The War of the Bavarian Succession (German: Bayerischer Erbfolgekrieg; 3 July 1778 – 13 May 1779) was a dispute between the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and an alliance of Saxony and Prussia over succession to the Electorate of Bavaria after the extinction of the Bavarian branch of the House of Wittelsbach. The Habsburgs sought to acquire Bavaria, and the alliance opposed them, favoring another branch of the Wittelsbachs. Both sides mobilized large armies, but the only fighting in the war was a few minor battles. However, thousands of soldiers died from disease and starvation, earning the conflict the name Kartoffelkrieg (Potato War) in Prussia and Saxony; in Habsburg Austria, it was sometimes called the Zwetschgenrummel (Plum Fuss).
On 30 December 1777, Maximilian III Joseph, the last of the junior Wittelsbach line, died of smallpox, leaving no children. Charles Theodore, a scion of a senior branch of the House of Wittelsbach, held the closest claim of kinship, but he also had no legitimate children to succeed him. His cousin, Charles II August, Duke of Zweibrücken, therefore had a legitimate legal claim as Charles Theodore's heir presumptive. Across Bavaria's southern border, Emperor Joseph II coveted the Bavarian territory and had married Maximilian Joseph's sister Maria Josepha in 1765 to strengthen any claim he could extend. His agreement with the heir, Charles Theodore, to partition the territory neglected any claims of the heir presumptive, Charles August.
Acquiring territory in the German-speaking states was an essential part of Joseph's policy to expand his family's influence in Central Europe. For King Frederick the Great of Prussia, Joseph's claim threatened Prussian influence in German politics, but he questioned whether he should preserve the status quo through war, diplomacy, or trade. Empress Maria Theresa, Joseph's mother and co-ruler, considered any conflict over the Bavarian electorate not worth bloodshed, and neither she nor Frederick saw any point in pursuing hostilities. Joseph would not drop his claim despite his mother's contrary insistence. Elector Frederick August III of Saxony wanted to preserve the territorial integrity of Bavaria for his brother-in-law, Charles August, and had no interest in seeing the Habsburgs acquire additional territory on his southern and western borders. Despite his dislike of Prussia, which had been Saxony's enemy in two previous wars, Charles August sought the support of Frederick, who was happy to challenge the Habsburgs. France became involved to maintain the balance of power. Finally, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia's threat to intervene on the side of Prussia with fifty thousand Russian troops forced Joseph to reconsider his position. With Catherine's assistance, he and Frederick negotiated a solution to the problem of the Bavarian succession with the Treaty of Teschen, signed on 13 May 1779.
For some historians, the War of the Bavarian Succession was the last of the old-style cabinet wars of the Ancien Régime era, in which troops maneuvered while diplomats traveled between capitals to resolve their monarchs' complaints. The subsequent French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars differed in scope, strategy, organization, and tactics.
Background
In 1713, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI established a line of succession that gave precedence to his own daughters over the daughters of his deceased older brother, Emperor Joseph I. To protect the Habsburg inheritance, he coerced, cajoled, and persuaded the crowned heads of Europe to accept the Pragmatic Sanction. In this agreement, they acknowledged any of his legitimate daughters as the rightful queen of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, and archduchess of Austria—a break from the tradition of agnatic primogeniture.
Holy Roman emperors had been elected from the House of Habsburg for most of the previous three centuries. Charles VI arranged a marriage of his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, to Francis III of Lorraine. Francis relinquished the Duchy of Lorraine neighbouring France in exchange for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to make himself a more appealing candidate for eventual election as emperor. On paper, many heads of state and, most importantly, the rulers of the German states of the Holy Roman Empire, accepted the Pragmatic Sanction and the idea of Francis as the next emperor. Two key exceptions, the Electorate of Bavaria and the Electorate of Saxony, held important electoral votes and could impede or even block Francis' election. When Charles died in 1740, Maria Theresa had to fight for her family's entitlements in Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, and her husband faced competition in his election as the Holy Roman emperor.
Charles Albert, Prince-elector and Duke of Bavaria, claimed the German territories of the Habsburg dynasty as a son-in-law of Joseph I, and furthermore presented himself as Charles VI's legitimate imperial successor. If women were going to inherit, he claimed, then his family should have precedence: his wife, Maria Amalia, was the daughter of Joseph I. Both Charles VI and his predecessor Joseph I had died without sons. Charles Albert of Bavaria suggested that the legitimate succession pass to Joseph's female children, rather than to the daughters of the younger brother, Charles VI. For different reasons, Prussia, France, Spain, and the Polish-Saxon monarchy supported Charles of Bavaria's claim to the Habsburg territory and the Imperial title and reneged on the Pragmatic Sanction.
Charles Albert of Bavaria needed military assistance to take the imperial title by force, which he secured the Treaty of Nymphenburg (July 1741). During the subsequent War of the Austrian Succession, he successfully captured Prague, where he was crowned King of Bohemia. He invaded Upper Austria, planning to capture Vienna, but diplomatic exigencies complicated his plans. His French allies redirected their troops into Bohemia, where Frederick the Great, himself newly King of Prussia, had taken advantage of the chaos in Austria and Bavaria to annex Silesia.
Charles Albert's military options disappeared with the French. Adopting a new plan, he subverted the imperial election. He sold the County of Glatz to Prussia for a reduced price in exchange for Frederick's electoral vote. Charles's brother, Klemens August of Bavaria, archbishop and prince-elector of the Electorate of Cologne, voted for him in the imperial election and personally crowned him on 12 February 1742 in the traditional ceremony in Frankfurt am Main. The next day, the new Charles VII's Bavarian capital of Munich capitulated to the Austrians to avoid being plundered by Maria Theresa's troops. In the following weeks, her army overran most of Charles's territories, occupied Bavaria, and barred him from his ancestral lands and from Bohemia.
Charles VII spent most of his three-year reign as emperor residing in Frankfurt while Maria Theresa battled Prussia for her patrimony in Bohemia and Hungary. Frederick could not secure Bohemia for Charles, but he did manage to push the Austrians out of Bavaria. For the last three months of his short reign, the gout-ridden Charles lived in Munich, where he died in January 1745. His son, Maximilian III Joseph (known as Max Joseph) inherited his father's electoral dignities but not his imperial ambition. With the Peace of Füssen (22 April 1745), Max Joseph promised to vote for Francis of Lorraine, Maria Theresa's husband, in the pending imperial election. He also acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. In return, he obtained the restitution of his family's electoral position and territories. For his subjects, his negotiations ended five years of warfare and brought a generation of peace and relative prosperity that began with his father's death in 1745 and ended with his own in 1777.
As the Duke of Bavaria, Max Joseph was the prince of one of the largest states in the German-speaking portion of the Holy Roman Empire. As a prince-elector, he stood in the highest rank of the Empire, with broad legal, economic, and judicial rights. As an elector, he was one of the men who selected the Holy Roman Emperor from a group of candidates. He was the son of one Holy Roman Emperor (Charles VII), and the grandson of another (Joseph I). When he died of smallpox on 30 December 1777, he left no children to succeed him and several ambitious men prepared to carve his patrimony into pieces.
Contenders
The Heir
The Sulzbach branch of the Wittelsbach family inherited the Electorate of Bavaria. In this line, the 55-year-old Charles IV Theodore, the Duke of Berg-Jülich, held the first claim. Unfortunately for Charles Theodore, he was already the Elector Palatine. By the terms of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, he had to cede the Palatine electorate to his own heir before he could claim the Bavarian electorate. He was not eager to do so, even though Bavaria was larger and more important. He preferred living in the Palatinate, with its salubrious climate and compatible social scene. He patronized the arts, and had developed in Mannheim, his capital city, an array of theaters and museums at tremendous cost to his subjects. He hosted Voltaire at one of his many palaces. During the visit, he had enticed Voltaire's secretary, the Florentine noble Cosimo Alessandro Collini, into his own employment, considered a coup in some of the Enlightenment circles. Thomas Carlyle referred to Charles Theodore as a "poor idle creature, of purely egoistical, ornamental, dilettante nature; sunk in theatricals, [and] bastard children". The French foreign minister Vergennes, who knew him, described Charles Theodore's foibles more forcefully:
Although by nature intelligent, he [Charles Theodore] has never succeeded in ruling by himself; he has always been governed by his ministers or by his father-confessor or (for a time) by the electress [his wife]. This conduct has increased his natural weakness and apathy to such a degree that for a long time he has had no opinions save those inspired in him by his entourage. The void which this indolence has left in his soul is filled with the amusements of the hunt and of music and by secret liaisons, for which His Electoral Majesty has at all times had a particular penchant.
The Electress had provided him with a son, who had immediately died, but Charles Theodore's "particular penchant" for secret liaisons, most of whom were French actresses that he had raised to the status of countess, had produced several natural children. By the time of Max Joseph's death, he had legitimated seven of the males of his various alliances, and was considering the legitimation of two more. With this host of male offspring, although Charles Theodore certainly wished to acquire more territory, he needed it to be territory that he could bequeath through his testament, rather than territory encumbered by a legal entailment that could only pass to a legitimate child.
Deal-maker
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, Archduke of Austria, and co-ruler with his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, coveted Bavaria. He felt the War of the Austrian Succession had shown that the House of Habsburg-Lorraine needed a wider sphere of influence in the German-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire. Without this, the family could not count on the election of their chosen male candidate as emperor, nor could the family count on an uncontested succession to the Habsburg territories of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia. For most of Joseph's adult life, he sought to strengthen his family's influence in German-speaking lands. For him, this meant the acquisition of German lands (generally better-developed economically), not lands in the eastern region of the Habsburg empire, even such strategic territories as Bukovina.
Joseph married Max Joseph's sister, Maria Josepha, in 1765, hoping he could claim the Bavarian electorate for his offspring. After two years of unhappy marriage, Maria Josepha died without issue. When Max Joseph died ten years later, Joseph could only present a weak legal claim to Lower Bavaria through a dubious and ancient grant made by the Emperor Sigismund to the House of Habsburg in 1425. Knowing its poor legal grounds, Joseph negotiated a secret agreement with Charles Theodore shortly after Max Joseph's death. In this agreement (3 January 1778), Charles Theodore ceded Lower Bavaria to Austria in exchange for uncontested succession to the remainder of the electorate. Charles Theodore also hoped to acquire from Joseph some unencumbered parts of the Austrian Netherlands and parts of Further Austria that he could bequeath to his bastards, but this was not written into the agreement and Joseph was not a particularly generous man. Furthermore, the agreement entirely ignored the interests of Charles Theodore's own heir presumptive, Charles II August, of the House of Palatinate-Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld. Charles August was the presumptive heir of Charles Theodore's domains and titles. He had a clear and direct interest in the disposition of the Bavarian electorate, especially in its territorial integrity.
Heir presumptive
Unbeknownst to either Charles Theodore or Joseph, a widow (historians are uncertain which widow) opened secret negotiations with Prussia to secure the eventual succession of Charles II August (Charles August). Some historians maintain the active negotiator was Max Joseph's widow, Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony. Others assert it was Max Joseph's sister, Maria Antonia of Bavaria, who was also Charles August's mother-in-law and the mother of the reigning Elector of Saxony. Ernest Henderson even maintained she was the "only manly one among the many Wittelsbach parties" involved in the issue.
Charles August was no great admirer of Joseph's. As a younger man, he had sought the hand of Joseph's sister, Archduchess Maria Amalia. She had been quite content to take him, but Joseph and their mother insisted she marry instead the better-connected Ferdinand, Duke of Parma. After this disappointment, Charles II August married Maria Amalia of Saxony in 1774; she was the daughter of Frederick Christian, Elector of Saxony (d. 1763) and his wife Maria Antonia, Max Joseph's sister. In 1769, the reigning Saxon elector, Frederick Augustus III, had married Charles August's sister. Charles August, sometimes called duc de Deux-Ponts (a French translation of Zweibrücken, or two bridges), was a French client and could theoretically draw on French support for his claim. However, he had especially good relations with the Saxon Elector: both his mother- and brother-in-law wanted to ensure that Maria Amalia's husband received his rightful inheritance.