ABSTRACT
The origins of the War of the Second Coalition were as complex as the aims of the protagonists. They encompassed such grandiose schemes as Bonaparte's eastern expedition and such tedious pettiness as the German princes' wrangling over territory at the Congress of Rastatt. With stubborn tenacity the Austrian negotiators had insisted that the territory to the north of a line running from the confluence of the river Nette with the Rhine near Koblenz to Venloo on the Meuse should remain part of the Holy Roman Empire. Throughout the first half of 1798 attempts were made to persuade the French to grant more territory in Italy, to prevent Prussian expansion in Germany and to give up the plan to secularise the ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire. Austria's hand was then forced by an independent initiative in Italy, for on 12 November 1798 the Neapolitan army invaded the Roman Republic.
