Savoyard diplomacy in the eighteenth century (1684-1798)

Summary

The prestige and political importance of the Savoyard state during the eighteenth century contrasted sharply both with its own relative unimportance in the seventeenth and with the marked failure of most of the other Italian states to play an effective independent role in international politics in the period. This enhanced status was the product of a series of military and political developments during the decades around 1700. Victor Amadeus II's membership of the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV in the Nine Years War (1688–97), forcing the French first (1695) from Casale and then in a separate peace (1696) which undermined the anti-French coalition, from the other fortress, Pinerolo, which dominated his capital, Turin, astonished his contemporaries. Participation in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) won a more easily defended Alpine frontier with France, which confirmed the shaking off by the Savoyard state of its French satellite status to become more completely autonomou in the European states system. It also brought the coveted royal title associated with the rich and strategically valuable island kingdom of Sicily. Victor Amadeus was obliged by the QuadrupleAlliance to exchange Sicily for the inferior Sardinia (1718–20), something neither he nor his successors forgot or forgave. Nevertheless, the island and crown of Sardinia represented a significance advance on the dignity and dominion Victor Amadeus had enjoyed at his accession in 1684.2 Victor Amadeus was one of those princes who had successfully seized the opportunities made available in the cycle of European warfare between 1688 and 1720 to gain territory and dignity.