In Our Time - Maria Theresa

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Maria Theresa (1717-1780) who inherited the Austrian throne in 1740 at the age of 23. Her neighbours circled like wolves and, within two months, Frederick the Great had seized one of her most prized lands, Silesia, exploiting her vulnerability. Yet over the next forty years through political reforms, alliances and marriages, she built Austria up into a formidable power, and she would do whatever it took to save the souls of her Catholic subjects, with a rigidity and intolerance that Joseph II, her son and heir, could not wait to challenge. WithCatriona Seth Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of OxfordMartyn Rady Professor of Central European History at University College LondonAndThomas Biskup Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of HullProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, when Maria Theresa inherited the Austrian throne in 1740 at the age of 23, her neighbours circled her, seeing a chance to bite into that great empire. Within two months, Frederick the Great seized one of her most prized,

lands exploiting her vulnerability. Yet over the next 40 years, through political reforms, alliances and marriages, she built Austria up into a formidable power. And she would do whatever was needed to save the souls of her Catholic subjects. With rigidity, her son and her couldn't wait to challenge. With me to discuss Maria Theresa and Martin Rady, Professor of Central European History at University College London, Thomas Biscoup, lecturer in early modern history at the University of Hull, and Catriona Seth, Marshall Foch Professor of French literature at the University of Oxford. Katriona, her father had no male heir. Can we say that the neighbouring powers saw that as an opportunity? I think the neighbouring powers definitely saw the fact

that Maria Theresa's father, Emperor Charles VI, had no male heir, as an opportunity. He had tried to guarantee the fact that his heirs would inherit the throne, even if he only had female heirs. He'd created something called the pragmatic sanction, which was basically a contract passed with neighbouring states in order for his heirs to take over and for the Hapsburg line to be perpetuated. Austria, as it was, was made up of a series of different parts, which were not united in many ways, and what was holding together, in a sense, was the Habsburg glue. And he's not actually expecting a daughter to inherit the throne.

And indeed, he first has a son who dies as a child, and then Maria Theresa comes along. And Charles X, died, as you said in 1740, quite unexpectedly. And a lot of the neighbouring powers saw this as an occasion, thinking, well, we can go back on our promises, and we can seize lands. we can profit from the fact that Maria Theresa is only a woman. Now, Catholicism is going to play a great part in this,

and it muttered intensely to Maria Theresa. Can you tell us why it had such a grip on her and therefore on the empire? Catholicism is essential to the Habsburgs. There's a form of Habsburg piety to which they refer as Pietas Austriaca. Catholicism is central to the empire and to Maria Theresa. believes that there is no virtue without religion. And Maria Theresa uses Catholicism as something central to her life, both on a personal level and on a state level. For Maria Teresa, on a personal level, Catholicism allows her to be pragmatic, for instance, when a child dies.

She'll see it as God's will, even if she suffers emotionally. She has a very strong personal faith. She carries out many acts of private devotion. But for Maria Theresa, religion is also part of what makes the state great, and it is the way in which the state can serve God for eternity. Religion is part of the state pageantry. It's a way for Maria Theresa of consolidating her power, showing that the Habsbergs are God's chosen dynasty. So, for instance, there'll be public celebrations for baptisms of archdukes, or there will be public celebrations for the Feast of the Church, like Easter. And these are public manifestations destined to show the unity of the empire.

And I think that for Maria Theresa, aligning with Catholics is always going to be something much more simple than aligning with Protestants. She's quite ferocious about Protestants and Jews, isn't she? Maria Theresa was extremely. ferocious about Protestants and Jews. She took to relocating Protestants. After all, it was useful to have lots of subjects, but she didn't want them too near her if she could avoid having them near her. And she tried when she could to encourage them to convert in different ways. She absolutely hated the Jews, and that's very, very clear. And there were a number of measures which were extremely

unfair. For instance, the Jews of Prague, there are Jews of Prague, it's a a huge Ashkenazi community, and she tries to expel them, and she has them exported towards Transylvania, because Transylvania is already a multi-confessional region. Amongst the things she does with the Jews, when she acquires Galicia with a large number of Jews in it, they need surnames, and they're given surnames which make them stick out, and surnames which can quite often be disparaging surnames, but these are names which are meant to stigmatise you as a Jew. Martin, Martin Reddy. How well prepared was she? She's 23. Her father's died. How well prepared was she to become a ruler of this vast estate? How well prepared? Very unprepared. She herself in her testament,

which she writes towards the end of her life, says that she actually comes to the throne completely without any knowledge of affairs of state, without anybody she, can trust, without anybody to give her advice. And this was the case, because right through to the end, her father was hoping against all hope that his wife will still be managed to produce a son. And he dies prematurely. And so the daughter comes along and she takes over. And she hasn't been educated for government.

She's learnt languages. She's very good at French, and she speaks French most of the time. It's what royal and aristocratic women do. She is not educated, funnily enough, in German, so she remains a very coarse German speaker all her life, and she has no idea of the new subjects that are on the curriculum for boys, such as geography, state knowledge. I understand that when she took over, there were no maps,

so she didn't know where anywhere was, which caused great confusion. There is a huge problem with maps, they haven't really been developed at this time. They're not very good. One of the first things the sun does is map the empire. And it's only at that point that people discover that the Danube has a bend just north of Budapest. It's so bad that when there are two rivers bug, both of them rise in the middle of the Ukraine.

One of them flows into the Black Sea, the other flows into the Baltic. But they're very close to each other, and they regularly get confused in diplomatic correspondence. Can you give us any idea of the range of the territory? It is complex and massive and very important, and somehow she's going to pull it together. Can you just whip through? I think it's best to think of it as consisting of three blocks and some outliers.

The first block on the east of the map, on the right, as it were, is Hungary and next to it Transylvania, which is now Western Romania. Hungary is much larger than it is today, so it includes Slovakia and it includes Croatia. Block B in the centre of the Austrian lands. These extend down, these are where Austria is today, but also Slovenia. So reaching down a little way into the Balkans, but going across in shards and fragments of territory

right through to the black forest and to the French border and reaching down to the Tyrol, again much larger than it is now and into Lombardy and Milan. And the third block would be the Bohemian block, which also includes to begin with Cilesia, which is where we started

at the beginning of this programme. Yes. When Frederick O'Grady took it over, it's a great manufacturing and co-centra and that sort of thing. So what we're talking about is, I mean, she comes to it, is a, not exactly a mess, but a confusion, and a lot of it is still taking its energy from late medieval,

the late medieval time there. There are differences, there are compromises having been made, and it's jogged along, and it's having to cease to jog because the countries around it are modernising. Well, I think that's one way of putting it, but do bear in mind that if you look at somewhere like France, we all think of France as sort of modern, centralised, under Louis the 14th. But of course, huge amounts of the periphery of France, Brittany, down in the

south, these have their own separate Parliament. They have their own separate jurisdictions as well. What's happening is that other countries are modernising and really at the same time as they're modernising, perhaps Bergs are beginning to modernise as well. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thomas Biscope, it's fair to say that Maria Torres' relationship with Frederick Great and with Prussia was particularly acidic and difficult. Well, Frederick the second

was really the only European monarch to really benefit, to really make a profit from the war of the Austrian succession over Mariah Theresa's inheritance. In contrast, even to the kings of France, Spain and Poland and other rulers, so he invaded the rich Habsburg duchy of Silesia

only weeks after the death of Mariah Teresa's father, annexed it and managed to keep it under his control. Now, obviously, Mariah Teresa viewed this as a betrayal and reserved her particular wrath for Frederick. And this shaped Austro-Prussian relations for the entire reigns of both Mariah Teresa and Frederick until the 1780s. But I think it's important to keep in mind that it really had repercussions far beyond the question which dynastic ruler now owned one province situated between Bohemia and Poland. This established Brandenburg Prussia as a major force on the international stage. And it led to a realignment of Europe's international politics.

For two centuries, much of European politics had been structured around the conflict between the Habsburgs on the one hand and the kings of France on the other. But after the betrayal, after Frederick's betrayal, both the French and the Habsburgs had a rapprochement in the 1750s, and the new foreign minister managed to strike a deal with the old enemy and create a Habsburg-Burban alliance. And this really had a momentous effect, not just on central European politics, but really on global politics. Thank you very much, sir. She's one way and another balance is shifted. and we can leave aside for another juicier time

the particular spite they seem to have had for each other. So let's go to this, Katrina. How did she use her children? She's 16 children, 13 survived, and she used them as pawns, didn't she? Yes, Maria Theresa very much uses her children as pawns. Many listeners will be able to recall one of the versions of the Maiton's picture,

which Maria Teresa had painted regularly, which shows the imperial couple with their children. And year after year, there's an ever-increasing brood. And on the pictures, there's a small copy in the Wallace Collection in London. On the pictures, the boys are beside their mother, the girls are beside their father, which I think illustrates the fact that Maria Teresa is the real figure of power. And Maria Theresa uses her children as political capital. One of the Latin motos, which is often repeated about Austria, is too Felix Austria Nube.

So other countries wage war, but you happy Austria, you marry. And Maria Theresa is very successful in this respect. She uses her children in particular to consolidate the political realignment of the diplomatic change over the reversement of the alliance, which has seen her align with. France. She starts off with her heir, Archduke Joseph, and she marries him to Isabella of Palmer, his first wife. Isabella of Palmer is the granddaughter of Louis VIII of France through her mother, which launches this sort of axis between the Austrians on the one hand and the Bourbonne on the other. And Maria Theresa does that with her other children, her other daughters, in her daughters in particular, she marries them off two Catholic future heads of state.

How did she keep, she was determined to keep them under her thumb, wasn't she? She didn't just let them go and marry these people. Maria Theresa thinks she can control every aspect of her children's lives, or he wants to control every aspect of her children's lives. Of the children who married, only one was allowed to choose her suitor. But Maria Theresa, with her children, is very much. a control freak. She writes instructions to their children, so political instructions, how to behave. She tells them how to pray, how often to pray. But she also gets involved in questions like

the appointment of wet nurses for her grandchildren, the sorts of steps you should use to get out of a carriage if you're pregnant in order to avoid any accident and so on. Martin Rady, we have an idea of of this ruler, deeply invested in building up Austria. How did she relate to her subjects? She very much follows the Habsburg ceremonial, and one of the key aspects of that ceremonial is the role of petitioning,

where people can come and see them and ask for favours or ask for advice. When you say people, do you mean... Anybody, anybody? Anybody. Anybody. You really mean anybody, do you? Absolutely.

I mean, somebody who's sweeping the streets can go in and say, I've got a favour to ask. Yes, I mean, you'd probably be made sure that you look presentable when you went in, but anybody will go in. And there are plenty of stories of peasant farmers from Lower Austria who are concerned about the person

their daughter's going to marry, and they drive to Vienna to go and have a word with the emperor or empress. And the estimate for Joseph, Joseph II, is that he meets personally about a million of his subject. There may be duplicates, but there are million occasions in which he meets very ordinary people, and his mother likewise. But she had this man-woman advantage.

She turned it to her advantage. She could be a weeping woman in front of people, in front of her hungry, the diet there, the parliament there saying, I need help, and weep and have her baby in her arms. And she had to do a bit of being the man in order to get what she wanted to do. Is that right? I think you've got it there. I mean, she certainly is a heavy drinker right up until certainly 10 or a dozen years into her reign. Ultimately, childbirth gets the better of her. She stays up late.

She plays cars. She's playing for big sums of money, but she normally wins. Beyond that, she presents herself as she calls herself Mother of my people. She calls herself Mother of my army. She weeps at the Hungarian diet of 1741. and as she partitions Poland in 1772, she weeps as well. And as Frederick the Great commented on that occasion, the more she wept, the more she took, she can turn the tables.

The big one is in 1743 when Prague has just been liberated. The Bavarians have been sent packing. And she then has the ride of the women through Vienna, and they ride down the ring into the Spanish riding stables, firing pistols as they go, and they then engage in a mock joust in the Spanish riding school. She's very good at doing it symbolically. A lot of the iconography plays with both sides of the coin. So there's the iconography of Maria Theresa on horseback, brandishing a sword in Hungary,

as this king-queen of Hungary. And on the other hand, there is Maria Theresa the mother of many children. And I think it's very much something which she uses to her advantage, playing both sides. Well, we're with you. She decided that she decided that the military wasn't in good enough shape,

education wasn't in good enough shape, the civil service wasn't in good enough shape, and she attempted, as I understand it, through very, very good advisors to change that. And she, over her years, she did change that. Yes, Marie-Theresa, on the one hand, she's not at all an enlightenment monarch in the way her son Joseph will be. She's not tolerant, for instance. She only very grudgingly allows torture to be ended at the end of her reign and because Joseph is leaning on her to do so.

Joseph, her son, yes, her son and heir, who will be her joint ruler after her husband dies. Maria Theresa is very much a reforming monarch all the same. And as you aptly said, she uses a number of intermediaries, a number of statesmen, who are very good advisors. And to help her, for instance, Chancellor Kaunits is one of them, who help her to reform military education. So military education, which had been the preserve of the upper echelons of the nobility, become something which is much more open. She reforms education. She is very interested, I think, in the question of education. To what extent she personally advised them or wanted them, I think, is probably open to discussion. Yeah, I think it's an interesting thought. You know, we've long been

accustomed to considering Mariah Theresa as a reforming monarch, not an enlightened monarch, like Joseph II or Leopold the Second, who both self-consciously styled themselves as enlightened and read and quoted all the French and German philosopher and outlera. But I think we should be careful to really project back 19th century ideas of reform to Mariah Theresa's reign. I mean, if you look at the reforms initiated in the late 1740s by Haukowitz, they were already being transformed again just over a decade later, you know, by Kaunitz. And as this didn't work out then again. you know, another series of reform followed.

So there was reform after reform and what really happened on the ground, you know, what the effects of these reforms was very difficult actually to assess. So how much? But you say difficult to assess, but we were told that after some time, 10, 20 years, the army was much better organized.

The education system was better organized. She tightened her grip on these smaller powers. The things had moved forward. Now, what I'd like to know is, was it her doing? was the people she employed who did it? And did it happen as much as I think it's happened? Or are you pulling back from that? Well, I'd say the reforms she initiated,

the domestic reforms were not as far-reaching as historians have later made them look. I think we can safely say a lot of reforms happen, but they contributed not least to the expansion of the bureaucracy. So that I think was an important part. If you just look at the files in the Vienna archives, you know, they multiplied within a few decades. Mariah Reza was successful. They were successful in a number of areas, such as rebuilding the army, because she entrusted people like Down with rebuilding the army very effectively.

But I think we should really be careful to project ideas of enlightened absolutism and a far-reaching reform program back to Mariah Theresa's reign. recent historography has really shown that many of these reforms were not as effective as we might think. But can I come in there? Please do. I think there are a number of points here. She is certainly a very, very active reformer. Being historians, we tend to look at the big picture. We tend to look at things like the administration and the finance and the way these are merged together, then demerged,

then reorganized again over the period of. her reign. We tend to look at these sort of things. Maria herself is looking at the day-to-day, everyday things. And what is quite remarkable are the number of decrees she puts forward, and the range and details that she is concerned with. The classic ones that I remember are not playing post-horns at night, not having candles in barns, not drinking by haystacks, not having, putting lids on pipes, making sure that triangulation points are properly preserved, not advertising arsenic in pharmacies. Now the question is, why is she doing all this?

Is it because she is a sort of nanny? No, I think the idea, I think behind it is this belief that government exists for the welfare of the people, this idea that has been put forward by natural law, which is, in a sense, what all her advisers have been brought up on, on principles of natural law. And that natural law necessarily leads in to an enlightenment idea. So I'd say that there's a bit of the enlightenment there with her reforms. Can I come back to you for a second, get you and I'll open more than a second, obviously,

and talk about her last daughter, a youngest daughter, who became Marie Antoinette, and was sent to France, married the no-fam eventually became the Queen of France, which is a greatest coup in that area, isn't it? Yes, the marriage of Antonia, Maria Antonia, Madame Antoine, she's called at Court in Vienna, whom we know by her French name as Marie Antoinette, is Maria Theresa's greatest diplomatic triumph.

She has no thought at that stage, as with the marriages of her other children, of anything except political gain, and therefore it really is the success of her endeavours. But when Marie Antoinette arrives at the court in France, she finds that there are still a lot of people there who feel very strongly that Austria is the natural enemy of France, and she's very much tarred with the fact that she is an Austrian princess. And until she's put to death, Marie Antoinette is referred to disparagingly as Loutrich. the Austrian woman. And Marie Antoinette's arrival in France is a triumph, yes, but it's also

for Maria Theresa an occasion to try and lobby Marie Antoinette to favour Austrian interests. And she does that very much through the intermediary of the Austrian ambassador in France and gets him to urge Marie Antoinette to support Austria's cause whenever she can. So that can be very mundane things. like, for instance, if an Austrian dignitary is coming through France on a private visit to make sure that Marie Antoinette invites his family to court. Excuse me, in a rather bigger thing, she's very worried that for eight years, her daughter doesn't do the thing that is most expected and is the whole point of the enterprise, which is to have a child.

So she then sends her son in to tell her daughter and her daughter's husband how to do it. Yes, Maria Theresa is very concerned because this is a. diplomatic match about the fact that if Marie Antoinette doesn't produce an heir to the throne, then she could be repudiated. And this has happened before in French history. Queens or wives of French princes have been repudiated. Maria Theresa, of course, on paper, looked like the ideal potential grandmother because she'd had so many children. Therefore, it was expected that her own daughters would be very fertile. And there's Marie Antonet not having any children. And Joseph is sent to court and is sent to find out what's happening.

And for Maria Theresa, obviously, the absolute moment of triumph would be the birth of a male heir to Marie Antoinette. And she doesn't live to see this. She does live to find out that the marriage has at last been consummated, that Marie Antoinette has given birth to a child, her first child, a daughter. A daughter, of course, called Marie Therese, because all of Maria Theresa's. first granddaughters except one were called Maria Theresa after her. And that, in a sense, marks for Maria Theresa the idea that the marriage between Marie Antoinette and Louis, who's then become Luis Cés of France, is actually on the right track. But can I come back to the point that I almost started with, which is, and I'm not being

pure into anything, it is fascinating. Her son went to tell his sister, and to tell the man who was married to, who said Dofant, France, when I said how to do it, that's, well, it's what it happened. I mean, it seemed as if they did not know about sex, and it seems as if he went and told them how to do it, and it seemed as he was after that she had a child. Is that right? Well, certainly we do have a letter from Joseph

after he's been to court, which reports back about his conversation with Louis XVIth and says, well, this is what happens when they're in bed together. He doesn't seem to know how to go about. it. You know, nothing happens, but it's not because there's any form of malformation because there's been a lot of discussion about whether or not maybe there was some form of malformation which meant that the marriage couldn't be consummated. So yes, there are very technical details. It's not altogether unheard of. Louis X, for instance, writes to his grandsons about sex and about their

sexual organs and about whether or not they need operations and so on. So I think they're in a sense much less prudish about this than we are. Now Maria Theresa herself, of course, is very much a prude and one of the things which she couldn't bear was adultery and that's something which she tries to stop from happening when she's making sure she knows what's going on in her subject's lives. She is, I mean, she's very concerned about morals and she institutes the famous chastity commission which rounds up the prostitutes of Vienna and exports them to Transylvania. but she's not prudish when she comes to the anatomy. And her doctor Van Svieten certainly is giving her and discussing with her very intimate details

concerning firstly her own obesity and secondly about her own sexual organs and how she should treat them. And one of the things which Maria Theresa is very interested in when the marriage is not being consummated between Marie Antoinette and Louis 16th is, for instance, knowing whether Marianne Antoinette has had her period or not, whether she could possibly be pregnant and this sort of thing. So there is a lot of monitoring of bodily functions. It goes on because... Yeah. Can I come to bring in Thomas? Looking at the everyday life in her world, we haven't, I think, had a real go at that. At the end of 40 years, would her subjects, I suppose, that could be called subjects, say, yes, life is better. We are better organized. We are better off. We're safer. What would they say?

What did she done that would make a difference to them? Well, it's difficult to say that because in Mariah Theresa's lands, as well as in so many parts of 18th century Europe, the personality and the policies of a monarch often did not matter that much for the everyday life of the majority of the population. And we need to keep in mind that the majority of the population lived in villages or small towns and was really subject to minorial lords or magnet families. And they met that usually much more than the pretty poorly staffed representatives of the distant monarch. So I think it's very difficult to make a general assessment here. We do get at her death, quite as at the death of many successful monarchs, an outpouring

of grief. And that actually increases during the following decade when Joseph II makes a mess of his pretty far-reaching reforms. But I think we need to answer this question more specifically. So if we look at particular groups in 18th century Austrian and Hungarian and Bohemian society, we can see the immediate effects of Mariah Theresa's preferences. For instance, her religious preferences. I think Katriona already mentioned Jews and Protestants who were expelled. You know, we had the mass expulsion of Jews from Prague in 1744. You know, these people directly felt the effects of her policies. But it's much more difficult to make an assessment here when you consider administrative reforms, fiscal reforms. One way to look at this is actually to look at the number of rebellions

in the Habsburg monarchy. You know, the Habsburg monarchy was such a vast empire that you always had, you know, from the 15th century on, some rebellion going on at some place. But actually, if you look at it between 1740 and 1780, you find much smaller number of rebellions and much fewer unrest during her reign. So you might be able to take that as a sign of successful rule. But it's very difficult to make a general assessment here. I think looking back at Mariah Theresa's reign, in particular, the rule of Joseph II

really highlighted her achievements yet again. Why do you think, Martin, that she seemed to follow the example of her mother who is an alcoholic and... I mean, her mother has a problem producing, which obviously Maria Theresa doesn't. This is Christine Elizabeth of Volfer Boutle. And she's a prodigal.

to begin with, and it's thought that she converts, and it's thought that her infertility is as a consequence of insincerity of conversion. The Charles himself thinks, oh, well, there must be some cure for this, and his cure is copious quantities of red wine. Maria herself, yeah, she... Can you know, can we get some idea towards the end of her reign? there for 40 years, a very long time and an awful lot's happening in Europe, it's heaving and cracking and taking a new shape.

How do they, and how is she regarded? Is she the great sort of steadying rock in the middle of this Europe or is she regarded as? Well, tell me. Maria Theresa, I think, is viewed differently by different people in different constituencies. One of the things which is certain is that she is seen as an important figure of power.

She's been at war for half of her reign, when she dies. And wars which are not sort of, you know, small-scale wars, but ones which actually engage a number of important powers within Europe. She has at different stages held her ground, not always, but she's tried to. And I think she's viewed with some admiration. Indeed, you know, even by Frederick II, he's reputed to have said, you know, for once the Habsburgs have a man and he's a woman and a number of other things like that. they're sort of grudging recognitions of the fact that, yes, she is an extremely strong ruler. And I think that some of her daughters who'd been married to the heirs to thrones of other states,

Marie-Antelette, obviously, but also Maria Amalia and Maria Carolina, who are married to the heirs of Palmer and of Naples, they're seen as scheming women, partly because the fact of having had Maria Teresa as a mother means that they're viewed with suspicion from the start as possibly women who might want to confiscate male prerogatives. We haven't talked about superstition. I love the story about the ambassador, was it an ambassador who was taken ill and rushed to church

to have these burial service. And as he was going down the name, a kicking and a yelling from inside the coffin. This is interpreted as the devil trying to get out and so it was hurried even more and put in a vault and left there. That's right. That was in seven, And I think it's a very good example of how things have changed.

In 1702, it was actually the Bohemian Chancellor has a stroke in Vienna, taken up, buried in Prague, and then we have the incident with the coffin. And it would be difficult to think of the same thing happening 50 years later. And I think, you know, that's if one wants to judge, you know, the, whatever one wants to look at it, the disenchantment of the world, the removal of something. superstition. Of course there still is superstition. Maria deals with it very firmly in 1755 when we have the vampire scare in Moravia, where in Olomotes they start digging up corpses and burning them.

And she doesn't send in the priests. She sends in the doctors. She sends in the medical profession. They take over the churchyard, exhum and investigate and report back that there is no supernatural events at all everything can be explained in purely rational terms

so bodies that haven't decomposed it's because the weather's cold this type of thing and that that I think shows the way that a new rational structure is beginning to exert itself certainly within the court within government

Is it possible for the three of you, starting with you, Thomas, to give us a summary of her legacy. What she, I know it's probably you'll find it simplistic, but for the way you work, but what she achieved in those 40 years? Well, she certainly managed to defend her inheritance, which in the early 1740s wasn't clear at all, and she stabilised the Habsburg monarchy. I think these are too important. She also managed to rebuild the dynasty, the kind of, Parsley, Austria, you know, which there hadn't been any male offspring after the death of

Charles of the 6th. And, you know, after this dynastic blip, really, she reinvigorated the Habsburg dynasty with her children and managed to successfully marry them off to various parts of Europe, rebuilding the dynastic links that were really at the heart of what you might call the Habsburg project. So she was very, very, very... very successful as a traditional dynastic ruler. And she was also moderately successful as a reforming monarchs. But I think what we also need to keep in mind is that her legacy was really shaped by 19th and 20th century historians. It really transformed her into an icon of Habsburg mythology.

You know, in the 19th century, the Habsburg monarchy got into a great crisis. And the Habsburg monarchy was looking for the mythical figures in the past, which could be integrated into the Habsburg myth. In Mariah Theresa, he was the ideal figure, really, you know, the motherly figure, who was both pious and orderly, who held together the family as well as the empire. So she could, you know, she could project an image of Habsburg power that was used throughout the monarchy in the 19th century. Can they go across you, Martin?

I agree, exactly with everything that's been said there. But I'd said there's another legacy as well. And that is the legacy of the intrusive, meddling, interfering state. And that, I think, is one of the things that comes particularly across looking at Maria Theresa's range of activity. She doesn't just rule she interferes. She interferes in every aspect of life. Some of those interferences we may think are beneficial, such as forcing peasants to take their children to school.

In fact, there weren't the schools built, so it was a fairly pointless exercise in many areas. Trying to reduce... This is a typical meddling when you don't know what's happening. She tries to reduce the amount of days that peasants have to work on the land for their masters in Hungary, but she doesn't know how many days they really are working. So she fixes it at three,

which actually means that for most of the peasants, they're working more than they did before. So in other words, there's this interference without adequate knowledge, and it's interference without restraint. I mentioned earlier some of those interferences, niggling points. Everybody should have a lid on the top of their pipe. This type of meddling creates a legacy on which Joseph will. build ludicrously with his false bottomed coffins to save on wood, etc, etc. It gets better and better, doesn't it really?

Katjana, finally from you, what do you want you? Did she do anything for women particularly? It's a ridiculous question, but no, it isn't a ridiculous question. Of course you're a ridiculous question. What's quite striking is that Maria Theresa didn't educate her daughters to rule. She educated them or had them educated to a certain extent to be consorts, but no more than that. And she trapped them because on the one hand,

she wanted them to be sort of decorative, well brought up, produce airs, and conform to a traditional female role and nothing more than that. But on the other hand, she really hoped that they would interfere so discreetly that it wouldn't be visible, but in order to further Austria's aims.

So I think certainly with her own daughters, she left them very much as sort of poisons chalice as a legacy. And finally from you, what do you think was the thing that marked her reign most specifically? I think possibly her use of iconography and pageantry. There are far more portraits of Maria Teresa, for instance, than of her father. She uses her image to project a number of aspects of her character or of things in which she believes. She uses public ceremony in order to create loyalty and to affirm, for a number of aspects of her character, or of things in which she believes.

She uses public ceremony in order to create loyalty and to affirm, for instance, her engagement in favor of the Catholic Church. And that will be developed subsequently. Martin was mentioning that 19th century historiography used Maria Theresa as a sort of unifying figure for Austria. And a lot of that was done, for instance, through building statues in the center of Vienna, which show Maria Teresa, through editing her correspondence. Alfred von Arnett, her biographer who ran the Austrian archives, also published her correspondence. And I think in that respect, there was very much this concerted effort to build on something which was already there,

Maria Theresa's will to control things through correspondence, through her image and so on, and to use it to further the aims of a much later Austrian state. Thank you very much in need all through you. Thank you, Katrina, Nerseth. Martin Rady and Thomas Viscoup. Next week, the great poem, Piers Plumann, written in Middle English

between the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. As I was saying, I was sorry we didn't talk about Schoenbrun at all, the way in which Maria Theresa takes what is a hunting lodge just outside Vienna

and then turns it into this spectacular palace, which is the sort of Austrian Versailles, and the way in which there is an iconographic program. She gets very interested in the decoration, in the ways in which power can be represented through a building, on the one hand, and her taste also can be present in the building. She's quite somebody, isn't she?

I mean, she, from having had, some of you said, no education, One of you said, in the notes of one of the others of you said, well, it's rather better education than it's generally thought. But having said that, she covered all sorts of territories with great enthusiasm and, from what you've just said, some knowledge. Well, she was a very conscientious ruler, too, wasn't she, enthusiastic in many ways? And I think many contemporaries actually appreciated that. So if you read diplomatic correspondences, you know,

even from political opponents and enemies like Prussia or Hanover, you actually find a lot of respect for her energy and drive. People don't always agree with her policies, particularly not with her religious policies, I guess, in particular Protestants, but they do recognize this energy and drive. That is quite impressive indeed. I think there is indeed a sort of grudging admiration for Maria Theresa from most of the rulers of Europe. Why grudging? Because they don't agree, as Thomas was just saying, a lot of them will think that her religious policies are absolutely appalling or that some of her designs are not ones which they can share.

But they're very much struck by the fact that she gets things done. Although that changes a bit towards the end of her reign, doesn't it? I mean, she, you know, after the death of Francis Stephen and 1765, she retreats more to the inner circles of a court. she loses activity she gets her weight causes all kinds of practical problems she can't walk any more properly

through the palace so I think towards the end of her life she's kind of almost a lost figure to a degree isn't she I mean in 1780 Europe has really changed a lot

so on most European thrones you would have people who have some element of enlightened reform and I think, you know, by the late 1770s, you can see that people really orient themselves towards her sons, Joseph II and Leopold II, who are very keen on setting up new reform programs that are much more in line with the zeitgeist, really. So I think that actually also may explain why at her death. You know, there is grudging respect on the one hand, but people also, are keen to know what will happen now. She's very popular amongst ordinary people in Britain.

She's, if you look at the number of pubs that are called the Queen of Hungary, they're actually quite substantial. She becomes less popular in the 1750s because, of course, she's fighting on the other side. So they change the pub names from Queen of Hungary to King of Prussia. That is true, yes. Actually, there's a shopping mall in the United States called King of Prussia. So that's also a result of the seven years war. But I think she's very successful in presenting herself as a successful ruler for the first 25 years or so of her rule.

But then, you know, she loses some of this energy and drive. But that's not atypical, isn't it? I mean, you've got a number of rulers in the early modern period who rule for 30, 40, even 50 years. You know, it's a lot of time you sit on the throne. You know, being at the very top of the court and government for such a long time, of course, always is an enormous strain. And I think there are very, very few rulers who keep their energy going for decades. And there's the tension between Maria Theresa and Joseph, which is obvious at various stages. We've talked about it, for instance, regarding questions of tolerance or the abolition of torture.

This is our son, Joseph, yeah. This is Maria Theresa's son, Joseph. And I think towards the end of her life, Maria Theresa does let Joseph take over and get on with his program to a certain degree, not as much as he would like to. And that's when she's still writing letters to her children overseas and trying to control things in a more underhand way, possibly. Yeah, I think the relationship, maybe we could have discussed that more, the relationship between Mariah Theresa and Joseph II, which is really, really, really, interesting. And we know so much about it because they kept writing all these letters, because Joseph was travelling so much and kept writing letters back to Vienna. So we're much better informed about the relationship of Mariah Theresa and Joseph, as well as her other children,

than those of other rulers, because they all lived so far apart and kept writing all these letters. And also every time that one of the children goes away somewhere, Maria Teresa will be asking him or her to write to her, but also saying, for instance, to his secretary or to the ambassadors, etc. She'll be asking for reports all along. So she'll be able to compare and contrast, and she does frequently. So for instance, if one of her children is away from her and hasn't fessed up to something, but she knows about it through a third party, she will pretend that it is common knowledge that, for instance, you know, the Dauphine of France has spent too much on buying earrings or that her son, you know, has stayed out late and therefore missed the post

had not written to her and so on. Martin, do you want to come in here? No, no, no, no. I mean, I think the critical thing is that as she tires in the 1770s that Joseph begins to take over more and more of foreign policy. Maria is quite happy to help herself to Poland, but it's Joseph who grabs the Bukovina from the Turks. And it's Joseph who pushes for involvement in the war of the Bavarian succession,

which results in minimal games for Austria. And it's Joseph who opens up negotiations with Russia, which result in a war with Turkey, which will in the end ruin his own reign? She doesn't call herself enlightened but pursues quite a lot of policies and projects which would be called enlightened in other territories. And in this respect, I think it's worth looking to Britain.

You know, many things are happening in Britain which have been called enlightenment, but of course the British never called themselves enlightened in the 18th century. You know, some of the Scots did, but not the English. So it's similar to that. So you can actually have elements of enlightenment without calling yourself enlightened.

And I think there's a form of pragmatism also because Maria Theresa, who has been opposed to smallpox inoculation, is then won over when she sees that it works. And that's an example, I think, of the way in which science can make her budge and change her position. Well, thank you all very much. We're not in the studio. We're in our own places.

So Simon can't come in off, tea or coffee and biscuits, which I think all of us miss. So we'll have to get our own. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. A new podcast from BBC Radio 4.

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