ABSTRACT
Although the Habsburg government in Vienna had accepted the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt reluctantly, Emperor Karl VI (1711–40) had much reason none the less to congratulate himself and his two predecessors on the outcome of the several decades of crisis, both internal and external, which had so seriously threatened the integrity and cohesion of his dominions. Whereas many well-informed Europeans on several occasions in the previous forty years had had good grounds to predict a diminution or even collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, it actually emerged from the pacification of the War of the Spanish Succession and its subsequent adjustments as the largest state in both population and territorial extent in all of western and central Europe. It had not only salvaged as much of the Spanish inheritance for itself as could reasonably be expected, including both the Spanish (now Austrian) Netherlands and the strategically important Italian territories, but had also solidified its control over nearly all of historic Hungary, virtually neutralizing its ancient Turkish enemy in the process. And while it is true that there was still some grumbling in the Empire about the losses of imperial territory to France, and that Karl had been forced to accept the longest electoral capitulation ever demanded of a candidate for the imperial throne as the price of his election, his relations with the imperial estates, benefiting from the diminished tensions of a more peaceful Europe, were generally good.
