Maria Theresa Born: Habsburg Reformer and Defender

Maria Theresa inherited the Habsburg throne at twenty-three in 1740 and spent forty years defending her realm against a coalition of European powers while modernizing Austria's government, military, and education system. Her father, Emperor Charles VI, had spent decades securing the Pragmatic Sanction, an agreement by which the major European powers recognized her right to inherit the Habsburg lands. They signed the document and then promptly ignored it when he died. Frederick the Great of Prussia invaded Silesia within weeks of her accession, and France, Bavaria, Saxony, and Spain joined the attack on what they assumed would be easy prey. Maria Theresa rallied the Hungarian nobility to her cause with a dramatic personal appeal to the Diet in Pressburg, and the resulting War of the Austrian Succession lasted eight years. She lost Silesia to Prussia but preserved the rest of her domains. Her reforms centralized tax collection for the first time, replacing the patchwork of feudal obligations with a rationalized system that required even the nobility and clergy to contribute. She established compulsory primary education in 1774, making the Habsburg Empire one of the first states in the world to require schooling for all children. She modernized the military, reformed the judicial system, and expanded the bureaucracy into a professional civil service. Her alliance with France, cemented by the marriage of her daughter Marie Antoinette to the future Louis XVI, reversed centuries of Franco-Austrian rivalry. She governed as queen of Hungary and Bohemia and archduchess of Austria, though her husband Francis Stephen held the title of Holy Roman Emperor. She bore sixteen children, of whom ten survived to adulthood. She died on November 29, 1780, at sixty-three.