Maria Theresa

• 1. Introduction

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  Maria Theresa was born on the 13th of May 1717 in Vienna, six months after the death of her elder brother, and her arrival was met not with celebration but with disappointment. Her father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, had hoped for a son who would prevent the extinction of the House of Habsburg. Instead, he got a daughter with large blue eyes, fair hair with a slight tinge of red, and what a Prussian ambassador noted as a notably strong body. That body would need to be strong. When Charles VI died on the 20th of October 1740, most likely from mushroom poisoning, he left his 23-year-old daughter a treasury containing only 100,000 florins and an army reduced from its full strength of 160,000 to roughly 108,000 men, scattered and poorly trained across territories stretching from the Austrian Netherlands to Transylvania. Every major power that had signed the Pragmatic Sanction guaranteeing her succession promptly broke their word. Within weeks, Frederick II of Prussia invaded the wealthy province of Silesia. What followed was a 40-year reign that would reshape Central Europe, reform its institutions, and leave a continent altered by the force of a single woman's determination.

• 2. A Kingdom Besieged

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  Frederick II invaded the Duchy of Silesia in December 1740 and offered Maria Theresa a compromise: cede at least part of the province, and he would defend her rights against other enemies. Her husband Francis Stephen was inclined to accept. Maria Theresa was not. She feared that any breach of the Pragmatic Sanction would invalidate the entire document, and she was confident she would retain what she called "the jewel of the House of Austria". That confidence cost her dearly. The Austrians suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Mollwitz in April 1741. France drew up a plan to partition Austria between Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Spain, with Bohemia slated to become Bavarian territory. Vienna panicked. By October 1741, the Elector of Bavaria had captured Prague and declared himself king of Bohemia. Charles Albert was elected Holy Roman Emperor in January 1742, becoming the only non-Habsburg to hold that title since 1440. The same day he was crowned, Austrian troops under Ludwig Andreas von Khevenhüller captured Munich, his own capital. It was a signal of the war's strange reversals. Maria Theresa had lost Silesia by the Treaty of Breslau in June 1742, but she recovered Bohemia and was crowned Queen of Bohemia in St. Vitus Cathedral on the 12th of May 1743. When Frederick again invaded Bohemia in 1744, beginning a Second Silesian War, the wider conflict ground on until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which recognised Prussia's permanent possession of Silesia.

• 3. The Hungarian Gamble

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  On the 11th of September 1741, with her options exhausted and allies abandoning her, Maria Theresa appeared before the Hungarian Diet wearing the Holy Crown of Hungary. She began speaking in Latin. She had spent months learning the equestrian skills required for her coronation as queen of Hungary, held earlier that year in St. Martin's Cathedral in Pressburg. To address concerns about her gender, she had assumed masculine titles: in formal nomenclature, she was archduke and king. Now, in that chamber, she told the assembled delegates that the very existence of Hungary, her own person and children, and her crown were at stake. She declared that she placed her sole reliance in the fidelity and long-tried valor of the Hungarians. The response was hostile. Members of the Diet questioned her. Someone shouted that she would do better to apply to Satan than the Hungarians for help. Maria Theresa had prepared for this moment. She held her infant son and heir Joseph while weeping, and she dramatically placed the future king under the protection of the brave Hungarians. The room turned. The delegates declared they would die for her. She had won the numbers she desperately needed, though volunteers at first came only in the hundreds. The theatrical skill she demonstrated that day would prove as decisive as any battle Maria Theresa ever fought.

• 4. The Diplomatic Revolution

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  Prince Wenzel Anton of Kaunitz-Rietberg served as Austrian ambassador to Versailles from 1750 to 1753 with one objective: to bring France into an alliance against Prussia. It was a radical idea. France had been one of Austria's archenemies alongside Russia and the Ottoman Empire for generations. When the British instead concluded the Treaty of Westminster with Frederick II in 1756, Maria Theresa sent Georg Adam, Prince of Starhemberg, to Paris, and the result was the First Treaty of Versailles on the 1st of May 1756. Historians have noted that the alliance came at a high price for France: Louis XV was required to deploy troops in Germany and provide subsidies of 25-30 million pounds a year to Austria. The Second Treaty of Versailles, signed on the 1st of May 1757, went further. Louis XV promised 130,000 men in addition to 12 million florins yearly, and both powers agreed to continue the war until Prussia was compelled to abandon Silesia and Glatz. The resulting Seven Years' War brought Austria closer to its goal than any previous conflict. Austrian and Russian troops occupied Berlin for several days in August 1760. Prussia suffered successive defeats at Hochkirch in Saxony in October 1758, at Kunersdorf in Brandenburg in August 1759, and at Landeshut near Glatz in June 1760. But Russian support collapsed after the death of Empress Elizabeth in early 1762, and France, losing badly in America and India, cut its subsidies by half. The Treaty of Hubertusburg in 1763 left Silesia in Prussian hands.

• 5. Rebuilding the State

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  Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz created a standing army of 108,000 men for Maria Theresa, funded by 14 million florins extracted from crown lands. He also instituted taxation of the nobility, who had never before paid taxes, and after his appointment as head of the new central administrative agency called the Directorium in publicis et cameralibus in 1749, he pushed centralisation of state institutions down to the level of the District Office. By 1760 there was a class of government officials numbering around 10,000. Maria Theresa doubled state revenue from 20 to 40 million florins between 1754 and 1764. In 1775, the Habsburg monarchy achieved its first balanced budget, and by 1780 state revenue had reached 50 million florins. On the legal side, the Constitutio Criminalis Theresiana was published in 1769, codifying traditional criminal justice since the Middle Ages. The same year, she founded the Supreme Judiciary as a court of final appeal for all hereditary lands. In 1776, Austria outlawed torture, primarily at the insistence of Joseph II, though Maria Theresa herself had opposed the abolition. Her Chastity Commission, established in 1752, employed secret agents to investigate the private lives of citizens suspected of prostitution, homosexuality, or adultery, with punishments ranging from whipping to deportation to death. The census of 1770-1771 revealed widespread illiteracy and exposed the brutal demands placed on serfs, with some landlords requiring peasants to work up to seven days per week on noble land, leaving only night hours to tend their own plots.

• 6. Smallpox and Inoculation

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  Gerard van Swieten, recruited by Maria Theresa from the Netherlands, arrived in Vienna and employed a fellow Dutchman named Anton de Haen to found the Viennese Medicine School. Van Swieten would become one of the empress's most important advisers, and also one of her most significant obstacles when it came to the question of inoculation against smallpox. The disease was devastating the imperial family. Maria Theresa's daughter Maria Christina survived a bout in July 1749; her eldest son Joseph survived one in January 1757; her son Charles died from it in January 1761 at the age of fifteen; her twelve-year-old daughter Johanna died from it in December 1762. In 1767, Joseph's first wife Isabella of Parma died from smallpox, then his second wife Maria Josepha of Bavaria caught it in May of that year and died a week later. Maria Theresa contracted the disease after embracing her daughter-in-law before the sick chamber was sealed. She received the last rites on the 1st of June. When news came that she had survived, the city of Vienna rejoiced. Her daughter Josepha died later that same year, after visiting the Imperial Crypt where she may have been exposed. Maria Theresa learned of inoculation through her correspondence with Maria Antonia, Electress of Saxony. She overrode Van Swieten's objections and ordered a trial on thirty-four newborn orphans and sixty-seven orphans aged five to fourteen. The trial succeeded, and Maria Theresa had herself and two of her children inoculated. She then hosted a dinner at Schonbrunn Palace for the first sixty-five inoculated children, waiting on them herself.

• 7. Education and Reform

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  The census of 1770-1771 made visible something that had long been suspected: the Habsburg lands were deeply illiterate. Maria Theresa wrote to her rival Frederick II of Prussia to request that the Silesian school reformer Johann Ignaz von Felbiger be allowed to move to Austria. Felbiger's first proposals became law by December 1774. The reform established secular primary schools that all children of both sexes, aged six to twelve, were required to attend. The curriculum stressed social responsibility, work ethic, and the use of reason over rote learning, and instruction was to begin in each child's mother tongue. Prizes were given to able students, and teachers were forbidden to take on outside employment; teacher training colleges were established to spread the new methods. The reform faced serious opposition. Peasants wanted children in the fields. Aristocrats feared that greater literacy would expose the population to Protestant and Enlightenment ideas. Maria Theresa ordered the arrest of all those who openly opposed the changes. The results, at least in some regions, were dramatic: in the Archdiocese of Vienna, school attendance rose from 40% in 1780 to 94% by 1807. Austrian historian Karl Vocelka described the educational reforms as built on Enlightenment ideas, even if the driving motive was to produce administrators, officers, and specialists for an absolutist state. For the wealthier classes, the Theresianum had been established in Vienna in 1746 to educate nobles' sons, the Theresian Military Academy was founded in Wiener Neustadt in 1751, and an Oriental Academy for future diplomats was created in 1754.

• 8. Death and Legacy

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  Maria Theresa fell ill on the 24th of November 1780. Her physician Dr. Storck considered the situation serious; her son Joseph was confident she would recover. She asked for the last rites on the 26th of November. On the 28th, the physician told her the time had come. She died on the 29th of November 1780, surrounded by her remaining children. Her body was buried in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna beside her husband Francis Stephen, in a coffin she had inscribed during her lifetime. Frederick the Great, on hearing the news, said that she had honoured her throne and her sex, and that although he had fought her in three wars, he had never considered her his enemy. With her death, the original House of Habsburg came to an end and was replaced by the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Joseph II, as her successor, introduced sweeping reforms, issuing nearly 700 edicts per year, compared to roughly 100 annually under his mother. His Patent of Toleration, issued immediately after her death, granted the freedom of worship she had refused for as long as she lived. In Vienna, a large bronze monument was built in her honour at Maria-Theresien-Platz in 1888. The Military Order of Maria Theresa, founded by her in 1757, remained in existence until after World War I. The city of Subotica was renamed Maria-Theresiapolis in her honour in 1779, and her granddaughter Maria Theresa of Naples and Sicily became Holy Roman Empress in 1792, carrying her name forward into the next century.