Empress Maria Theresa of Austria Part 2

Summary

Podcast Summary: The History Chicks – Empress Maria Theresa of Austria Part 2

Introduction and Recap

In the second installment of their deep dive into the life of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, The History Chicks continue to unravel the complexities of her reign and personal life. After navigating through the tumultuous rise to power and securing her borders in part one, the hosts delve into Maria Theresa's efforts to consolidate her empire internally, manage familial tensions, and implement sweeping reforms.

Centralization and Religious Policies

Maria Theresa's reign was marked by a determined effort to centralize authority within the diverse Habsburg Empire. As Host B recaps at [00:07], Maria Theresa worked to streamline administration by bringing various districts under central government control, particularly focusing on tax management. This move, although unpopular among local authorities, allowed her to implement her policies more effectively without yearly negotiations.

A significant aspect of her centralization was her rigid enforcement of Catholicism. She attempted to assimilate religious minorities through policies that pressured Protestants and Jews to convert or emigrate. At [01:10], Host A highlights the harshness of these policies, especially towards the Roma people, who faced a four-step process aimed at cultural assimilation, ultimately leading to forced migration and the separation of Roma children from their families. Despite her strict enforcement at the court, Maria Theresa could not entirely expel Protestants due to numerical realities and partial resistance from her administration and the populace.

Joseph's Marriage and Internal Family Dynamics

The podcast moves on to discuss Maria Theresa's strategic marriages to secure political alliances, focusing on her son Joseph's marriage to Princess Isabella of Parma. Host B describes the opulent wedding at [04:00], emphasizing it as both a diplomatic maneuver and a PR spectacle designed to showcase the Habsburgs' wealth and power. Isabella's subsequent emotional turmoil, including her affection for Maria Christina, Maria Theresa's favorite daughter, is explored with notable quotes like “[Joseph wrote,] I am a victim of the state. I am sacrificing myself, hoping that God will repay me” ([05:40]).

The dynamics within the Habsburg family were complex, with Joseph feeling constrained by his mother's decisions. Host A elaborates at [11:10] on the "three ring circus" of Maria Theresa juggling her administrative reforms, dynastic marriages, and family obligations simultaneously. This section underscores the personal sacrifices and tensions that accompanied her political strategies.

Smallpox Epidemics and Health Reforms

A recurring theme in the episode is the impact of smallpox on Maria Theresa's family and her subsequent health reforms. At [06:48], Isabella's tragic death from smallpox shortly after her marriage to Joseph is discussed, highlighting the personal costs of the epidemic. Host B continues at [36:05] to explain how these losses spurred Maria Theresa and Joseph to prioritize smallpox prevention through variolation—a precursor to vaccination. Despite initial resistance and the country's slow adoption, these efforts laid the groundwork for improved public health practices within the empire.

Educational Reforms

Maria Theresa's commitment to education reform is a significant topic covered in the episode. Host B details at [64:06] how she implemented a new school system inspired by the Prussian model, mandating compulsory education for both genders from ages six to twelve. This reform aimed to instill a strong work ethic and moral values among the youth. Despite resistance from parents and logistical challenges, by [67:21], the empire boasted 500 elementary and secondary schools, and Maria Theresa even allowed non-Catholics to attend university and introduced secular subjects, broadening the educational landscape.

Foreign Policy and the Division of Poland

The division of Poland was a pivotal moment in Maria Theresa's foreign policy. Host B narrates at [58:23] how, fearing a strong rival from Russia, Maria Theresa reluctantly agreed to the division of Poland alongside major European powers. This decision, though morally conflicted for Maria Theresa, was a strategic move to maintain the balance of power and prevent Russian dominance. The agreement resulted in Austria gaining Galicia, adding three million people and valuable resources to the empire. However, this also sowed seeds of resentment and showcased the moral dilemmas inherent in dynastic politics.

Maria Theresa's Declining Health and Death

In the final years of her reign, Maria Theresa faced declining health, grappling with respiratory issues, insomnia, and joint inflammation. Host A recounts at [71:07] how her health struggles limited her mobility and led her to retreat from public life. Despite her weakening condition, she continued to oversee the empire's affairs meticulously. On [73:03], Host B describes her last moments, including her private family meeting where she expressed her deep affection for her children and entrusted them to Joseph's care. Maria Theresa passed away on November 29, 1780, at the age of 63, leaving behind a transformed empire.

Fates of Maria Theresa's Children

The episode provides a comprehensive overview of Maria Theresa's surviving children and their roles post her death:

1. Maria Anna: Born with a spinal deformity, she remained at a convent, supporting the arts throughout her life ([83:07]).
2. Maria Christina: Married Prince Albert of Saxony for love, she became the governor of the Austrian Netherlands and a significant art patron ([84:27]).
3. Maria Elisabeth: Her marriage was marred by smallpox and untimely deaths, leading to Joseph's reluctance to remarry ([35:13]).
4. Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette): Prepared for a dynastic marriage to the French dauphin, her story is covered in a separate episode due to her historical prominence ([90:47]).
5. Maria Carolina: Queen of Naples and Sicily, she was a strong ruler who later faced exile under Napoleon ([85:39]).
6. Leopold: Joseph's heir, remembered as an art patron and reformer in his short reign ([87:47]).
7. Maximilian Franz: Took a career in the Church, becoming a patron of the arts and avoiding the political marriages his siblings endured ([91:29]).

Each child’s narrative illustrates the varied outcomes of Maria Theresa's dynastic strategies, emphasizing both achievements and personal struggles within the Habsburg family.

Reflection on Reforms and Joseph's Reign

The hosts reflect on Maria Theresa's legacy and Joseph's attempts to continue her reforms. Host B points out at [78:13] that while Joseph implemented numerous progressive laws—such as the abolition of serfdom and freedom of the press—he faced criticism for his rapid pace and idealism. The contrast between Maria Theresa’s foundational reforms and Joseph’s accelerated efforts highlights the challenges of sustaining and expanding imperial policies.

Conclusion and Legacy

In closing, The History Chicks laud Maria Theresa as the greatest Habsburg, praising her intelligence, firmness, and ability to rebuild the empire from its fragmented state. They note that her reforms significantly improved Austria’s administration and finances, laying a robust foundation for future rulers. Host B shares a quote from Frederick the Great, acknowledging Maria Theresa's impact: “She has done honor to the throne and to her sex. I have warred with her, but I have never been her enemy.”

Notable Quotes

• “[Joseph wrote,] I am a victim of the state. I am sacrificing myself, hoping that God will repay me.” ([06:48])
• “[Maria Theresa] abandoned all ornamentation. She cut her hair short. She painted her rooms black.” ([19:03])
• “Maria Teresa has done honor to the throne and to her sex. I have warred with her, but I have never been her enemy.” – Frederick the Great ([78:13])

Additional Resources

For listeners interested in further exploration, the hosts recommend several books and resources:

• Maria Theresa, the Habsburg Empress in Her Time by Barbara Stolberg Rillinger
• In the Shadow of the Empress by Nancy Goldstone
• Maria Theresa of Austria, Full Blooded Politician, Devoted, Wild Wife and Mother to All by Regina Neuhauser
• Online resources like Die Welt der Habsburger and virtual tours of imperial crypts.

Final Thoughts

Empress Maria Theresa's reign was a blend of strategic acumen, personal hardship, and progressive reforms. The History Chicks adeptly capture the multifaceted nature of her leadership and the enduring legacy she left on the Habsburg Empire. Through engaging storytelling and meticulous research, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of Maria Theresa's pivotal role in European history.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

[B]

Hello and welcome back to the show. Today is part two of our coverage of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Obviously you might want to go back and listen to part one, but here's a quick recap because it's been a couple of weeks. We took Maria Theresa from her contentious place in the order of succession, thanks to her papa, through the chaos that erupted in Europe when she did come to pass power both from internal family forces and the warring forces of Europe. She was married to the man that she wanted to be married to and began having children almost every year. When at last the wars were over and she had secured most of her borders from the outside, Rip Silesia, a little salute for you. She began to look inward to see how she could take this broken piece of pottery called an empire and make it into some kind of vessel that held water.

[A]

When we left her, she was about 46 years old. She had been ruling for half of her life and is kind of cracking her knuckles and rolling up her sleeves for that next phase.

[B]

In part one, we talked about her beginning efforts to circumvent the administrations in the different districts and bringing them onto central government control with regard to taxes, which was sort of unpopular among the authorities there. But it gave her the power to plan her business instead of doing that dance of negotiation every year with all and sundry. She only had one Excel spreadsheet, please. Also, culturally, there were some unadmirable things that were all taking place to some degree through the rest of her reign. We talked in part one about her forced displacement of the Jewish population, especially in the area of Prague. And there was great empire wide pressure for Protestants to convert to Catholicism or get out of the country with another bit of forced migration to the area of Transylvania. Now, I will say, despite her stated policies, and I assure you her genuine wish to make everyone assimilate, practically speaking numerically, she could not expel the Protestants completely. There was a lot more pressure to live and let live coming from the field, really, and her own administration about the Protestant population. She, though at court was very strict in regard to attendance at church and fasting on fast days and frequent communion, you know, right under my thumb, right in my house, you will do what I say. And she believed that she was setting a good example in that way. Now, there was similar but more enforceable cruelty against the Roma people, who of course, history has unkindly called the gypsies. There was a four step, ever increasing hammering of their Culture with the goal of assimilation first. Now this sounds like a carrot. The Roma were given land, okay? But for our roaming people, that is 50% around the globe from what they want. Secondly, they were no longer allowed to speak Romany and marry among each other. They only could take wives and husbands from outside of their group, which of course dilutes your culture. Third, they were registered with the government, which seems very threatening aura, like fourth, and finally, the worst, their children were taken away to be raised within the Austrian culture. Her son Joseph regarded his mother's religious policies as, and I quote, unjust, impossible, harmful and ridiculous. But it was not up to him. You know what else was largely not up to him? The matter of his marriage.

[A]

For the next huge chunk of her story, Maria Teresa is going to be taking all those children and trying to marry them into politically advantageous marriages. And you gotta start with the big guy, the Crown Prince himself. Unlike Maria Theresa, Joseph had been raised to rule. He knew what his responsibilities were. He was exposed to military things, unlike her when she was that age. He was going to council meetings. You know, he was already involved as much as he could be without actually having a crown on his head. In the last episode, we had talked about the alliance between France and Austria. And both Grandpa King and Maria Teresa wanted to strengthen that alliance through their marriages. So the very first, first marriage that she's arranging is of Joseph to France's King Louis XV's granddaughter, Princess Isabella of Parma. She's beautiful, she's intelligent. She would go on to write about all kinds of intellectual things, from philosophy to diplomacy to culture and education. And this wedding was an event not just diplomatically, but it was also a PR event for the Habsburg Empire. It was lavish. They spent money that they maybe didn't actually have. Isabella arrived in Vienna in a 90 carriage procession, rolling through custom made arches that were depicting the couple. The wedding was in the family wedding church. Does your family have a church where all your weddings and funerals are? They have one and it's St. Augustine's in Vienna, the wedding banquet was set with gold cutlery. Nobility were honored to be serving in the fanciest court dress, which again, still had that Spanish flair from her, her father. The whole point, besides getting these two married, was to say, we're Habsburgs, we have endless vats of wealth. You might not want to mess with us.

[B]

On our recent visit to Vienna, we actually saw hanging on the walls of Schonbrun Palace, a depiction of the carriages arriving at this wedding. It's very shocking. It's A painting called Entry of the Bride. And how very, very much gratuitous wealth and splendor there really was swirling around. I said this before, please just give me a giant house in the country. And I do not want to keep up with the Joneses. It seems like an exhausting treadmill, like a giant stairmaster of never enoughitude. That's all it is. I mean, there were carriages that had. I don't even know. I think we counted at the time. I didn't write it down. Like 40 plus footmen walking beside them in displays of individual pomp and circumstance. The painting depicts all the livery properly so you can tell who's where in what carriage. They had to wind backwards and forth like a Disneyland line all across the courtyard on their way in. Anyway, we can put a picture of that painting in the show notes or on our Pinterest board. Now, before she got there, Joseph was always very dramatic. He said, and I quote, I am a victim of the state. I am sacrificing myself, hoping that God will repay me.

[A]

But then he saw her and it was Auga eyes for sure. Like I said, she was beautiful and intelligent. He was all in on this wedding as soon as he met her. Not that he had a choice in the matter. He was totally enamored with her. And as time went on, and not a lot of time, it turned out that Isabella of Parma was totally enamored with his sister, Maria Cristina.

[B]

Yeah. It's largely the consensus of historians that Isabella had a relationship with Maria Therese's favorite daughter, Maria Christina. So rather than falling in love with her husband, she fell in love with his sister.

[A]

And I know what some of you are thinking. The language at the time with female friendships was often very romantic sounding and very flowery. And we do have only Isabella's letters. Christina's did not survive. Survive. They were destroyed, obviously. But something like, my dear angel, I love you and will love you to the grave.

[B]

The main body of historians, I mean, to get people to admit to that, I mean, you know, we've talked so often in this show about like, well, they are probably just friends, say historians. Nope, in this case, everybody seems pretty clear, which is rare enough and admirable. Although, you know, they could never be together because of her official position and obviously the family relationship. They couldn't be together openly anyway.

[A]

No. And Isabella did give birth to a child fairly quickly. And almost all of Maria Teresa's children, their first born daughters, they named Maria Teresa. So this is the very first Maria Teresa daughter. Multiple miscarriages did follow. And Isabella's mental health understandably took a decline. And she was pregnant again and contracted smallpox.

[B]

She had a little girl who died immediately after the birth and unfortunately died five days later, just shy of her 22nd birthday. And for the crown prince, this was devastating. He wrote, I will never be happy again. Isabella's tomb. I don't know if I took a picture of this. We can certainly find one online. We were in that crypt for a long time. We saw everyone. But her tomb has a teeny tiny coffin tucked under one corner, under one of the legs. What that indicates is that baby, and likely the mother died in childbirth. So we were the witness to that. Now, smallpox ran through the family, not for the first and not for the last time. Carl Joseph, the second brother, died at only the age of 16. There had been some grumblings about the heir getting snapped up. And so as a little bit of a political maneuver, the second son, Carl Joseph, had been promised to the Neapolitan Princess Maria Luisa. Maria Teresa set up a cadet branch of the Habsburgs in Tuscany. And it is something called, and I don't know if I can say this word second degeniture, which is basically like the creation of a cadet branch that may or may not ultimately merge back into the original line. He was to become the Grand Duke of Tuscany after he died at the age of 16. His future bride, Maria Luisa was simply passed on to Maria Teresa's next son, Archduke Leopold, the next year, which we're only at 176212 year old Maria Johanna, who was supposed to marry Maria Luis's brother in this like reciprocal double tie, she caught the disease and died right before Christmas. And I'm just telling you more on smallpox and more on that particular groom here in a little bit.

[A]

Just like in part one. This entire story is kind of like a three ring circus, Maria Teresa's three ring circus. Because there's so many moving parts in different areas of her life that are all going on at the same time and a lot of them take many years to be accomplished. Like marrying off all those children and multi step reforms, they take years. But I just think it's very interesting that there's so many balls in the air at the same time and she's juggling all of them.

[B]

Here's another one. There was tension, major tension between Vienna and Rome due to the conflict between the church and state in Austria. Well, Maria Theresa believed the Austrian clergy should be taxed for one thing, and the church was, I guess, affronted by this and chose not to respond to her inquiries. And so she had the court lawyers construct a new law about it. How do you like those apfels, you know? And even though she was super, super duper religious, a deeply religious woman, she nevertheless thought it was vital to weaken the hold the Church had on the government of the empire, exactly similar to the way that she had weakened the opposition from the different regional governments of the empire. Power should funnel to one place. She was convinced by her advisors that the Jesuits posed a danger to her authority. I mean, you know what? Maybe they did, because they're the brainful ones, they're the thoughtful ones, they're the one, the educated ones. They're the ones that are going to be smart enough to pull things off. Well, they'd been the ones that educated both her and her children. She was very hesitant because she owed them a lot. But nevertheless, she issued a decree that basically removed them from all the institutions of the monarchy. Church law used to apply in secular courts. No longer it was severed. No more Jesuit teachers at the university. Monasteries were regulated. Words from the Pope were not to be read from the pulpit of a Sunday without the consent of the government. The only way the Pope could communicate it had to go through the Foreign Office as if he were an ambassador, almost not an equal of the Empress. I mean, you're going to tell people what level they're on.

[A]

Yeah. And, you know, we kind of gave Frederick the Great a lot of grief in the last episode, but one of the very first things that he did when he took the throne was legislate religious freedoms. So she is doing exactly the opposite. Maria Teresa had, as we've already talked about, been placing government in places that had been self governed before. And one of those places was guilds. These are the people that produce anything across her lands. Fabrics, metalworks, bricks, stonework. Everything that is created has a guild. That local guild had been arranging all the rules for the guild. Who's a master? How can they train somebody? How long does the training last? What do the apprentices learn? What Maria Teresa wanted to do was get her government involved in the guilds. Instead of them being self governed, what Maria Teresa was doing was taking these guilds and kind of merging them together, or some of them just disappeared entirely. The thought was, if the government is controlling it, they can also control production. So if they're controlling production, they can control how much money is coming into the lands, how much money is coming into the royal coffers. And she is still trying to pay down the debt from the seven years War. She doesn't want anybody to see that. But this is one of the ways she's doing it.

[B]

Some of these guilds had been operating since the Middle Ages, and so she was really flying in the face of tradition. And despite that, and I'm not sure what magic it was, maybe it was just the fact that she was like, my way or the highway. She was still. I mean, not everyone loved her, but she was in general, beloved by her people. Yeah, it was kind of a feminine plus masculine magic, like we talked about in the first episode.

[A]

Use what you got. You know, speaking of using what you've got, there's a series out there called the Empress, and it's in German. But if you've watched it, you see Francis Stephen talking about his calico fact factory. And he did indeed have a calico factory, which kind of circumvented some of the laws that she was putting in place at this very time. So that's, you know, using what he's got, I guess. And she let him.

[B]

Speaking of Francis, he was not sleeping on something that became very, very important. Do you remember that there was a subsidiary title for the person that was supposed to be the heir to become the next Holy Roman Emperor? It was a matter of electing this person to the job, but that meant the Holy Roman Emperor could oversee the investiture of his successor before he left the earth. So Francis supervised Joseph's crowning as King of the Romans and was able to keep it in the family. We do not want that title of Holy Roman Emperor to get passed laterally out of the family again. And this was a way to ensure a seamless succession. As it turned out, he was just in time. It's officially vacation season. Personally, I'm super excited to take a trip to NYC with me.

[A]

Oh, gosh, that annoyed even me.

[B]

But you know who's not invited along? A vacation body odor.

[A]

Nope, body odor is not coming with me. Because no matter where I go, I am wearing Lumi whole body deodorant, keeping me smelling fresh from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

[B]

We flew all the way to Vienna and back in some pretty tight quarters. You know, most of the window seats don't have windows anymore in an airplane. There's a lot of people and assorted odors in an airplane. Did I mention that they make the perfect mini dos for your travel bag? As a special offer, new customers get 15% off all Lumi products with our exclusive code and link. Use code [e-mail] L U M E D E O D O r a n t.com Lumi is clinically proven to block odor all day and control odor for up to 72 hours. Unlike certain traditional deodorants that try to just mask odor with a fragrance, Lume is formulated and powered by mandelic acid to stop odor before it starts. Plus new sweat control with the same outrageously effective whole body deodorant you love with the bonus of sweat control now available in the cream tube with 72 hour odor and sweat control.

[A]

I like that about Lumi that you can either have the regular stick deodorant or these tubes of a cream deodorant so you can kind of specifically target an area like, you know, underneath your bra.

[B]

Lumi's starter pack is perfect for new customers. It comes with one of those solid stick deodorants, Cream tube deodorants, two free products of your choice like Mini body wash and Deodorant wipes, which are Susan's favorite. And free shipping as a special offer for listeners. New customers get 15% off all Lumi products with our exclusive code. And if you combine the 15% off with the already discounted starter pack, that equals over 40% off their starter pack.

[A]

Use code chicks for 15% off your first [e-mail] that's code chicks at L U M E D E O D O r a n t.com.

[B]

On January 1, 1765, less than a year after he supervised his son's investiture as Emperor of the Romans, Francis died. And this meant that the eldest son, Joseph, became the emperor and the co regent, Maria Theresa abandoned all, I guess I'd call it ornamentation. She cut her hair short. She painted her rooms black. She dressed in mourning clothing for the rest of her life. She completely withdrew from court life, from all public events, even the theater, which she loved. And she described her state of mind as, and I quote, I hardly know myself now, for I have become like an animal with no true life or reasoning power.

[A]

Where Francis Stephen had died ties back into one of those arranged marriages. When Leopold was getting married, it was during the wedding week. The wedding festivities is when Francis Stephen died. She's not even in Vienna. They're in Innsbruck. She even had a moment where she was thinking, maybe I need to step down. Maybe with the loss of him, I don't have it in me anymore to do this. She changed her mind. So she has to go back to Vienna. And she wrote to one of her advisors, I'm letting myself be dragged Back to Vienna wholly and solely to assume the guardianship of nine orphans. I'm exceedingly anxious about their future, which will be decided in the course of the next winter. Now she's grieving. I'm not going to make fun of her. Her oldest, though, is 27 and her youngest is 9. So taking care of her children has a different connotation than if they were all still little, you know?

[B]

Mm, I don't think so, but okay.

[A]

You don't think it has a different connotation?

[B]

She didn't take care of them in the first place.

[A]

Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know. I. Yeah, I thought that she was. I mean, I'm not gonna say she was being overly dramatic because she's felt what she felt, you know?

[B]

Well, what I think maybe she meant was that she needed to arrange their futures before too much more time passed in case she also left. She wanted to see all of her business checked off or planned, I think maybe.

[A]

Right. And I think that was a huge project of her at this phase in her life.

[B]

Well, she immediately pressurized her oldest son to get married again. Against his will, frankly. Right after his father died, you know, he became the Holy Roman Emperor and she, his mother, pressured him to marry. I think it's a second cousin. I've lost track. A lady named Maria Josepha. She was a daughter of the powerful Bavarian elector, and the Bavarian elector had no sons. So this was strategic. It was part of like a plan on Maria Theresa's part to eventually lay claim to the territory of Bavaria. Like, it was a cold hearted marriage that her son entered after he had had such a love match. She unfortunately was described by history as physically unattractive and slow witted, but very affectionate and sweet tempered. And she tried in vain to make her husband even talk to her, and he pretty much ignored her whole existence. Their marriage was probably likely never even consummated.

[A]

In contrast, Maria Teresa's favorite child, and she wasn't even shy about it. You know, we all say, oh, you're all my favorites. You know, I told all my kids that they were my favorite. And then they. It took them years before they told the other ones. And the other ones are all like, wait, she told me the same thing.

[B]

That's the benefit of me only having one child, because I can be like, you are my favorite. And it's totally true.

[A]

It was so funny though. They all came to me, they're like, you told me I was your favorite.

[B]

And I was like, you are.

[A]

It was one of my great Moments in parenting, I think, anyway. Her favorite, Maria Christina had started an actual love relationship with Prince Albert of Saxony many years ago. And Maria Theresa had said, okay, that's not a good political marriage for you. I can't sign off on it. Your father wants you to marry his cousin. He's already got this all planned out, and that kind of makes sense. But I'll tell you what, Maria Christina, just be quiet about your relationship with Prince Albert, and I'll see what I can do. Well, now that Frances wasn't around to put the kibosh on it, Maria Christina was actually allowed to marry the man she loves. Not only did she let Maria Christina marry Albert, but Joseph, who at this point is co ruling with Maria Teresa, he signed off on it so fast. And he wrote this cute letter where he said that he had got to tell Albert himself. And he said it was a long time before he'd believe I was speaking seriously, because the guy's like, really? I can marry her. Really? Are you serious, or. You have to convince him. But he had no property, so the dowry that Maria Christina got was huger than any of her other children. It actually ended up equaling about 4 million guilders. And it was all in a marriage contract that was kept as a state secret for a very long time. She gave him a job of running a certain area of Hungary, and then the promise of running the Austrian Netherlands. When that position opened up, she told all of her daughters, she said, never marry a man who has nothing to do. So Maria Teresa made sure that Albert had plenty to do and that he had plenty of money. They ended up being a really powerful couple in Europe. You know, they lived an amazing life, but the other kids in the family, the other daughters, they had to marry, whoever.

[B]

Mama said that family conflict was in the background. But there was a powerful conflict that took place pretty much for the rest of Maria Teresa's reign. A running just rubbing against of wills with her son Joseph. It really clouded the last years of her reign, all of her widowhood. He was intrigued with the new philosophy of the Enlightenment, which she thought was too much change. It was a different way to understand human nature. He admired Frederick the Great, an enlightened Ish ruler. You know, as far as his people went, he was a little more liberal with some concepts. She was so offended by the fact that her son admired Frederick the Great. Of course, I mean, I get that. And his foreign policy and his irritations and goals just filled her with trepidation. She felt like he was too rash. Well, she was Too conservative. And there were threats of abdication on both his part and hers. I would say there were a lot of slammed doors, but they have people.

[A]

For that lady in waiting. Slam that door for me right now.

[B]

There are so many written complaints about his mother and what he saw as her mismanagement of the issues that Joseph wrote to his younger brother Leopold. And I'm glad he had somebody. Anyway, you know, one thing he really was feeling strongly about is that his mother's policies, the good effects, didn't trickle down to the people that really needed him. And I think his timeline might have been a little bit idealistic and tight. And I'm not entirely sure he understood the fact that she was steering this giant ship that had been going in one direction. That's like TM for so long. And the changes she was making were actually radical. You know, it was in pieces. It was laying around on the ground. She glued it together like wabi sabi with threads of gold, which I'm. That's a rabbit hole.

[A]

Oh, that's a good rabbit hole.

[B]

Yeah. So we'll, we'll. Anyway, sometimes in Japanese culture, when something breaks, they repair it visibly. And it. And it strengthens both the aesthetic appeal and the physical structure. So I think that's what she's doing. But all he saw was the fact that it had been broken, and so he just wanted to see the results faster. So for the rest of her reign, she really has this almost like kite in the air, dragging her policies here and there. And I can only imagine how frustrating that is. One key advisor was in the middle of everything, and this poor dude wrote, and I quote, royal authority was never really shared. The empress kept it all for herself. Yet she would not do anything without the consent of her successor and co regent. For his part, he never agreed with his mother. If she opposed his own way of seeing things, he drove her to despair by refusing to relent. And their discussions. On several occasions, I found her in tears after such disputations. She then sent me to hear his decision on a matter. And the emperor wished to decide nothing on his own. Sent me back to her.

[A]

I mean, ask your father, ask your mother. What's your father say? What'd your mother say? Yeah.

[B]

And there were times it had to.

[A]

Be difficult because she looked at him as if he was in his apprentice years. And he looked at himself as if, all right, I've been planning for this my entire life. I've seen the steps we've made. We need to make bigger ones.

[B]

Right? And there were Times she also promised to sort of withdraw and let him have the power, but never could bring herself to do it. Each of them thought they had the best plan. And you really just can't have two diametrically opposed wishes. I mean, honestly, you can see the difference between them just in their tombs. We're always coming back to this crypt, aren't we? We were just in Vienna, and Maria Teresa and her husband's tomb is giant. Giant and elaborate. It dominates a great room. I mean, it dominates this giant vaulted room. And right in front of her is an extraordinarily simple casket that Joseph chose for himself. Now, that is a metaphor. She's like, all things to all people. Loudly, with much fanfare and interference. And he's like, please build the foundation and calm the waters a little bit before, like, can we just. Can we just not focus so much on ourselves and our power and put it out into the world? So anyway, wait, can I ask you a question?

[A]

Was hers the one with the penises on it?

[B]

With this. With the.

[A]

I don't know, the hats, you know, armor. They had, like, armor hats on. I'll have to look into that.

[B]

Gosh, I don't know.

[A]

I tapped somebody and I was like, is that. She looked at it. She's like, why, yes, it is. I'm like, oh, okay.

[B]

It's like they were like, almost like.

[A]

Pillars around the crypt.

[B]

Hmm.

[A]

I know. I don't know if it was hers.

[B]

I'm a little interested by her.

[A]

I know. I'll find out before the end. I'll find out which one it was.

[B]

I didn't even notice. You know, one thing you do notice down there, there is a. There are a lot of crowns. There are a lot of skulls. They make no bones about what you're looking at here. Yeah, it is kind of creepy and cool to be in a room with so much that had. Had so much power. And now here we are, you know.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And they're visible. It's not just headstones. It's the whole.

[A]

Anyway, yeah, no, it was cool. And it was so much cooler that we're kind of in the same era where John and Abigail Adams crypts are just In Quincy, Massachusetts, are just like stone painted white in the basement of a church. This was also at the basement of a church, but they did it big.

[B]

In 1767, Maria Teresa came down with a severe case of smallpox. She had been infected while looking after her poor, unloved daughter in law, Maria Josepha. Her son Joseph immediately ordered prayers for her speedy recovery to be said in churches all throughout the empire. And it was very dicey for about a week. And against everyone's expectations, I mean, everyone's holding their breath, expecting the worst. Her condition improved. She got better. She had some scarring, but was in other ways unharmed. And the sad prayers on one's knees of petition to God for healing powers became prayers of thanksgiving. I will tell you, the whole empire popped off with assorted levels of celebrations. Poems were written, festivals were had, as far as I know, barrels of wine were tapped. I mean, the common people were folded into the celebration. That seems to be the usual methodology.

[A]

Right.

[B]

All of these celebrations had the effect of strengthening the country's emotional attachment to their monarch. And, you know, in modern day, I think we have a similar attachment, or at least have had until recently to Queen Elizabeth ii. The vast majority of us will never have met her, you know, but somehow she is. She represents stability. She represents, like the mother of the country, that kind of thing. All these celebrations and, like, ceremonies of thanks for her. Her recovery really strengthened that bond between her people and Maria Teresa. Joseph actually persuaded his mama to come out for the major service at St Stephen's Cathedral, which we just saw, which was her first appearance in public in two years since her husband had died. And she was received with great acclaim in public at St. Stephen's Cathedral.

[A]

You know what just occurred to me right now? The fact that her illness is being used to create public relations for her, you know, is kind of something that she started. And it's filtered down so deeply into the family and into the advisors and everything that it's just almost second nature at this point. Early on, she might have been saying, we need to do this big thing so that people see that we're wealthy and we have power, you know, but now it's just natural. Let's get everybody praying for her across the lands. Our mother figure. Yeah, Some PR class should go study that. If I was in college again, I'd write a paper on it, I think, because that's interesting. Okay.

[B]

In the background, sort of, Joseph's wife, Maria Josepha, also had contracted the disease. In fact, I think Maria Teresa got the disease from her and died pretty much unmourned by her husband. I mean, he noticed, I think she was gone, but that's about it. And Joseph, after this, he resisted any further marriage plans made by his mother. He was not going to go in again?

[A]

No. She was only 28. They had only been married two years, and again, they probably didn't even consummate the marriage. There were no children.

[B]

How about this for another doomed marriage and another confusing series of similar names?

[A]

I know, okay. In the line of those children that Maria Teresa needs to marry off is her own Maria Josepha, which is exactly the same name as Joseph's recently departed wife. Not too confusing. According to legend, Maria Teresa insisted that Maria Josepha go down and pray at the crypto of her recently departed sister in law. So Maria Josepha did. She didn't want to, but she did it anyway. The legend says that the script wasn't fully sealed, that the whole area smelled of the decomposing body, and that Maria Josepha, the daughter, at 16, contracted smallpox from her dead sister in law's body. Probably not, because she developed symptoms within just a couple days. And the incubation period for Smallpox was about 10 days. So she was exposed to it earlier. But it sure made for a great story, didn't it?

[B]

And Maria Josepha died the day before she was to set out on her wedding journey in which she was to replace her previously deceased sister, Maria Johanna, as the bride of Ferdinand, the King of Naples. So that is two sisters that were supposed to have married the King of Naples that did not make it to the altar. I will tell you. Guess who else got it at this court during this year. Little tiny Wolfgang Mozart. His father sped him out of there so fast, but it was touch and go there for a while. He got nothing but smallpox, actually, from the court. The smallpox raging through the court made it impossible to perform in the city and to make money. And so they were going to leave anyway and they had to leave to survive. Basically, that's a bummer.

[A]

And in this epidemic of smallpox that's happening this year, another archduchess, Maria Elizabeth, she was the sixth born. She also contracted smallpox. She did survive, but her face was so badly scarred that the arranged marriage that she was supposed to have fell apart once her betrothed heard what was going on.

[B]

Maria Theresa's decision to have her children inoculated after this epidemic was responsible for changing the Austrian doctor's negative view of inoculation. Now, we covered this in several other episodes. Catherine the Great was the first person in Russia to undergo what was called variolation. And her son, the heir, was inoculated soon after. So that is a vote of confidence to have it done to your heir, isn't it? Following her inoculation, Catherine initiated a campaign that saw 20,000 Russians receive inoculations. And in a matter of 20 years, there were over 2 million. And over in Russia. Her efforts sparked hospital Funding training programs, improving healthcare in general, and I will say a trusted public figure openly supporting vaccinations encourages others to follow. That's a lesson that we may or may not have learned during COVID Another powerful woman who used her power for good in this instance was Queen Charlotte of Great Britain. We talked about her both in the Queen Charlotte podcast and in the Mary Wortley Montague podcast. So we are going to give you a bunch of links for that. Now. Given all these losses that had happened in Vienna, Maria Teresa and Joseph now concerned themselves with smallpox prevention in their own empire. The first, it was called variolation. It's basically where you scratch smallpox into your skin. The first trials in Vienna were started the year after the great epidemic and she hired a doctor with experience in smallpox variation to set up trials on charity children. It's really heartless. That's what I think. Anyway. When she was finally confident that the process was safe, she had her remaining younger children inoculated, including Marie Antoinette, the future Queen of France, who had had her inoculation as a child and therefore survived a smallpox epidemic later in France. I'm going to say this to you, but I'm not sure I feel brave enough to put it in the show.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Unfortunately, unlike Britain and Russia, in Vienna, vaccination, which is what I'm calling it, it's really variolation. Vaccination stayed extremely unpopular in the Austrian empire and especially in the country. And I quote the doctor, here's what he said. For the sole reason that these utterly stupid peasants leave it to the further will of God and don't listen to the wise counsel.

[A]

Yeah, it takes about 30 years before it actually catches on and a lot of people start getting these inoculations variations. So it's another slow moving train that she set going.

[B]

We talked in detail about smallpox in our Lady Mary Wortley Montagu podcast. And during the 18th century, the disease killed about 400,000 Europeans every year. Between 20 and 60% of those infected died from the disease. Remember, Maria, Theresa's uncle had died of smallpox and put her on the road to inheritance in the first place.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Your chances of dying from smallpox if you were not inoculated was around 18%. And if you were inoculated, it was about 1% chance of death. I think that's really amazing odds.

[A]

That's significant. Absolutely, absolutely. You have to remember, of her 16 surviving births, four of Maria Trace's children died from smallpox. Now also, two of her daughter in laws died from smallpox. That's a lot in One family, but the odds were pretty consistent with the rest of the populace.

[B]

During the 1700s, smallpox raged also through the American colonies. Smallpox impacted the Continental army so severely during the Revolutionary War that no less than George Washington himself mandated inoculation for all Continental soldiers and was trying to.

[A]

Prevent his wife Martha from getting it. But she went behind his back, had the inoculation done anyway, and recuperated at John Hancock's house in Philadelphia. Why do I remember that?

[B]

Sometimes things stick. So sorry for the harping on smallpox, but it was such a big spectre all through the 1700s and part of the 1800s until vaccination really got going. I mean, it laid waste to families and power and monarchies. Like things changed hands because of this disease. No one understood where it came from, how to prevent it. I mean, it was a stalking terror like the angel of death, and it didn't spare anyone. From rich to poor.

[A]

Here we are in the middle of summer and warmer sunny days are still here. We can all fuel up for them with factors no prep, no mess meals and meet all of our wellness goals this summer thanks to a menu of chef crafted meals with options like Calorie smart, Protein plus. I love those Protein plus and keto Protein's big.

[B]

Protein is very, very big. The other day my instacart guy was like, I don't know what's happening. All the cottage cheese is gone. All of it. And I said TikTok happened. That's why all the cottage cheese is gone. Am I wrong? Factor can come to the rescue with some tastier protein packed meals than your cottage cheese with marinara on it or whatever nonsense that is.

[A]

Oh my gosh, you really made me gag. Wow. Factor's fresh Never frozen meals are dietitian approved, chef crafted and ready to eat. And this is the best part. In just two minutes in your microwave, you'll get nutritious and great tasting meals in. I'll repeat it again. Two minutes.

[B]

Yeah. So you keep kitchen time to a minimum. No shopping, no prepping, no cooking and no cleaning up. It's effortless support for your lifestyle. You can choose from six menu preferences to help you manage the way that you like calories, protein, vegetarian, or simply eat well balanced in different ways. So head to FactorMeals.com HC50 and use code HC50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next month.

[A]

That's code [e-mail] HC50 to get 50% off YOUR first box plus 20% off YOUR next month while Your subscription is active.

[B]

So it wasn't just health reforms. The reforms kept coming. In 1767, she imposed a law on Hungary called the Herbarium, which was really just a mandatory census. And what it did was regulated the size of a peasant's land and sort of enshrining in law a ratio of, you know, duties, goods, services. Each peasant was obliged to provide their lord, especially the days of required labor, which was a practice called corve. This had happened since the Middle Ages. Peasants were required to provide their lord a certain number of days work each year, either on the estate or road maintenance, that kind of thing. And there had been some, shall we say, creep, like how your corporate job gets pieces of the jobs of people that leave and put them on you until you're weighed down by responsibility. Can you tell? I take that a little personally. So I am definitely on the peasants side for this. And the new laws suffered, I will say, comically, somewhat, because it was the lords themselves that were responsible for implementing it. So you've got foxes in the chicken coops. But it was later strengthened by Joseph in his reign. Now again, Maria Teresa had an idea and then her son was able to refine and nail it down. So I think in that regard it was a good partnership. Though I will be willing to bet that Joseph saw it as his mother not finishing the job. You know, you gotta start stuff, though. I mean, she went from zero to one.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Which is the hardest part, I think.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I'm okay. You walk into your living room and you wanna redecorate it. Do you do it all in one fell swoop? No. You get a new sofa, then you get new carpeting, and then you get new paint, maybe in a different order, but it takes time. It's not just like a TLC show. It's just boom, 30 minutes, it's brand new living room.

[B]

Yeah. So she's making the foundations of honestly, cultural revolution, but it just takes a long time.

[A]

Yeah. Speaking of reforms, Maria Teresa created a new penal code. It was called the Constitutio Criminalis Teresiano. And what she wanted was a unified set of laws throughout the lands. This is something that she's been trying to do since the very beginning. Although only Austria and Bohemia enacted this set of laws, Hungary and Belgium and Lombardy did not. So it's not even going to do what she wants it to do. But these are a little bit stricter laws. It was kind of a crime and punishment manual, complete with illustrations. Unlike Frederick the Great in Prussia, who had also outlawed Torture as a judiciary device. She thinks that it's a good thing to have, but only under certain circumstances. And she puts illustrations in here about how to torture somebody. This rack is fine. You may do this amount of things. If they do this, that and the other thing as a criminal behavior.

[B]

Well, up to that time, it was left completely up to the discretion of the perpetrator of the torture. So at least we have a guidebook now, for all that's worth. It's baby steps. She actually did regulate the methods of torture for each crime. And you've got detailed instructions. I don't know that I ever have seen a thumbscrew until I saw that illustration. And now I have, so I know.

[A]

And we will link you to those illustrations also.

[B]

Twice a year, incorrigible females, they said, the homeless, rebellious farmers, smugglers, poachers, basically probable repeat offenders were just deported by boat to the southeast of Hungary and forced to work in textile factories, especially those incorrigible females, which was code, of course, for women of negotiable affection. And in her battle against such conduct, Maria Teresa did not even spare the members of the upper classes. She long ago had established an official chastity commission which spied on the activities of noblemen with reputations. At least it was the men this time. Yeah, they were subject to large fines and they could even forfeit their military career. Women ran the risk of being confined to convents for the rest of their lives, or at least years at a time. Until Joseph came along. There was a big event, objector, which actually kind of makes me laugh. Casanova. You know, Casanova, as in the Casanova. He objected. He called the. He called her workers, quote, a legion of vile spies who were the merciless tormentors of all pretty girls. No, hilariously, of course, he would be the one to object. It was basically, you'd run a risk. If you were a woman of even moderate means who chose to walk unaccompanied, you could be swept up and sent away. It was. That was actually kind of dangerous.

[A]

Yeah. She started this back when her husband was one of those people that often had affairs. So it just bothered her. To be fair, her council of state did not sign off on this entire document. And, oh, hey, big shock. It did not end prostitution because she was sweeping up people who were completely innocent based on her view of what immoral behavior is and her wanting to legislate it. I mean, even gay people got sent to the penal colony just for being themselves. She was really trying to legislate morality based on what she considered immoral behavior, which of course was not what everybody considered immoral behavior.

[B]

Once again, we have a bridegroom appear on the scene that has already been in our story twice. King Ferdinand of Naples wants a wife and he wants a Habsburg wife. And you know, at the beginning you would say he didn't care. He didn't care which one was going. Johanna was supposed to go and she died at the age of 12. Josepha died on the day she was supposed to leave. Well, Maria Teresa wanted him to accept one of her slightly elder daughters, Maria Amalia. And he is absolutely. No, she's older than me. You know, it's not gonna work out. I would like a younger wife. And you know what? You look down the line. And the next sister up for bids is the third, Maria Carolina.

[A]

She was only 15 at the time. And like her other sisters who were hastily put into these marriages, she had about six months to get herself polished up and ready to be sent down to Naples. She was scared and a lot of her family could not go with her. Like her brother, the co regent normally would have gone with the wedding caravan, but he couldn't because his daughter, the young Maria Teresa, had just gotten the smallpox vaccination and he wanted to stay with her, his only child, to make sure she was okay through it. So he wasn't available. But I love Leopold. He is kind of like the person in this family that everybody turns to. He seems very agreeable and very smart. He seems like the guy that when you have a big problem, you can lay it all out in front of him and he'll take the pieces that need to be addressed and address them. So Maria Carolina was able to stop by at Leopold's house and when he saw how scared she was, he kind of decided he was going to be her sovereign sensei. And he signs on to kind of mentor her in the responsibility she's going to have as queen of Naples and Sicily. He's in the carriage with her, he's kind of calming her down. And later she was able to credit him with her learning, quote, many languages, including Greek and Latin. I studied philosophy and I became more open minded, strong spirited and desired like my brothers, those reforms that increase the power of the principality. So she gets in the car, a 15 year old scared girl, and within a short period of time, she's a ruler in mind.

[B]

Anyway, we covered this medium extensively when we covered Marie Antoinette, how Maria Carolina was actually probably destined to go marry the dauphin of France. She had a strong character, she could dominate her Husband, which she was pretty good at being the ruler, thanks to her bro bro's training. I am just saying, France might have had a different outcome had this sister gone instead of the one that did. But Maria Teresa looked around after she sent Maria Carolina around. You know, you're so used to having this vast cavalcade of spares, right? And then she looks and sees, oh, I just have this one. This one. Woefully unprepared, under the radar, not learning, having person left. And so preparations were immediately begun. Many years too late to prepare Marie Antoinette to go ahead and go to France, although it would take another couple of years for her to go. It was like, oh, my gosh, all hands on deck for this one. And that's what happened about now.

[A]

From afar, Maria Carolina did try to help Marie Antoinette, but she had her own situation on her plate where she also had a husband that wasn't doing the job right. And she could see how it was supposed to be done. And she was able to kind of not overpower him, but convince him that she was the smarter one in this relationship.

[B]

Some say that Maria Carolina was the most like her mother. And in this regard, I definitely see it. You know what? I'm here to take care of things. Why don't you go on your little hunting trip? Just, you know.

[A]

Right. Yeah. Well, Ferdinand was a child. I mean, he took the throne at 8. He let his advisors rule, and even when he came into it in his own right, he let them keep ruling. And when. This is the kind of guy he is. When he found out that his betrothed had died of smallpox, he wasn't upset because his marriage had, you know, fallen apart before he'd even had a chance to marry her. He was upset because he couldn't go hunting that day because the court had to go into mourning. So his staff said, oh, well, let's help him along. And they created this mock funeral procession. They took one of the guys and dressed him up in a shroud, and he was the corpse. And they're, like, doing a parade. And Ferdinand's like, oh, this is so much fun, and leads the parade. This fake, mocking funeral procession. That's the kind of guy he is.

[B]

This reminds me so much of. I mean, no wonder Catherine the Great overthrew her husband. I really admire that series, the Great with one of the Fanning sisters in it. Just the sheer eccentricity of some of these men who have risen to power almost demand that a strong woman come and just take the reins, because otherwise, like, what on earth Right.

[A]

And I think Carolina did it smarter because I don't think Ferdinand thought he was overthrown right.

[B]

Back in Austria. This is January of 1770. Joseph's daughter, his only child, little Maria Theresa, died at the age of 8 and was deeply and utterly mourned by her father, who really never came to terms with her death. He would scream, I am no longer a father. Give me back my child. Give me back my child. In the crypt, there's the picture of his first wife with the tiny little coffin wedged under it. And just to the right is the tomb of their child, who was 8 at the time that she died. He never remarried. He never got over this particular loss. Okay, so on to world events, now that we've covered some domestic ones. Russia and Turkey had been at war for a number of years and there was the possibility that Russia was going to win. What that meant for Austria and the Habsburg Empire was that they would suddenly have a powerful rival touching them just to the south, which was very unacceptable to Maria Theresa's advisors. And her advisors became so nervous after about 1771 that this was becoming a probability they actually recommended, ma'am, maybe you should send troops to go help the Turks. An idea absolutely resisted by Maria Theresa. She still regarded the Turks as predators, by the way, in Europe. And a person honestly with such little religious tolerance is not going to get on board with helping the Muslim empire win anyway, I don't think, no matter what the benefit to herself. Frederick the Great, though, had an idea. How about this? The three big powers of Europe could, by gentlemen's agreement, though two thirds of them, or ladies, divide up Poland to keep a balance of power and then we'll have together sort of an all hands on deck policy against the Ottoman Empire. There had been a power vacuum of sorts in Poland for about five years. King Augustus had died and Catherine the Great had thrown her support behind her man friend, Poniatowski. We talked about him in the Catherine the Great episode. But mostly she installed her boyfriend there to keep Poland like a little puppet state. And it wasn't working out. Civil war had broken out and it was chaos. Austria ultimately agreed to the division idea and Maria Teresa just really, really agonized about it because she thought, okay, the difficulties I'd had at the beginning of my reign, it's exactly the same thing, like the European powers didn't respect my territory. And so I'm agreeing to doing this and I'm endorsing the same kind of claim jumping policy that had caused me such grief. Why would I Impose this on someone else. Something I wouldn't have wanted to have happened to me. Is that the subjunctive case? Something I wouldn't have wanted to have happened to me. Honestly, it came out naturally. I understand what it means. I couldn't have taught it to someone if you begged me. Anyway, you tell me, English majors, what was that that I just perpetrated? However, as advisors warned her, if you refuse to take part in this, okay, the threat of war is just going to continue, number one. But also it's going to weaken you relative to the two neighbors, because they don't have a problem dividing Poland in two pieces, honestly, and leaving you out. They're going to gain land, they're going to gain taxpayers, which is most important to you, and you're going to receive nothing. So that's your choice. So the division of Poland went on, reluctance or not. Joseph met with Poland's third neighbor, of course, King Frederick the Great of Prussia, his big fanboy hero. I don't know. And yeah, here again, her son's working with her big old enemy. Each neighbor took a part of the country. Austria got Galicia, a piece of land that has valuable salt mines and more importantly, 3 million new people. And poor old King Mr. Poniatowski was just steamrolled by powerful neighbors and a world indifferent to his plight. And he had to agree to everything.

[A]

Welcome to the ruling class, my friend.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

In 1775, another rebellion broke out. This one was from peasants in Bohemia. And you know, these things don't just happen. You know, they foster for years, there's little fire ups and then something happens and they revolt. Back in Maria Teresa's early days, she had talked about doing away with serfdom. But serfdom had been in place for long, long, long before Maria Theresa stepped onto the playing field. It's going to be very difficult for her to get rid of it completely. Basically, serfdom is forced labor without pay in return for a very meager existence. Different versions of it all over the world, all throughout history. Here in the United States at the early part of the last century, it was like sharecropping. You know, the people that own the land are the ones that benefit, and the people that are working the land are living on meager existence.

[B]

Characteristically, this is how it was handled. Maria Theresa had gathered a royal commission to study a curious decline in tax receipts from Bohemia. They found out the landlords had seized lands from peasants, and since only the peasants paid taxes, I'm going to put asterisks on that. Since Only the peasants paid taxes. The royal revenues had decreased. So as a response, she issued a series of ordinances to protect the peasants from the landlords. So fees that were paid by peasants to landlords were regulated now from the central government. Rules preventing peasants from selling in the free market were repealed, particularly beer and wine. A lot of landlords kept key industries to themselves. So if you, for example, wanted to grind your grain, you had to go to the land landlord's mill and pay him to grind. You weren't allowed to set up your own mill. That all of that was made illegal. And peasants were allowed to complain against the lords to imperial government officials. God, do. Would you, though, like, would it be too scary?

[A]

I know.

[B]

Are those officials always there? That's the question I would have. Like, are they sitting there on the premises or do they just come by once in a while? I don't know. The hotel people? I don't know. Again, I have to say that what on the outside might look like humanitarian efforts all came back to tax revenues and increased production. I almost think that's the main difference between Maria Teresa's policies and her sons. They really had different motivations. So what looks like, oh, no, these peasants are being oppressed. It's like, wait a minute, where did that money go, though?

[A]

Follow the money.

[B]

Maria Teresa also made another reform. She took a large percentage of crown estates and divided it it into what's called small holdings and gave them into peasants. And she tried desperately to extend these reforms to land that was actually held by noblemen, but there was enormous resistance to that. So progress was very slow. It was a radical change. And of course, it didn't have the full effect in that short time that we're looking at it, you know, like it was the beginning of something that ultimately changed society for good, you know.

[A]

But it takes time and it takes steps. And I guess this was a step in the right direction.

[B]

Well, yeah. Later, her son would expand all these reforms. He would grant the serfs freedom of movement. They weren't even allowed to leave, by the way, leave their land of origin. He, in fact, untied them from that hereditary chaining to the land of their lord, you know, free to roam about the country. Sometimes scents evoke memories. They're very powerful and have the capacity to transport you back in time, back to being on the beach during your favorite vacation. It's an amazing feeling when you finally find a product that transports you to sunny summer days.

[A]

And because I started using Osea's undaria, algae body oil and lotion, at the beginning of summer, it's always going to remind me of summer, this summer, which has been a pretty good summer.

[B]

But it's not just style. OSEA also has substance. This body oil is clinically proven to instantly improve your skin elasticity. It moisturizes deeply and leaves your skin silky and soft, delivering that post vacation glow like you just got back from a tropical vacation. It elicits envy.

[A]

I've gone on those vacations where I didn't want to take a shower afterwards because I just wanted to hold on to as much of that on my skin as possible and this body oil lets me do that. I never really understood what glowing skin meant until I started using OSEA products.

[B]

Also, you do not have to choose between your values and your best skin because this skincare is clean, vegan, cruelty free and climate neutral certified. OSEA is a women founded company and has made clean, clinically proven seaweed infused skincare for over 28 years. They know what they're doing.

[A]

Get healthy glowing skin for summer with clean vegan skin and body care from Osea. Get 10% off your first order site wide with code [e-mail] you'll get free.

[B]

Samples with every order and free shipping on orders over $60. Head to o s e a malibu.com and use code chicks for 10% off. Maria Teresa reformed education in her empire, also with a new school system based on the Prussian one. See, maybe Frederick wasn't all bad over there, right? All children of both genders had to attend school from the ages of 6 to 12. Now again, this was not as humanitarian as it appears. Exactly. By this time there was a large percentage of the rural population, especially made up of people like traders, cottagers, small manufacturers, who, unlike the serfs we just talked about, didn't really owe a lot of duties to any Lord at all. And these people represented, yes, an exciting and future looking workforce, but they also could be an ignorant, potentially non disciplined rural population. They were loose cannons, in other words.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And so compulsory education was a method of, in Maria Theresa's view, instilling a good work ethic and a sense of morality in them. Again, she's legislating morality this time though it happens to be a way that we approve of through education.

[A]

And again, it doesn't happen overnight. She gets opposition at first because she says do this, but then all those municipalities have to make it happen and she's not freeing up enough funds to get school set up, for instance. At first the people who opposed her, she had them Arrested. There's a fine solution. It's going to be slow going as far as education is concerned.

[B]

You know, it was met with a lot of hostility that no dedicated funding. That was a big deal, especially like we can't provide teachers. So education in most of these schools was rickety for a while. Also, parents objected in many parts of the empire because they were forced to send their children to school. And in the countryside especially, children were seen as a valuable labor force and school was just a way to take them away from being helpful to the family. The same objections, by the way, that reformers in America went through in 1938. So it has always been thus.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When the economy favors cheap labor, children are always pressed into service, unfortunately.

[A]

Yeah. And it's going to take 10 years. In those 10 years, there's going to be schools set up to educate those teachers, to train them in the curriculum. The actual curriculum in reading, writing and math was created in the local languages. Not in Latin like she probably learned from, but the language of that particular municipality. So that was smart. It's going to take 10 years before this all gets going, but she got it going.

[B]

Yeah. There were 500 elementary and secondary schools by 1780. It was amazing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And only onward and upward. She also permitted non Catholics to attend university. That's kind of radical. Well, men, folks, you know, we're not like super radical. And she also allowed at university the introduction of secular subjects. You know, it used to be theology based university and now there's a little bit of a decline in that focus and they can study other things. A few years later she had a plan that she was going to expel this sect of Protestants called Moravian Protestants. These are the people who were Protestant 60 years before the much more famous Martin Luther. Made it cool, by the way. They were the OGs. Because yet again, Joseph, who was opposed to her intentions, threatened to abdicate if she moved forward with it. That was one of the battles Royale with cheese that they had where somebody left and ordered someone to slam the door behind them. Figuratively speaking. As a matter of fact, when he was the ruler, he specifically created freedom to worship based partially on this conflict that he had had with his mother. You know, my dead body, said Maria Teresa. And he's like, merry Christmas. Yeah, guess what happens.

[A]

He's like, it's okay, Mom, I've got a list going.

[B]

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

[A]

Joseph is trying to step out and do his own thing. He's trying to be a ruler without having to go to mommy and get permission for everything. For Instance, remember we had talked about how he was like a fanboy of Frederick the Great? Well, well, Frederick was ill at one time and Joseph thought, oh, here's my opportunity. I'm going to do something that's going to make my mom really excited. I am going to assume that he's going to die and I'm going to get all my armies on the border of Silesia so the minute he's gone, I can retake that country for the Habsburg. Won't that be great? He didn't die. Frederick got word of it and from then on he realized that Joseph was ready to double cross him. He could not not trust him like he had been. Which was probably for the best.

[B]

As late as 1779, Maria Teresa single handedly frustrated another one of her son's war goals, another full scale war with Prussia called the War of the Bavarian Succession. He was just in it for some more territory and Maria Teresa went behind his back to sue for peace with Frederick the Great. Her point is, can we just please focus on peace for five minutes? Can we just get our internal affairs in order without rattling the borders, please? And his point was, we're owed this.

[A]

To his credit, Joseph felt like he had a right to claim Bavaria because his wife, who had died that he didn't really care about at all, was in the line of succession through her bloodline. He felt like it was his right to take over as the head of Bavaria.

[B]

That's why Maria Teresa had married him to his second wife in the first place. The ruler of Bavaria hadn't had any sons and so that was actually a direct response to that. If he and his poor second wife had had sons, he might have had a stronger claim in the eyes of everyone else too. Most of this conflict had been assorted teams engaged in trying to cut off the supply lines of the other teams. Anyway, this war is actually dismissively referred to as the Kartoffelkrieg, which means the potato war. Anyway, it didn't go very far because Maria Teresa shut that ish down for.

[A]

About the last 10 years. She didn't abdicate, although she often said one version of this. I've lived long enough. My age and infirmities which mount from day to day no longer grant me a moment's respite and my cares and losses drive me to utter ruination. She didn't have good health. She had respiratory problems, insomnia, her weight and just general inflammation of her joints and things made her unable to be very mobile. She had to be carried around in a sedan Chair. She wanted to see all her kids at least one more time, and she thought maybe a reunion somewhere. She couldn't really go and visit each one of them in their own lands. They kind of had to come to hers. And at one point, Joseph was working with her to plan this big reunion. But her health declined so rapidly that it had to be put off.

[B]

On October 15, 1780, she sat down and made a will, or had it made. And in it she directed generous bequests to the poor and also a month's pay to her soldiers. In addition to paying the soldiers, she wrote in her will a significant bequest for what they call normal Scriptures schools, which is what one calls a teacher's college. So she is funding the education of teachers for her educational program. I once lived on Normal street when I was in theater school. It was a source of great amusement, as my house was one of the party houses.

[A]

Nice. I did read one place where she had bequeathed more than she had, and Joseph either had to dig into his own pocket to pay all of it, or he ended up looking like the jerk.

[B]

Well, that might have been her last little. Guess what.

[A]

I know. That's right.

[B]

On the 8th of November that year, she was at a hunt and appears to maybe have caught a cold in the pouring rain, which for the 18th century, that's a death sentence. We've all read like, oh, no, the heroin caught a cold. And that was it for her. She. She actually did, though, suffer from a horrible cough that was. I mean, maybe one of those ones that's almost strong enough to break a rib. Very bad coug.

[A]

There were some historians who thought that perhaps she had lingering effects from when she had smallpox and that just weakened her entire system.

[B]

Absolutely possible. I read something that said the same thing about Mozart, how his latter years were fraught with health concerns that might have been directly related to his childhood exposure to smallpox. So, yeah, we don't take that lightly. She tried desperately to keep busy and keep from falling into despair. She got her affairs in order and tried to meet with whoever of her children could meet with her. On 25 November, she received communion. On the 28th, she received a sacrament called Extreme Unction. That's last rites. You might have heard it called. Kind of like the last thing you need to do before you check out of the hotel Earth, you know?

[A]

Right, right. And she did have some of her children around her. And on that same day, she called them all into a private family meeting and everyone was in tears. And she told them how much they all meant to her. And she told them that Joseph would take care of them. She gave him a blessing. And then she looked at her. This is such a mom thing. She looked at her kids and she said, okay, away with you. It costs me too much to see you like this. She dismissed them. Now, her actual last words. There's so many different variations out there that I don't think it's possible to be able to tell you exactly what they were. The one that I personally hope is correct was that she looked out the window and saw that it was raining and said, what bad weather to take a journey. Oh, wow, okay, I know, I know. On November 29, 1780, Maria Teresa died surrounded by some members of her family and loved ones. She was 63 years old. The reactions were actually mixed upon hearing about her death. The common folk were actually really still pissed off at her about a recent beverage tax. It was kind of tough to get a sympathetic emotion out of that group. There was court mourning, and not just in Vienna, but also Versailles, Florence, Milan, Naples and Brussels. She was buried in a massive crypt. We've already talked about it with her husband, Francis Stephen. She actually oversaw the design of this. The crypt had been designed 30 years before she died, which was still 10 years or so before her husband died. So she had planned this thing out. You and I saw her crypt, and we could see that there was a bust of Maria Teresa and Frances Devon at the top of the crypt. But if you look at photographs and we'll put some in the show notes, it's them actually reclining on a bed. There's pillows, and they're kind of leaned up on their arms looking at each other. It's very sweet. And yes, there are two soldiers that look like they are in army gear. You know, they have a helmet on and a shield and all that. But they are actually a male member of the anatomy. It's very interesting, actually.

[B]

Genitalia is what you're saying.

[A]

That is exactly what I'm saying. And so poorly too.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And like you had said, in that room, she is surrounded by most of her children in their Crips.

[B]

After her death, Joseph tried to finish her work of reform, continuing with the educational system. He had an especial thought for the University of Vienna. He hired and inveigled the best scholars and scientists to come to Vienna to practice and teach. He extended the separation between the judiciary branch of the government and the executive branch down further into more local levels of government, Something that Maria Teresa had started at the top. He pushed it down Further, also, Maria Teresa had begun a public health service. And. And by the time Joseph got there, he was able to get the general hospital in Vienna to be one of the best equipped and well regarded in all of Europe. The monarchy had a balanced checkbook for the first time in a long time. And the army and its organization was considered to be one of the very best in Europe. Joseph issued the abolition of serfdom. He issued an edict called the Edict of Toleration that established religious equality before the law. And he granted freedom of the press.

[A]

All very good things. He actually issued over 6,000 edicts and 11,000 new laws in the 10 years of his reign. That's a lot. The guy was busy. He was also not very popular because the things that his mom had said, slow down on a lot of them, he went ahead on. And he was just mucking up the waters and getting people upset that he was trying to change things too fast.

[B]

I will say that's probably the one criticism people have of Joseph. He had always been very idealistic. And so the criticism is that he tried to do too much too quickly. And the consensus seems to be that he died a deeply disappointed man.

[A]

He must have, because on his tomb it says, here lies a ruler who, despite his best intentions, was unsuccessful in all of his endeavors.

[B]

Yikes. Because he wasn't, though.

[A]

I know, I know.

[B]

I know how he felt, though. Yep. That is how he felt. And I really do feel like, number one, he went too fast. Number two, he never appreciated the foundation his mother had made for his endeavors. And I. I wish they'd been able to work more closely together.

[A]

Yeah, that would have been good for both of them. You know how if you mess up something in your house and you don't have time to fix it, you just get blind to it?

[B]

Yeah. It stays broken. It does.

[A]

The other day I walked into my kitchen and I realized how bad my blinds looked. I just have these inexpensive blinds that I got at a big box store, and I don't like how they look.

[B]

There's a better way to buy blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery. Curtains. Curtains, if it's you. And it's called Three Day Blinds. They're the leading manufacturer of custom window treatments in the United States. And right now they are running a buy one, get one 50% off deal. You know, you can shop for anything from the comfort of your sofa with your coffee in your hand. So why don't you, Susan, just shop for blinds at home, too?

[A]

I actually had my coffee in my hand the other day when I walked into my kitchen, so I took that coffee out to the porch and I went to three day blinds Instagram page and I saw window treatments that I never would have thought of. They had like Roman shades that open from the top and the bottom. They have automated. You can just tell Alexa to open your blinds in the morning in your bedroom and your blinds open.

[B]

I love it. You know what else I super love is the fact that they have local, professionally trained design people who have an average of 10 years of experience and they provide you guidance on the right blinds in the comfort of your home. And you just set up an appointment and you'll get a free no obligation quote the very same day. And I like a little instant gratification.

[A]

3 Day Blinds has been in business for 45 years. They put up blinds and window treatments in a lot of houses. That's why they're the highest rated blinds company on trustpilot at a 4.7 out of 5 stars.

[B]

Right now you can get 3 day blinds. Buy one, get one 50% off deal on custom blinds, shades, shutters and drapery for a free no charge, no obligation consultation. Just head to threedayblinds.com chicks that's buy.

[A]

One get one 50% off when you head to threedayblinds dot com chicks one last time. That's the number three da yblinds dot com chicks.

[B]

There was a saying that went all the way back to medieval times. And it goes like this. Let others wage war, but you happy Austria marry because what Mars gives to others, divine Venus gives to you. So that says something about Austria's strategy, really. Throughout the years of conquest through marriage, not only was Maria Theresa active in politics, of course, but her children were also given the responsibility to execute political tasks. Usually, of course, but not exclusively as pawns on the marriage market. Dynastic expansion.

[A]

You know, like at the end of 90s movies where they showed the pictures of the supporting characters in the movie, like their yearbook photos, and underneath their picture it tells you what they did for the rest of their lives.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Imagine that. Now. Okay, let's list them in order of birth. Although these are only the surviving children, these are the ones that made it through childhood. Some of these people did not get married. And we should mention that I feel badly because there's some that we've never even talked about in this entire two parts. For instance, like firstborn Maria Anna. She lived a very full life. Although she was born with a spinal deformity that pretty much took her off the marriage market. She was attached to a convent, just on paper, while her mother was alive. And then after her mother passed away, she went to live at that convent. But she was a very curious person, and she supported scientists and artists for her whole life.

[B]

The next step we mentioned before, Maria Theresa's favorite daughter, Maria Cristina, who was born on her mother's 25th birthday, and ever since that day was just the apple of her mama's eye. She married for love, Prince Albert of Saxony. The couple later received the Duchy of Teschen, and she was appointed governor of the Austrian Netherlands jointly with her husband. They were also big patrons of art. There is actually an art museum in the city of Vienna called the Albertina, which, at the time we were there, was featuring a Klimt exhibit.

[A]

They did not have any children, although they adopted one of Leopold's sons to raise as their heir. See, Leopold is the nicest guy. Next up is Maria Elizabeth.

[B]

Simultaneously, when Maria Antonia was getting prepared to go marry the dauphin of France, there was a plan put forth. I am freaking out by this, but there was a plan put forth that Maria Elizabeth, who was significantly older than her younger sister, should be married to the widowed Louis XV of France. Grandpa king. Yes, for real. She had gotten to this age despite being considered the most beautiful in the family because of administrative mess. Like, there had to be, like, a dispensation if people were closer than a certain degree of relation. And. And the man at the church that had to sign that document was having beef with Maria Teresa at the time and refused to sign it. So her marriage prospects had been shining earlier in life, and due to some bungling, she had never gotten married. Now, before the marriage to the king of France could be finalized, something happened.

[A]

Louis sent a portrait artist to Vienna to take a portrait of his betrothed. And when the artist came back, he was like, oh, your highness, she is severely scarred from smallpox. At which point Louis just kind of wiped his hand and said, forget it. Let's just focus on the dauphin and Maria Antonio and let's be done with it. I'm not gonna marry again. But Maria Elizabeth kind of reminds me of Jane Austen because she was very bright, she was very witty. She had a comeback for everything, but she got to be like the eccentric aunt that she just lived at home and did her thing. I kind of think she got a good deal, even though she did have to survive smallpox to get it. Next up is Maria Amalia.

[B]

Maria Amalia had fallen in love, fallen in love with someone that her mother considered a bad match. And she said, no, And Maria Amalia could not believe it. I mean, her sister, Marie Christine had been able to marry the person of her dreams. But no, a dynastic marriage. Marriage was Maria Amalia's fate. She was very, very bitter about it. She was told she had to go marry the King of Spain's cousin, the Duke of Parma. And it was all about relationships between countries. And the Duke of Parma was five years younger than his wife. He was universally regarded as rude and full of debauchery. And his favorite pastimes were hanging out with peasants. I'm imagining chugging beer and burping, like play acting at Being a peasant was awesome to him. She was so upset and cried and cried to her mother. And Maria Teresa promised her an amazing dowry. And unfortunately, it didn't matter. There were no obstacles. There was a proxy wedding, and then the bride, who had been crying all night, showed up at the wedding. And Maria Amalia never forgave her mother for forcing into this unwanted marriage, ever.

[A]

So much so that although every other child who had a firstborn daughter named them after their mother, this is the only one Maria Amalia named her firstborn daughter Maria Carolina, not Maria Teresa.

[B]

I just the unfairness of that slightly older sister being able to do what she wanted and then no amount of pleading, working. It's just like. Like, it's so shocking.

[A]

Yeah. Next up, turn the page of that yearbook. We have Leopold. He and Louisa, his wife had 16 living children. Again, one of them they let Maria Christina raise. He was Joseph's heir. So when Joseph died, Leopold stepped into the position. Although he was only there for two years, he was remembered as a huge art patron and for bringing Italian opera into Vienna, unfortunately, at the expense of the opera singers who were already there.

[B]

The relationship that Leopold has with his younger sister, Maria Carolina, which we talked about earlier, reminds me of the relationship between Benedict and Eloise in Bridgerton.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

Like, they're always, you know, meeting to just be like, yeah, middle child. What? Yep. You know, and trying to help each other. And they're always meeting in the garden, you know, figuratively speaking. It has to be by letter because Leopold and Carolina are far away, but they have a very close relationship. I think almost closer than anyone. But Maria Carolina and Marie Antoinette, I think I agree.

[A]

And speaking of Maria Carolina, she's next up. She did have 18 living children. And as the Queen of Naples and Sicily, she. I think we said this earlier, she ran things an awful lot like her mother did. She was able to put together a navy. Naples is on the ocean it didn't have a navy, and she made sure that one was put together. She also worked with Maria Christina to try to get Marie Antoinette out of France when the end was coming. But that plan backfired. And it was. They weren't able to do it, but they were working really hard to make it happen. And after her sister was executed, Maria Carolina banned all things French from her court because she was so mad at France.

[B]

That's amazing. I don't think I knew that.

[A]

And she had things running really well until Napoleon showed up, and even he said she was the only man in the Kingdom of Naples. But she eventually exiled herself to Vienna and died at age 62. She is the last of Maria Theresa's children to die. Archduke Ferdinand. I don't think we mentioned him even once. He's part of that younger group of their children. He was the third from the last to be born. He married into an Italian family. He became governor of the Duchy of Milan and governor of Lombardy and had 10 children.

[B]

We know so much, or at least think we do, about the next child, who would ultimately be known by history as Marie Antoinette of France, that we have a whole episode about her. So just very briefly, she. She was prepared as the last available option to marry the dauphin of France. Went there as an extremely young woman, received letters every two weeks from her mom yelling about how she didn't consummate her marriage. She's not doing her duty. She has a great responsibility as the Queen of France to influence her husband to have many children. You know what? She's not the only one that she, you know, she's not the only one. Maria Carolina, the one handling things, taking names, kicking booties over in Naples, got extensive letters from her mother about how she needs to hide her political activities and not be so open about taking over from her husband, which is like girl, pot and kettle. She is just like you. She learned it from watching you. And how about a little bit less of it in your letters? But, you know, we kept it on side.

[A]

Once a micromanager, always a micromanager. Thanks, Mom. And finally we get to the baby. Archduke Maximilian Franz. He actually was able to zig and zag his way out that he never had to marry. He never got caught up at any of these political marriages. He had a career in the Church. He was the archbishop and the Elector of Cologne. He was a patron of the arts, including a young man named Ludwig van Beethoven. He was a patron of. So good job, Maximilian. That's it. That's all the kids there are okay.

[B]

So that's the end of the life of Maria Theresa in the brief little epilogue of what happened to her children. You know, this is more war than we have ever covered.

[A]

It absolutely is. And I found that very daunting at the beginning because I wasn't sure how to format everything and make it a good story.

[B]

Right. There's a lot of conflict, there's a lot of characters, which normally isn't the case. There's a lot of vital characters.

[A]

Yes, definitely a lot of moving parts. And again, I say Maria Teresa's Three Ring Circus.

[B]

And now we'll move on to media. As to books there. One of the main sources I used is such a big book that I was even full of intimidation. It's not quite 4 inches deep, but it approaches 4 inches. It's heavy enough that my husband asks me, what is in your bag? He thought I had arm weights in there.

[A]

It has over a thousand pages.

[B]

It's called Maria Theresa, the Habsburg Empress in Her Time by Barbara Stolberg Rillinger. And it is. It was originally written in German. And I of course read a translation because Duolingo helps you with things like who put the dog in the freezer, but does not help you learn history in a foreign language.

[A]

There is lots of illustrations in there. Yes, but There is also 200 pages of footnotes.

[B]

Yes, that is a well researched individual.

[A]

It is. So if you're not into the very heavy books personally, the one I liked most for its readable style is called in the Shadow of the Empress by Nancy Goldstone. It's not just about Maria Theresa, it's about three of her children, also. Christina, Carolina and Antoinette.

[B]

And another, less weighty tome, Maria Theresa of Austria, Full blooded politician, devoted, wild wife and Mother to All by Regina Neuhauser. And honestly, I didn't find a lot of children's books. When you search for children's books with the name Maria Teresa, you. You do get one where the main character is named that but isn't our Maria Teresa? And then you get a whole bunch of Mother Teresa books.

[A]

There is one that I would call middle grade, probably it's called the Habsburg Empire. A very short introduction and it's by Martin Rowdy. It's only about 144 pages. It was a quick read. There is no shame in reading a middle grade book. That's all I'm gonna say because I read a lot of them and I'm not shameful about it at all.

[B]

There's plenty about Maria Theresa of Austria in Marie Antoinette The Journey by Antonia Fraser. And in the movie Sophia Coppola made, based on this book, with Marianne Faithful as an intimidating Maria Teresa. You know what? As to movies, you're gonna find a movie that was made in 2017. And you know what? Here is my biggest memory from that. In the background, her husband is, for some reason, correct me if I'm wrong, throwing cherries into the bosom of random ladies. I just wrote down the background. Actors look like they're in a Mentos commercial is what I wrote. So I am not sure this is gonna be a satisfying watch. Here's us telling you, if you are a student of both history and filmmaking, I think you have open season here because there's a lot of material. I'm shocked that no one has got a hold of it. I mean, they did Catherine the Great. Great. I think with the Fanning daughter. I never can tell them apart. I mean, I can tell them apart, but I don't remember who is who. So she did a great job. I think they did a great job making it humorous and accessible. And I wish somebody would do the same thing with Maria Theresa. There was a lot going on.

[A]

Yeah, that would be good. There is a documentary, if you're gonna make that movie, that you should probably watch, so you can put in some very funny scenes about if you were going that way. Maria Teresa's Vampire Hunter. It's available on Prime. You do have to pay to watch it, and I found it a little bit dry. But if you're into the mythology around vampires, it was very interesting. It's a great little rabbit hole.

[B]

There is an amazing website, speaking of rabbit holes, that I mean, anything you would ever want to know or learn or didn't know you needed the world of the Habsburgs. In German, it's called Die Welt der Habsburger. You use whichever translation you like. It's amazing. There's pages by different authors, just about every Habsburger throughout history. And then once you get to the Maria Teresa, there's like Maria Teresa's reform. Her daughter, her attitudes, her fashions, her upbringing. I mean, everything you want to know is right there.

[A]

We can also send you on a virtual visit of those imperial crypts. If you like, we'll give you a link to a virtual tour that they have there. Also, if you're in Vienna, you must go to Schonbrunn Palace. If you don't go there, don't tell us you went, because why didn't you go? It's right there. Even if it's winter, there's still a lot to see. You go see Schonbrunn, you go see the Hofburg, where you get a kind of a two for one, because Empress Sisti has a whole museum in the Hofburg in her old apartments, as well as the Hofburg with all its splendor.

[B]

And at Schombrunn, you could see a panda. It's not historical, but it's pretty rare.

[A]

I know. I love that part.

[B]

It has what some are terming the oldest zoo in the Western world is housed in the grounds at Schonbrunn. So head there at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are a couple of artifacts. If you're around there, you should see there is actually a Hungarian coronation coin featuring Maria Teresa on her amazing horse with her sword on the reverse side. And also a painting called Coronation of Maria Theresa in Hungary by Anton Franz Wiedemann.

[A]

When you go to Vienna, you're going to see a ginormous statue of Maria Theresa in what's called the Museum Quarter. It's over by the Hofburg. It was put up in 1888, so about 100 years after she died. It's bronze. It is 65ft tall. Maria herself is nearly 20ft tall on this statue. And you can dazzle the people you go with because they're gonna say, oh, are those her sons that are around the base of the statue, either standing or riding a horse? And you say, no, those are her advisors and people that were very important to her. Her military leaders, her administrators. And, oh, look, there's a cute little Wolfgang Mozart.

[B]

Wow. Wolfgang made it onto the statue.

[A]

He absolutely did. There's leader, military leaders, administrators, musicians and scientists.

[B]

And Wolfie, I have a couple of other links, both related to food, neither related to either strudel or schnitzel, by the way, that's a running joke. We had a lot of strudel and schnitzel. But if you would like to know the history of Quiche Lorraine and why and how it didn't have cheese on it until a lot after it was invented, discover the origins of the iconic Quiche Lorraine by Atelier Monnier. And then also, just for comedy, I will send you for a little Hungarian mushroom soup. And for even more comedy, the recipe is called to die for. It is a recipe that was once in the Moosewood Cookbook. So it's safe for consumption assuming you choose your mushrooms wisely and probably from a commercial establishment.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And not the forest.

[A]

That's a. Yeah. Right. There's a lot of articles out there, we'll link you to some of them. About Frederick the Great There is an article on the blog Making Queer History about Isabella of Parma and Maria Christina, and in that article there's a whole bunch of sources that they actually link to. So if you would like to tumble down that particular rabbit hole, there's a lot of places you can go with that article. I don't have anything else and that.

[B]

Will bring us to a close. And in closing, According to her contemporaries, Maria Theresa was the greatest of the Habsburg. She wasn't seen as someone who just repaired a broken empire, but someone who constructed a brand new monarchy from what amounted to spare parts born from the ashes of its ruin. Like a phoenix. She left the administration and finances of Austria radically improved from how she had received them and laid the foundations for the reforms of the rulers who followed her. Those who knew her best called her intelligence amiable and honorable. All that was worthy and winning with firmness of purpose combined with extraordinary gentleness and strength of her convictions. Even such a character as Frederick the Great recognized her merits when he said, she has done honor to the throne and to her sex. I have warred with her, but I have never been her enemy. Thanks for listening.

[A]

Bye.

[B]

If you liked what you heard today, please leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts or or better yet, tell a few friends about a specific episode that you think they would like. Follow us on Pinterest, where we have a board for each and every subject, including our current friend Maria Teresa, and join us in the lounge. Go on Facebook to our page the History Chicks and hit the button in the middle that says Join Group. There are active conversations there, and plenty of our friends are making friends. The song in the middle is part of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 29 for Hammer Clavier, Opus 106, played by Sebastian Forster. And the song at the end is as Far As I Can See by Heffer Vessent. I picked it because it reminds me of when Maria Teresa was in the early part of her reign and she had all these plans and was meeting with nothing but obstacles. See you next time. Have we seen the actual reality of a monster's crime? A product of a tortured brain.

[A]

Got half the world inside him but I ain't got no door Got paintings and pictures Got music and my song Got writing in the brickwork but the models are wrong Got comfort in the cushion Got feathers in the bed Got half.

[B]

The world inside every space in my.

[A]

Head Got plans for us restoration Got blueprints from my wings Got everything I.

[B]

Wanted but it just don't mean me Conservation got tools to take the p.

[A]

Got everything I wanted but it just.

[B]

Don'T mean jack Sh. It.