Charles VI

Holy Roman Emperor and archduke of Austria (r. 1711-1740)

• Born: October 1, 1685
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: October 20, 1740
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Much of Charles’s reign was devoted to ensuring the survival of the Austrian Habsburg empire. To that end, he issued the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713 and then focused his efforts on persuading other European rulers to accept that document. He also expanded his imperial territory in the Netherlands and Italy.

Early Life

Charles VI, German emperor and archduke of Austria from 1711 until his death in 1740, was named after Karl Borromäus, archbishop of Milan, an important leader in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. He was the second son of Leopold I, the Habsburg archduke and Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1658-1705). His mother was Eleonore Magadalena (1655-1720), the daughter of Count Philipp Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg, a member of the Wittelsbach family. Charles’s mother was a pious member of a lay order of noble women devoted to the memory of Mary. His godfather was King Charles II of Spain (r. 1665-1700).

Seven years younger than his brother Joseph (1678-1711), Charles was Leopold’s favorite son. Like his father, he took Communion often, and he loved music. Charles was more reserved and less decisive than his brother, nor was he as devoted to wine and women. Charles was a slim boy with dark brown hair who inherited the typical Habsburg lower lip and elongated face. Later in life, the envoy to the Viennese court from Savoy described Charles as ugly with an unmajestic walk. As early as age fourteen, he exhibited a devotion to formal ceremony, when he insisted that the Bavarian envoy to Vienna could not cover his head in his presence.

Charles received a carefully planned education, influenced by his mother, who had a close relationship with her second son. In contrast to his brother, he was educated by Jesuits. His education was supervised by Anton Florian, count of Liechtenstein, who instilled in Charles a belief that he was selected by God to rule Christian people. Charles also studied Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, and later in life he learned Catalonian and Hungarian. At court, he favored formal Latin and Italian, although in private he used a Viennese dialect. He was never very interested in the philosophical debates of his time.

Life’s Work

When Charles was twelve years old, his father wanted to send him to his godfather Charles II in Spain who was ill and without a direct heir. However, Charles did not travel to Spain until September, 1703, three years after Charles II died and left his throne to Philip of Anjou, the grandson of the French king Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). When Charles left the court in 1703 to seize the throne of Spain from King Philip V, his mother lamented his departure. Arriving in Portugal with twelve thousand allied troops in late 1704, Charles began his lifelong effort to secure the future of the House of Habsburg, first in Spain and then in the Austrian Empire.

With the support of the English fleet, Charles entered Barcelona in November, 1705, and in 1706 his allies captured Madrid and proclaimed Charles kingCharles III of Spain. The next year, however, Charles had to retreat to Catalonia, where he found popular support. In Barcelona, Charles married Princess Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1691-1750) on August 1, 1708. Elisabeth, a Protestant princess who converted to Catholicism, bore a son, Leopold Johann, who died in infancy, and two daughters who reached adulthood.

Charles’s efforts in Spain came to an end when Charles’s brother, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I (r. 1705-1711), died on April 17, 1711, without a male heir. Although Charles was not eager to leave Spain, he returned to Frankfurt to claim the imperial crown on December 22, 1711, as Emperor Charles VI. On May 22, 1712, he was crowned king of Hungary in Pressburg and on June 5, 1723, he was crowned king of Bohemia in Prague. In addition to relying heavily on Spanish advisers and his close friend Count Michael Johann Althann, Charles VI continued to use his brother’s counselors, particularly Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736), a superb military leader.

At his court in Vienna, Charles dressed in Spanish regalia, with black and red socks and shoes and a hat with a feather, and he demanded strict adherence to protocol and etiquette. He worked diligently and wrote imperial instructions in his own hand. In religious policies, he supported the resettlement of Protestants to border regions, and he put pressure on the Greek Orthodox Christians in the southeastern military districts. For entertainment he enjoyed hunting, cards, music, and the theater.

Charles refused to accept the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which marked the first phase of the end the War of the Spanish Succession. In the Treaties of Rastatt and Baden in 1714, Charles made peace with the Bourbons, although he did not renounce his claim to the Spanish throne until 1725. Charles obtained the Spanish Netherlands and Italian land for the Austrian Habsburgs, but after the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735), he lost Naples and Sicily in exchange for northern Italian lands. He was much more successful against the traditional Habsburg enemies in the southeast, the Ottoman Turks. His military commander, Eugene of Savoy, defeated the grand vizier at Peterwardein on August 5, 1716. The Habsburgs made enormous territorial gains in the southeast by the Treaty of Peterwardein on July 21, 1718. Much of that gain, however, was lost in another war with the Turks in 1736-1739.

To ensure the survival of the House of Habsburg, Charles devoted much of his reign between 1713 and 1740 to ensuring the acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction by all the major European powers. He first announced the Pragmatic Sanction on April 19, 1713, to his officials in Vienna. This decree declared that in the event that Charles died while there was no male Habsburg heir, his daughters would succeed to the throne. In case his daughters died, the succession would go first to the daughters of Joseph I and then to the daughters of Leopold I. The second important provision of the Pragmatic Sanction was that the Habsburg possessions would no longer be divided but would all be inherited by one person.

Charles devoted the rest of his reign, particularly after his son Leopold died six months after his birth in 1716, to ensuring the viability of his decree. Charles never experienced the failure of the Pragmatic Sanction, which had technically been accepted by all major European powers but was immediately violated after Charles died on October 20, 1740, following a hunting trip and, perhaps, the consumption of poisonous mushrooms.

Significance

Charles VI sacrificed territorial, economic, and strategic Habsburg interests to ensure the acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction, while failing to prepare the military and administrative reforms necessary to make the Pragmatic Sanction an effective document. He gave up the Habsburg East Indian Trade Company in 1731 to obtain the support of England and the Netherlands. To obtain the approval of Spain, Charles exchanged Naples and Sicily for the far less desirable northern Italian territories of Parma and Piacenza. To arrange the marriage of his daughter Maria Theresa to the duke of Lorraine, he forced his son-in-law to renounce all claim to Lorraine. His alliance with Russia led to a disastrous war with the Ottoman Turks.

It would have been more prudent for Charles to have continued a policy of economic and administrative modernization. Instead, he failed to integrate his Spanish lands, and he compromised with the regional Habsburg elites. He never limited church lands, which would have provided the empire with more tax money, and he did not support the agrarian reforms advocated by his advisers. He did support commercial growth, however, and he built the ports of Trieste and Fiume and constructed roads over the Brenner and the Semmering Passes to northern Italy and the Adriatic.

Charles failed to heed the advice of Eugene of Savoy that his daughter Maria Theresa should marry the duke of Bavaria in order to reduce the danger posed by Prussia. On the positive ledger, Charles’s Pragmatic Sanction ensured that the Habsburg lands would no longer be divided among various heirs but would form a unified whole, thus allowing the Habsburg empire to survive into the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Hochedlinger, Michael. Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State, and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1683-1797. New York: Longman, 2003. Excellent Habsburg military history from the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 to the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797; includes a section on Charles VI’s wars.

Hughes, Michael. Law and Politics in Eighteenth Century Germany: The Imperial Aulic Council in the Reign of Charles VI. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell Press, 1988. Important scholarly treatment of Charles VI’s policies in the Holy Roman Empire.

Ingrao, Charles W. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. A chapter on the Second Habsburg empire offers the best scholarly survey of Charles VI’s reign in English.

Lindsay, J. O., ed. The Old Regime, 1713. Vol. 7 in The New Cambridge Modern History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Charles VI’s reign is briefly but competently surveyed in a chapter, “The Habsburg Dominions,” by C. A. Macartney.

Roberts, Penfield. The Quest for Security. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Blames Charles VI’s personal failures and court rivalries for his inability to compete more effectively with European rivals.