The Treaty of Rastatt

MAR 07 1714 · 12:00

Prince Eugene of Savoy and Marshal de Villars at Rastatt, 1714, by Paul Dominique Philippoteaux. Place: Schloss Rastatt, Margraviate of Baden-Baden Figures: Prince Eugene of Savoy, for Emperor Charles VI · Marshal Claude Louis Hector de Villars, for Louis XIV · Charles VI himself, refusing to sign anything bearing the title of Philip V of Spain The Emperor's Late Peace The Treaty of Utrecht (see [[peace-of-utrecht-1713]]) closes the War of the Spanish Succession for everyone except the Holy Roman Emperor, who refuses to recognize Philip V as king of Spain and continues the war alone on the upper Rhine. Within nine months the financial and military reality is plain: without British and Dutch subsidies Charles VI cannot sustain a campaign against an unburdened France. Eugene of Savoy and Villars, who have faced each other across the Rhineland for years, are sent to negotiate without their respective foreign ministries. They meet at Rastatt and Baden-Baden over the winter of 1713 to 1714. The text is drafted in French, the first major imperial treaty for which Latin is set aside. The diplomatic prestige of the Empire takes a small but symbolic blow at the level of the language itself. What Rastatt Confirms The substance is mostly an acceptance of Utrecht's distributions. Charles VI receives the former Spanish Netherlands (now the Austrian Netherlands), Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and the Tuscan ports. France keeps Strasbourg, Landau, and a strong position on the Rhine; the Wittelsbach electors of Bavaria and Cologne, who had sided with France, are restored to their lands. Philip V is, by absence rather than by named recognition, accepted as king of Spain. A separate Treaty of Baden in September 1714 is signed by the Empire as a whole, and stages the same outcome in Latin for the imperial record. The episode confirms a pattern visible at Münster and Osnabrück sixty-six years earlier: the Holy Roman Empire as a coordinated diplomatic actor is essentially ceremonial. The substantive treaty is negotiated by its largest member, Austria, in its own dynastic interest; the imperial signature is added afterwards. The Westphalian principle that princes are sovereign within their territories has, for the Empire itself, become indistinguishable from dissolution.