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The fact that Maria Theresa gave birth to sixteen children is a well-known part of her life story. Of her eleven daughters and five sons ten survived into adulthood. Maria Theresa’s first child, a daughter named Maria Elisabeth (1737–1740), died while still a young child. The eldest of the surviving children was Maria Anna (1738–1789 ...
- Maria Theresa in The Eyes of Her Contemporaries
Pangels, Charlotte: Die Kinder Maria Theresias. Leben und...
- Maria Theresa
As Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria,...
- The Heiress
Maria Theresa received the upbringing and education typical...
- Maria Theresa in The Eyes of Her Contemporaries
- Overview
- Early life
- War of the Austrian Succession
- Domestic reforms
- Foreign relations
Maria Theresa’s father was the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI, and her mother was Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Charles was the last surviving prince of his line, and, in an effort to preserve the Habsburg dominions, he issued the Pragmatic Sanction to allow Maria Theresa to succeed him.
What was Maria Theresa’s childhood like?
From the day she was born, Maria Theresa was one of the most important people in 18th-century Europe. Although she could not reign as Holy Roman empress in her own right, she was groomed from an early age to preserve Habsburg territory and influence. When she was 18, she married Francis Stephen of Lorraine.
What were Maria Theresa’s accomplishments?
Within months of Charles VI’s death, Frederick II of Prussia invaded Silesia, a Habsburg province, beginning the War of the Austrian Succession. Maria Theresa led Austria through this and two other wars, preserving the bulk of Habsburg territory in the face of a series of militarily superior opponents.
Where is Maria Theresa buried?
Maria Theresa was the eldest daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI and Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The death of an only son prompted Charles, the only living prince of his line, to promulgate the so-called Pragmatic Sanction, a royal act, eventually recognized by most powers, whereby female issue was entitled to succeed to the doma...
On October 20, 1740, Charles VI died, and the war of succession he had striven so hard to forestall broke out before the end of the year. Charles left the Habsburg state at the lowest point of its prestige, its coffers empty, its capital beset by unrest. The naive courage with which Maria Theresa assumed her heritage (and made her husband co-regent...
Realizing the need for a sizable standing army and in order to maintain one, Maria Theresa accepted the plans of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz—the first in a succession of remarkable men of intellect she was to draw into her council. In the face of the opposition of many noblemen, she managed to reduce drastically (except in Hungary) the powers of the various dominions’ estates, which had held the monarchy’s purse strings since time immemorial. In the further process of abolishing tax exemptions held by the great landowners, who dominated those assemblies, she hit on the notion of a “God-pleasing equality.” Yet she did not question the justice of the manorial lord’s claim on the labour of his hereditary subjects. Only many years later did peasant riots in famine-stricken Bohemia, as well as the reported cruelty of Hungarian magnates, cause her to limit the use of forced labour. “The peasantry must be able to sustain itself as well as pay taxes…,” she wrote.
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Practical, if not always fiscal, considerations, rather than doctrinaire humanitarianism, guided all of Maria Theresa’s reforms. An enlarged central administration—from which the judiciary was separated in 1749—and a repeatedly reorganized treasury required knowledgeable civil servants and judges; and their training was, to her mind, the sole purpose of higher education. She approved drastic changes that her physician, the Dutchman Gerhard van Swieten, carried through at the universities (such as the introduction of textbooks, the linking of the medical school of the University of Vienna with the embryonic public health service, and the sovereign’s right to veto the election of deans by the faculties) even as he took them out of the hands of the Jesuits, to whose Society she herself was devoted. (She was the last of the Catholic monarchs to close its establishments.) Deeply pious, strictly observant, and intolerant to the point of bigotry, she was moving, nonetheless, toward subordinating the church to the authority of the state.
Neither the peace of 1745 (by which Austria ceded Silesia to Prussia) nor the peace of 1748 (which ended Maria Theresa’s war with the rest of her enemies) ended her efforts to modernize the army. The dazzling ideas of her new chancellor, Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, fired her determination to recover Silesia, indeed, to destroy Prussia. In a famous “reversal of alliances” (1756) she threw over England, the old ally and “banker” of the Habsburgs, and allied herself with France, their ancient foe. Moreover, she had entered into a treaty with Russia, a newcomer to European rivalries. She paid but scant attention to the global ramifications of the ensuing Seven Years’ War. When its end sealed the loss of Silesia and left the monarchy with a mountain of debts, she became a champion of peace. As late as 1779 she single-handedly frustrated another full-scale war with Prussia, risked by her self-opinionated firstborn, Joseph II, who on his father’s demise had become co-regent in the Habsburg dominions (and been elected emperor).
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Though Francis had not been a faithful husband, Maria Theresa never wavered in her love, and his sudden death in 1765 plunged her into prolonged grief. She emerged from it, her zeal for activity nowise impaired. A new public-debt policy, the settlement of the empty spaces of Hungary, the drafting of a penal code to supplant the tangle of local systems, and a kind of poor law—these were but some of the innovations in which she herself took a hand, with her common sense doing service for the book learning she lacked. In step with the enforced retreat of the church from secular affairs, she came to feel that it was incumbent on the state to control the intellectual life of its subjects. It was she who institutionalized government censorship; on the other hand, it was she, too, who launched plans for compulsory primary education.
- Robert Pick
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Apr 2, 2014 · Maria Theresa died on November 29, 1780, at Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria—where she had reigned for four decades—leaving behind a solid basis for future generations of the family empire.
Apr 15, 2021 · The marriage of the then 19-year-old Maria Theresa to her beloved Franz Stephan of Lorraine took place on February 12, 1736 in the Augustinian Church in Vienna . Three months after the marriage, she was already pregnant and gave birth to 16 children within 20 years. The first-born daughter, Maria Elisabeth (1737-1740) already died as a toddler.
Maria Theresa (Maria Theresia Walburga Amalia Christina; 13 May 1717 – 29 November 1780) was ruler of the Habsburg dominions from 1740 until her death in 1780, and the only woman to hold the position suo jure (in her own right). She was the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria ...
- 12 May 1743 – 29 November 1780
- Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
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