33.3 Europe: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 3/27)

Garibaldi had taken over control of Sicily and Naples, with his thousand volunteers, but these areas were annexed to Emmanuel's domain in 1860. In 1861 an Italian parliament met in Turin and declared Victor Emmanuel as King of all Italy. When Austria was defeated by Prussia in 1866, Italy acquired Venetia. Up until about that date Italians, like most Germans, were more attached to their provincial rulers and cultures (Tuscan, Emilian, etc.) than to a national idealism, although the middle class of people had objected to Austrian rule. By the last 2/3 of the century, the Italians extended the Piedmontese (Sardinian) constitution to the whole country and made Italy a centralized entity on the French model. (Ref. 68 , 139 , 8 )

An interesting sidelight is the beginning of the control of malaria in the environs of Rome at the beginning of this century by Pope Pius Vll. Ever since the days of the late Roman Empire, when a shortage of manpower and the frequent barbarian invasions led to neglect of the drainage systems of the city and the surrounding areas, which had previously been irrigated, malaria had been a serious, endemic disease of the region. From a population of 750,000 in 70 B.C. Rome fell to 35,000 in A.D. 1050 and malaria has been indicted by some as the chief cause. But the draining of the marshes was started again by Pius VII and completed in the next century by Mussolini, when the population of Rome reached a million. (Ref. 213 )

Central europe

Northern Europe had one of the worst summers of all recorded time in 1816. There was frost in July and practically no harvest, so that famine resulted. (Ref. 213 )

Germany

Between 1801 and 1803 Napoleon and his minister, Talleyrand, supervised the reorganization of the old Holy Roman Empire and this was done, not on German soil, but in Paris. The initial steps involved over 1/2 of the more than 300 political entities that had claimed sovereign status since the Treaty of Westphalia. Some 64 ecclesiastical principalities were secularized and 45 of the 51 free-cities were absorbed into larger units. Then the German princes confiscated all religious establishments and the lands of most of the "Knights". By October of 1806 Napoleon had delivered Prussia a telling blow at Jena and the French armies entered Berlin. In the same year Napoleon established the Confederation of the Rhine, with himself as its official protector. All states of the old empire joined this except Austria, Prussia, Brunswick and electoral Hesse. This definitely ended the Holy Roman Empire, forcing the abdication of the title of emperor by Francis II of Austria and then Germany began to draw itself together. At the same time Napoleon was rewarding Wuerttemburg, Saxony and Bavaria for their loyalties by elevating their dukes to kings and giving each a little more territory. Saxony got the Duchy of Warsaw from Prussia; Maximilian became king of Bavaria. But by 1813 Metternick got his Austria to declare war again on France and maneuvered to get Bavaria to desert Napoleon. In a 4 day battle near Leipzig, Napoleon was totally defeated and in the later Peace of Paris and the European Congress at Vienna, which lasted 10 months, Europe was divided among the 4 great powers of Prussia, Austria, Russia and England.