ABSTRACT
During the first half of the eighteenth century it was definitively accepted that territorial extent was not the only and certainly not the most reliable measure of great-power status. If it had been, Charles VI would have been one of the most successful Austrian Habsburgs: the Habsburg Monarchy had never been greater in extent than after the peace settlements of Rastatt and Passarowitz, with the Emperor’s possessions now reaching from the Scheldt down to the southern toe of the Italian peninsula, from the Rhine in the west as far as present-day Ukraine in the east. The old east-west dichotomy of Imperial foreign policy thus soon came to the fore again.
