18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 33

[cahn]

And, I mean, it doesn't have to be just 18th century characters, either!

(also, waiting for Yuletide!)

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Victor Amadeus II and Eugene

[mildred_of_midgard]

Eugene of Savoy and Victor Amadeus were cousins. VA's father Charles Emanuel II was the son of Victor Amadeus I, who was the father of Charles Emanuel I, whose younger son was Thomas Francis, Prince of Carignano, who was the father of Eugene Maurice, Prince of Soissons, who married Olympia Mancini, one of the Mazarin nieces and implicated in the infamous Affair of the Poisons, and Eugene and Olympia were the parents of Eugene. Eugene, as we've discussed, ends up in Austria because he can't get a good job in France after his mother was exiled for her involvement in the Affair of the Poisons.

Eugene and VA get along fairly well at first. VA gives Eugene sources of income when the French kick him out and the Austrians aren't paying him well enough yet. Eugene is outraged and betrayed, though, when VA switches sides in 1696:

The armistice finally revealed all and Eugene was never to trust his cousin again; their relations were strained for the rest of their lives, although Eugene continued to pay due deference to the duke as head of his own family and to write to him fairly intimately for a further ten years.

Eugene's opinion was that you should pick one side and be loyal to it forever, like he did with Austria after France didn't want him.

Conflicting interests between the cousins leading to differences of opinions in how the War of the Spanish Succession should be fought come between them, and they grow further apart. Then, finally, in 1719, drama happens.

Remember that Charles VI had an older brother, Joseph, who was HRE from 1705 to 1711, just before Charles. He died with no sons, so his brother Charles succeeded him, but he had two daughters. These daughters marry into the Saxon and Bavarian electoral houses, and these marriages result in alternative claimants to MT. The whole Pragmatic Sanction was driven by Charles' desire not to have the HRE divided up by the claims of his nieces.

Eugene, unfortunately, in 1719, is supporting the marrying of Joseph's daughters into Saxony and Bavaria. Which means he runs afoul of other factions.

In particular, one faction is for marrying Maria Amalia (the one who marries the Bavarian Wittelsbach guy, Charles Albert, and thus ends up Holy Roman Empress for a few years; she will meet Wilhelmine and argue about chairs and speak a dialect W has difficult understanding) into Savoy. She was supposed to marry VA's oldest, favorite son, but he died of smallpox in 1715 (and VA went a little crazy and butchered a horse as therapy).

VA obviously wants the Savoyard marriage to go through so he can claim the Holy Roman Empire for his descendants! Or at least some of the Habsburg inheritance.

So he funds a cabal that badmouths Eugene to the emperor and tries to get him dismissed starting in February 1719. The cabal accepts his money but have their own political motivations, like getting Eugene's position as governor of the Austrian Netherlands taken away from him.

Eugene rides the political waves, wins back the emperor's favor, and gets his enemies dismissed and disgraced. VA's envoy is sent away from Vienna, and no Savoy marriage. Maria Amalia marries Charles Albert of Bavaria in 1722; her older sister Maria Josepha marries future Augustus III of Saxony-Poland (son and heir of August the Strong), in August 1719.

Eugene decides to stay out of marriage intrigues forevermore. "Nope, Boss, I have no opinion on who your daughter should marry. I'm just a foreigner!"