Sorry about the low resolution, but just make a note of where Savoy is in relation to France, the Duchy of Milan, and "Austrian Lands."
Zooming in:
High-level Overview
The number one thing you need to understand about VA's policies is that he's trapped between two bigger and more powerful states: France and Austria. Both of them have designs on Italy. Spain, furthermore, has territory in neighboring Italy, such as Parma and Milan.
The number two thing you need to understand is that VA's raison d'être is:
- My mother doesn't tell me what to do. - My subjects don't tell me what to do. - Louis XIV doesn't tell me what to do. - The Pope doesn't tell me what to do. - The Emperor doesn't tell me what to do.
and that most of his life is a struggle with the fact that at one time or another, all of these parties are, in fact, in a position to tell him what to do. If you understand that, the rest is details.
Now for the details.
Savoy as Satellite of France
Savoy is a small, weak state located next to a big, strong state. When VA inherits in the 1670s and comes to power in the 1680s, Louis XIV is at his peak and Savoy is simply a client state. It has no independent policies of what Louis wants. Furthermore, it's fairly decentralized, with factions fighting all the time.
There's not much his mother can do about that, since she is 1) a WOMAN, 2) only temporarily in power with no rights of her own. Her main goal ends up being keeping herself in power as long as possible (Symcox said her marriage was a boring and frustrating time with no scope for her ambitions, which I can believe), which meant getting Louis' help with playing the nobles off each other and keeping her from being overthrown and, eventually, her son from taking over when he comes of age.
Victor Amadeus comes of age determined to get rid of "My nobles tell me what to do," "My mother tells me what to do," and "Louis XIV tells me what to do." But he's got to go one thing at a time.
If he wants to overthrow Mom, he's got to get Louis on his side. And Louis likes having his neighbor Savoy as a client state. So VA has to play up how loyal he'll be, marry a French princess (Anne, daughter of gay Philippe and thus niece of Louis, whom VA will then resent and despise), and promise to take Louis' side in all his wars.
Louis supports his bid for power, Mom is banished from power forever, VA's in power. Sweet! Only now he's Louis' underling, which he does not like.. But there's nothing he can do about that right now, so he focuses on reforming the state into something modern, financially stabilized, and centralized, with a proportionately large army and an absolute prince at its head. Now, this process had been started before him, but he has more success than his predecessors in taming the factions of the nobility and the peasant unrests. The per capita proportion of the Savoyard army to its population ends up being second only to Prussia.
Nine Years' War Starts
Not long after VA comes to power (1684), Louis XIV ends up at war with most of Europe, because everyone is upset with his powermongering efforts toward hegemony in Europe. And by "everyone" we mean "especially William III," who as of 1688 is king of England and starting the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) against Louis. Also, remember that everyone is planning for the death of Carlos II of Spain at this point. (The VA bio uses Carlos, which I've decided I shall also use, because there are too many Charleses. I almost regret having used Charles XII instead of Karl XII. :P)
This is not irrelevant to Victor Amadeus. Right now, he's stuck doing whatever Louis tells him, giving him regiments (which he knows are effectively hostages for Savoy's good behavior) to fight in this war, etc. But! Savoy's proximity to France, while a weakness in that it allows France to ride roughshod over it, is also a strength in that it's in a really strategic position for invading France. Which means if France is at war, you can use your strategic position to get good terms from France's allies.
Switching Sides #1
Which VA promptly proceeds to do. His goal from the moment he came to power was to get out of the position of being Louis' satellite state. He's worked hard to semi-secretly replace the manpower for those regiments he had to give to Louis (making Louis rightly suspicious). And now the opportunity has come.
In 1690, VA allies with France, England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland (not yet Great Britain), and the Netherlands against Louis.
Switching Sides #2
So far so good! But parts of Savoy are historically imperial fiefs, and much of northern Italy is claimed by Leopold as imperial fiefs, and Leopold wants to grab VA's neighbor Milan from Spain when Carlos II dies. None of which makes VA happy, since he wants to grab neighbor Milan from Spain when Carlos II dies! And he most definitely does not want to trade weak Spain under Carlos II as a neighbor for strong Austria under Leopold.
So once Leopold starts throwing his weight around too much in Italy, VA is ripe pickings for defection.
And Louis is looking for someone to defect. France is financially exhausted, and the writing of the War of the Spanish Succession is on the wall. So Louis starts fishing for enemies who are willing to make a separate peace, and he gets a bite in Savoy. VA agrees to stop fighting and to marry his daughter to one of Louis' grandsons.
Once they make terms, they do something very similar to what Fritz and MT did with their separate peace: they pretend they're still at war until VA has an excuse to publicly sue for peace.
In Between Wars
VA now has a terrible reputation. He's now defected on all the major powers in his vicinity. This when people start making quips about him.
His 1696 defection makes it hard for William III and Leopold to carry on the war against France, since Savoy is in such a key strategic location. So Louis manages to bring the war to an end in 1697. Just in time for Carlos of Spain to die in 1700 and kick off another war!
But between 1697-1700, you may remember, Louis and William were trying to avoid another war by partitioning the Spanish empire. At one point, they had agreed to leave the Spanish throne to a Bavarian kid, only then the Bavarian kid promptly died, leaving no compromise candidate.
So while these negotiations are going on, VA is 1) reminding everyone that has a claim to the Spanish throne two, 2) generously offering to accept some Spanish territory as compensation instead. In particular, he wants Milan: prosperous territory contiguous to his, to which his family has vague claims.
But William III is not on board with this. He calls the idea of giving a large chunk of territory to the guy who just defected on him "a joke." (Symcox puts this in quotes, so I'm assuming either W3 or one of his ministers actually used this phrase.)
VA's other goal is not to let the Habsburgs get too strong in Italy, lest he trade being a satellite state of France for being a satellite state of Austria. In the words of one of his contemporaries:
I believe the Duke of Savoy would as willingly have the French at Milan as the Imperialists; but he would rather see the Turk than either of them.
So these talks go on right up until Louis realizes that the dying Carlos may have just made a will that leaves everything intact to the French. At which point he has no incentive to bargain with VA over a partition.
War of the Spanish Succession Starts, or, Savoy as Satellite State, Round 2
Sure enough, Philip d'Anjou gets an offer to become Philip V, Louis snaps at it, and Philip is installed in Spain. The Spanish governor of Milan promptly declares his loyalty to Philip. Now VA is trapped between two allied Bourbon powers. He can a) fight them, and have his territory occupied, or b) cooperate with them while looking for an opportunity to offer his services to the Allies as soon as possible.
You can guess which one he chooses! So while allowing Louis to march through his territory and marrying his daughter Marie-Louise to Philip V, ostensibly to cement his loyalty (he's now got 2 daughters married to 2 grandsons of Louis), he's frantically carrying on talks with Leopold. VA tells Leopold that he sided with Louis only under duress, and would have preferred Leopold. This is true, says Symcox, because Leopold was in a weaker position in Italy and would have had to make more concessions.
Now, since VA has a reputation at this point, when his cousin Eugene of Savoy appears at the head of an Imperial army in northern Italy waging war on France to conquer Milan for the Austrian Habsburgs, VA is immediately suspected of being in contact with him.
[Goldstone digression: this is where Goldstone adopts a "once a Habsburg territory, always a Habsburg territory" approach, so if the French were in northern Italy, they must have stolen it. But as we've seen, the Spanish owned the Duchy of Milan, the local Spanish governor declared for Philip, and the French were there with permission, while the Austrians were invading and trying to turn it into an Austrian territory. But, as VA would point out, there's a reason that any time Louis showed up in his grandson's territory with permission, all the neighbors got super nervous. I.e. what happened when he occupied the Spanish Netherlands with permission and the Dutch promptly declared war.]
Switching Sides #3
Now apparently Eugene (according to McKay) was careful not to open talks while he was in northern Italy, lest he be accused of treason for unauthorized negotiating with the enemy, the moment he was back in Vienna he was closely involved in the talks to get VA to defect.
Which VA, predictably--Horowski says something like "His watch showed him it was Switching Sides o'Clock"--does.
This is when Marie-Louise writes her "how long, dear Papa, are you going to persecute your own children?" letter that made me and selenak wonder if there was a conscious allusion to Cicero there.
So now Eugene and VA are allies, and they wage war against France for many years. In 1707 they try invading Toulon (southern coast of France, west of Savoy, see the zoomed in map above) with British help. They fail at invading but do manage to strike a blow at the French navy.
Late middle ages and Renaissance footnote: Savoy's geographical position is why Habsburgs and France were majorly invested in who was ruling there back in the day already. cahn, remember in the book you've just read, this is why Margaret the daughter of Emperor Maximilian ("future pape"), aunt of Charles V. and great aunt of Margaret of Parma got married to Savoy's duke as her third and final husband, why she kicked out his bastard half brother and ruled herself (since her husband was of the amiable lazy type and Margaret clearly had some of the same genes as much later Habsburg MT had), why said half brother ended up at the French court, and also why Margaret's sister-in-law Louise of Savoy, with whom she grew up as a child at the court of Anne the Regent, became a major player once Louise's son Francis became future Francis I.
Margaret even later when living in the Netherlands again and governing there called her place of residence the "Cour de Savoye", and to differentiate her from all the other Margarets of Austria, she's sometimes also called "Margaret of Savoy", though that didn't become as popular as calling teen detective Margaret of Austria "Margaret of Parma".
So now Eugene and VA are allies, and they wage war against France for many years. In 1707 they try invading Toulon (southern coast of France, west of Savoy, see the zoomed in map above) with British help.
Here's where we connect this discussion to a discussion of a few months ago. The British admiral who's leading the fleet that tries to invade southern France via Toulon, with VA and Eugene, is Admiral Shovell. As soon as I saw that name, I had to check if it was the one I knew, and it was. I haven't told you about him, but he came up in my reading, because...
After the failure to invade France, Shovell has to sail his fleet out of the Mediterranean and back up to England. As the ships get close to England, the weather is really bad. They can't take sightings or soundings to determine where they are, so they get horribly lost. Not in the sense that they're very far away from their destination, but in that they're much, much closer than they think they are. This means they end up in shallow waters, thinking they're in deep waters, and the ships run aground. Four warships with everyone aboard them sink, killing 1,400-2,000 people.
Now, this is presented in the longitude book I read, by Dava Sobel, as a result of the longitude problem not being solved, i.e. they had no way of telling how far east they were. Wikipedia tells me, in contrast, that the ships most likely sank for other reasons, including failure to determine latitude adequately. However,
While no contemporary discussions are known that appear to relate the disaster specifically to the longitude problem, the scale of the disaster may have contributed to concern about the problem in general, which ultimately led to the Longitude Act in 1714.
And this is of course the act that led to the events of the longitude book and the invention of Harrison's timekeeping device!
I should add that Sobel, a few pages into the book, also presented stories of the sinking that sounded so apocryphal to me that I immediately stopped reading, checked Wikipedia, and was informed that these stories were unsupported myths that arose decades later. So this immediately told me that the longitude book could not be trusted for history. (Sadly, or perhaps encouragingly considering how many people use it, Wikipedia presents a better sourced and more convincing looking account of this disaster than the published book I read. It even points out that Sobel is reviving discredited myths by presenting them as "unqualified truth" in the book.)
Regardless, it was cool to make a connection and realize that an episode in the two bios I was reading simultaneously, Eugene and Victor Amadeus, were related to an event I knew about from reading up on the longitude problem!
Also. Up to 2000 people dying off the coast of the Scilly Isles because the British navy can't tell where it is that close to home, in 1707, came as quite a shock to me. This isn't Amelia Earhart getting lost in the middle of the Pacific, this is the Brits at the Scilly Isles!
Navigation is harder than I thought, it turns out.
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cahn
Victor Amadeus II: Why is he always switching sides? Part 1
Date: 2022-01-03 12:40 am (UTC)Sorry about the low resolution, but just make a note of where Savoy is in relation to France, the Duchy of Milan, and "Austrian Lands."
Zooming in:
High-level Overview
The number one thing you need to understand about VA's policies is that he's trapped between two bigger and more powerful states: France and Austria. Both of them have designs on Italy. Spain, furthermore, has territory in neighboring Italy, such as Parma and Milan.
The number two thing you need to understand is that VA's raison d'être is:
- My mother doesn't tell me what to do.
- My subjects don't tell me what to do.
- Louis XIV doesn't tell me what to do.
- The Pope doesn't tell me what to do.
- The Emperor doesn't tell me what to do.
and that most of his life is a struggle with the fact that at one time or another, all of these parties are, in fact, in a position to tell him what to do. If you understand that, the rest is details.
Now for the details.
Savoy as Satellite of France
Savoy is a small, weak state located next to a big, strong state. When VA inherits in the 1670s and comes to power in the 1680s, Louis XIV is at his peak and Savoy is simply a client state. It has no independent policies of what Louis wants. Furthermore, it's fairly decentralized, with factions fighting all the time.
There's not much his mother can do about that, since she is 1) a WOMAN, 2) only temporarily in power with no rights of her own. Her main goal ends up being keeping herself in power as long as possible (Symcox said her marriage was a boring and frustrating time with no scope for her ambitions, which I can believe), which meant getting Louis' help with playing the nobles off each other and keeping her from being overthrown and, eventually, her son from taking over when he comes of age.
Victor Amadeus comes of age determined to get rid of "My nobles tell me what to do," "My mother tells me what to do," and "Louis XIV tells me what to do." But he's got to go one thing at a time.
If he wants to overthrow Mom, he's got to get Louis on his side. And Louis likes having his neighbor Savoy as a client state. So VA has to play up how loyal he'll be, marry a French princess (Anne, daughter of gay Philippe and thus niece of Louis, whom VA will then resent and despise), and promise to take Louis' side in all his wars.
Louis supports his bid for power, Mom is banished from power forever, VA's in power. Sweet! Only now he's Louis' underling, which he does not like.. But there's nothing he can do about that right now, so he focuses on reforming the state into something modern, financially stabilized, and centralized, with a proportionately large army and an absolute prince at its head. Now, this process had been started before him, but he has more success than his predecessors in taming the factions of the nobility and the peasant unrests. The per capita proportion of the Savoyard army to its population ends up being second only to Prussia.
Nine Years' War Starts
Not long after VA comes to power (1684), Louis XIV ends up at war with most of Europe, because everyone is upset with his powermongering efforts toward hegemony in Europe. And by "everyone" we mean "especially William III," who as of 1688 is king of England and starting the Nine Years' War (1688-1697) against Louis. Also, remember that everyone is planning for the death of Carlos II of Spain at this point. (The VA bio uses Carlos, which I've decided I shall also use, because there are too many Charleses. I almost regret having used Charles XII instead of Karl XII. :P)
This is not irrelevant to Victor Amadeus. Right now, he's stuck doing whatever Louis tells him, giving him regiments (which he knows are effectively hostages for Savoy's good behavior) to fight in this war, etc. But! Savoy's proximity to France, while a weakness in that it allows France to ride roughshod over it, is also a strength in that it's in a really strategic position for invading France. Which means if France is at war, you can use your strategic position to get good terms from France's allies.
Switching Sides #1
Which VA promptly proceeds to do. His goal from the moment he came to power was to get out of the position of being Louis' satellite state. He's worked hard to semi-secretly replace the manpower for those regiments he had to give to Louis (making Louis rightly suspicious). And now the opportunity has come.
In 1690, VA allies with France, England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland (not yet Great Britain), and the Netherlands against Louis.
Switching Sides #2
So far so good! But parts of Savoy are historically imperial fiefs, and much of northern Italy is claimed by Leopold as imperial fiefs, and Leopold wants to grab VA's neighbor Milan from Spain when Carlos II dies. None of which makes VA happy, since he wants to grab neighbor Milan from Spain when Carlos II dies! And he most definitely does not want to trade weak Spain under Carlos II as a neighbor for strong Austria under Leopold.
So once Leopold starts throwing his weight around too much in Italy, VA is ripe pickings for defection.
And Louis is looking for someone to defect. France is financially exhausted, and the writing of the War of the Spanish Succession is on the wall. So Louis starts fishing for enemies who are willing to make a separate peace, and he gets a bite in Savoy. VA agrees to stop fighting and to marry his daughter to one of Louis' grandsons.
Once they make terms, they do something very similar to what Fritz and MT did with their separate peace: they pretend they're still at war until VA has an excuse to publicly sue for peace.
In Between Wars
VA now has a terrible reputation. He's now defected on all the major powers in his vicinity. This when people start making quips about him.
His 1696 defection makes it hard for William III and Leopold to carry on the war against France, since Savoy is in such a key strategic location. So Louis manages to bring the war to an end in 1697. Just in time for Carlos of Spain to die in 1700 and kick off another war!
But between 1697-1700, you may remember, Louis and William were trying to avoid another war by partitioning the Spanish empire. At one point, they had agreed to leave the Spanish throne to a Bavarian kid, only then the Bavarian kid promptly died, leaving no compromise candidate.
So while these negotiations are going on, VA is 1) reminding everyone that has a claim to the Spanish throne two, 2) generously offering to accept some Spanish territory as compensation instead. In particular, he wants Milan: prosperous territory contiguous to his, to which his family has vague claims.
But William III is not on board with this. He calls the idea of giving a large chunk of territory to the guy who just defected on him "a joke." (Symcox puts this in quotes, so I'm assuming either W3 or one of his ministers actually used this phrase.)
VA's other goal is not to let the Habsburgs get too strong in Italy, lest he trade being a satellite state of France for being a satellite state of Austria. In the words of one of his contemporaries:
I believe the Duke of Savoy would as willingly have the French at Milan as the Imperialists; but he would rather see the Turk than either of them.
So these talks go on right up until Louis realizes that the dying Carlos may have just made a will that leaves everything intact to the French. At which point he has no incentive to bargain with VA over a partition.
War of the Spanish Succession Starts, or, Savoy as Satellite State, Round 2
Sure enough, Philip d'Anjou gets an offer to become Philip V, Louis snaps at it, and Philip is installed in Spain. The Spanish governor of Milan promptly declares his loyalty to Philip. Now VA is trapped between two allied Bourbon powers. He can a) fight them, and have his territory occupied, or b) cooperate with them while looking for an opportunity to offer his services to the Allies as soon as possible.
You can guess which one he chooses! So while allowing Louis to march through his territory and marrying his daughter Marie-Louise to Philip V, ostensibly to cement his loyalty (he's now got 2 daughters married to 2 grandsons of Louis), he's frantically carrying on talks with Leopold.
VA tells Leopold that he sided with Louis only under duress, and would have preferred Leopold. This is true, says Symcox, because Leopold was in a weaker position in Italy and would have had to make more concessions.
Now, since VA has a reputation at this point, when his cousin Eugene of Savoy appears at the head of an Imperial army in northern Italy waging war on France to conquer Milan for the Austrian Habsburgs, VA is immediately suspected of being in contact with him.
[Goldstone digression: this is where Goldstone adopts a "once a Habsburg territory, always a Habsburg territory" approach, so if the French were in northern Italy, they must have stolen it. But as we've seen, the Spanish owned the Duchy of Milan, the local Spanish governor declared for Philip, and the French were there with permission, while the Austrians were invading and trying to turn it into an Austrian territory. But, as VA would point out, there's a reason that any time Louis showed up in his grandson's territory with permission, all the neighbors got super nervous. I.e. what happened when he occupied the Spanish Netherlands with permission and the Dutch promptly declared war.]
Switching Sides #3
Now apparently Eugene (according to McKay) was careful not to open talks while he was in northern Italy, lest he be accused of treason for unauthorized negotiating with the enemy, the moment he was back in Vienna he was closely involved in the talks to get VA to defect.
Which VA, predictably--Horowski says something like "His watch showed him it was Switching Sides o'Clock"--does.
This is when Marie-Louise writes her "how long, dear Papa, are you going to persecute your own children?" letter that made me and
So now Eugene and VA are allies, and they wage war against France for many years. In 1707 they try invading Toulon (southern coast of France, west of Savoy, see the zoomed in map above) with British help. They fail at invading but do manage to strike a blow at the French navy.
Re: Victor Amadeus II: Why is he always switching sides? Part 1
Date: 2022-01-03 07:17 am (UTC)Late middle ages and Renaissance footnote: Savoy's geographical position is why Habsburgs and France were majorly invested in who was ruling there back in the day already.
Margaret even later when living in the Netherlands again and governing there called her place of residence the "Cour de Savoye", and to differentiate her from all the other Margarets of Austria, she's sometimes also called "Margaret of Savoy", though that didn't become as popular as calling teen detective Margaret of Austria "Margaret of Parma".
Scilly naval disaster
Date: 2022-01-04 12:44 am (UTC)Here's where we connect this discussion to a discussion of a few months ago. The British admiral who's leading the fleet that tries to invade southern France via Toulon, with VA and Eugene, is Admiral Shovell. As soon as I saw that name, I had to check if it was the one I knew, and it was. I haven't told you about him, but he came up in my reading, because...
After the failure to invade France, Shovell has to sail his fleet out of the Mediterranean and back up to England. As the ships get close to England, the weather is really bad. They can't take sightings or soundings to determine where they are, so they get horribly lost. Not in the sense that they're very far away from their destination, but in that they're much, much closer than they think they are. This means they end up in shallow waters, thinking they're in deep waters, and the ships run aground. Four warships with everyone aboard them sink, killing 1,400-2,000 people.
Now, this is presented in the longitude book I read, by Dava Sobel, as a result of the longitude problem not being solved, i.e. they had no way of telling how far east they were. Wikipedia tells me, in contrast, that the ships most likely sank for other reasons, including failure to determine latitude adequately. However,
While no contemporary discussions are known that appear to relate the disaster specifically to the longitude problem, the scale of the disaster may have contributed to concern about the problem in general, which ultimately led to the Longitude Act in 1714.
And this is of course the act that led to the events of the longitude book and the invention of Harrison's timekeeping device!
I should add that Sobel, a few pages into the book, also presented stories of the sinking that sounded so apocryphal to me that I immediately stopped reading, checked Wikipedia, and was informed that these stories were unsupported myths that arose decades later. So this immediately told me that the longitude book could not be trusted for history. (Sadly, or perhaps encouragingly considering how many people use it, Wikipedia presents a better sourced and more convincing looking account of this disaster than the published book I read. It even points out that Sobel is reviving discredited myths by presenting them as "unqualified truth" in the book.)
Regardless, it was cool to make a connection and realize that an episode in the two bios I was reading simultaneously, Eugene and Victor Amadeus, were related to an event I knew about from reading up on the longitude problem!
Also. Up to 2000 people dying off the coast of the Scilly Isles because the British navy can't tell where it is that close to home, in 1707, came as quite a shock to me. This isn't Amelia Earhart getting lost in the middle of the Pacific, this is the Brits at the Scilly Isles!
Navigation is harder than I thought, it turns out.