Maria Theresa

Biography

Maria Theresa was born in Vienna in 1717, the eldest surviving child of Emperor Charles VI. Her father, who had no son, spent his reign winning European recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction so that she could inherit the Habsburg lands. In 1736 she married Francis Stephen of Lorraine.

When Charles died in October 1740 several powers repudiated the sanction, and Frederick the Great of Prussia seized Silesia, starting the War of the Austrian Succession. Maria Theresa won crucial support from the Hungarians and held on to most of her inheritance, losing Silesia and some Italian lands, and in 1745 secured the imperial crown for her husband.

With advisers such as Kaunitz, Haugwitz and Gerard van Swieten she reformed the state's finances, administration, army, medicine and schools. Kaunitz's diplomacy reversed Austria's alliances in 1756, joining it with France against Prussia, but the Seven Years' War that followed failed to recover Silesia. After Francis died in 1765 she shared power with her son Joseph II while keeping control herself, and in 1772 she reluctantly accepted Austria's share in the First Partition of Poland.

A devout Catholic, she was hostile to Protestants, Jews and Freemasons and at times ordered their expulsion. She bore sixteen children, among them the emperors Joseph II and Leopold II and Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. She died in Vienna in 1780 after a forty-year reign.