Background
Charles VI was born on the 1st of October 1685 at Vienna. He was the second son of the emperor Leopold I by his third marriage with Eleanore, daughter of Philip William of Neuburg, elector palatine of the Rhine.
Charles VI was born on the 1st of October 1685 at Vienna. He was the second son of the emperor Leopold I by his third marriage with Eleanore, daughter of Philip William of Neuburg, elector palatine of the Rhine.
When the Spanish branch of the house of Habsburg became extinct in 1700 Charles VI was put forward as the lawful heir in opposition to Philip V, the Bourbon to whom the Spanish dominions had been left by the will of Charles II of Spain.
He was proclaimed at Vienna on the 19th of September 1703, and made his way to Spain by the Low Countries, England and Lisbon, remaining in Spain till 1711, mostly in Catalonia, where the Habsburg party was strong.
The death of Joseph without male issue had been foreseen, and Charles had at one time been prepared to give up Spain and the Indies on condition that he was allowed to retain Naples, Sicily and the Milanese.
Only the emphatic refusal of the European powers to tolerate the reconstruction of the empire of Charles V forced him to give a sullen submission to necessity.
It is to his honour that he was very reluctant to desert the Catalans who had fought for his cause.
Some of their chiefs followed him to Vienna, and their advice had an unfortunate influence on his mind.
Charles showed an enlightened, though not always successful, interest in the commercial prosperity of his subjects, but from the date of his return to Germany till his death his ruling passion was to secure his inheritance against dismemberment.
As early as 1713 he had begun to prepare the " Pragmatic Sanction " which was to regulate the succession.
He made great concessions to obtain his aim, and embarked on complicated diplomatic negotiations.
His last days were embittered by a disastrous war with Turkey, in which he lost almost all he had gained by the peace of Passarowitz.
Charles VI was an admirable representative of the tenacious ambition of the Habsburgs, and of their belief in their own " august greatness " and boundless rights. For the personal character of Charles VI.
In 1708 Charles VI was married at Barcelona to Elizabeth Christina of Brunswick- Wolfenbiittel (1691 - 1750), a Lutheran princess.