BEFORE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Into the details of history we cannot here enter, but we must glance for a moment at the most important territorial readjustments that were made in the course of the first half of the eighteenth century, though we must remember that it is not easy to make a compact statement covering all the details.
The one fact of greatest moment is that the Italian peninsula, with its population of fourteen millions,[1] had no central dominating government, but was split up among many different sovereignties. Between 1700 and 1750 four treaties were made which transferred large portions of Italian territory from one European power to another. The first treaty was that of Utrecht in 1713, at the close of the War of the Spanish Succession. This transferred the Kingdom of Naples, which had been Spanish since 1504, from Spain to Austria; Sardinia from Spain to Austria; Sicily from Spain to Savoy; and the Duchy of Milan from Spain to Austria. In 1720 a partial readjustment was made by an agreement between Savoy and Austria to exchange Sicily and Sardinia. This had for Austria the advantage of giving her sovereignty over the adjacent regions of Naples and Sicily. In 1738 the Peace of Vienna brought about extensive changes. Austria relinquished the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily and other bits of Italian territory to the Spanish Bourbons and in her turn received Parma and Piacenza, whose last Farnese duke had died in 1731. At the same time, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was confirmed to Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine. He had married Maria Theresa of Austria in 1736; and hence Tuscany became to all intents an Austrian possession. But in 1765 their son Peter Leopold was made Grand Duke of Tuscany, and he ruled here with practical independency of Austria until his election as Emperor in 1790. As a minor matter we may add that early in the eighteenth century the Duchy of Mantua became a dependency of Austria and was made a part of Austrian Lombardy. Lastly, we note that, in 1748, at the close of the War of the Austrian Succession, Parma and Piacenza were given to a Bourbon
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