War of the Austrian Succession

Frederick II invaded Silesia in December 1740, two months after Charles VI died, and eight years of European war followed. Charles had spent three decades obtaining signatures on the Pragmatic Sanction guaranteeing his daughter's inheritance. Prussia was among the signatories, and Frederick had been on the throne for five months. His justification rested on some obsolete dynastic claims that his own officials thought thin, and his real reasons were that Silesia was rich, populous and adjacent, that Austria's army was poor and its treasury empty, and that Maria Theresa was twenty-three, pregnant, and untried. He offered to defend the rest of her inheritance if she gave him the province. The invasion opened the field. France, Bavaria and Spain joined in to partition the Habsburg lands, the Elector of Bavaria was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1742 — the first non-Habsburg in three centuries — and Britain and the Dutch supported Austria to prevent France dominating the continent. Maria Theresa saved herself by going to the Hungarian diet in person with her infant son and obtaining an army from nobles who had every reason to refuse. The war ran across Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, North America and India, and included Fontenoy, Dettingen and the Jacobite rising of 1745. The peace at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 restored almost everything to where it had been except Silesia, which Prussia kept and which made it a great power. Austria spent the next eight years building the alliance that fought the Seven Years' War to get it back.

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