The War of the Spanish Succession, explained in one line: from 1701 to 1714, Europe's great powers fought over who should inherit the Spanish Empire after Charles II died childless — the Bourbon Philip of Anjou, backed by his grandfather Louis XIV of France, or the Habsburg archduke Charles, backed by the Grand Alliance of the Emperor, England and the Dutch Republic — and the compromise peace left Philip on the Spanish throne, stripped Spain of its European empire, and made Britain the war's chief beneficiary. Carlos, Neal and Wandschneider note that European historians have called it the first truly world war, with a North American theatre the English called Queen Anne's War.

Key takeaways

  • A will started it: Charles II's final will left his dominions undivided to Philip of Anjou. Louis XIV accepted it — after two partition treaties had already failed — and his follow-on provocations brought the Maritime Powers into the war (see Why did Europe fight over the Spanish throne?).
  • The toll is a range, not a number: compiled estimates of the dead run from about 400,000 (Bodart; Clodfelter) through 700,000 military killed and died (Urlanis) to 1,251,000 (Levy) — before the separate estimate of 600,000 French famine deaths after the Great Frost of 1709 (see What did the war cost?).
  • Debt was the second battlefield: Britain's national debt rose from £16.4 million in the pre-war peace to £53,680,000 at Utrecht, yet Britain alone emerged with a durable system of war finance — France was bankrupt within two years of the peace.
  • Utrecht redrew two maps: Spain lost the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan and Sicily in Europe, while Britain gained Gibraltar, Minorca, North American territory and the asiento — and, in Britannica's judgement, the leading position in world trade.

Contents

Overview

The War of the Spanish Succession was a general European war fought from 1701 to 1714 over the inheritance of Charles II of Spain, who died on 1 November 1700 without children — the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. Hostilities began in March 1701, and the last general peace was signed at Baden on 7 September 1714. Britannica frames it as a struggle to determine whether the vast possessions of the Spanish Empire should pass to the House of Bourbon or the House of Habsburg, both of which had dynastic claims, or be partitioned to preserve the balance of power in Europe. It was fought, Britannica records, on five land fronts — the Low Countries, the Rhine, the Danube, northern Italy and Spain itself — as well as at sea.

The outcome was partition by another name. Philip V, the Bourbon candidate, kept Spain and its American empire but renounced the French throne; Spain's European possessions went to Austria and Savoy; and the ultimate result, in Britannica's summary, was the erosion of French and Spanish power in favour of an ascendant Britain and its growing colonial empire.

Why did Europe fight over the Spanish throne?

Because the Spanish inheritance was too large to let either rival dynasty have it whole — and every attempt to divide it in advance collapsed. Spain, though weakened by decades of warfare, still held the Netherlands and much of Italy in Europe and an empire in the Americas. Both claimants descended from Philip IV's daughters: the Bourbon claim ran through Marie-Thérèse, who had renounced her Spanish rights on marrying Louis XIV, and the Habsburg claim through Margarita Teresa, who had made no renunciation — Britannica calls both claims dubious, and the compromise candidate's claim, the Bavarian electoral prince Joseph Ferdinand's, superior to either.

Diplomacy tried partition first. Under the First Partition Treaty of October 1698, Louis XIV and William III recognised Joseph Ferdinand's rights to Spain, the Spanish Netherlands and the Indies, with Milan going to the archduke Charles and the rest of Spanish Italy to the French dauphin. Spain was indignant, Charles II willed the whole inheritance to Joseph Ferdinand — and the boy died in February 1699. A Second Partition Treaty (agreed in 1699, subscribed in March 1700) offered Spain, the Netherlands and the Indies to Archduke Charles and Spanish Italy to the dauphin, but the Emperor refused it, hoping to win the whole succession. Charles II answered in October 1700 with a final will leaving his dominions undivided, and separate from any other crown, to Philip, duc d'Anjou, the dauphin's second son.

Louis accepted the will — war with the Emperor looked inevitable either way — and Philip was proclaimed king on 16 November 1700. What turned a Franco-Imperial succession dispute into a general war, Britannica argues, was Louis's own hauteur: in December 1700 he formally preserved Philip's place in the French succession, in September 1701 he recognised the exiled James II's son as king of England, and he made clear French merchants would enjoy exclusive rights in the slave trade to Spanish America. England and the Dutch Republic, already fearing French aggrandisement and the loss of their trade with Spain and the West Indies, renewed the Grand Alliance by the Treaty of The Hague in September 1701.

Peninsular Spain about 1700, showing the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon with Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands — the composite monarchy whose eastern kingdoms backed the Habsburg claimant and whose fueros were abolished after the war. Modern reference map, not a period depiction.
Peninsular Spain about 1700, showing the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon with Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands — the composite monarchy whose eastern kingdoms backed the Habsburg claimant and whose fueros were abolished after the war. Modern reference map, not a period depiction.

How did the war unfold?

The war unfolded in four movements, and its turning points were Blenheim (1704), which destroyed a Franco-Bavarian army and saved Vienna; Almansa (1707), which decided Spain itself for the Bourbons; Malplaquet (1709), the bloodiest battle, which cost the Allies about 22,000 casualties; and the death of Emperor Joseph I in 1711, which inverted the Allied war aim and opened the road to Utrecht. Hostilities began in March 1701, when French troops seized Spanish fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands; that year's fighting was mainly in northern Italy, where Prince Eugene of Savoy beat the French at Chiari on 1 September. The war became general in 1702 — England, the Dutch and the Emperor declared war in May — and an English expedition that failed at Cádiz destroyed the Spanish silver fleet in Vigo Bay in October. In 1703 Portugal joined the Allies, giving England a base in Iberia, and Savoy abandoned France for the Emperor.

The crisis year was 1704. A Franco-Bavarian army threatened Vienna until Marlborough marched to the Danube and, with Eugene, destroyed it at the Battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704 — a victory that, Britannica records, shattered the French army's reputation, saved Vienna and knocked Bavaria out of the war. In the Mediterranean, Admiral Rooke captured Gibraltar on 4 August 1704 and fought the French fleet at Málaga three weeks later, giving England command of the Mediterranean for the rest of the war. Marlborough broke the French again at Ramillies on 23 May 1706, overrunning Brabant and most of Flanders in a fortnight, and Eugene relieved Turin in September; the Convention of Milan in March 1707 took France out of Italy altogether.

Inside Spain the current ran the other way. The Allies took Barcelona in 1705, and Catalonia and Valencia declared for Archduke Charles; Allied forces entered Madrid in 1706 but could not hold it. At Almansa on 25 April 1707, a Franco-Spanish army under Berwick decisively defeated the Allied army in Spain — the turning point on that front in the encyclopedia account — and Aragon, Valencia and Murcia were lost. Spain, short of troops, arms and supplies, depended on France, and the war on Spanish soil was fought chiefly by foreign troops; yet Castile received the Bourbon dynasty enthusiastically, while Catalonia's resistance was a defence of its fueros — a civil war inside the European one. In the north, Marlborough won again at Oudenaarde (1708) and took Lille, but at Malplaquet on 11 September 1709 his victory cost about 22,000 Allied casualties against roughly 11,000–12,000 French casualties (Britannica gives about 12,000 French; the World History Encyclopedia around 11,000) — a bill that, Britannica notes, was looked upon in England almost as a defeat.

Peace nearly came twice on terms harsher than the final settlement: in 1709 Louis was prepared to relinquish the whole Spanish inheritance, and in 1710 he offered to pay for troops to expel his own grandson — but the Allies insisted French troops do the expelling, and both rounds collapsed. What actually ended the war was a death in Vienna. On 17 April 1711 Emperor Joseph I died, and the Habsburg claimant to Spain became Emperor Charles VI: putting him in Madrid would now unite Spain with the Empire, upsetting the balance of power, as the World History Encyclopedia puts it, as much as the Bourbon alliance the Allies had fought for ten years to prevent. Britain's Tory government opened separate negotiations, Marlborough was dismissed on 31 December 1711, the Congress of Utrecht met from January 1712, and Villars's victory over Eugene at Denain (24 July 1712) improved France's hand at the table. Catalonia, abandoned by its allies, fought on alone until Barcelona fell in September 1714.

What did the war cost?

Compiled estimates of the military dead range from about 400,000 to more than 1.2 million, depending on what is counted — and the disagreement is the finding. Matthew White's compilation of the standard casualty literature gives the spread. Gaston Bodart, in Losses of Life in Modern Wars (1916), put the total dead of both sides at 400,000; Micheal Clodfelter's statistical encyclopedia likewise gives about 400,000 dead, both sides. Boris Urlanis separated the categories: 235,000 killed in battle, rising to 700,000 military killed and died once disease and wounds are included. At the top of the range, Jack Levy's compiled figure and Eckhardt's military total both run to 1,251,000, and Pitirim Sorokin's killed-and-wounded total reaches 1,324,300; the compilation's own median lies between 700,000 and 1,251,000 — about one million. Early modern armies were, as Britannica notes of the period's warfare generally, too difficult to replace for generals to risk casualties lightly — which is why the war's set-piece battles stand out. At Blenheim, Carlos, Neal and Wandschneider give the British and Austrian loss as 4,500 killed and 7,500 wounded, against a Franco-Bavarian estimate of 40,000 lost including 11,000 prisoners; the World History Encyclopedia's figures for the same battle are 4,500 Allied killed and 8,000 wounded against 6,000 French and Bavarians killed, 7,000 wounded and 14,000 captured.

Civilians died in their largest numbers not in battle but in the winter of 1708–09. The Great Frost — the coldest European winter in 500 years on the reference record — destroyed the French harvest, and the famine that followed was estimated to have caused 600,000 deaths in France by the end of 1710, a figure carried in the reference record from W. Gregory Monahan's Year of Sorrows: The Great Famine of 1709 in Lyon (Ohio State University Press, 1993) and Marcel Lachiver's Les Années de Misère (Fayard, 1991). That famine figure is an estimate of famine mortality, not a battle toll, and is published here separately for exactly that reason.

Economic effects

Every great power emerged with unprecedented government debt; the experiments in refinancing it over the following decade decided which of them had won the financial war. That is the argument of Carlos, Neal and Wandschneider: the war's expense left Austria, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Spain all carrying burdens without precedent, and the competitive refinancing that followed left Britain alone holding the key to success in war finance.

Britain's numbers show both the strain and the system. The House of Commons Library's historical overview records that in 1711 military spending made up 64 percent of all British government spending, and puts the war's total British cost (1702–1713) at £6,762 million in 2013 prices. Bastable's history of the English debt gives the nominal series: reduced to £16,400,000 in the peace after Ryswick, the debt rose during the Spanish Succession war at over £3,000,000 a year until at the Peace of Utrecht it stood at £53,680,000 — the Commons Library's rounded series has it at around £50 million by 1715, up from around £1 million in 1688. Why Britain could carry it is the historiographical point: Dickson's classic study credited funded long-term debt credibly backed by Parliament; Jones showed the short-term financing of immediate war needs was fully implemented in this war; Brewer showed the tax capacity that serviced it; and Carlos, Neal and Wandschneider add the tradability of the claims — a large, diverse body of holders who could sell their claims to each other in London rather than redeeming them from the state.

France shows the counter-case. The World History Encyclopedia records that the war drained France's treasury and left the kingdom nearly bankrupt; Carlos and his co-authors add the sequel — after Louis XIV's death in 1715 France turned to John Law's système, and after its collapse in 1720 passed through a segmented default in 1723. Spain's war economy ran through France: with the silver fleet destroyed at Vigo, Spain relied on French shipping, prohibited Franco-Spanish colonial trade thrived as interloping under French protection, and, in the encyclopedia account's blunt judgement, France benefited more from Spain's colonies during the war than Spain did. Kamen's fiscal chapters trace the countervailing reform: French-directed restructuring in Valencia and Aragón increased Madrid's revenues, and wartime measures carried into peacetime.

How did it shape the world?

It replaced a dynastic map with a balance-of-power settlement — and the settlement's own terms say so. The treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt and Baden (1714) confirmed Philip V in Spain on the condition that powered the whole war's logic: the French and Spanish crowns were never to be united, Philip formally renouncing his French claim in 1712. Spain kept its internal unity and its colonial empire, the Library of Congress records, but lost its European possessions and emerged with its political position in Europe weakened. The transfers split by treaty: at Utrecht, Sicily went to Savoy, and France ceded Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the Hudson Bay territory and St Kitts to Britain and promised to demolish Dunkirk's fortifications; under the follow-on treaties of Rastatt (6 March 1714) and Baden (7 September 1714), the Spanish Netherlands, Naples and Milan went to the Emperor Charles VI — the Spanish Netherlands becoming the Austrian Netherlands. Britain kept Gibraltar and Minorca, taken in the war, and received the asiento — the exclusive contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America for thirty years, transferred from France. Britannica's verdict is that Britain received the largest portion of colonial and commercial spoils and took the leading position in world trade, and that in international politics the Utrecht settlement established a pattern for the next twenty years.

Inside Spain, the war founded a new state form. The Library of Congress account is categorical: under Philip V, centralised government was institutionalised, local fueros were abrogated, regional parliaments were abolished, and the aristocracy's independent influence on the councils of state was destroyed — the settlement codified in the Nueva Planta decrees, first imposed on the defeated kingdoms of Aragón and Valencia and extended to Catalonia by the decree of 16 January 1716 on the Catalan timeline record. Barcelona's fall on 11 September 1714, after the prolonged siege of 1713–14, closed the last resistance; the date remains Catalonia's national day. And the dynasty the war installed endured: Philip V was the first Bourbon king of Spain, founder of the line that still rules Spain today — the publisher's description of Henry Kamen's biography of Philip (Yale University Press, 2001) calls his 46-year reign one of the most important in the country's history, laying the basis of the modern Spanish state. Beyond Europe, the war's North American theatre (Queen Anne's War) formed part of the same contest, and the strategic holdings Britain acquired in the war presaged, in Carlos, Neal and Wandschneider's assessment, Royal Navy dominance of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic trades for the next two centuries.

What historians debate

  • Was the fate of Spain decided in Spain at all? Britannica calls it a curious fact that the fate of Spain was decided principally by campaigns in the Low Countries or on the Danube, with very little regard to what was actually happening on the Iberian Peninsula — and that Marlborough favoured a far more forceful, "Napoleonic" strategy than the manoeuvre warfare normal for the age. Against the great-power framing, the Library of Congress insists the war in Spain was also a Spanish civil war, decided there in part by allegiance: Castile enthusiastic for the Bourbons, Catalonia fighting for its fueros — its historic liberties — against the French-style centralisation it feared. Carlos, Neal and Wandschneider support the second reading from the French side's experience — French forces in Spain were backed by most of the Spanish population, with the notable exception of Catalonia, which is one reason France persisted.
  • Did the Bourbons centralise Spain, or inherit the project? The traditional account credits Philip V's French advisers with creating centralised Spain. Kamen's The War of Succession in Spain, 1700–1715 (1969), built on archives in Paris, Simancas, Madrid and Seville, complicates it: as its Hispanic American Historical Review reviewer summarises, Spain's recovery had begun after 1680 under the Habsburgs, Castilian arbitristas had urged centralising reforms for years, Habsburg officials had attempted them, and the literature's focus on Jean Orry has obscured the bigger contributions of Bergeyck and of Louis's ambassador Amelot. Kamen also argues Louis's interest in Spain was more commercial than political. The fiscal centralisation itself is not in dispute — only who authored it, and when it truly began.
  • What kind of war was Louis fighting? John A. Lynn, in The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999) — described by its publisher as the first modern comprehensive study of those wars in any language — examines Louis's wars for evidence of a coherent strategic policy, with the Spanish Succession war as their climax. In his shorter The French Wars 1667–1714 (2002), Lynn characterises the style of warfare this war produced in Spain as "war-as-process": not so much a goal as a result, a form of conflict in which the inability to achieve decision on the battlefield produced long wars of attrition. The attritional reading fits the record the narrative sources give — five fronts, thirteen years, and a settlement finally produced by a death in Vienna and exhaustion in London and Paris rather than by any single battle, Blenheim included.

This explainer is drawn from the sources listed below, all opened or read during this run. Casualty and cost figures are published strictly as the attributed ranges and estimates those sources give.