Il contributo della Toscana e della Lombardia allo sforzo bellico asburgico durante la guerra dei sette anni

TARGET: With the social, politic and military history of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and of the Hapsburg Lombardy on the background, the goals of this dissertation are two. The first is reconstructing the history of the two units from the creation, passing trough the years on campaign, till the end of the Seven Years’ War. The second is the analysis of the social aspects of the two regiments, starting from the officer down to the soldiers. Their personal and service data, for each rank are put together for identyfing common trends and differences between the units and other armies of the XVIIIth century. Important will be the investigation of the national origin of men in every rank, for the impact of the enlistment in the two territory and for verifying the circulation of military manpower. Strictly linked to the national origin is the reconstruction of the jobs conducted by non-commissioned officers and soldiers before joining the army. Starting from this information will be checked the possibility of describing the Tuscan and Lombard society, veryfing also if the presence of some profession is linked to the crisis of some manufacturing sector. METHOD: The research is mainly based on archive sources, collected between Florence, Bologna, Milan and Vienna. Nevertheless all the work is supported by a vast bibliography in italian, english and german concerning social, economical, political and military history of Tuscany, Lombardy and Hapsburg Empire. The dissertation is divided in 5 chapters: 1) storiography on Tuscan military, Austrian military presence in Lombardy, Seven Years’ War and analysis on archive sources; 2) political, social and military background of Tuscany since 1737 and creation of the Toscanische Infanterie Regiment; 3) political, social and military background of Lombardy since 1740 and creation of the Clerici Regiment; 4) analysis of the partecipation of the two regiment in the war; 5) comparison and processing of origin, age, service and profession of officers, non-commissioned officers and soldiers. CONCLUSIONS: Thanks to archive source and old but important bibliographical sources the history of this two regiment has been enlarged. There is still a lot to do, because of the hugeness of document conserved in the Wien Kriegsarchiv, of which I could only see a small part. Regarding the social and human aspects of this research, it was possible to trace back 3411 names for Toscanischen Regiment and 4631 for Clerici Regiment, unfortunately not all accompanied with the same amount of information about age, origin, service status and profession. Nevertheless the collected data have allowed to answer to the main question of the research with a “yes, but”. This because of the lack, in the austrian musterlisten, of two of the most important professional category: farmers and day workers.