FRANCIS (GERMANY AND AUSTEIA) 419 of Amboise, and was now imprudent enough to appear. He was arrested, tried, and soon condemned to die as a traitor. The death of Francis, however, saved his life, and restored him to the leadership of the Huguenots. The young king had long suffered from an abscess in his ear, and died after a reign of IT months, so suddenly that rumors of poison, now re- garded as unfounded, spread, and were believ- ed throughout the country; the more easily, as assassination was becoming fashionable in France, and the queen mother was renowned for her love of alchemy and the use of poisons. Francis bequeathed to his brother and succes- sor, Charles IX., then a boy of ten years, a treasury loaded with debt, and a state full of the elements of civil war. The regency was intrusted to Catharine de' Medici, whose in- trigues fostered civil and religious dissensions. II. GERMANY AND AUSTRIA. FRANCIS I. (STEPHEN), emperor of Germany, born Dec. 8, 1708, died at Innspruck, Aug. 18, 1765. He was the son of Leopold, duke of Lorraine, and of a niece of Louis XIV., and was the great-grandson of the emperor Ferdi- nand III. In 1729 lie succeeded his father, but in consequence of the war of the Polish succession, his duchy was given in 1735 to the ex- king Stanislas, father-in-law of Louis XV., to revert after his death to France, and he received the reversion of the duchy of Tus- cany, where the house of Medici was about becoming extinct. Francis in 1736 married Maria Theresa, daughter and heiress of the emperor Charles VI. Charles appointed him generalissimo, and he subsequently fought in a successful campaign against the Turks. After the death of the last of the Medicis in 1737, Francis went with Maria to Florence, the capital of his new dominion. The emperor dying in 1740, he returned to share with his wife the regency of the Austrian dominions, though without any real power in the admin- istration, and fought for her rights in the wars which ensued. Francis was elected em- peror of Germany in 1745, and acknowledged by Bavaria and Prussia in the same year, but not by France and Spain until the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. Being of a mild and peaceful disposition, and influenced more by avarice than by ambition, he promoted com- merce and agriculture, particularly in Tuscany, but left the heavier cares of government to his wife, who in 1756 became involved in the seven years' war with Prussia. Two years after the termination of this war Francis died, leaving the German crown to his son Joseph II., for whom, however, his mother reigned till 1780, and Tuscany to his younger son, afterward Leopold II. FRANCIS II., emperor of Germany (I. of Austria), born in Florence, Feb. 12, 1768, died in Vienna, March 2, 1835. He was the son of the emperor Leopold II. and of Maria Louisa, daughter of Charles III., king of Spain. He was educated first at the polished and popular court of Florence, then at that of Vienna. He accompanied his uncle Joseph II. in his cam- paign against the Turks in 1788, and in 1789 received the title of commander-in-chief of the army, though still a youth of 21 years, the old and experienced general Laudon being his assistant and adviser. After the death of Joseph (1790), Francis held the reins of the empire for a few days, till the arrival of his father from Florence, whom he followed in the next year to the convention of Pilnitz, where the emperor and the king of Prussia formed the first coalition against revolutionary France. Leopold died in 1792, and Francis was suc- cessively crowned king of Hungary, emperor of Germany, and king of Bohemia. He was soon surrounded with difficulties and dangers. Hungary was in a state of national excitement, and the Belgian provinces were ripe for revolt. The legislative assembly of France obliged Louis XVI. to declare war against him in April, 1792. The victories of Dumouriez and the revolt of Belgium, the victories of Custine on the Rhine, the execution of Louis XVI., and that of Marie Antoinette, the aunt of Francis, rapidly followed. It was in vain that Clerfayt obtained some advantages over the French, and that Francis took the command of the army in person. The armies of the repub- lic soon drove back the allies; Francis's con- federates deserted him, and in 1795 Tuscany, Sweden, Spain, and Prussia concluded at Basel a treaty of peace with the republic, whose Italian army, now commanded by Bonaparte, conquered in the next two years the whole north of Italy. Francis himself, notwithstand- ing some slight advantages gained by his bro- ther the archduke Charles over Moreau, in southern Germany, was finally forced to con- clude the treaty of Campo Formio (Oct. 17, 1797), in which he sacrificed Belgium, Milan, and a Rhenish province of the empire, in ex- change for Venice. Changes in France and new French aggressions tempted Austria, Russia, and England to another war in 1799. The allied armies were successful for a while un- der the archduke Charles in Germany, under Hotze in Switzerland, and under Kray and Suvaroff in Italy. But reverses came ; Suva- roff was recalled by his emperor, and Bona- parte became master of France by a coup d'etat, and of Italy by the passage of the Alps and the battle of Marengo (June 14, 1800), while Moreau fought his way through southern Ger- many toward Vienna. These disasters com- pelled Francis to the peace of Luneville in 1801, by which he lost a portion of Germany and acquired a portion of Italy. England made peace with France at Amiens, but broke it again, and framed a new coalition, in which the emperors Francis and Alexander and the king of Sweden took part, while Prussia re- mained neutral, and Bavaria, Wtirtemberg, and Baden were ready to side with the French. Francis expected the first attack from Italy,
