Birthday Greetings #60

Happy birthday to Charles VII, Holy Roman Emperor.  Given the time (middle 1700s) you could be forgiven for thinking he would be a Habsburg.  However Chuck 7 was actually a Wittlesbach.  The Wittlesbach were a noble, southern German family famous mostly for being overrun by anyone who wanted their territories and frequently going barking mad into the bargain.  Despite the preceding they managed a somewhat nervous tenure as electors (and later kings) of Bavaria for several centuries.

The first years of Charles's life were spent under house arrest in Vienna (the Wittlesbachs had picked the wrong side in the War of the Spanish Succession).  Eventually the war ended and Charles slunk back into Bavaria.  Inheriting the Bavarian throne (or whatever it is an Elector sits on) Charles managed to build good relations with both the French and the Habsburgs which since Bavaria was situated inconveniently between the two was an excellent idea.

If things had gone on normally Charles might not have been a too bad ruler of Bavaria, he certainly wasn't the worst, or the looniest.  Unfortunately opportunity knocked and ambition reared its ugly head.  It would turn out that opportunity was only knocking to leave a bag of flaming dog shit on the doorstep but its easy to identify the blindingly obvious in hindsight.  The opportunity was the imminent end of the Habsburg dynasty.  A combination of bad luck and centuries of inbreeding had reduced the number of Habsburg males to precisely one, the current emperor.  He had two daughters but had reluctantly come to accept that a son wasn't likely.  To preserve his lands intact he instituted the Pragmatic Sanction and got most of the rulers to sign up in return for various concessions.  The Pragmatic Sanction guaranteed that the entirety of the emperors heritage would pass to his eldest daughter one Maria Theresia.  Charles, however saw his chance.

Refusing to sign the Pragmatic Sanction he kept himself free to claim Maria Theresia's German territories once the emperor, her father, was safely filling a box.  But the imminent box occupancy of the reigning emperor persuaded Charles to go further.  The one title that couldn't be passed down to Maria Theresia was the imperial crown itself.  Not only was it an elective title but it was males only.  Maria Theresia had her husband, an easy going non entity who has been the subject of two separate birthday greeting in this blog, tagged for the top job but when it came to moderately high born non entities Charles felt with a certain amount of justification that his claim would be as good as any other.

The emperor died and the collective states of Europe proved exactly how much their guarantees were worth by invading Maria Theresia's territories pretty much simultaneously.  Charles sided with the French.  This was good sense on both sides.  The Germans would never accept rulership by a French king but they might tolerate a French patsy.  For Charles it would mean that there would be a serious army on his side to supplement the ramshackle joke that were his own armed forces.

At first things went well, the French (with some Bavarians in tow) overran Bohemia and Charles had little difficulty persuading the remaining electors to make him emperor.  Things went pretty much downhill from there.  The Prussians, who had also been at war with Maria Theresia, cut a separate peace deal and suddenly the Habsburg army was bearing down on Bohemia with blood in its eyes.  Charles ran for Bavaria but the Habsburgs didn't stop there and kicked the French and the Bavarians out of Bavaria as well.  Charles wound up hiding out in Frankfurt making imperial proclamations nobody listened to and generally bewailing his fate.

A French counter attack allowed him to slip back into Munich where he barely had time to clean up the mess from the previous Habsburg occupation before a counter counter attack drove the French (and the Bavarian for what that was worth) army out again and Charles although now crippled with gout limped back to Frankfurt.  Eventually an alliance with the Prussians got the Habsburgs out of Bavaria for good and Charles hobbled back home again to a country completely despoiled by war.  A few months later he was dead.  After that Maria Theresia got the easy going non entity she was married to elected emperor in his place.  Its fair to say he did a better job.