At the accession of Maria Theresa in 1740, the Austro-Hungarian army included 52 infantry regiments, of which three were Hungarian, three Netherlandish and one Italian. The remainder drew their recruits not only from the Habsburg territories, including Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (the last being lost to Prussia in 1742), but from the autonomous states of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. The proportion of Hungarian raised regiments was set to rise in the coming years though - indeed 'foreign' personnel comprised an important part of the military etablishment. This title, the second in a sequence of three, details the organisation, uniform and equipment of the cosmopolitan Austrian Army from 1740-80, focusing on infantry troops.

Until at least the latter years of Maria Theresa's reign, the Austrian artillery was acknowledged to be second to none in Europe; and it must have been no coincidence that Jean Baptiste de Gribeauval, who went on and so radically reformed the French artillery after he became inspector of artillery in 1776, had spent the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) on attachment to the Austrian army from the French. In this last of three volumes \[Men-at arms 271 & 276\], Philip Haythornwaite does a first class job of examining the composition and uniforms of these and other specialist troops of the Austrian army 1740-80, including the artillery units, engineers, Grenz, Jägers and medical troops.