Pragmatic Sanction — Habsburg Succession Law
Charles VI issued a decree in April 1713 declaring the Habsburg lands indivisible and inheritable by a daughter, and spent the rest of his life persuading Europe to accept it. He had no children at all when he issued it. His only son was born in 1716 and died within months, and his eldest daughter Maria Theresa was born in 1717. The instrument mattered because the Habsburg possessions were a personal union of separate crowns and duchies — Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Milan, Naples — each with its own law of succession, some of which excluded women, and several of which had rival claimants with claims through earlier Habsburg daughters. His own late brother's daughters had a better claim than his own by an earlier family compact, which he simply overrode. He obtained acceptance from the estates of each territory, which took until 1725, and then from the powers: Spain, Russia, Prussia, Britain, the Dutch, France and the imperial diet, at the price of dissolving the Ostend Company, granting commercial concessions, and fighting a war over the Polish succession that cost him Naples and Sicily. Prince Eugene told him that a hundred thousand men in good order would guarantee it better than a hundred treaties. He died in October 1740, and Frederick II of Prussia invaded Silesia in December without any claim worth stating, and Bavaria, France, Saxony and Spain followed. Maria Theresa fought eight years, kept everything but Silesia, and got her husband elected emperor. The episode is the standard illustration of what a treaty guarantee is worth without the means to enforce it. Every signatory except Britain and the Dutch either attacked her or took territory, and several cited the document while doing it.
- Year: 1713 CE
- Category: Political
