Victor Amadeus II
Victor Amadeus II was Duke of Savoy for fifty-five years, changed sides twice in the great wars of Louis XIV, held Turin through a siege in 1706 that turned the war in Italy, was made a king by the peace of 1713 with Sicily and exchanged it for Sardinia in 1720, built the state that would unite Italy a century and a half later, and abdicated in 1730 only to try to take the throne back and be locked up by his son. He succeeded his father as a boy of nine in 1675 under his mother's regency, and his first act as an adult was to marry a niece of Louis XIV and then, in 1690, to join the coalition against him. The French beat him at Staffarda and Marsaglia and occupied most of Piedmont, and in 1696 he made a separate peace that got Pinerolo back and took him out of the war. In the War of the Spanish Succession he began on the French side, with a daughter married to the Duke of Burgundy and another to Philip V of Spain, and in 1703 went over to the Austrians. The French army came to Turin in May 1706. The city held for four months behind its citadel and its mines, in one of which the miner Pietro Micca blew himself up to stop a French party, and on 7 September the duke and his cousin Prince Eugene broke the siege from outside. Utrecht gave him Sicily and the title of king in 1713, and the powers took Sicily back and gave him Sardinia in 1720. The kingdom kept the island's name and was governed from Turin. He reformed the state in the French manner: a land survey, a new university, a code of laws, an administration of salaried officials, and a concordat that ended a twenty-year quarrel with Rome. In 1730 he abdicated for his son Charles Emmanuel III and retired to Chambery with his second wife, a commoner he had married in secret. Within a year he had changed his mind. The son had him arrested at Moncalieri in September 1731 and he died at Rivoli the next October, the first king of the house that would end as kings of Italy.
- Lived: 1666 CE – 1732 CE
- Nationality: Savoyard
- Roles: king, monarch, duke
