text: **Turning point**
  
  The Battle of Ramillies where the 
  French fought the Dutch and British, 
  23 May 1706 
  
  The final phases of the War of the Spanish Succession demonstrated that the Allies could 
  not maintain Archduke Charles in Spain just as surely as France could not retain the entire 
  Spanish inheritance for Philip V. The Allies were definitively expelled from central Spain 
  by the Franco-Spanish victories at the Battles of Villaviciosa and Brihuega in 1710. 
  French forces elsewhere remained obdurate despite their defeats. The Allies suffered a 
  Pyrrhic victory at the Battle of Malplaquet with 21,000 casualties, twice that of the 
  French.[100] Eventually, France recovered its military pride with the decisive victory at 
  Denain in 1712. 
  
  French military successes near the end of the war took place against the background of a 
  changed political situation in Austria. In 1705, Emperor Leopold I died. His elder son and 
  successor, Joseph I, followed him in 1711. His heir was none other than Archduke Charles, 
  who secured control of all of his brother's Austrian landholdings. If the Spanish empire 
  then fell to him, it would have resurrected a domain as vast as Holy Roman Emperor 
  Charles V's in the 16th century. To the maritime powers of Great Britain and the Dutch 
  Republic, this would have been as undesirable as a Franco-Spanish union.[101] 
  Louis XIV depicted on a Louis d'or in 
  1709 