Queen of the night

Maria Theresa’s « Enlightenment »

In 1777, Vienna became Europe’s most literally enlightened city by introducing the first all-night street lighting system: 3500 hand-lit lanterns. We’re accustomed to placing « the Enlightenment », whatever that is, in Edinburgh or Paris. Vienna isn’t where we would usually look.

This was the Vienna of Maria Theresa of Austria. Born in 1717, she ruled the Habsburg crown-lands from 1740 until her death in 1780. From 1745, she also presided, de facto, over the Holy Roman Empire. She wielded enormous power over modern-day Austria, Bohemia, Slovenia, northern Italy, Belgium and parts of Germany. (The large Kingdom of Hungary stood slightly apart: it enjoyed significant autonomy while supplying the monarchy with natural resources and military recruits.) To these realms she would add, in 1772, swathes of what is now southern Poland and western Ukraine.

A Habsburg monarch could assume many titles; Maria Theresa’s collection was made complicated by the fact of her gender. By legal fiction she was « King », not Queen, of Hungary and Bohemia, and it was as « King of Hungary » or « King of Bohemia » that she was referred to most frequently in diplomatic correspondence and legal documents. These were the titles she held in her own right. « Holy Roman Empress » was more convoluted: her father, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor until 1740, was succeeded by her (Wittelsbach) uncle-by-marriage, Charles VII of Bavaria. When he died in 1745, the title passed not to Maria Theresa (she was disqualified as a woman) but to her husband (and second cousin), Francis Stephen, whom she’d married in 1736. No one believed that he was anything but his wife’s cipher. Heir to the dispossessed ducal house of Lorraine, his family didn’t even have a castle to live in, let alone, say, an army to call on. On their double tomb, the couple are depicted jointly holding a sceptre, but Maria Theresa has the upper hand.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Her coronation as queen/king of Hungary is a better place to start. On 25 June 1741, at Pressburg (the city’s German name; Pozsony is the Hungarian name; today it is Bratislava, the Slovak capital) she mounted a horse and galloped up Coronation Hill to slice the air at the points of the compass with a sword as a sign of her willingness to defend the kingdom against all comers. To her advisors’ horror — but to the crowd’s delight — she insisted on performing the ceremony while pregnant and on riding in a man’s saddle. (It was her third pregnancy. She gave birth sixteen times between 1737 and 1756; ten of her children survived to adulthood.) Artists then and now would obscure the scandal by depicting her riding side-saddle.

There followed an eight-year struggle now called the War of Austrian Succession (1740‑48). The unprecedented ascent of a woman to the Habsburg throne inspired Bavaria’s royal family to try and wrest the imperial title away from its centuries-old Habsburg custody and also to claim disputed territories. Maria Theresa would survive, with British help, but at the bitter cost of ceding to the Bavarians’ Prussian allies the realm of Silesia (then Czech, today Polish), which had hitherto been key to the monarchy’s finances. During the war, the Prussians, aided by the French and Saxons, seized large chunks of the Czech lands including, for a few months, Prague itself.

To ponder Maria Theresa’s reign (and her biographies) is to ponder the vast and never-ending question of what enlightenment was, or is. Further, and more particularly: to immerse oneself, from the vantage of today’s Hungary (where I work as a political journalist), in the arcana of Maria Theresa, is a curious experience. On one hand, I find myself tracing things in our own era « back », as it were, to Maria Theresa as paradoxical founder, or foundress. On the other, Habsburgiana lives on here in ways which are by turn charming and slightly sinister.