Maria Josepha of Bavaria
1739 – 1767 · Generation XVII · Consort
Maria Josepha (1739 – 1767). Consort. Married Joseph in 1765. Second wife of Joseph II; died of smallpox. The youngest child of Charles Albert of Bavaria — the Emperor Charles VII — she was her husband’s second cousin, chosen largely because Prince Kaunitz prized the Bavarian connection. Joseph, still mourning his first wife, Isabella of Parma, remarried only at his mother’s insistence and found his bride unattractive; he granted that she was blameless and devoted to him, yet treated her with icy coldness. Timid and deeply attached to him, she found her one protector in her father-in-law, Francis I, whose death in August 1765 made her empress but left her friendless at court. The marriage produced no children. Joseph kept away from her sickbed and from her burial in the Imperial Crypt, though Maria Theresa visited her and caught the disease herself. Years later he cited the Bavarian marriage among his grounds for claiming Bavarian territory — the dispute that became the War of the Bavarian Succession.
Place in the family
- Maria Josepha of Bavaria married Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, a son of Maria Theresa.
Partners
- Married Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (1741 – 1790) in 1765
Life
- 1739 — Born
- 1765 — Married Joseph
- 1767 — Died