ABSTRACT
The only significant loser by the Silesian war was the Habsburg Empire. Even before the war had ended Count Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz had begun serious efforts to overhaul the Habsburg finances. The war of the Austrian Succession made international relations more fluid by eroding old assumptions and certainties. In Vienna the opposition to France which had well over two centuries of tradition behind it now seemed increasingly irrelevant and a hindrance in coping with the new situation facing the Habsburg's in central Europe. Prussia's quantum leap to a new level of international importance was all the more impressive to contemporaries because it had been so rapid and because it owed nothing to population or wealth and everything to organisation and leadership. Frederick had laid the foundations of a Prusso-Austrian, Hohenzollern-Habsburg rivalry, with potent overtones of Protestant-Catholic antagonism, which was to last for well over a century.
