MARIA THERESA: The Habsburg Empress in Her Time

One of the great European female rulers, Maria Theresa inherited the Hapsburg Empire in 1740 on the death of her father, Charles VI, who had paved the way for female inheritance with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. Maria Theresa's 40-year tenure of the throne was punctuated by such challenges as the War of the Austrian Succession, with which Frederick II of Prussia quickly disputed her rule, and later the Seven Years' War, in which she unsuccessfully attempted to regain the lands lost in the earlier conflict. On the death of her father Maria Theresa inherited the Hapsburg lands but not the elected office of Holy Roman Emperor, and her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, was not accepted as ruler by the Electors of Bavaria and Saxony by virtue of his marriage. Over the next years she negotiated with a wide range of neighbouring political powers including Catholics, Protestants, Hungarians and Muslim Turkey. When Francis I was finally crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1745, the ceremony, described by Goethe, was full of ambiguities and the empire continued in a state of permanent crisis. While Maria Theresa has sometimes been portrayed as an enlightened reformer, her rule had a darker side which the author unpicks in detailed research. When her principal commissioner Alexander Ferdinand von Thurn und Taxis turned against her early in her reign, she retained his services in what was less an act of magnanimity than a demonstration of Hapsburg power and control. Privately she maintained similar strategies in the face of her husband's infidelities. An unpopular aspect of her administration was the use of deportation for prostitutes and others designated "undesirable", and the author uncovers a deep suspicion of Enlightenment philosophy on Maria Theresa's part, coupled with an ostentatious personal piety. Meanwhile Protestantism was in hiding, and in spite of her dependence on Jewish doctors and lawyers, she initiated the last great mass expulsion of Jews in pre-modern Europe, on the pretext of collaboration with the Prussians in the Seven Years' War. A definitive and ground-breaking biography of one of Europe's most powerful women. 1045pp, genealogy, colour photos.