ABSTRACT
Charles II of Spain, on 2 October 1700, a month before he died and already in a much weakened state, named his successor in his will and so achieved the most significant act of his thirty-five-year reign. The king had yielded to pressure from cardinal Portocarrero and the Castilian national party and by disinheriting his uncle, the emperor Leopold I, he had barred the cadet branch of the Habsburg family from what it saw as its rightful inheritance and distanced himself from the House of Habsburg. The Spanish nation wanted to preserve the Spanish monarchy of Charles V and Philip II and would not countenance any division of Spanish territories. The Council of Spain knew that the Austrian monarchy, for all its recent victories in Hungary, was incapable of successfully defending its Madrid ally in the war which then seemed inevitable.
