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Introduction - The Italian 'Independence' Wars[]
By the tail end of the 18th century, European conflicts had erupted all across the continent, within the Holy Roman Empire, France and the lowlands. Within this framework of chaos and instability, Italian states of various enlightenment ideologies and virtues, found themselves fighting for a shared goal, but the term 'Independence' War here, does not apply in the sense of a liberation movement from a real dominating power, such as a colonial overlord or a Great power, instead, the term independence here is used to describe the political disatisfaction of Italian nobles and elites with the peninsular political and diplomatic climate of the era. For decades, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, a regional powerhouse, had been projecting its influence over the region. This divided Italian regional leadership further and further, as many traditional powers in Italy, such as Savoy, Genoa and the Papal States, feared their rapid decline, and sided against the Two Sicilies and their network, known as the Italian League.
After the fall of the March of Umbria, in 1731, the Papal States would seek an alliance with France, in exchange for the right of the French Emperor to excert his influence over the city of Avignon. However this Franco-Papal pact would not last, as the Bourbon dynasty in the Two Sicilies simply strengthened its ties with Versailles, avoiding any future disputes with the French crown. This drove the Papal States to desperation, as they feared that their influence over Italy would become obsolete. In the Confrence of Turin, 1758, the mentioned Italian powers (Savoy, Genoa and the Papacy) met to forge an alliance that would stand as the bulwark against Sicillian domination over Italy.
On the other hand, the Italian League, a collection of smaller Italian duchies and republics, under the leadership of the Republic of Venice, and the Two Sicilies, had been steadily building up as a force opposed to the 'Foreign meddling' and Papal subjugated mindset of the Italian countries, they espoused a unitarian and anti-papal rhetoric, proposing an early prototype of Italian unification, the Italian Confederation. Seeking to diplomatically unite the peninsula under a single banner.
Conflict Ignites[]
The casue of war would be the matter of Italian involvement in the ongoing 7 Years War. At the time, the Habsburgs, who were fighting France and Prussia on the Continent, had control over the Duchy of Milan, a direct fiefdom of the Austrian crown. And as such it was used as a field of operations to conduct warfare against France. This would inevitably cause Italian neutral states, that had no hand in the war, to become battlefields for foreign armies, something which te Kingdom of Two Sicilies protested, refusing safe passage to French troops on their territory in 1757. Followed by the Republic of Venice, which refused passage to Austrian troops respectively. This upset both France and Austria, but releaved some of the pressure that Austria would have been facing, had the Italian league accepted this right of passage to France. Regardless, the action was the definitive first steps towards italian true sovereignty.
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