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The Hello and welcome to a history of Europe Key Battles podcast.

This is the War of Austrian Succession, 1740 to 1748, Part 1.

This set of episodes is about the War of Austrian Succession and the years leading up to it.

It follows episodes on the Great Northern War and the War of Spanish Succession.

Today I will talk about the beginning of the rise of Brennanburg Prussia. The beginning of the people of Europe were experiencing an unusual period of sustained peace.

The previous 100 years had been particularly brutal. a seemingly never-ending cycle of violence across the continent.

Wars such as the 30-year-s war and a series of conflicts in Eastern Europe were at such a scale that they affected the average citizen far more than most earlier conflicts.

Historians referred to the emergence of so-called fiscal military states,

which based their economic model on the sustainment of its armed forces,

usually in times of prolonged or severe conflict.

Such states subjected citizens to high levels of taxation for this purpose,

and those which were unable to reform to achieve the structure and centralisation required

to raise even greater taxes, came at risk of being overwhelmed by those neighbours who were able to.

Most states raised the size of their armies to such a size they were simply unable to support

them with their own native resources, and so their armies went abroad resorted to confiscating food and supplies

from local populations. Sometimes this was done in a controlled way, sometimes just random

pillaging and plunder, but in all cases the effect on the local population was devastating.

The populations of the most affected regions

permitted, not so much by direct killings, but by famine,

disease and emigration. The calm of the 1720s was in part due to the exhaustion of all the parties after such a long period of conflict.

This also happened to be a period when either rulers were young

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