CHAP. XLIX.]

REFLECTIONS ON THE PARTITION.

215

1773. The whole business, however, was not concluded till March, 1775, by the execution on the part of the Polish King and Republic of seven separate acts or treaties, namely, three with Russia, two with Austria, and two with Prussia.1 These acts included the cession of the confiscated provinces. A new Constitution was established for Poland, which Russia guaranteed. The Crown was to be perpetually elective, and none but a Piast noble having possessions in the Kingdom was to be eligible. The son or grandson of a deceased King could not be elected till after an interval of two reigns. The Government was to be composed of the King and two estates, the Senate, and the Equestrian Order. A permanent Executive Council was to be established, composed of an equal number of members of the two estates, without, however, either legislative or judicial power. Thus the seal was put to the vicious Constitution of Poland; the King was reduced to a mere puppet, and the ground prepared for the final extinction of the Kingdom.

The first partition of Poland is the most remarkable event of the eighteenth century, before the French Revolution. Breaches of national rights as gross as this have undoubtedly been perpetrated both before and since; but what rendered it particularly odious, and most revolted public opinion in Europe, was the circumstance that three great and powerful Sovereigns should combine together to commit such an act of spoliation. The Cabinets of Europe, however, were either silent or confined themselves to feeble remonstrances. The political effects of the partition were not, indeed, so important as it has been sometimes supposed. Poland itself was of but little weight in the political balance of Europe, and the three great Powers which divided the spoils, by receiving pretty equal shares, remained much in the same position with respect to one another as they had occupied before. Great Britain, engaged in paying court to Catharine II., in order to separate her from the Prussian alliance, took no steps to prevent the partition, and contented itself, in the interests of its commerce, with inciting Catharine not to let Dantzic and Thorn fall into Frederick's hands. With regard to France, the Duc d'Aiguillon, who had succeeded Choiseul in the Ministry, either through his own fault or that of the Cardinal de Rohan, the French Ambassador at Vienna, seems not to have been acquainted with the partition till informed of it at Paris by the Imperial

1 Martens, Recueil, t. iv. p. 142 sqq.

216

DEATH OF MUSTAPHA III.

[CHAP. XLIX. Ambassador. To amend the fault of his improvidence, he tried to persuade Louis XV. to attack the Austrian Netherlands; but this proposition was rejected by the majority of the Council, on account of the state of the finances. It was also proposed to England to send a French and English fleet into the Baltic, to prevent the consummation of the dismemberment, but the proposal was coldly received."

We now resume the history of the Russian and Turkish war, interrupted in order to bring to a conclusion the affairs of Poland. The Porte, as we have said, had in 1770 accepted the mediation of Austria and Prussia. But Russia rejected the interference of any Power, and put her terms so high, by insisting on occupying Moldavia and Wallachia for a term of twenty-five years, which, of course, meant permanently, that it was impossible to listen to them. Kaunitz, therefore, entered into the treaty with the Porte of July 6th, 1771, already mentioned, by which Austria was to receive 20,000 purses (10,000,000 piastres, or 11,250,000 gulden), on the score of her warlike preparations, and was also to obtain a portion of Wallachia; while she engaged to assist the Porte in recovering all the conquests of the Russians, and to compel them to evacuate Poland. Kaunitz's secret object in this treaty we have already seen. Russia showed herself so compliant, that the Austrian Minister did not think it necessary to ratify the treaty, although he received a good part of the subsidy.

The campaign of 1771 was unimportant on the Danube; but the Russians, under Dolgorouki, subdued the Crimea, as well as Arabat, Yenikale, Kertsch, Kaffa, and Taman. The Tartars now submitted to Russia, on condition of retaining their ancient customs, and Catharine appointed a new Khan. We have already mentioned the truce of 1772, and the Congress of Fokchany; which, however, like a subsequent one at Bucharest, proved fruitless. The war, when renewed in 1773, went in favour of the Turks. The Russians were compelled to recross the Danube and remain on the defensive.

Sultan Mustapha died towards the end of this year (December 24th). His death had little influence on the course of events. His weak brother and successor, Abdul Hamed, then forty-eight years of age, was in the hands of the war party. The ensuing campaign was opened with great pomp by the Turks in April, 1774, but they were soon so thoroughly beaten as to be glad of a

Ségur, Politique de tous les Cabinets, t. i. p. 183.

Flassan, Diplomatie Franç., t. vii. p. 87; Coxe, House of Austria, vol. v.

CHAP. XLIX.]

RUSSIAN PRETENDERS.

217

peace on almost any terms. Never was a celebrated treaty concluded in so short a space of time as that dictated in four hours by Count Romanzoff, in his camp at Kutchuk Kainardji (July 16th), where the Turks were almost entirely surrounded. By this peace the Tartars of the Crimea, Kuban, &c., were declared independent of either empire, and were to enjoy the right of electing their Khan from the family of Zingis; only they were to recognize the Sultan as Caliph and head of their religion. Russia restored to the Tartars her conquests in the Crimea, &c., retaining only Kertsch and Yenikale. She also restored to the Porte Bessarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia, &c., and the islands in the Archipelago; retaining Kinburn and its territory, Azof, the two Kabardas, but evacuating Georgia and Mingrelia. The Turks, however, abandoned the tribute of young men and women, which they had been accustomed to exact from these countries; and they agreed to pay four million roubles for the costs of the war. Poland, which had caused the breach between the two Empires, was not even named in the treaty.1 A A year after this peace, the Porte ceded to Austria the Bukovina, or Red Forest, a district formerly belonging to Transylvania, which connected that country with the newly-acquired Kingdom of Galicia.

During the course of this war (1773), Catharine II. was alarmed by the rebellion of a Cossack deserter named Pugatscheff, who personated the character of Peter III., to which Prince he bore some resemblance. Many thousand discontented Cossacks flocked. to his standard, and at one time it was apprehended that Moscow itself would rise in his favour. But the peace put an end to his hopes, and he was shortly afterwards captured and put to death."

The treaty will be found in Wilkinson's Account of Moldavia and Wallachia. 2 Peter III. had also been personated in Dalmatia by a Montenegrin adven

turer named Stefano. An insurrection which he excited in 1767 was quelled in the following year.

218

JOSEPH II., EMPEROR.

[CHAP. L.

THE

CHAPTER L.

HE Emperor was celebrating at Innsbruck the marriage of his second son, Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, with Maria Louisa, Infanta of Spain, when, on entering his son's apartment, on the evening of August 18th, 1765, he sank into his arms in a fit of apoplexy, and immediately expired. By this event, his eldest son Joseph, who had been elected King of the Romans, and crowned at Frankfort' in the spring of 1764, became Emperor, with the title of Joseph II. Francis I. was fifty-eight years of age at the time of his death. He was a good-humoured, polite gentleman, and had enriched himself by entering into various commercial and banking speculations. He had so little ambition, that he was better pleased to appear as a private man than as an Emperor, and although co-Regent with his wife, took little or no part in the government of the Austrian Monarchy. The Austrian Government, therefore, proceeded in much the same train as before. Maria Theresa, who had experienced in her early days the evils and horrors of war, was inclined to pursue a peaceful policy. It was her aim to strengthen the connection with the Bourbon Courts, with which view she gave the hand of her daughter, Maria Antoinette, to the Dauphin, afterwards Louis XVI., May 19th, 1770. Another Archduchess married Ferdinand IV., King of the Two Sicilies, and a third was united with the Duke of Parma.

2

But the character of Joseph II. differed from his mother's. Although possessed of considerable talents, he was tormented with a febrile and restless ambition, without any very fixed or definite object. During his father's lifetime he had endeavoured to procure the reversion to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, to the prejudice of his brother Leopold; alleging, that although he should become an Emperor on his father's death, he should not possess a foot of territory. Maria Theresa, to satisfy this craving, had promised to make him co-Regent of Austria on the death of her hus

Goethe, then a youth of fifteen, was present at the ceremony, and has left a description of it in his Wahrheit und Dichtung, Buch. v.

2 Born November 2nd, 1755.

CHAP. L.]

CLAIMANTS OF BAVARIA.

219

band; but, during his mother's lifetime, that office remained little more than nominal. It was chiefly through Joseph's ambition and desire of aggrandizement that Austria was threatened with the War of the Bavarian Succession. This affair, which assumes very small dimensions when compared with the wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions, need not occupy any great share of our

attention.

By the death of Maximilian Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, December 30th, 1777, the younger branch of the House of Wittelsbach became extinct, and with it the Bavarian Electorate, which had been vested only in that family. Charles Theodore, Elector Palatine, as representative of the elder, or Rodolphine, branch of the House of Wittelsbach, was undoubtedly entitled to succeed to the Bavarian dominions, with the exception of the allodial possessions. The common ancestor of the two branches, Louis the Severe, Elector Palatine and Duke of Bavaria, had divided the succession to those possessions between his two sons, Rodolph and Louis, in 1310; and the latter, after obtaining the Imperial Crown as Louis V., had confirmed this partition by a treaty with his nephews, sons of his elder brother, Rodolph, in 1329. By this treaty the two contracting parties had reserved the right of reciprocal succession in their respective dominions, the Rhenish Electoral Palatinate and the Duchy of Bavaria.1 Several claimants, however, burrowing in the inexhaustible chaos of the German archives, advanced pretensions to various parts of the Bavarian dominions. Maria Theresa, as Queen of Bohemia, claimed the fiefs of Upper Bavaria, and, as Archduchess of Austria, all the districts which had belonged to the line of Straubingen. But of this line she was not the true representative, but rather Frederick II. of Prussia, as descended from the eldest sister. Nor were her pretensions as Queen of Bohemia better founded. Joseph II. also claimed several portions of Bavaria as Imperial fiefs. But his pretensions were contrary to the provisions of the Golden Bull, as well as the Peace of Westphalia and the public law of Germany, which recognizes as valid such family compacts as those made by the House of Wittelsbach, even though detrimental to the rights of the Empire. Other minor claimants were the Electress Dowager of Saxony, who, as sister of Maximilian Joseph, claimed the allodial succession; and the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who claimed the Landgraviate of Leuchtenberg by virtue of an

3

1 Pfeffel, t. i. pp. 472, 494.

2 See Garden, Hist. des Traités, t. iv. p. 246. 3 Ibid. p. 248.