Maximilian III Joseph

• 1. Introduction

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  Maximilian III Joseph, the Elector of Bavaria, died on the 30th of December 1777 without a single heir to his name. But what made his final weeks so memorable was not the politics that followed. It was a clock. Riding through Munich in December 1777, Maximilian passed one of the city's tower clocks when its mechanism broke. The clock struck 77 times. He turned to his fellow passengers and said, as though settling the matter, that his years had run out. Within days, he was ill. None of his 15 doctors could identify the disease. By Christmas, it had declared itself: a particularly virulent strain of smallpox known at the time as "purple small pox." He was dead before the month ended.

  What followed his death was a scramble for Bavaria that pulled in Prussia, Austria, and a web of Wittelsbach relatives. But the story of Maximilian III Joseph is not just about who came after him. It is the story of a ruler who, in just over three decades, reshaped Bavaria from a war-torn inheritance into a country with a press free from Jesuit censorship, an academy of sciences, and a first opera performance by a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

• 2. An Inherited War

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  Maximilian was born in Munich on the 28th of March 1727, the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII and his wife, Maria Amalia of Austria, herself the daughter of Emperor Joseph I. When his father died in January 1745, Maximilian was 18 years old and Bavaria was already being invaded by Austrian armies in the War of the Austrian Succession.

  He found himself caught between two camps at court. His mother, Maria Amalia, led the Peace-party alongside Army Commander Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorff. Arrayed against them was the War-party, driven by Foreign Minister General Ignaz Count of Törring and the French envoy Chavigny. The 18-year-old wavered. Then came the Battle of Pfaffenhofen on the 15th of April, a decisive defeat that resolved his indecision for him.

  Maximilian abandoned his father's imperial ambitions and made peace with the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa in the Treaty of Fuessen. The price was a commitment to support Maria Theresa's husband, Grand Duke Francis II Stephen of Tuscany, in the upcoming imperial election. The young elector had traded battlefield risk for diplomatic survival, and he would carry that instinct for strategic restraint through the rest of his reign.

• 3. The Art of Staying Out

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  When the Seven Years' War arrived, Maximilian sent 4,000 men to join the Austrian army. That was it. Bavaria's contribution to a continent-wide conflict was kept deliberately small, and within a year and a half of the war's beginning, in 1758-1759, he pulled even those auxiliary troops back from Austrian service.

  His reasoning was not simply reluctance to fight. Maximilian recognized that a weakened Prussia would leave Bavaria exposed to Habsburg dominance with no counterweight. Bavaria needed Prussia to exist as a power. That political calculation shaped his conduct throughout the war. Working with fellow Wittelsbach Elector Charles Theodore of the Palatinate, he pushed for the neutrality of the Empire during the conflict.

  Family ties complicated the picture. His sister Maria Josepha of Bavaria married Archduke Joseph, the son of Maria Theresa, in 1765. And back in 1747, Maximilian himself had married his first cousin, Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony. The marriage produced no children, a fact that would eventually determine the fate of Bavaria itself. The dynastic alliance with Austria grew closer even as Maximilian worked to keep his duchy out of Austria's orbit.

• 4. The Enlightened Elector

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  In 1747, the Nymphenburg Porcelain Factory was established under Maximilian's reign. Nine years later came the Codex Maximilianeus bavaricus civilis, a civil law code, in 1756. By 1759, he had founded Munich's first academic institution, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In 1770, he created the precursor of the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In 1771, the elector regulated general school attendance across Bavaria.

  He abolished the Jesuit censorship of the press, a move that opened Bavarian intellectual life to currents that had been blocked for generations. He issued an edict against the extravagant pomposity of the Church in 1770, which historians associate with the end of the era of Bavarian rococo. In the same year, he also forbade the Oberammergau Passion Play.

  During a severe famine in 1770, Maximilian sold crown jewels to pay for grain imports and relieve hunger among his people. His epithet, "the much beloved," was not an accident of court flattery. It reflected a ruler who translated Enlightenment values into concrete policy: legal reform, scientific institutions, schooling, and a willingness to part with royal treasure when the people were starving.

• 5. Music and Architecture

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  In 1751, Maximilian commissioned the French architect François de Cuvilliés to build what became the Cuvilliés Theatre, a splendid rococo structure that still stands in Munich. In 1755, he ordered the construction of the Stone Hall of Nymphenburg Palace and directed that some rooms of the New Schleissheim Palace be decorated in rococo style.

  Maximilian was not merely a patron in name. Like his sister Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria, he was skilled in music and composed himself. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came before him seeking a post, Maximilian received him warmly enough, but strict frugality at the Bavarian court meant no position could be offered.

  Mozart's connection to Munich persisted despite that rejection. In 1775, La finta giardiniera, an Italian opera by Mozart, received its world premiere at the Salvatortheater in Munich. Maximilian's court had shaped the cultural landscape that made such an event possible, even if the elector's purse could not extend to keeping Mozart in residence.

• 6. The Empty Succession

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  Maximilian III Joseph was buried in the crypt of the Theatinerkirche in Munich. He was the last of the Bavarian branch of the House of Wittelsbach, a line tracing back to Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor, which had ruled Bavaria since the early 14th century. His death without an heir ignited a succession dispute almost immediately.

  Austrian armies had already invaded portions of the duchy before Maximilian's body was cold. The successor in the male line was Charles Theodore, the Elector Palatine and 12th cousin once removed of Maximilian, drawn from the senior branch of the Wittelsbach dynasty. Charles Theodore was famously indifferent to his new realm. He repeatedly tried to exchange Bavaria for Further Austria, for the Austrian Netherlands, or for anything closer to his Palatinian homeland.

  The women of the Wittelsbach family stepped into the breach. Maximilian's widow, Maria Anna Sophia of Saxony, his sister Duchess Maria Antonia of Bavaria, and Maria Anna of Palatinate-Sulzbach, the widow of former Bavarian crown prince Duke Clement Francis of Bavaria, all negotiated with the reluctant new elector. They worked alongside Frederick II of Prussia and Charles II August, Duke of Zweibrücken, the presumptive successor to Charles Theodore, to secure Bavaria's independence from Austria. The Prussian king had to threaten both the emperor and Bavaria itself with war before the matter was settled. The brief War of the Bavarian Succession was the direct consequence of a carriage ride, a broken clock, and a ruler who outlasted his branch of a dynasty.