded in October 1735.

Francis had agreed on January 31, 1736, to marry Maria Theresa after hesitating three times (and laying down the feather before signing).

Especially his mother Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans and his brother Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine are against the loss of Lorraine.

Maria Theresa sends Francis a letter on February 1: she will withdraw from her future reign, when a male successor for her father appears.

They married on February 12 in the Augustinian Church, Vienna; the wedding celebration was held two days later.

In March, the Emperor had persuaded Francis to secretly sign away Lorraine.

Elisabeth of Parma had also wanted the Grand Duchy of Tuscany for her son Charles III of Spain; Gian Gastone de' Medici is childless and is related to Elisabeth via her great grandmother Margherita de' Medici.

As a result, Elisabeth son's can claim by right of being a descendant of Margherita.

Although fighting had stopped after the preliminary peace, the final peace settlement has had to wait until the death of the last Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, Gian Gastone in 1737, to allow the territorial exchanges provided for by the peace settlement to go into effect, in November 1738 ratified in the Treaty of Vienna.

Under its terms, Stanisław Leszczyński, the father-in-law of King Louis XV and the losing claimant to the Polish throne, receives Lorraine, while Francis, in compensation for his loss, is made heir to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which he had inherited in 1737.

The First Silesian War, which inaugurates, and is generally seen in the context of, the wider ranging War of the Austrian Succession, owes its origins to the Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713 whereby the Emperor Charles VI had decreed the imperial succession arrangements as set out in his will, according precedence to his own daughters over the daughters of his (by now deceased) elder brother Joseph I.

This had proved prescient: the Emperor’s own eldest daughter was born in May 1717, and on his death in 1740, she duly succeeds to the thrones of lands within the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and present-day Belgium) as the Queen Maria Theresa.

However, her succession to the Holy Roman Empire is contested widely because she is a woman.

Charles had ignored the advice of Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had urged him to concentrate on filling the treasury and equipping the army rather than on acquiring signatures of fellow monarchs.

During the emperor’s lifetime, the Pragmatic Sanction had been generally acknowledged by the German states: following his death on October 20, 1740, probably of mushroom poisoning, the agreement is promptly contested both by Frederick II, the new king of Prussia, and by Bavaria's king Charles Albert.

The Bavarian king launches a claim to the imperial throne and to the Habsburg territories, while Prussia demands Silesia and a part of the Habsburg territories for itself.

Frederick II of Prussia bases his demands on a breach of the 1537 Treaty of Schwiebus, whereby the Silesian princedoms of Liegnitz, Wohlau and Brieg were to pass to Brandenburg on the extinction of the Piast dynasty.

With the death in 1675, of George William of Legnica, the Piast line had died out: at that time no attempt had been made to implement these old treaty provisions, and the Prussian Elector (ruler) had been persuaded to renounce the claim in return for a payment.

An extensive alliance has formed sixty-five years on in support of Prussia’s newly asserted claims on Silesia.

Prussia is supported by France, Bavaria, and Sweden along with various smaller European powers.

The shared objective within the alliance is the destruction or at least the diminution of the Habsburg Monarchy and of its dominant influence over the other German states.

The Habsburgs find themselves supported by the Russians along with the maritime powers, the Dutch and the British/Hanoverians whose imperial aspirations beyond Europe always incline them to join available eighteenth century European wars on the anti-French side.

Britain and Austria are bound by the Anglo-Austrian Alliance, which has existed since 1731.

Maria Theresa finds herself in a difficult situation.

Unschooled in matters of state and unaware of the weakness of her late father's ministers, she decides to rely on her father's advice to retain his councilors and defer to her husband, whom she considers to be more experienced, on other matters.

Both decisions, though natural, will prove to be unfortunate.

The Emperor, who had spent his entire reign securing the Pragmatic Sanction, has left Austria in an impoverished state, bankrupted by the recent Turkish war and the War of the Polish Succession; the treasury contains only one hundred thousand florins, which are claimed by his widow.

The army numbers only eighty thousand men, most of whom have not been paid in months; they are nevertheless remarkably loyal and devoted to their new sovereign.

Ten years later, Maria Theresa is to bitterly recall in her Political Testament the circumstances under which she had ascended: "I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own and finally, also without any counsel because each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop." (Browning, Reed: The War of the Austrian Succession p. 37. Palgrave Macmillan 1995).

She dismisses the possibility that other countries might try to seize her territories and immediately starts ensuring the imperial dignity for herself; since a woman cannot be elected Holy Roman Empress, Maria Theresa wants to secure the imperial office for her husband.

However, Francis Stephen does not possess enough land or rank within the Holy Roman Empire.

In order to make him eligible for the imperial throne and to enable to him to vote in the imperial elections as elector of Bohemia (which she can't due to her gender), Maria Theresa on November 21, 1740, makes Francis Stephen co-ruler of the Austrian and Bohemian lands. (It will take more than a year for the Diet of Hungary to accept Francis Stephen as co-ruler.)

Despite her love for him and his position as co-ruler, Maria Theresa will never allow her husband to decide about matters of state, often dismissing him from council meetings when they disagree.

The first display of the new queen's authority is the formal act of homage of the Lower Austrian Estates to her on November 22, 1740.

It is an elaborate public event that serves as a formal recognition and legitimization of her accession.

The oath of fealty to Maria Theresa is taken on the same day in Hofburg.

Immediately after her accession, a number of European sovereigns who had recognized Maria Theresa as heiress break their promises; Queen Elisabeth of Spain and Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria, married to Maria Theresa's deprived cousin Maria Amalia and supported by Empress Wilhelmine Amalia, want portions of her inheritance.

Maria Theresa secures the recognition of King Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia, who hadn't accepted the Pragmatic Sanction during her father's lifetime, in November 1740.

Prussian forces occupy the Duchy of Silesia, which belongs to the Bohemian Crown of the Habsburg possessions, after a two-month campaign.

King Frederick II of Prussia requests that Maria Theresa cede it, threatening to join her enemies if she refuses.

Maria Theresa decides to fight for the mineral-rich province.

Frederick even offers a compromise: he will defend Maria Theresa's rights if she agrees to cede him at least a part of Silesia.

Francis Stephen is inclined to consider such an arrangement, but the Queen and her advisers are not, fearing that any violation of the Pragmatic Sanction will invalidate the entire document.

Maria Theresa's firmness soon assures Francis Stephen that they should fight for Silesia and she is confident that she will retain "the jewel of the House of Austria". (Browning, Reed: The War of the Austrian Succession p. 42, 44 Palgrave Macmillan 1995)

The invasion of Silesia by Frederick is the start of a lifelong enmity; she refers to him as "that evil man".(Holborn, Hajo: A History of Modern Germany: 1648–1840 p 218. Princeton University Press 1982)

As Austria is short of experienced military commanders, Maria Theresa releases Marshall Neipperg, who had been imprisoned by her father for his poor performance in the Turkish War.

Neipperg takes command of the Austrian troops in March.

Frederick II has taken Silesia by storm and nearly has the entire province occupied.

His Prussian troops have settled down into winter quarters and are expecting an easy land-grab when Maria Theresa sends an army of about twenty thousand men led by Wilhelm Reinhard von Neipperg to take back the province and assert herself as a strong monarch.

This army led by Neipperg catches Frederick II completely off-guard as he lingers in the province, and Neipperg's forces surge northwards past Frederick and his army in order to relieve the city of Neisse, which is being besieged by a small Prussian force and has not yet fallen.

Both Neipperg and Frederick race northwards in a rush to reach the city first, in parallel columns.

The weather is atrocious for both sides but von Neipperg reaches Neisse first and sets up camp there.

Frederick II and his entire army are now caught behind enemy lines with a large Austrian force lying between him and the rest of his kingdom and his supply and communication lines cut off.

Both sides know that battle is now inevitable.

The Prussian victory is actually the responsibility of Field Marshal Schwerin.

The Prussian king had fled from the battlefield when the Austrians seemed to be winning.

Later Frederick the Great will swear never again to leave his troops behind in battle and will adhere to this promise faithfully until his death in the late eighteenth century.

He annexes the province of Silesia from Austria, having learned a number of valuable lessons from Mollwitz.

He is quoted as saying "Mollwitz was my school".

Frederick had made several mistakes but his army still managed to win the battle due to the superior training of his soldiers.

From now on, he will be committed to aggressiveness, and gear his entire army towards an aggressive approach.

He gives a standing order that his cavalry commanders will never receive a cavalry charge while standing still.

He greatly increases the use of light cavalry, Hussars, who will act as skirmishers and scouts.

Afterwards he is quoted as saying "The Prussian army always attacks."