Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Leopold II carried a name full of contradictions. Born on the 5th of May 1747 in Vienna as the third son of Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I, he was initially groomed for the clergy, not a throne. Yet when his older brother Archduke Charles died young in 1761, Leopold's path changed entirely. He would spend twenty-five years as Grand Duke of Tuscany, quietly building one of the most progressive governments in eighteenth-century Europe, before inheriting the most powerful crown on the continent. Historians know him chiefly as the penultimate Holy Roman Emperor, the ruler sandwiched between his famous brother Joseph II and his son Francis II. But the historian Paul W. Schroeder called Leopold "one of the most shrewd and sensible monarchs ever to wear a crown." What did Leopold actually do to earn that judgment? He abolished the death penalty. He pioneered the humane treatment of the mentally ill. He drafted a constitution years before France did. And he managed, in just two years as emperor, to hold together a crumbling empire while outmaneuvering three major powers at once. The question worth asking is not why Leopold is remembered, but why he is so rarely the first name that comes to mind.

• 2. The Tuscany Years

  ›

  For the first five years after Leopold arrived in Tuscany, his mother's appointed counselors held the real authority. In 1770, he traveled to Vienna and secured the removal of that guardianship, returning to Florence with a free hand. What followed was two decades of methodical reform. Leopold dismantled the ruinous commercial restrictions that the House of Medici had left behind, reduced tax rates by introducing a rational system of taxation, and undertook profitable public works including the drainage of the Valdichiana. His personality was cold and his habits almost deliberately plain. His Italian subjects never warmed to him, partly because his reforms cut against those who had profited from the old regime. He had no army to maintain and had suppressed the Medici's small naval force, so every coin of public revenue went directly into improving the state. His ecclesiastical reforms failed to gain traction because they collided with the deeply held convictions of his people and drew the opposition of the Pope. He could neither fully secularize religious property nor put the clergy entirely under civil authority. Yet material prosperity rose steadily across the grand duchy under his watch. And in the final years of his Tuscan rule, Leopold collaborated on the drafting of a political constitution that, according to the source, anticipated the French constitution by many years and bore similarities to the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1778. It was never enacted, partly because it was so radically new that it faced opposition even from those who stood to gain from it, and partly because Leopold left Florence for Vienna in 1790 to claim the imperial throne.

• 3. The Leopoldine Code

  ›

  On the 30th of November 1786, Leopold signed into law the Leopoldine Code, reforming Tuscany's entire penal system and abolishing both the death penalty and torture. This was not an impulsive act. The last capital execution in Tuscany had taken place in 1769, seventeen years before the formal law, meaning Leopold had already de facto blocked executions for nearly two decades before enshrining the ban in statute. The code also ordered the physical destruction of all instruments used for capital punishment within his territory. Historians regard this as the first permanent abolition of the death penalty in modern history. The date of the 30th of November has been commemorated since the year 2000 through a regional observance called the Feast of Tuscany, held annually to mark the event. Leopold extended his reform of punishment further by establishing, on the 23rd of January 1774, the "legge sui pazzi," or law on the insane, the first such law in Europe. A few years later, he commissioned a new hospital and placed the young physician Vincenzo Chiarugi in charge of it. Chiarugi and his colleagues banned chains and physical punishment in the hospital and introduced humanitarian standards of care that later became known as the moral treatment movement. Leopold also made smallpox inoculation systematically available and founded an early institution for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents. He enlarged the museum known as La Specola with medical waxworks and educational exhibits aimed at teaching Florentines to observe natural laws directly.

• 4. The Emperor's Inheritance

  ›

  Joseph II died in Vienna on the 20th of February 1790. Leopold was still in Florence when the news arrived, and he did not depart his Italian capital until the 3rd of March. He knew what he was inheriting: a Habsburg domain destabilized by his brother's aggressive reforms, with rebellions simmering in Hungary, Bohemia, and the Austrian Netherlands. Leopold's response was calibrated rather than reactive. He recognized the Estates of his various dominions as "the pillars of the monarchy," a phrase that carried real political weight, and he granted the Hungarians and Bohemians significant concessions. In the Austrian Netherlands, he divided the insurgents through careful compromise, then marched troops in to restore order while simultaneously restoring the historic rights of the Flemish. He did not, however, simply reverse everything his brother had done. He continued to insist, for instance, that no papal bull could be published in his dominions without his prior consent. One of the harshest decisions of his reign came on the 9th of May 1790, when he issued a decree forcing thousands of Bohemian serfs, whom Joseph had freed, back into servitude. It was a political concession to noble interests, made to stabilize the realm. His coronation as King of Hungary followed on the 11th of November 1790, secured after a personal meeting with Frederick William II of Prussia at Reichenbach in July 1790. That meeting produced an arrangement that functionally defeated Prussian ambitions. Leopold had already negotiated an eight-month truce with the Ottoman Empire in September 1790, clearing the path toward ending the war that Joseph II had started.

• 5. Maneuvering Between Powers

  ›

  Catherine II of Russia wanted Austria and Prussia to march west against the French Revolution so that she could quietly absorb what remained of Poland and press further against the Ottoman Empire. Leopold saw through the strategy without difficulty and refused to be drawn. From the west, his sister Marie Antoinette sent him passionate appeals for help, and royalist exiles pressed him persistently for military intervention in France. He gave his sister good advice and promised assistance if she and Louis XVI could escape Paris. The exiles he largely turned away, and when they forced themselves into his presence, he denied them help outright. When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette attempted their flight and were stopped at Varennes in June 1791, Leopold issued the Padua Circular, a general appeal to European sovereigns to consider "the honour of all sovereigns, and the security of all governments." The language was measured rather than martial. In August 1791, he met Frederick William II of Prussia at Pillnitz Castle near Dresden, and the two rulers signed the Declaration of Pillnitz, announcing their readiness to intervene in France if all the other major powers agreed to join them. Leopold knew the condition would never be met: Russia and Britain had no intention of acting. He viewed the declaration as a formality. The French revolutionary movement, however, read it as a genuine threat, and it contributed to the radicalization of French politics. Leopold spent the early months of 1792 hoping that a settlement had been reached after Louis XVI swore to observe the September 1791 constitution, only to watch the situation in France deteriorate further. He died suddenly from pneumonia in Vienna on the 1st of March 1792 before the war he had tried to avoid finally began.

• 6. Opera and Artistic Patronage

  ›

  Leopold was passionate about Italian opera, particularly as practiced in Florence. As Grand Duke of Tuscany, he became a major patron of the composer Tommaso Traetta and subsidized the staging of numerous new operas, including the first performance in Florence of Traetta's 1763 work Ifigenia in Tauride. He also supported the opera singers Giovanni Manzuoli, Giusto Fernando Tenducci, and Tommaso Guarducci. When Leopold moved to Vienna in 1790, he brought much of his Florentine musical circle with him. This had immediate and lasting consequences for the Vienna court. Before his accession, opera buffa had dominated the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertortheater. Leopold shifted the court's central repertoire toward opera seria and ballet. The change came with personnel consequences: the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was among those dismissed as Leopold overhauled the Vienna court's artistic staff. Mozart, who had collaborated with Da Ponte on The Marriage of Figaro in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, and Così fan tutte in 1790, now pivoted toward opera seria. The Estates of Bohemia commissioned Mozart to compose La clemenza di Tito for the festivities surrounding Leopold's coronation as King of Bohemia in Prague on the 6th of September 1791. The preference for opera seria and ballet that Leopold established in Vienna persisted for decades beyond his death and into the nineteenth century.

• 7. Family and Legacy

  ›

  Leopold fathered sixteen children with his wife Maria Luisa, daughter of King Charles III of Spain. The number matched exactly the sixteen children his own mother, Maria Theresa, had produced. He also had an illegitimate son, Luigi von Grün, born in 1788 to the ballerina Livia Raimondi. His eldest son Francis became the last Holy Roman Emperor, known as Francis II. Among his other sons: Ferdinand III ruled Tuscany until the French invasion of 1797; Archduke Charles became a celebrated military commander; Archduke Joseph served as Palatine of Hungary; and Archduke Rainer became Viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia. One son, Archduke Alexander Leopold, died at age twenty-two in an accident involving a fireworks display. Leopold was buried in the Tuscan Crypt within the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, a fitting resting place for an emperor whose most consequential work had been done in Florence. His reign as Holy Roman Emperor lasted barely two years. His reign in Tuscany lasted twenty-five. The Feast of Tuscany, held each the 30th of November since 2000, keeps the memory of the Leopoldine Code alive in the region where he did the work that history would most clearly remember him for.