The compassionate rule of Empress Maria Theresa

The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, Maria Theresa: Empress, the first English biography of Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy — Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan — had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism. Yet, partly owing to Maria Theresa’s force of character, this complex tapestry of nationalities remained a great power.

After she came to the throne in 1740, she felt “forsaken by the whole world.” Encouraged by France, Austria’s neighbors Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria invaded the monarchy in order to divide it between them. By the time of Maria Theresa’s death in 1780, the Habsburg monarchy had become, in the words of A.J.P. Taylor, “the toughest institution in the history of central Europe.”

At that time, a state was compared to a machine which needed the systematic coordination of all its parts in order to function; but the sovereign’s personality remained as important as the machinery of state. “Those who are summoned to her councils will find the decisions rest with her, not with them,” prophesied a Venetian ambassador before Maria Theresa’s accession. Bassett shows that the empress used her blonde hair, fine complexion and conquering eyes, as well as her dynastic prestige, to win hearts and minds.

Breaking through barriers of etiquette, on September 11, 1741 she made a celebrated appeal to the Hungarian nobles to save “our own person, our children and our crown.” Speaking in Latin, she called on their fidelity and “immemorial courage.” The Hungarians drew their swords, cried “eljen!” (“hurrah!”) repeatedly and offered 60,000 troops. Thereafter, Maria Theresa kept better relations than other Habsburgs with the kingdom of Hungary. The massive royal palace overlooking Budapest dates from her reign.

More skillful than most monarchs at “impression management,” she began the tradition of granting open audiences once or twice a week to members of the public, which distinguished the Habsburg monarchy from its rivals and lasted until 1918. She charmed the Mozart family with her “extraordinary friendliness,” which included her stroking Frau Mozart’s cheek and pressing her hands when they met at a public dinner.

She charmed the Mozart family with her ‘extraordinary friendliness,’ which included stroking Frau Mozart’s cheek

In 1771, an English visitor, Lady Mary Coke, was impressed by Austria. She felt that “the common people,” as well as the old, were better treated there than in England: “The empress is so compassionate that she hates to see anyone put to death… [She had] more spirit and sense in her eyes than I ever saw… Her speaking is a kind of witchcraft.”

The structure of Bassett’s biography, as well as the personality of Maria Theresa, will appeal to readers. Maintenance of the empress’s dynastic inheritance through the Wars of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War (although she never recovered Silesia from her hated rival Frederick of Prussia) occupies the first half of the book. Thereafter, there are short chapters on subjects as varied as the visits of the artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, Mozart, the empress’s religion, music, sculpture and her relations with each part of the empire, from the southern Netherlands to Galicia. Some Belgians might be surprised to learn that they have never been so prosperous as they were under Maria Theresa.

She ruled through hard work as well as charm. She had tentacles in every part of her dominions and most aspects of the lives of her subjects. In 1766, the Codex Theresianus began the codification of laws — followed by the well-named Nemesis Theresiana for the code of criminal law. Austria had law codes of its own long before the Napoleonic code. In 1774 a General School Ordinance led to the establishment of new schools in much of the monarchy. Two years later, torture was abolished. Maria Theresa also founded a “chastity commission” to limit prostitution; Casanova called its officials “the tormentors of pretty girls.”

Trieste was one of many cities which boomed. While imposing restrictions on Jews elsewhere, the empress encouraged them to settle in what became the westernmost port of the Levant, which also attracted Greeks and Arabs. It trebled in population and was called the “consoler of the afflicted and refuge of sinners.” Maria Theresa thalers, minted in Austria for use in the Ottoman empire, were known as levantiner. 

Maria Theresa herself preferred as neighbors the Ottoman empire — “our good Turks” — to those she called “treacherous Slavs.” Unlike her descendant Franz Joseph, who took Bosnia from the Ottoman empire with fatal effect, the empress foresaw nothing but trouble from Balkan acquisitions. She wrote in 1777: “I will never prepare myself for the partition of the Ottoman empire and I hope that our descendants will never see it expelled from Europe.” She also opposed her son Joseph II’s attempt to secure Bavaria, which she called “coveting that to which we have no right.” She knew the partition of Poland was robbery, but accepted Austria’s share.

Few British writers know the “highways and byways” of central Europe and the Balkans better than Bassett, as he has already shown in books such as Balkan Hours (1990) and Last Days in Old Europe (2020). A European Englishman, he knows Vienna and Trieste as well as London. He also understands the military foundations of monarchies. Regiments and armies can be more decisive than nationality or religion in determining allegiance and shaping events. For two centuries, the region called the “military frontier” between Austria and the Ottoman empire was literally a law unto itself, distinct from neighboring Hungary and Croatia.

Maria Theresa tried to mitigate the horrors of serfdom and forced labor out of concern for the fighting quality, rather than the legal rights, of Austrian recruits. Her desire to end serfdom was “the only thing which keeps me at the helm of the state,” she wrote. Their noble masters, especially in Bohemia and Hungary, emerge as cruelly oppressive, more interested in increasing profits by selling wheat abroad than in feeding starving serfs at home. Most aspects of serfdom ceased in 1781, a year after the empress’s death, and before serfdom’s abolition in Prussia and Russia. 

Bassett shows that Maria Theresa was skillful not only at ruling but at forging links between Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia. When well-governed, a multinational monarchy can work better than some nation states. In 1792, the French national monarchy was destroyed by revolution, like its successors in 1830, 1848 and 1870. Many of the Habsburg monarchy’s successor states became nationalistic prisons. What Jaap Scholten wrote in Comrade Baron, his book on the fate of Hungarian nobles in Transylvania under Romanian communism, could also apply to Austria: “Mixed villages had the best tunes.” And mixed monarchies — partly thanks to Maria Theresa.