Maria Leopoldine of Austria

1632 – 1649 · Generation XII · Consort · Austrian Habsburgs

Maria Leopoldine of Austria-Tyrol was Holy Roman Empress for just over a year before she died in childbirth at seventeen. Born at Innsbruck on 6 April 1632, she was the last of the five children of Leopold V, Archduke of Further Austria, and Claudia de’ Medici, and her father died when she was five months old. In 1641 the Protestant Charles Louis of the Palatinate floated a marriage with her, but the staunchly Catholic Habsburgs would not allow it.

In Linz on 2 July 1648 she married her widowed first cousin, the emperor Ferdinand III, becoming empress and queen of Hungary and Bohemia. Her wedding was hailed as a sign that the Thirty Years’ War was ending, and an opera was composed to mark it, though its Prague premiere was cancelled when Ferdinand’s brother-in-law, King Władysław IV of Poland, died. Her kinship to her husband was as close as that of his first wife, Maria Anna of Spain, one of the many close marriages by which the house both strengthened itself and suffered from inbreeding.

She soon became pregnant and was painted so by Lorenzo Lippi. Her only child, Archduke Charles Joseph, was born on 7 August 1649 after a very difficult labour, and she died the same day. Ferdinand remarried within two years, and their son died childless at fourteen. She lies in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna.

Place in the family

• Maria Leopoldine of Austria married Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor, a great-grandfather of Maria Theresa.

One of 24 people of Austrian Habsburgs (1527–1754) in this archive. The Vienna line, which held the Holy Roman crown almost without a break.

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Partners

• Married Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor (1608 – 1657) in 1648

Life

• 1632 — Born
• 1648 — Married Ferdinand
• 1649 — Died

Sources

1. Maria Leopoldine of Austria · Wikipedia
2. Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor · Wikipedia