Maria Theresa

Maria Theresa ruled the lands of the Habsburg dynasty from 1740 to 1780, the only woman ever to do so in her own right. She inherited a bankrupt state that her neighbours immediately tried to carve up, fought off most of the attack while losing Silesia to Prussia, and then rebuilt the government, army, finances and schools of what would become the Austrian Empire. A devout and often intolerant Catholic, she was also the mother of sixteen children, among them two emperors and Queen Marie Antoinette of France.

Maria Theresa was born in Vienna on 13 May 1717, the eldest daughter of Emperor Charles VI and Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Charles was the last male Habsburg, and he had already issued the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, a family law allowing his lands to pass undivided to a daughter. He spent much of his reign buying foreign recognition of it with concessions, while the army and treasury decayed. He never trained his daughter to rule.

In 1736 she married Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine, a genuine love match on her side. As part of a European settlement Francis gave up Lorraine to France and received the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in exchange, with its capital at Florence. The couple had sixteen children between 1737 and 1756, of whom ten reached adulthood.

Charles VI died on 20 October 1740, leaving his 23-year-old daughter an empty treasury and an army of barely 100,000 scattered men. Within weeks the guarantees he had collected proved worthless. In December Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Silesia, and Bavaria, Saxony, Spain and France soon joined in, planning to partition her inheritance. In 1741 a Bavarian and French army took Prague, and the Elector of Bavaria was crowned king of Bohemia and then elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles VII, the first non-Habsburg in that office in three centuries.

Maria Theresa refused to give way. Crowned queen of Hungary at Pressburg (Bratislava) in June 1741, she went before the Hungarian Diet that September and, in a famous scene, appealed to the nobles for help; they voted troops in return for confirmation of their privileges. Austrian forces recovered Bohemia and briefly occupied Munich. She was forced to cede Silesia in 1742 and again, after Frederick's second attack, in 1745, but the same year she secured the election of her husband as Emperor Francis I of the Holy Roman Empire. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 confirmed her rule over almost all her father's lands, minus Silesia and the Italian duchy of Parma.

The war convinced her that the monarchy needed a stronger centre. From 1749 her minister Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz merged the separate Austrian and Bohemian chanceries into a single administration, created district offices answerable to Vienna, and imposed regular taxes on the nobility and clergy to pay for a standing army. A military academy was founded at Wiener Neustadt in 1751. Later, under the State Council created in 1760 and the guidance of her chancellor Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, the reforms moved into new areas.

In 1774 a general school ordinance introduced state primary schools that children of both sexes were expected to attend from six to twelve, one of her most durable achievements. In the 1770s she issued decrees limiting the forced labour that landlords could demand from serfs in Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary, after a census exposed the misery of the peasantry. After smallpox killed several members of her family she had her children inoculated and sponsored inoculation more widely. A new criminal code of 1769 still permitted torture, which was abolished in 1776 at the urging of her son Joseph against her own preference. Her reforms owed more to the practical needs of the state than to the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, which she distrusted.

Maria Theresa never accepted the loss of Silesia. Kaunitz engineered a reversal of alliances, and in 1756 Austria allied with its old enemy France, joined by Russia, against Prussia and Britain. In the Seven Years' War that followed, Austrian armies under Leopold von Daun and Ernst von Laudon won at Kolín, Hochkirch and, with the Russians, at Kunersdorf, and briefly occupied Berlin. But the coalition broke apart when Russia changed sides in 1762, and the Peace of Hubertusburg in 1763 left Silesia with Prussia. To seal the French alliance, she later married her youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, to the future Louis XVI in 1770.

Francis died suddenly at Innsbruck in August 1765. Maria Theresa wore mourning for the rest of her life and made her eldest son, now Emperor Joseph II, co-ruler of the Habsburg lands. The partnership was tense. Joseph wanted faster, more radical change and religious toleration; his mother resisted both.

In 1772 she reluctantly agreed to the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with Prussia and Catherine the Great, taking Galicia. She protested that it was unjust; Frederick remarked that the more she wept, the more she took. In 1778–1779 Joseph's attempt to acquire Bavaria led to a brief war with Prussia that she ended by negotiation.

Her piety had a harsh side. In 1744 she ordered the expulsion of the Jews of Prague, accusing them of disloyalty during the Bavarian occupation; the order was carried out in 1745 and reversed in 1748 under economic and diplomatic pressure. Secret Protestants in the Austrian lands were hunted out, sent to workhouses to be converted, or deported to Transylvania, several thousand of them in the 1750s. She also set up a Chastity Commission to police public morals in Vienna.

Maria Theresa died in Vienna on 29 November 1780 and was buried beside her husband in the Capuchin Crypt. Joseph II succeeded her as sole ruler and quickly pushed through the toleration she had refused. Her daughters became queens of France and Naples, and her son Leopold followed Joseph as emperor.

She is remembered in Austria as one of the most capable rulers of the Habsburg Monarchy. Her centralising reforms turned a loose collection of crowns into something closer to a modern state, able to survive the wars of the next century, while her religious policies are now seen as the darker side of a long and energetic reign.