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Politicy, Diplomacy, Battles
Geoffrey Symcox
This chapter analyses the role played by the Savoyard state in the pattern of alliances dur-
ing the War of Spanish Succession, down to 1706. After the outbreak of hostilities early in
1701, precipitated by the Habsburg emperor Leopold I’s bid to conquer the duchy of
Milan, Duke Vittorio Amedeo II of Savoy allied with the emperor’s opponents, Louis XIV
and his nephew Philip V, the new Bourbon king of Spain. The Bourbon alliance however
offered the duke no possibility of territorial expansion, and threatened him with encir-
clement. The formation of the Grand Alliance (Austria, England and the Dutch Republic)
against the Bourbons opened a way for Vittorio Amedeo to escape from Louis XIV’s tute-
lage, and to obtain territory in Lombardy from the Habsburgs in return for his military sup-
port. In September 1703 he broke with Louis XIV, gambling that the support of his new
allies would counterbalance the superiority of the Bourbon armies arrayed against him.
This gamble paid off, but at a heavy cost. Through 1704 and 1705 the Bourbon army con-
quered much of Piedmont, and in 1706 besieged Turin. On 7 September of that year Vit-
torio Amedeo routed the besiegers and liberated Turin with the aid of a Habsburg army
under his cousin Prince Eugenio of Savoy, recruited and paid to a large extent by his Eng-
lish and Dutch allies. This decisive victory assured the future autonomy of the Savoyard
state, but it unleashed an escalating conflict between the duke and his Habsburg ally. The
Habsburgs’ conquest of Milan and Naples in 1707 established them as the dominant power
in the Italian peninsula, threatening to block any further expansion by the Savoyard state,
and setting the stage for more than a century of political and territorial rivalry between the
Houses of Austria and Savoy.
Eugenio of Savoy: A Portrait
Alessandro Barbero
Prince Eugenio of Savoy is an evasive character, who has left us neither memoirs nor pri-
vate correspondence. Son of a Savoy prince and nephew of Cardinal Mazarin, he was born
and lived in France until he was eighteen. Subsequently immersed in the highest ranks of
the Austrian nobility, he represents an extreme example of the cosmopolitan nature of high
society during the
ancien regime
. His life can be clearly divided between his first eighteen
years, spent in the shadows at the court of the Sun King, the next thirty-five, during which
he fought in no less than thirty campaigns, and the remaining eighteen of his old age, when
politics prevailed over soldiery. This essay mainly concentrates on the central period, in
which Eugenio emerges as the most famous general of his time. His twelve great battles,
Abstracts