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was regulated in accordance with the strictest rules of Spanish etiquette, but in his relations to his family a naturally kind disposition often broke through the crust of rigid conventions. Although one of the most intolerant sovereigns of his age, he gave considerable attention to science, and took a prominent part in the establishment of the universities of Innsbruck, Olmütz, Halle, and Breslau. Early in his reign he allowed his judgment to be controlled by his cabinet, but he never placed implicit trust in any minister after the discovery that Lobkowitz had been in communication with the French. He was married three times, and two of his sons became emperors – Joseph I. and Charles VI. (J. SI.)
LEOPOLD II., Holy Roman emperor, was born on the 5th of May 1747. After the death of his father, the emperor Francis I., in 1765, he became grand-duke of Tuscany, a country which he ruled for twenty-five years in a thoroughly enlightened spirit. Earlier than his brother, Joseph II., he saw the necessity of ecclesiastical reform, but he effected with moderation and good sense the changes which he considered advisable. Agriculture, industry, and commerce he encouraged in accordance with the ideas of his age, and Tuscany owed to him a well-conceived criminal code. He had even prepared a scheme for instituting representative government in Tuscany when, in 1790, he succeeded Joseph II. in the hereditary lauds of the house of Hapsburg and in the empire. Joseph, with all his good intentions, had left his hereditary states in much confusion; and vigour and prudence were essential for the re-establish ment of order. The chief difficulty was in the Netherlands, which were disinclined to respond to Leopold's advances. He despatched an army against them, and it entered Brussels on the 3d of December 1791. The country was then at his mercy; but he acted with great discretion, restoring certain ancient rights which Joseph, in his zeal for improvement, had withdrawn. In Hungary, too, the emperor succeeded in calming popular excitement; and on the 4th of August 1791 the treaty of Sistova was signed, bringing to an end the unlucky war which Joseph had waged with the Turks. The violence of the French Revolution ists produced a bad effect on the internal policy of Leopold, who supposed that it was necessary, not only to introduce a secret police, but to limit the freedom of the press. The same influences led him to conciliate Prussia, which had been always on its guard against Austria since the estab lishment of the Confederation of Princes by Frederick the Great. On the 27th of August 1791 the emperor and the king of Prussia met at Pillnitz; and it was agreed that they should act together for the deliverance of Louis XVI. of France. In pursuance of this understanding a defensive and offensive treaty of alliance between Austria and Prussia was concluded on the 7th of February 1792; but the emperor's schemes were suddenly broken by death. He died on the 1st of March 1792, and was succeeded by his son, the emperor Francis II.
LEOPOLD I. (1790-1865), king of the Belgians, was the fourth son of Francis, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and thus the uncle of Queen Victoria of England. His youth was chiefly spent in the Russian military service; he commanded a battalion at Lützen, Bautzen, and Leipsic, entered Paris with the allied sovereigns, and accompanied them to England. In May 1816 he married the Princess Charlotte, only child of the Prince Regent (who died in the following year), having previously been created duke of Kendal in the English peerage. In 1830 he declined the crown of Greece, but was elected to the throne of Belgium in June 1831. For the subsequent events of his life see BELGIUM, vol. iii. p. 528 sq.
LEOPOLD I. (1676-1747), duke of Anhalt-Dessau, der alte Dessauer, a famous Prussian general, was born at Dessau, July 3, 1676. Possessing great physical energy and an absorbing interest in military affairs, he at an early age displayed capacity for commands of high responsibility. On the death of his father in 1693 he succeeded him as colonel of a regiment in the service of Brandenburg, and, having rendered invaluable assistance at the capture of Namur by William III of Orange in 1696, he obtained the rank of major-general. Returning shortly afterwards to his principality, he conceived a passionate attachment for the daughter of an apothecary, whom he raised to the rank of nobility and made his wife on reaching his majority. During the years that he now spent in his principality, he won the ardent affection of the mass of the people, both by his considerate regard for their welfare and by the influence of his strong personality. In command of a division of twelve thousand men at Blenheim in 1704, Leopold so acted in a critical contingency as practically to turn the scales of victory; and in Eugene's Italian campaigns he was conspicuous at the battle of Cassano in 1705, the storming of Turin in 1706, and in other affairs of minor importance. After serving as a volunteer at Malplaquet in 1709, he received an independent command from Prussia, and rendered important assistance to Marlborough against Villars. Created field-marshal in 1715, he gained the special confidence of Frederick William I., and it was in no small degree to his instructions in military tactics, and the splendid perfection to which he had brought the small army of Prussia, that the great military triumphs of Frederick II. were due. His more important military inventions are the iron ramrod and the equal step. As a general he specially excelled in stratagems and surprises, in which he was greatly aided by his daring and impetuous energy. These qualities were specially displayed in the surprise and bloodless capture of Mörs castle in 1712, the seizure during night of the island of Rügen in 1715, the formation in 1741 of the famous entrenched camp at Göttin near Magdeburg, where with an army of thirty-six thousand men he was prepared for events either in Saxony or Hanover, the defeat of the Austrians at Neustadt in 1744, and the expulsion of the Saxons, though superior both in numbers and artillery, from a strongly entrenched position at Kesselsdorf in 1745. He died 7th April 1747. Leopold is graphically portrayed in Carlyle's Frederick, where he is spoken of as "a man of vast dumb faculty, dumb but fertile, deep – no end of imagination, no end of ingenuities – with as much mother wit as in whole talking parliaments."
See also the Lives by Varnhagen von Ense, 3d edition 1872, Hosäus 1876, and Siebigk 1876; and Crousatz, Miltärische Denkwürdigkeiten des Fürsten Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau, 1875.
LEPANTO (the Italian form of the modern Greek Epakto), known in ancient times as Naupactus, a name which has recently been revived in official documents, is a town in the nomarchy of Acarnania and Ætolia, Greece, situated on a bay on the north side of the straits of Lepanto, by which the gulf of the same name is connected with that of Patras. It stands on the south-eastern and southern slopes of one of the spurs of Mount Rigani; the surrounding plain is well watered and fertile, but the harbour, once the best on the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf, is now almost entirely choked up, and is accessible only to the smallest craft. Lepanto is an episcopal see; the population of the deme of Naupactus in 1879 was 5295.
According to traditional etymology, Naupactus derived its name from the circumstance that here the Heraclidæ built the fleet with which they invaded the Peloponnesus. The place is first mentioned in actual history as having been taken from the Locri Ozolæ by the Athenians, who settled it with Messenian helots at the close of_the third Messenian war (455 B.C.), and who made it their chief military and naval station in western Greece during the war of the Peloponnesus. After Ægospotami it was successively held by the Locrians, Achæans, and Ætolians, and finally, after a siege of two
