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CHARLES VI

Charles VI (Charles the Silly) was a king of France. He was born in 1368 at Paris and died in 1422. He was a son of Charles The Wise and succeeded to the throne at the age of twelve. His reign was plagued by fits on insanity and the country plagued by civil war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, making the country easy prey for the English under Henry V who crossed over to Normandy, took Harfleur by storm, won the famous victory of Agincourt, and compelled the crazy king to acknowledge him as his successor.

Charles VI was Emperor of Germany. He was born in 1685 and died in 1740. The second son of the Emperor Leopold I, he was destined by the rules of inheritance to succeed his relative Charles II on the throne of Spain, but Charles II by his will made the French Prince, the Duke of Anjour, his heir. This led to the War of the Spanish Succession in which England and Holland took the part of the Austrian claimant. He held Madrid for a while before conceding Spain to the French claim and content himself with the Spanish subject-lands, Milan, Mantua, Sardinia, and the Netherlands (sanctioned by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the Treaty of Rastadt in 1714). He became Emperor of Germany in 1711.

In a war against the Turks his armies, led by Eugene of Savoy, gained the decisive victories of Peterwardein and Belgrade. After the death of his only son, Charles directed all his policy and energies to secure the guarantee of the various powers to the Pragmatic Sanction, settling the succession to the Austrian dominions on his daughter Maria Theresa. In 1733 a war with France and Spain regarding the succession in Poland terminated unfavourably for him, he having to surrender Sicily, Naples, and part of Milan to Spain, and Lorraine to France. In 1737 he renewed the war with the Turks, this time unsuccessfully.
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