What turned the transfer of a crown that had passed through so many into a struggle the ended on a pile of bodies, an outrageously burst economic bubble, and a Spanish flavor of the house of bourbon?
“Sometimes a nation’s luck runs out. Spain had had a good run, but centuries of Hapsburg inbreeding had finally produced a king barely able to function as an adult – King Charles II of Spain.”
J.M. Roberts, A History of Europe
The sole surviving son of a marriage between an uncle and a niece, King Charles was dysfunctional.
He was unable to speak until he was four, and unable to walk until he was eight. The only adult activity he performed enthusiastically was shooting. Because of a massive, deformed jaw he was barely able to speak coherently or chew. Because of uncontrollable premature ejaculation, he produced no children.
They called him “Charles the Hexed”.
Charles’s arch-nemesis was also his brother-in-law, King Louis XIV of France, who had married Charles’s half-sister, the oldest daughter of the previous king of Spain. As the “Sun King,” Louis set Europe’s standards of magnificence with his new palace at Versailles. By 1700, he had already fought four wars against the rest of Europe, trying to take the Spanish territories in Flanders and Burgundy along the eastern border of France. To keep him from gaining too much power, Austria, Britain, and Holland had established the ongoing Grand Alliance against him.
Charles the Hexed had always seemed doomed to a short life; so with the extinction of the Spanish Hapsburgs appearing imminent, the rest of Europe haggled at several conferences over who should get the inheritance. It was decided that the Hapsburgs in Spain would be revived using another Charles, the brother of Emperor Joseph of Austria, while France would be placated with stray Hapsburg lands scattered around the continent. Charles grew annoyed at the way the other great powers talked about him like he were already dead and their plans to carve up Spain. Out of spite, in 1700 on his deathbed, Charles altered his will to prevent the partition of his vast empire; he gave the whole thing to the French claimant, his half-sister’s grandson, who was also the grandson of King Louis XIV. This would link the two primary powers in Europe, leaving everyone else a distant second, so the rest of the world decided the union had to be stopped.
Austria invaded Italy to take the Spanish territories of Milan and Naples. The English held the French in the Low Countries. The war climaxed in 1704. England and Austria met up with a combined army around a hundred thousand. At the time, France was rampaging through Germany with infamously unbridled enthusiasm. The Anglos and Austrians snuck through the night like rats and France awoke already compromised. Artillery isolated their infantry while the cavalry was chased off. It was the first time someone had fucked up the French in more than fifty years.
Yet France still fell ass backward into victory. In 1711, the Emperor of Austria died childless. His brother, the claimant to the Spanish throne, became the new emperor. The Dutch and English got spooked because they didn’t really like the idea of Austria + Spain any more than France + Spain. So they drew up a treaty that split the inheritance of the mutant Charles between Spain + their overseas colonies (France) and everything Spanish in Europe but Spain (Austria).
The Normal Times 