Maria Theresa learned what Louis XIV called the craft of kingship very quickly because she had no choice. The next sentence of her memorandum resumes, “I found myself in this situation, without money, without an army, without experience or knowledge and finally without advice … when I was attacked by the King of Prussia.” Her ministers, “unable or unwilling” to believe he would do this, together with “my own inexperience and good faith,” explain why Frederick II “was left free to overrun the Duchy of Silesia within six weeks.” In this crisis she came to rely on a minister whom she had strongly disliked because of his policies at the time of her marriage four years previously. Looking back on the almost disastrous beginnings of her reign, Maria Theresa did not spare herself. Rivalries among her advisers “produced a deep enough split between ministers, services, and peoples which I did not notice early enough, and later, when it became very acute, I did not manage with sufficient resolution, because I was too good-hearted (and the situation was very delicate), but [I] only applied palliatives which made matters worse.”17
It is instructive to compare her remarks, written in the winter of 1749–50, with the reflections of her “smooth-tongued” enemy Frederick II many decades later. A notorious misogynist whose personal antipathy to women extended to the point of virtually excluding them from his court, the young Prussian king had once exclaimed that “no woman should ever be allowed to govern anything,” and his first important act as king had been to seize Silesia from its young Habsburg heiress. But decades of conflict taught this gynophobe never to underestimate her. In the preface to his History of My Times, published at Berlin in French, Old Fritz noted how “when it seemed that events presaged the ruin of the young Queen of Hungary [Maria Theresa], this princess, through her firmness and cleverness, escaped from such a dangerous corner and sustained her monarchy by sacrificing Silesia and a small part of the duchy of Milan; it was everything that one could expect from a young princess, who, scarcely arrived on her throne, grasped the spirit of government and became the soul of her council.”18
One Woman Ruling Two Kingdoms
Maria Theresa was the only woman in Europe to have official coronations in two kingdoms, although she lived in neither. Her experiences in becoming monarch were very different in each kingdom, and, while ruling both from Vienna, she treated them very differently throughout her long reign. Hungary, her favorite, she showered with all kinds of favors and privileges, while Bohemia was an unloved child, burdened with heavy taxes and reduced autonomy. As she said on her deathbed, “I have been a good Hungarian” she tried to repay Hungarian support by preserving as many of their traditional liberties as possible, and Magyars, who seldom love their Viennese Habsburg overlords, remember her fondly as mokuska, or “little squirrel.”19 For Czechs, however, Maria Theresa's reign was a dark age when nothing could be printed in the national language. She left few footprints in Prague except a church near its great palace, although in 1777 she converted a former Jesuit church into Bohemia's national library, which it remains today. Unsurprisingly, since 1980 she has had three biographies in Hungarian and one in Czech.
Her acclamation as king by the Hungarian diet in 1741—they reportedly shouted, “We offer our blood and our lives for our king, Maria Theresa!"—was an essential early achievement that prevented a possible dismemberment of her inheritance. In order to accomplish it, she not only used the Latin she had learned as a girl for extensive personal negotiations with Hungarian magnates, but also learned to ride in masculine fashion for her coronation: the culmination of the ceremony required Hungary's new monarch to charge up a hill and point a sword to all four points of the compass. The event was commemorated by a medal and soon afterward in a painting, the first to depict a sword-wielding woman ruler galloping on horseback. Although Frederick II always called her the queen of Hungary, she was also its king. In 1745 in a Hungarian fortress a French antiquarian located the tomb of a female who had been buried with a crown and insignia of the House of Anjou. He announced to Maria Theresa that he was “sending the remains of the first King Mary of Hungary to Your Sacred Majesty, the second Mary also King.”20
Throughout her reign Maria Theresa continued to shower favors on Hungary. She transferred the Serbian Banat district to Hungarian jurisdiction and rebuilt her official residences at Pressburg (now Bratislava), which remained Hungary's official capital, and at Buda. A minor Hungarian noble, Anton Grassalkovich, headed her treasury or Hofkammer from 1748 until 1771. Hungarian students had five equal-opportunity scholarships in her elite Viennese Theresianum; although the quota was rarely filled, no fewer than 117 Hungarians attended it between 1749 and 1774. A special unit of Hungarian royal bodyguards was created in 1760 for provincial nobles, including Protestants. In 1763 she founded an Academy of Mines in the kingdom's silver-mining center, Schemiz (Selmecbanya). In 1777 she transferred Hungary's small university to Buda, its largest city and traditional capital, attaching to it a Theresian College, founded in 1767, which provided funds, including uniforms and meals, for sons of twenty magnates, twenty nobles, and ten officials to enter every year.21
Her other kingdom treated her very differently in 1740, and she treated it very differently afterward. Under military and diplomatic pressure from France, Bohemia's diet had chosen the elector of Bavaria, the son-in-law of the older brother of Maria Theresa's father, as their new king. The successful candidate then cast Bohemia's vote to help elect himself emperor, but he could not enjoy a traditional coronation at Prague because the Bohemian crown of St. Wenceslaus had long ago been taken to Vienna. After Maria Theresa had utilized her recently born son in her Hungarian negotiations of 1741, she then motivated her troops to expel the Bavarians from the province of Upper Austria by sending her commander a Madonna-like mother and child portrait accompanied by a stirring call to battle. Her soldiers chased the invaders out and proceeded to invade Bavaria, occupying its capital on the same day the Bavarian elector was being crowned Holy Roman emperor in Frankfurt. After making a truce that effectively abandoned Silesia to Frederick II, Maria Theresa sent her forces into Bohemia, and they soon drove the French from Prague.
On January 2, 1743, Maria Theresa celebrated the recapture of Prague with a truly original spectacle known as the Ladies’ Carousel (Damen-Karroussel), which she commemorated with a large painting that still hangs in her palace of Schönbrunn. As the official newspaper reported, sixteen great noblewomen and court ladies, “despite having very little time to practice,” paraded through Vienna arranged in four quadrilles, half of them on horseback and the other half in ornate carriages. Maria Theresa rode in the middle, wearing a tricornered hat and brandishing a dagger. All these great ladies carried weapons, including lances, darts, and daggers, and some even fired off pistols before they reached the Spanish riding school in the palace complex. There they held a mock tournament, ending with a jousting contest between Maria Theresa and Countess Nostitz in which both women, carrying lances, tried to knock off a “Turk's head” held by negro slaves.22
Her master of ceremonies noted that “the Queen [Maria Theresa was now queen of Hungary] rode like a woman,” as did Countess Nostitz; but the other ladies, “both married and unmarried, rode in masculine fashion, which caused some remarks.” Although Maria Theresa knew how to ride in masculine fashion, she used a sidesaddle at this all-female Viennese rodeo because she was then more than three months pregnant (she was pregnant almost half the time throughout the 1740s). Her bellicose celebration was a sublimated form of wish fulfillment. Looking back on her first eight war-filled years, she remarked in her political testament that “had I not been nearly always pregnant, no one could have stopped my taking the field against my perjured enemy [Frederick II].”23 But on the battlefield, Prussia's soldier-king had to face only her male surrogates, her husband and her brother-in-law Charles of Loraine, and he proved more than a match for either of them.
Finally crowned at Prague amidst a wave of congratulatory pamphlets from her nervous new subjects and complaining tha
t the heavy Bohemian crown looked like “a fool's cap,” Maria Theresa displayed little respect for Bohemia's traditional liberties as she tried to apply her official motto, ‘Justice and Clemency.’ A special court set up to try the most prominent collaborators with the French and Bavarians eventually condemned six noblemen to death. Maria Theresa first exercised clemency by sparing the lives of all six, including one who had offered freedom to his serfs if they fought against the Austrians. Justice followed a few years later when she abolished Bohemia's separate chancery in Vienna and her major administrative and military reforms attempted to unify bureaucratic procedures within both her Bohemian and her Austrian possessions.24
Frederick II was politically correct in always referring to her as ‘queen of Hungary’ rather than empress, as she is conventionally known, because women could not rule the Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, after Charles Albert of Bavaria, the only European prince to reject the Pragmatic Sanction, had been elected emperor in 1741, the transfer of the imperial crown to her husband Francis Stephen, former Duke of Lorraine and Grand Duke of Tuscany, became the final major step in recovering her father's possessions. Although Maria Theresa was soon able to humiliate him militarily, she could do nothing about his imperial title as long as he lived. But his political misfortunes ruined his health, and Charles Albert died unexpectedly early in 1745, thus clearing the path for the election of Maria Theresa's husband. Her behavior when her husband was finally crowned emperor was noteworthy. Firmly opposing a separate coronation for herself, as the previous emperor had done for his wife, she used another pregnancy as an excuse for watching the ceremony from a balcony window, shouting an occasional Vivat. She explained to her chancellor that she valued this crown less than those of her two masculine coronations; this ceremony was merely “a comedy.”
Nevertheless, imperial prestige mattered. An edict of February 1746 ordered that her titles on coins minted throughout her hereditary possessions (in eight different countries of today's European Union) now began with R. Imp.Ge., Roman Empress of Germany. Moreover, half were now to depict the new emperor, whose face and titles had never appeared previously on Habsburg coins. However, evidence suggests that monetary parity was not actually observed. For example, during the next twenty years numismatists distinguish 129 types of silver thaler (the basic high-value Habsburg coin) bearing her name and only 82 with her husband's name—a ratio of more than 3:2.25
Politically, she now had it all. About the time she composed her political testament for her successors, Maria Theresa sat for a state portrait by Martin van Meytens that became the best-known image of her, apart from the millions of Maria Theresa thalers dated 1780 that are still produced. In Meytens's portrait, she wears a pink dress and holds a scepter; two crowns lie alongside her on a cushioned table, with a sword and a cornucopia resting on the fireplace behind her. But she was also very much a matriarch, and her numerous children crowd into several family portraits in which her husband is prominent but she invariably remains the center of attention (see fig. 13). Her titles were now far too numerous to be squeezed onto the circumference of any coin or medal, no matter how large. An official Austrian protocol from 1745, in Latin and German, began with six royal titles: Germany (as empress), Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, followed by archduchess of Austria. Next came sixteen duchies, led by Burgundy, followed by two principalities, four burgraves (markgrafen), eight counties, and five simple lordships (herrschaften). A final formal honor arrived in 1758, when Pope Clement XIII restored the Hungarian title of Apostolic Majesty, not used since the eleventh century.26
In her political testament Maria Theresa mentioned none of her political titles and said little about her wars with Frederick II. She remained focused on explaining her major reforms, designed to ensure Austria's future military protection and to streamline its political decision making. A financial base sufficient to maintain an adequate standing army required much higher and more reliable annual payments from the representative bodies of her various provinces. Bureaucratic procedures were centralized by amalgamating the central Austrian and Bohemian court chancellories (but that for Hungary remained separate). As Emile Karafiol noted, Maria Theresa always remained “careful not only to respect traditional forms, but to preserve old institutions as much as she thought compatible with the essential needs of the state. … [O]nly by consultation, compromise, and piecemeal reform was she able to carry out extensive changes successfully and peacefully” because “she herself was part of the old order, accepting its assumptions even while unwittingly she undermined its foundations.”27
Her early reforms concentrated on immediate and practical problems and adopted traditional forms wherever possible. For example, Maria Theresa called her comprehensive Austro-Bohemian census of 1753 a “description of souls” (Seelenbeschreibung) and entrusted it primarily to priests. It provided the ages of 6,134,558 of her subjects, including nobles and Jews, and also some street plans. Afterward, Habsburg bureaucracy continued its relentless march. Greater uniformity was introduced through parallel clerical and civil censuses in 1762. Military reforms created a Conscription Patent in 1770 which omitted only her most remote Italian and Belgian possessions. A separate Jewish census throughout her possessions followed in 1776.28 Despite its vast size, her state had a narrow summit; during her reign only seven great princely families, whose town palaces still adorn Vienna and Bratislava, effectively monopolized Hungary's major national offices.
Maria Theresa certainly did her part to increase Austria's population. When not preoccupied with mastering what her first mentor, the Count Silva Tarouca of Portugal, called “the ABCs of government” or pondering military strategies against Frederick II, she was producing a child almost every year until 1756. Overall, she gave birth to sixteen children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood—totals far exceeding those of any other reigning female monarch in Europe or elsewhere.29 Her oldest surviving child, Maria Anna (1738–89), became an abbess in Prague. Reversing the normal pattern of primogeniture, her oldest son, Josef, inherited his mother's Austrian hereditary lands and her two kingdoms, while the second son, Leopold, inherited his father's Grand Duchy of Tuscany. One other daughter also became an abbess, while the remainder married various princes; most famously, her youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, married the French crown prince who became Louis XVI. Her third son married the heiress to an Italian duchy, while the youngest boy became grand master of the Teutonic Knights and later archbishop of Cologne.
Maria Theresa played favorites with her children, as she did with her kingdoms. The daughter whom she loved best, the artistically talented Maria Christina, was allowed to marry for love, and the empress lavished wealth and honors on her dynastically disadvantaged husband, who had five older brothers. Maria Christina repaid her mother's favoritism by supervising her husband's magnificent art collection, which forms the nucleus of a great Viennese museum, the Albertina (her name provides its last four letters). No such sentimental considerations affected the marriages of any of Christina's sisters, especially the youngest, Marie Antoinette. Nor, for that matter, those of their oldest brother; Maria Theresa forced a disastrous second wedding on her heir and official coregent, Joseph.
In foreign affairs, Maria Theresa succeeded in making a durable alliance with Empress Elisabeth Petrovna of Russia, who gave her invaluable military assistance during two wars against Frederick II. After her greatest adviser, Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, persuaded her to ally with her old enemy France in 1756, only Elisabeth's death five years later prevented Maria Theresa from recovering Silesia from the Prussians during the ensuing Seven Years’ War. When it broke out, she could draw well-trained officers from her new military academy. After Austria's first great victory over Prussia in this conflict, she celebrated by naming a new Habsburg honorary military order for herself. As Kaunitz noted, she had many Protestant officers in her service, so the Maria-Theresien-Orden rewarded exceptional bravery in combat without any religious or genealogical p
rerequisites. The statutes of the order were proclaimed by her husband as grand master and printed at Vienna in 1759, and it would last as long as the Habsburg empire.30
In 1764 her Hungarian chancellor persuaded her to restore a long-defunct honorary order named for Hungary's first Christian king, St. Stephen. Open to civilian officials as well as to soldiers, it was limited to highly aristocratic Hungarians. Emperor Franz Stefan, grand master of the new order bearing his wife's name, vehemently opposed this idea as needless and refused to attend when his wife, wearing Hungarian dress, officially proclaimed it at the opening of Hungary's diet in 1764. Instead, she herself became its grand master, having “acquired masculine quality through the legal fiction of the Pragmatic Sanction.” When her husband died a year later, she quickly resigned in favor of her son.31
Maria Theresa accomplished most of her major political and military achievements before her husband's death in 1765, while they were celebrating the marriage of their second son. Her widowhood changed her lifestyle in various ways. After Joseph II automatically succeeded his father as Holy Roman emperor, his mother named him coregent; but Maria Theresa also announced that she would continue to rule “without however surrendering the whole or any part of our personal sovereignty over our states, which continue to be kept together, and moreover without the least actual or apparent breach of the Pragmatic Sanction.” She also ordered new coins minted for her son, just as she had done for her husband twenty years before. Separate, of course, does not mean equal. Maria Theresa's highest value coins were worth ten ducats; those of her imperial husband never exceeded five ducats, and those of her equally imperial son never exceeded three ducats during his mother's lifetime.
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 21
