Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

the young Louis XIV and young Leopold I had realized that without an agreement war on a cosmic scale could result. The two monarchs had married the two surviving sisters of Carlos II just to keep their hand in, and in conditions of the strictest secrecy agreed that on Carlos’s surely imminent death Leopold would receive Spain, America and northern Italy and Louis the Spanish Netherlands, Franche-Comté, Navarre, southern Italy and the Spanish bases in north Africa. The plan was both an interesting measure of how relatively unimportant America was still felt to be at this point and a mad vision of a future that never happened. This was quite possibly a future in which Paris and Vienna were so much more powerful that Britain could never have prospered as it did in the gaps and failures in the two empires’ security arrangements. In a further twist, in 1670, with Leopold still without a male heir, Louis did another secret deal, this time with the Elector of Bavaria, the entertainingly named Ferdinand Maria (apparently a sensible boy’s name in Catholic countries). Recognizing the coming extinction of both branches of the Habsburg family, this deal allowed Louis to take the entire Spanish Empire in return for helping Ferdinand Maria to take the Habsburg lands after Leopold’s death while also keeping Bavaria – the nightmare reverse of the usual Habsburg dream of adding Bavaria to their own domains. This scenario was only chased away by Leopold’s finally