She was a “lean in” kind of woman. Mother of 16 children and ruler of most of Europe. And if she didn’t exactly have to fight for everything she got, Maria Theresa did have to fight to keep it.
A portrait of Maria Theresa as a 10-year-old girl, in 1727, hangs in “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s Greatest Dynasty,” on display at the MIA through May 10. She appears winsome and poised, perhaps already cognizant of her unique destiny. Indeed, she was special before she was born.
Maria Theresa at about age 10.
Her father was Charles VI, emperor of the vast Habsburg lands that stretched from the royal capital of Vienna to the Netherlands in the north, Sicily in the south, and colonies in the Americas and Africa. When Charles was initially childless in his marriage to the euphoniously named Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, he declared that the daughters of royal princes could succeed the Habsburg throne, broadening the path to rule.
But four children of his own did eventually come along, and the two that survived were both female. Maria Theresa was the oldest.
The throne was hers, but before she could settle into it she had to fight an eight-year war of succession with France, Prussia, and other Habsburg states that refused to acknowledge her rule. Even after she won, she was never officially given the title of empress.
“I found myself without money, without credit, without army, without experience and knowledge of my own, and finally also without any counsel because each one of them at first wanted to wait and see how things would develop,” she wrote in her autobiography. Her husband Franz became her stand-in, and everyone seemed happy with this insincere acquiescence to sexual politics (he wasn’t even Habsburgian)–perhaps even Maria Theresa, who was still pulling the strings and had probably gotten tired of Franz lying around anyway.
She wasn’t much for idleness among the idle rich. Once a week, she wrote to each of her 13 surviving children (11 are depicted in the painting at top), critiquing their public appearances, their religious devotion, and their studies. She was preparing them, like any mom would, for their future: pawns of European politics, married off to one noble or another in order to secure an alliance. Four of her daughters became duchesses or queens, most famously Marie Antoinette, who married King Louis XVI of France at 14 and was beheaded in the French Revolution.
When her own husband died, Maria Theresa appointed her son Joseph II as emperor but ruled alongside him. She wanted to set an example, abolishing serfdom and providing universal schooling, and when her son objected, she sidelined him. A mother’s love only goes so far.