Kinlight · The House of Habsburg

Maria Theresa

1717 – 1780 · Generation XVI · Archduchess of Austria (r. 1740–1780)

Portrait of Maria Theresa

Maria Theresa ruled the Habsburg lands, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and their many dependencies, from 1740 to 1780, the only woman ever to do so in her own right. She was born in Vienna on 13 May 1717, the eldest surviving child of the Emperor Charles VI and Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Her father, the last male Habsburg, had issued the Pragmatic Sanction in 1713 to keep his territories together under a single heir, female if need be, and spent years buying the consent of foreign courts. He did much less to prepare his daughter. She was taught music, dancing, drawing and languages, the education of a future consort, and learned nothing of finance, war or diplomacy.

On 12 February 1736 she married Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who had grown up at the Viennese court and whom she loved. To satisfy France he had to give up his ancestral duchy and accept Tuscany in exchange. Between 1737 and 1756 she bore sixteen children, ten of whom reached adulthood. Among them were the future emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, and Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.

Charles VI died on 20 October 1740, leaving an empty treasury and a neglected army. Within weeks Frederick II of Prussia marched into Silesia, the richest Habsburg province, and Bavaria, Saxony and France cast aside their promises and joined the attack. She later wrote that she had found herself without money, credit, army, experience or advice. She refused to bargain. Crowned in Pressburg in June 1741, she appeared that September before the Hungarian Diet wearing the crown of St Stephen and appealed for its help, and the Hungarians voted her troops. The War of the Austrian Succession lasted eight years. The Bavarian elector took Prague and was elected emperor as Charles VII, but her armies recovered Bohemia, where she was crowned in 1743, and occupied Munich. After Charles VII died she secured her husband’s election as Emperor Francis I in 1745. The peace of 1748 left her inheritance intact except for Silesia and Parma.

Defeat by Prussia convinced her that the monarchy had to be rebuilt. With Count Haugwitz she created a standing army of 108,000 men, taxed the nobility for the first time and placed the Austrian and Bohemian lands under a central administration in 1749. Hungary, whose privileges she had sworn to respect, was left largely alone. Her chancellor Kaunitz reversed the old alliances and brought France to Austria’s side in 1756, in the hope of winning Silesia back. The Seven Years’ War brought victories such as Kolín but not the province, and it ended in 1763 with Frederick still in possession.

Her later reforms reached deeper into ordinary life. Her physician Gerard van Swieten guided her medical reforms, and after smallpox killed several of her family and nearly killed her in 1767 she had her children inoculated and promoted the practice. A law of 1774 set up primary schools that children of both sexes were required to attend from six to twelve. A series of decrees in the 1770s limited the forced labour that landlords could demand of their peasants. She was no daughter of the Enlightenment, however. A devout Catholic, she rejected religious toleration outright. She ordered the Jews of Prague expelled in 1744, a measure withdrawn only in 1748, and had Protestants from the Austrian lands deported to Transylvania. She opposed the abolition of judicial torture, which came in 1776 at Joseph’s insistence.

Francis died suddenly at Innsbruck on 18 August 1765. She cut her hair, had her rooms painted black and wore mourning for the rest of her life. Joseph became emperor and her co-regent, and mother and son quarrelled constantly. She thought the First Partition of Poland in 1772 unjust and said so, yet took Galicia as Austria’s share, which prompted Frederick’s remark that “the more she cried, the more she took”. She opposed Joseph’s war over the Bavarian succession in 1778 and opened peace talks with Frederick over her son’s head.

She died in Vienna on 29 November 1780 and was buried beside Francis in the Capuchin crypt, in the double tomb made ready in her lifetime. She had inherited a collection of provinces close to collapse and left a centralised state with an army, a civil service and schools, the base on which her sons built. The House of Habsburg-Lorraine, which reigned until 1918, descended from her marriage.

Place in the family

  • Maria Theresa was a great-great-grandmother of Franz Joseph I of Austria.
  • The archive records 23 of her descendants, across 9 generations.

Images

Line of descent: Rudolf I of Germany → Albert I of Germany → Albert II, Duke of Austria → Leopold III, Duke of Austria → Ernest, Duke of Austria → Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor → Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor → Philip I of Castile → Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor → Charles II, Archduke of Austria → Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor → Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor → Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor → Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor → Maria Theresa.

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Life

  • 1717 — Born
  • 1736 — Married Francis
  • 1780 — Died

Sources

  1. Maria Theresa · Wikipedia
  2. Maria Theresa: the heiress · Die Welt der Habsburger (Schloß Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H.)
  3. Maria Theresa · World History Encyclopedia

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