Maria Theresa (1717-1780) was the ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy, a sprawling empire that included Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and other territories spread out across Italy, the Netherlands, and Central Europe. Though her ascension to the throne was contested by rival European powers in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), she emerged from that conflict in a stronger and more secure position. She implemented several long-lasting reforms within the Habsburg domains and restored the military and economic power of Austria. One of the most important rulers of the 18th century, Maria Theresa certainly left a lasting mark on Europe during her 40-year reign.
Early Life
Maria Theresa was born on 13 May 1717 in Vienna, Austria. Born six months after the death of her elder brother, she was the oldest surviving child of Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, and his wife Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. For a long time, Charles VI had been faced with the prospect that he may never have a male heir, a fear that seemed confirmed with the death of his only son.
He had prepared for this eventuality in 1713 by issuing the Pragmatic Sanction, which proclaimed that henceforth females could inherit in the Habsburg domains; now, one of Charles VI's daughters could succeed him, thereby keeping the sprawling Habsburg territories intact. This was a controversial decree since it challenged the pre-existing Salic Law that stipulated that only males could inherit. Charles VI spent a large part of his reign persuading the other great powers of Europe to acknowledge the Pragmatic Sanction, which they reluctantly did after the emperor had granted them concessions. Thus, by the time of her birth, Maria Theresa was the precarious heir to the Habsburg throne.
As a child, Maria Theresa was a "slender, doll-like girl" with blond hair and "large, wistful blue eyes" (Mahan, 23). She and her younger sister Maria Anna were educated in a manner expected of 18th-century Austrian noblewomen. They were instructed in drawing and painting, and taught how to sing and dance. However, Maria Theresa was not given the education she should have received as heir to the empire. She struggled with spelling and lacked eloquence in her speech. Though she was allowed to sit in at her father's council meetings from the age of 14, she was never instructed in the arts of statecraft or diplomacy. While Charles VI had spent so much time securing his daughter's place as his heir, he neglected to teach her how to be one.
Indeed, he made plans to marry her off, as if she were just an ordinary princess. In 1723, there were talks of betrothing her to Leopold Clement, the young prince of Lorraine. But when the prince died of smallpox that same year, his younger brother Francis Stephen of Lorraine arrived in Vienna to pursue Maria Theresa's hand in his place. Though Charles VI considered other candidates, he eventually agreed to the match. Maria Theresa and Francis Stephen were married in Vienna on 12 February 1736. Because the French had initially objected to the marriage, Francis Stephen was forced to renounce his claims to his ancestral home of Lorraine; as recompense, Charles VI granted him the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in 1738.
Maria Theresa seems to have been very much smitten with her new husband. "If she sleeps it is only to dream of him," wrote the British ambassador about the couple, "if she wakes it is only to talk of him to her lady in waiting" (quoted in Mahan, 36). Indeed, Maria Theresa's letters to Francis Stephen are bursting with puppy dog affection: "Adieu, my little mouse, I embrace you with all my heart…I am your happy bride" (ibid). Francis Stephen's letters to his wife, by contrast, were much more formal.
Shortly after the marriage, Maria Theresa became pregnant for the first time. She gave birth to her first child, a girl, in 1737. The baby's gender greatly disappointed Maria Theresa, who longed for a boy to ensure the stability of the Habsburg Dynasty. Though her first child would sadly die in infancy, she would give birth 15 more times over the course of the next 19 years, with ten of her children reaching adulthood. Later in her reign, Maria Theresa joked that if she had not been pregnant so often, she could have led her armies into battle herself.
A Question of Succession
In October 1740, Charles VI fell ill while on a hunting trip along the Hungarian border; according to Voltaire, he had taken sick after mistakenly eating a batch of poisonous mushrooms. The emperor was taken back to the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, where he died on 20 October. At only 23, Maria Theresa ascended the Habsburg throne. However, the empire she inherited was in a sorry state of disrepair and decline. The treasury was empty, driven to near bankruptcy by the recent War of the Polish Succession. The army consisted of barely 100,000 ill-disciplined, poorly trained men, who were stretched out across the vast expanse of Habsburg territory.
What was worse, Maria Theresa had never been taught how to rule and was forced to rely on her father's advisors, who were, by and large, incompetent and weak. With nowhere else to turn, Maria Theresa increasingly relied on her husband, whom she designated as her co-ruler in November 1740. She also attempted to increase her legitimacy by gaining access to the Imperial title left vacant after the death of her father. But since women were prohibited from being elected Holy Roman Emperor, she campaigned for Francis Stephen's election.
As Maria Theresa desperately tried to consolidate her position, her enemies circled her like hungry vultures. Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, eyed the Imperial office for himself, while the Kingdom of Spain coveted the Habsburg holdings in Italy. But the most dangerous vulture would prove to be Frederick II, the young King of Prussia, who itched to prove himself on the world stage by conquering Silesia, the wealthiest and most developed province in the Habsburg Empire.
On 16 December 1740, Frederick invaded Silesia and occupied it within a matter of weeks. Maria Theresa sent an army to take it back, but the pro-Habsburg forces were soundly defeated at the Battle of Mollwitz (10 April 1741). Frederick's victory at Mollwitz emboldened the rest of Maria Theresa's enemies. Denying the Pragmatic Sanction – and therefore denying her right to rule – France, Spain, and Bavaria declared war, triggering the War of the Austrian Succession.
Initially, things went poorly for Maria Theresa, whose armies were briskly swept aside. In late 1741, a Franco-Bavarian army captured Prague, and Charles Albert was elected Holy Roman Emperor, the first non-Habsburg to hold the title in over three centuries. The next year, the Prussians defeated another Habsburg army at the Battle of Chotusitz (17 May 1742), forcing Maria Theresa to cede all Silesia to Frederick.
The young ruler knew that she could not hope to beat back her enemies on her own. In September 1741, she appeared before the Hungarian Diet. Wearing the Holy Crown of Hungary, she implored her Hungarian subjects for help, telling them that "the very existence of the Kingdom of Hungary, of our own person and children, and our crown are at stake. Forsaken by all, we place our sole reliance in the fidelity and long-tried valor of the Hungarians" (quoted in Mahan, 121). When the Hungarian nobility still showed reluctance, Maria Theresa hoisted her infant son Joseph in the air and, with tears streaming down her face, entrusted the well-being of her heir to the Hungarians. This managed to sway the Hungarian Diet, which committed troops to the war. Maria Theresa was also joined by other allies, including Great Britain, which could hardly miss a chance to humble its rival, France.
The fortunes of war swayed back and forth for the next several years until January 1745, when Charles Albert (who had been reigning as Charles VII) died of gout. This time, Maria Theresa managed to secure the election of her husband to the Imperial throne, who was crowned Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. In 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the war, largely restoring the prewar borders except for Silesia, which was kept by Prussia. The loss of Silesia was a small price to pay, as Maria Theresa was now confirmed in her rule of the Habsburg monarchy, coming out of the war stronger and wiser than she had been going into it.
Policies & Reforms
Having narrowly survived an existential conflict, Maria Theresa understood the importance of reforming and modernizing her army. To do this, she enlisted the aid of Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, who helped her create a standing army of 108,000 men. He paid for this army by imposing new taxes on the landed nobility, who had previously been tax-exempt. This succeeded in forming a better-provisioned and better-trained military force.
Pleased with Haugwitz's success, Maria Theresa put him in charge of a newly formed central administrative agency in 1749. Over the course of the next few years, he worked to centralize all government institutions across the Habsburg monarchy, placing them under the direct control of Maria Theresa and her officials (the Kingdom of Hungary was exempted from these reforms, since Maria Theresa had pledged to respect its existing privileges within the empire).
Of course, as the Habsburg monarchy became more centralized, it required talented civil servants and administrative officials. To this end, Maria Theresa implemented a program of empire-wide educational reform. Believing that the main purpose of higher education was to provide skilled bureaucrats, Maria Theresa encouraged universities to focus on secular subjects like law at the expense of theological subjects. The Theresianum, an academy for the sons of nobility, was founded in Vienna in 1746, just one example of the schools established at her direction.
As she sought to centralize her empire's administration, Maria Theresa also looked to centralize its legal system. Previously, each of the Habsburg territories adhered to its own set of laws. But in 1768, Maria Theresa issued the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana, a unified penal code that applied to all Habsburg-ruled domains. To the disappointment of many adherents of the Age of Enlightenment, this law code was quite conservative; it criminalized witchcraft and other religious offenses and upheld the use of torture and capital punishment (torture would ultimately be abolished in Austria in 1776).
Despite her reforms and her unusual position as a female ruler, Maria Theresa was in fact conservative in many ways. A deeply pious Catholic, she believed that religious cohesiveness was necessary for a state to thrive. As such, she rejected religious tolerance and tried to suppress Protestants and Jews. She did not, however, view herself as subservient to the Roman Catholic Church, choosing her own archbishops and limiting the Pope's influence within her realms.
Seven Years' War & Poland
By the early 1750s, it was clear that another war was looming on the horizon, as the empires of Europe scrambled to form new alliances. In Prussia, Frederick II – now referred to by his subjects as Frederick the Great – had formed an alliance with Great Britain, forcing Maria Theresa to negotiate an alliance with France. This political realignment, known as the Diplomatic Revolution, set the stage for the Seven Years' War, which began in earnest when Prussia invaded Saxony in August 1756.
This time, Maria Theresa was in a much better position than she had been in the last war. Her army was strong and well-trained, and she had surrounded herself with several talented advisors, most notably including her chancellor, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. At Kaunitz's urging, she decided that she would not make peace with Prussia until she had recovered Silesia. The next several years saw hard and bloody fighting on a scale unseen for decades. Though Austria won several major victories over the Prussians at the Battle of Hochkirch (14 October 1758) and the Battle of Kunersdorf (12 August 1759), Frederick refused to give up and kept fighting. When the war ended in 1763, Prussia retained control of Silesia, although Austria had reclaimed its position as a formidable power.
Although she was now more powerful than she had ever been, Maria Theresa was soon faced with tragedy. On 18 August 1765, Francis suddenly died in his carriage while returning from the opera at Innsbruck. Maria Theresa was distraught and never recovered emotionally from her husband's death. She retired completely from public life, painted all her rooms black, and dressed only in mourning clothes for the rest of her life. Every year, she spent the entire month of August in grieving seclusion. "I hardly know myself now," she lamented after Francis's death, "for I have become like an animal with no true life or reasoning power" (quoted in Crankshaw, 267).
Her eldest son, 24-year-old Joseph II, was elevated as her co-ruler and was also confirmed as Holy Roman Emperor. Intelligent and ambitious, Joseph took a liking to the ideals of the Enlightenment and admired Frederick the Great, both of which unnerved and offended Maria Theresa. Mother and son frequently quarreled about matters of state, with each often threatening the other with abdication. Things got so bad that the two rarely interacted away from the dinner table. After recovering from a near-fatal bout with smallpox in 1767, Maria Theresa increasingly left Joseph II in charge of policy matters. She did, however, focus on certain areas of personal interest, such as promoting the use of inoculation after witnessing its effectiveness against smallpox.
In 1770, Maria Theresa cemented her alliance with France by marrying her 14-year-old daughter Maria Antonia to the young Dauphin of France. Maria Theresa often sent letters to her young daughter instructing her how to behave at the French court, and relied on her to report on the goings-on at Versailles. A few years later, her daughter – who now went by the Francophone version of her name, Marie Antoinette – became queen when the dauphin ascended the throne as Louis XVI of France.
In 1772, Joseph II and Kaunitz conspired with Prussia and Russia to carve up Poland between the three of them. Initially, Maria Theresa was opposed to the idea; she hated and distrusted Frederick, whom she often referred to as "that evil man", and moreover thought that the partition was an unjust betrayal of the Polish people. Ultimately, she was convinced to agree to the First Partition of Poland, and Galicia and Lodomeria were added to the Habsburg Empire (these territories were afterward referred to as Austrian Poland). Commenting on what he believed were Maria Theresa's crocodile tears, Frederick mockingly said that "the more she cried, the more she took."
Final Years
Maria Theresa spent her final years within the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. She had never fully recovered from her bout with smallpox and was often in poor health, suffering from a shortness of breath, fatigue, and insomnia. She was, however, far from inactive during this period. In the early 1770s, she was prompted by an empire-wide famine to re-examine the system of serfdom. With the help of her advisors, she restricted the use of forced labor and, in 1773, carved up the large estates in Bohemia into smaller farms that were worked by peasants, thus giving them greater autonomy.
This predictably caused consternation amongst the Bohemian landlords. Despite his usual support for the Enlightenment, Joseph II sided with the nobles and accused his mother of trying to abolish serfdom entirely. The empress and her son butted heads several times during her final years, particularly over Joseph's attempt to expand Habsburg control into Bavaria in 1778. After the brief and nearly bloodless War of the Bavarian Succession against Prussia, Joseph was forced to back down.
On 24 November 1780, Maria Theresa fell ill. She was given her last rites two days later as her condition quickly deteriorated, and she died on 29 November at the age of 63, surrounded by her children. Her remains were interred in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna. Maria Theresa was the last ruler of the direct House of Habsburg; her children and all future Habsburg rulers came from the branch of the family that she founded, the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
Maria Theresa was one of the most consequential rulers in 18th-century Europe, and arguably one of the most effective Habsburg rulers of all time. Having inherited a weak, decentralized empire on the verge of collapse, she left it a modernized, powerful state on par with the dominant nations of Europe. Despite her personal conservatism, her reforms helped push the Habsburg monarchy toward the 'enlightened despotism' that would thrive under her son Joseph II, and the government was made to benefit the state rather than any one ruler. Her legacy helped shape the destiny of Europe as it advanced toward the modern age.
