Maria Theresa of Austria
Maria Theresa ruled the Habsburg lands for forty years, was attacked by half of Europe on her accession, and held them together. Born in Vienna in 1717, she was the eldest daughter of Charles VI, who spent his reign persuading the powers to accept the Pragmatic Sanction allowing a daughter to inherit, and who gave her no training in government whatever. He died in 1740, and Frederick II of Prussia invaded Silesia within weeks, followed by France, Bavaria and Spain. She was twenty-three and pregnant. She went to Pressburg, addressed the Hungarian diet in Latin with her infant son, and obtained troops and money from a kingdom that had spent a century resisting Vienna. The War of the Austrian Succession cost her Silesia, the richest province, and she never recovered it; the Seven Years' War was fought to try, and included the diplomatic revolution of 1756 that allied Austria with its old enemy France. She rebuilt the state instead. She doubled the army, imposed taxation on the nobility and clergy, created a central administration and a supreme court, abolished torture, established compulsory primary education in 1774, and reformed the university and the medical faculty. She was intensely Catholic and expelled Jews from Prague, which she was talked out of, and her attitudes to religious minorities were harsher than her son's. She bore sixteen children in nineteen years, including Joseph II and Marie Antoinette, and married them across Europe. She wore mourning for fifteen years after her husband Francis died, and ruled with Joseph as co-regent, quarrelling constantly. She died in 1780. She never used the title empress in her own right, since it was not hers to hold.
- Lived: 1717 CE – 1780 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: archduchess_of_austria, queen_of_hungary, queen_of_bohemia
