Treaty of Hubertusburg
Prussia, Austria and Saxony signed peace at Hubertusburg on 15 February 1763, five days after the Treaty of Paris, and restored every border to where it had been in 1756. Seven years of war across Europe had changed nothing on the map. Maria Theresa had fought it to recover Silesia, which Frederick the Great had seized in 1740 and which was the richest province the Habsburgs had lost; she gave up the claim, and Frederick in exchange undertook to vote for her son Joseph as King of the Romans. The war had come very close to going the other way. Prussia had faced France, Austria, Russia, Sweden and Saxony simultaneously, had lost Berlin to a raid, and by 1761 was reduced to holding on with British subsidies that the new Bute ministry then cut off. What saved it was the death of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia in January 1762 and the accession of Peter III, who idolised Frederick, immediately made peace and returned every conquest — the episode Prussian historiography calls the miracle of the House of Brandenburg. The settlement is the moment Prussia became a great power. A state of perhaps four and a half million people had fought the three largest monarchies in Europe to a standstill and kept what it had taken. Austria emerged with its army reformed and its finances intact, and Saxony ruined. The dualism between Berlin and Vienna over who led Germany was fixed for a century, and settled at Königgrätz in 1866. Frederick spent his remaining twenty-three years rebuilding a country that had lost perhaps a tenth of its population.
- Year: 1763 CE
- Category: Political
