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The imperial election of 1790 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on 30 September.
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| The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline .(October 2022) |
The imperial election of 1790 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on 30 September.
Maximilian III Joseph, the elector of Bavaria, died of smallpox on 30 December 1777, leaving no immediate heirs. He was succeeded by his distant cousin Charles Theodore, then elector of the Electoral Palatinate. Under the provisions of the Peace of Westphalia covering a merger of family lines, the vote of the Palatinate was suppressed, and Charles Theodore, while ruling both territories, would hold one vote as elector of Bavaria.
As Charles Theodore also had no immediate legitimate heirs, his cousin Charles II August, the duke of Zweibrücken, was entitled to inherit both Bavaria and the Palatinate. When Charles Theodore, who preferred to live in the Palatinate, offered southern Bavaria to Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor in exchange for part of the Austrian Netherlands, Charles August objected. He was joined in this objection by Prussia and Saxony, both of whom were wary of any increase in Austrian power in Central Europe. The resulting War of the Bavarian Succession was settled by the Treaty of Teschen of 13 May 1779, which granted the Innviertel to Austria, affirmed Charles Theodore's inheritance of the entire Bavarian electorate, and recognized some Prussian territorial claims.
Joseph died on 20 February 1790. The electors called to Frankfurt to choose his successor were:
Leopold was also king of Hungary and until earlier in the year had been Grand Duke of Tuscany. In the latter role, he had been a reformer and constitutionalist, and his election offered the potential of the spread of similar reforms in Austria and the broader empire.
Leopold was elected and became emperor.
The Electoral Palatinate or the Palatinate, officially the Electorate of the Palatinate, was a constituent state of the Holy Roman Empire. The electorate had its origins under the rulership of the Counts Palatine of Lotharingia in 915; it was then restructured under the Counts Palatine of the Rhine in 1085. From 1214 until the Electoral Palatinate was merged into the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1805, the House of Wittelsbach provided the Counts Palatine or Electors. These counts palatine of the Rhine would serve as prince-electors from "time immemorial", and were noted as such in a papal letter of 1261; they were confirmed as electors by the Golden Bull of 1356.
The House of Wittelsbach is a former Bavarian dynasty, with branches that have ruled over territories including the Electorate of Bavaria, the Electoral Palatinate, the Electorate of Cologne, Holland, Zeeland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hungary, Bohemia, and Greece. Their ancestral lands of Bavaria and the Palatinate were prince-electorates, and the family had three of its members elected emperors and kings of the Holy Roman Empire. They ruled over the Kingdom of Bavaria which was created in 1805 and continued to exist until 1918.
Charles VII was Prince-Elector of Bavaria from 26 February 1726 and Holy Roman Emperor from 24 January 1742 to his death. He was also King of Bohemia from 1741 to 1743. Charles was a member of the House of Wittelsbach, and his reign as Holy Roman Emperor thus marked the end of three centuries of uninterrupted Habsburg imperial rule, although he was related to the Habsburgs by both blood and marriage.
Maximilian I, occasionally called the Great, a member of the House of Wittelsbach, ruled as Duke of Bavaria from 1597. His reign was marked by the Thirty Years' War during which he obtained the title of a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire at the 1623 Diet of Regensburg.
The War of the Bavarian Succession was a dispute between the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and an alliance of Saxony and Prussia over succession to the Electorate of Bavaria after the extinction of the Bavarian branch of the House of Wittelsbach. The Habsburgs sought to acquire Bavaria, and the alliance opposed them, favoring another branch of the Wittelsbachs. Both sides mobilized large armies, but the only fighting in the war was a few minor skirmishes. However, thousands of soldiers died from disease and starvation, earning the conflict the name Kartoffelkrieg in Prussia and Saxony; in Habsburg Austria, it was sometimes called the Zwetschgenrummel.
Charles Theodore was a German nobleman of the Sulzbach branch of the House of Wittelsbach. He became Count Palatine of Sulzbach at the age of six following the death of his father Johann Christian in 1733. With the death of his cousin, Charles III Philip, he became Prince-elector and Count Palatine of the Rhine in 1742, being eighteen. In his fifties, he became Prince-Elector of Bavaria at the death of another cousin, Maximilian III Joseph, in 1777.
Maximilian III Joseph, "the much beloved", was a Prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire and Duke of Bavaria from 1745 to 1777. He was the last of the Bavarian branch of the House of Wittelsbach and because of his death, the War of Bavarian Succession broke out.
The Kingdom of Bavaria was a German state that succeeded the former Electorate of Bavaria in 1806 and continued to exist until 1918. With the unification of Germany into the German Empire in 1871, the kingdom became a federated state of the new empire and was second in size, power, and wealth only to the leading state, the Kingdom of Prussia.
The Treaty of Teschen was signed on 13 May 1779 in Teschen, then in Austrian Silesia, between the Austrian Habsburg monarchy and the Kingdom of Prussia, which officially ended the War of the Bavarian Succession.
The Electorate of Bavaria was a quasi-independent hereditary electorate of the Holy Roman Empire from 1623 to 1806, when it was succeeded by the Kingdom of Bavaria.
Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony was a daughter of King Augustus III of Poland and his wife Maria Josepha of Austria who became Electress of Bavaria by marriage to Maximilian III Joseph, Elector of Bavaria.
Charles II August Christian was Duke of Zweibrücken from 1775 to 1795. A member of the Palatine House of Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld, a branch of the House of Wittelsbach, he was the elder brother of the first King of Bavaria, Maximilian I, and of Queen Amalia of Saxony.
The Diet of Regensburg of 1623 was a meeting of the Imperial States of the Holy Roman Empire convened by Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II. The meeting was not technically an imperial diet in the full sense, but a convention of princes or Deputationstag – a looser constitutional format giving the emperor greater leeway to make decisions without being bound by formal procedures. At the meeting, the Electorate of the Palatinate was transferred to Maximilian I of Bavaria. The meeting marked the high-water mark of imperial power during the Thirty Years' War.
The imperial election of 1690 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Augsburg on January 23.
The imperial election of 1711 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place on October 12.
The imperial election of 1742 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on January 24. The result was the election of Charles Albert of Bavaria, the first non-Habsburg emperor in three hundred years.
The imperial election of 1745 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on September 13.
The imperial election of 1764 was an imperial election held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It took place in Frankfurt on 27 March.
The 1792 imperial election was the final imperial election, held to select the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire following the death of Leopold II on 1 March 1792. It took place in Frankfurt on 5 July; his son Francis II was elected.
